Fran Cannon Slayton found her inspiration for When the Whistle Blows from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas and Beulah by Rita Dove and stories my father, aunts, uncles and cousins told me about Rowlesburg, West Virginia. She lives with her family in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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Jimmy Cannon loves trains. And he wants to work on the railroad more than anything when he grows up. After all, his father is the foreman in Rowlesburg, and all the men in his family have worked on the rails. But times are changing in the 1940s, and Jimmy... SEE MORE