Print Friendly, PDF & Email

The guest speaker at the regular lunch meeting on February 28th was Mark Vehrenkamp, a man who has managed to follow his dual interests throughout his career. Mark was raised in Glendale, California. He remembers his parents taking him to the Glendale train station on occasion, to look for celebrities traveling to or from nearby Hollywood. On one such occasion, the train engineer invited him to climb up into the engine room. Although only 5 years old at the time, he said that experience “sealed the deal” – he knew that he wanted to become a train engineer.
Then when he was 13 years old, he discovered his other love….playing the tuba. Fast forwarding a few years – Mark had attended the U of O, earned his BA degree in music, and was working as a music teacher in Oregon City. He said he was on track to be a professor of music – but the “call of the whistle” of trains going through Eugene kept beckoning to him. In 1979, he left teaching and joined the Union Pacific Railroad company, where he has worked for the last 40 years as a freight train engineer.
Mark didn’t give up the tuba, though. He found that, by working the graveyard shift, he could play his tuba in various music groups in the evenings. And he did – a lot! Mark has played in as much as two dozen groups in a single year. He shared a few tunes with members, played on his trusty and beautiful sounding tuba, now over 100 years old.
His unusual occupation and side interests attracted the attention of OPB, who did a “State of Wonder” story on Mark in December of 2018, under a series called “Tales of the Side Hustle”. You can listen to the interview with Mark at the following link: https://www.opb.org/…/amy-miller-jodi-darby-alicia-jo-rabi…/