# Wolverine,... To Annandale... Steely Dan Lyrics.... Doah!



## rrdude (Sep 16, 2014)

While rocking the classics today, enjoying the "sights" and lovely traffic on I-95 SB to Silver Spring, MD, Steely Dan's "My Old School" came on, and being as Dumb-as-I-Always-Have-Been, I had never listened closely to the words before:

"_I remember the thirty-five sweet goodbyes_

_When you put me on the *Wolverine*
Up to *Annandale*
It was still September
When your daddy was quite surprised
To find you with the working girls
In the county jail
I was smoking with the boys upstairs
When I heard about the whole affair
I said oh no_
_*William and Mary* won't do........_."

Well, as stated above, I thought to myself, "Is there a city in Michigan (my home state) called "Annandale" that I don't know about? Google! No, appears not. I _know_ of Annandale, VA.... And William & Mary is in Williamsburg, VA........

Google some more!

Seems the NYC called one of it's NYC-Buffalo-Chicago trains "The Wolverine" and I assume it went up the Hudson River Valley, and passengers may have disembarked for Annandale at Rhinecliff, NY?

Does anyone know if after Buffalo (WB) it then went thru Canada (Like Amtrak's old Niagara Rainbow) and thence along the MCRR-NYC to Chicago? I'm just assuming it did, because of the name.

What other songs, with Railroad References, have* stumped you*?

Or, like me, after *decades of listening*, what songs with RR refs finally made the dim light bulb above your head finally go "on"?


----------



## The Davy Crockett (Sep 16, 2014)

> California tumbles into the sea
> 
> That'll be the day I go
> 
> ...


I don't know if this is true or not, but I found this at the website songfacts.com:



> The "Old School" referred to in this song is Bard College in Annendale, New York, where Donald Fagen and Walter Becker met. The song is at least partially inspired by an event that occurred at Bard, where both Becker and Fagen, along with their girlfriends, were arrested in a pot raid on a party that was orchestrated by an ambitious young District Attorney named G. Gordon Liddy (hence the line "Tried to warn ya about Geno and Daddy G"). Despite the fact that Califor
> 
> nia has not (yet) tumbled into the sea, both Fagen and Becker have returned to Bard.


And my own observation (which I have every once in a while... hboy: )

"Well I hear the whistle but I can't go..." ? :blink:

Even WAY,WAY back in the early 1970s, steam had been retired from almost all commercial rail operations in The States...

Don't they mean horn?


----------



## Ispolkom (Sep 16, 2014)

rrdude said:


> Does anyone know if after Buffalo (WB) it then went thru Canada (Like Amtrak's old Niagara Rainbow) and thence along the MCRR-NYC to Chicago? I'm just assuming it did, because of the name.


That's exactly what train #8 The Wolverine did in the 1953 NYC timetable. At that time it didn't stop in Annandale, but it did meet up with the New England Wolverine in Albany.


----------

