Traveling Outside of Time
His favorite story begins with a truck full of mushrooms wrapping itself around the locomotive of the northbound Coast Starlight in late December, 1998. The train – jammed with passengers making their way to New Year’s Eve celebrations in Portland and Seattle — was stuck in Salinas for nine hours while a crane extricated the locomotive from the mess and then another six hours for repairs. This normally wouldn’t sound like a story a general manager would want to tell about his train, but Rosenwald delights in it. When he got the distress call at his L.A. office, his first thought was the hundreds of passengers who were not going to make it to their destinations in time for New Year’s Eve. He dropped everything, jumped on a plane to Sacramento, then caught a turbo prop to Klamath Falls, Oregon, where he arrived two hours before the now 15-hour late train was due in the station.
He corralled the Klamath Falls ticket clerk and together, borrowing cash from the train station till, they headed for the local grocery store where they bought out the entire stock of champagne and every party hat, party favor and small gift they could find. When the train finally arrived, Rosenwald boarded and, with the charm and verve that are his hallmarks, proceeded to single-handedly orchestrate an off-the-cuff New Year’s Eve party for 320 guests. It was, he says – and the passengers agreed – an affair to remember.