Telegraph Days: Leah “Rosie” Rosenfeld on the Salton Sea

For years I wanted to write about a telegraph operator who ran a Southern Pacific Railroad station on the Salton Sea, at the same time raising her 12 children alone. Not only did she score a major legal victory for women, she was a painter too. Sounds like a desert folk hero, doesn’t she? But there was a hitch. In my file on Leah “Rosie” Rosenfeld, I only had one painting. It caught my full attention.

This simple landscape shows an isolated railroad siding and tracks, a semaphore signaling device, and in the background the Mecca mud hills—familiar to anyone who has driven the North Shore of the Salton Sea. An outpost in the remote desert 197 feet below sea level. All gone now.

The painting and the artist’s adventurous life destined her for renown—or so it seemed–but to write about an artist, didn’t I need a body of work, auction sales, New York Times reviews? I went looking for more.

My pipeline to the story was the eminent railroad photographer and historian Shirley Burman. A Sacramento resident, Burman spent years chronicling women on the railroad. Her late husband was the famed railroad photographer Richard Steinheimer. Read more about the couple’s desert days here.

Burman had the foresight to interview Rosie after the telegrapher was retired and in doing so captured the sole account of her life. Rosie was born in New Orleans in 1908 with the name Edna Letitia Lentz.  “When she turned 15, she walked out the door in New Orleans and made her way to California and stayed with a grandmother and went to school,” Burman says. “She took business courses and worked for a law firm for years. She never saw or spoke to her mother again after she left.” (Rosie told Shirley her mother had thwarted her plans for an education.) While working as a legal secretary in Baldwin Park, Rosie met and married David Rosenfeld.

David took a job as the Southern Pacific station agent in Palm Springs; Rosie began work there as a telegrapher in 1942. Rosie the Telegrapher is an obvious parallel to Rosie the Riveter, Burman says: “Railroads were hiring women to replace the draft-diminished male workforce.” Rosie and her husband divorced in 1953; the tales that came down in the family pointed to abuse. Rosie had fled her original family and now her husband and had nowhere to turn. She had kids depending on her. She needed work.

Women like Rosie often took jobs at the isolated duty stations on the railroad, Burman says, finding safety in the remote settings. Another legendary woman telegrapher, Nellie Bailiff, raised her six children at the Cabazon station. Rosie gravitated to the one-person stations along the Salton Sea where she could keep an eye on her children. As she told Burman: “Most male operators didn’t like desert duty, and that suited me just fine.”

The little telegrapher’s post called Mortmar became the family’s refuge. There was a shanty for an office, the Salton Sea in the backyard, and a converted freight car where the family slept. One of Rosie’s grandchildren, Monty, lived at Mortmar as a child and remembers row boating and swimming on the Salton Sea. “The railroad took good care of us,” he says. “They’d buy us water, ice and take us to town to get groceries.”

All of Rosie’s children except for Ruth Neal are gone now. Ruth, who lives in Wichita, Kansas, remembers her mother in those days as a strict disciplinarian. (Her brother Meyer remembered his mother chasing him up a tree with a shotgun.) But as Rosie’s granddaughter Lancine Aday says today, it was a hard life and Rosie was on her own herding freight trains and children. She had to be strict.

Maybe it was a slow hour between trains one day when Rosie walked away briefly from her station and looked back at it. She had her paints with her but painting was nothing she talked much about. It was just another skill like typing or telegraphy. Ruth says her mother worked at various times at photography, pottery, lapidary and ceramics. “Painting was the last one she took up and she really got good at it.”

Looking back at her home, Rosie saw her semaphore, her mail crane, her water tank. She recorded it all in paint: Her orderly, knowable, conquerable world.

 

Along with my hunt for more Rosie paintings, I wanted to know more about her now-extinct station on the Salton Sea. I knew a bit about the North Shore from my past quests in local art and history. This slice of the Sea is full of legends. Pioneering photographers Susie Keef Smith and Lula Mae Graves (Postcards from Mecca) roamed here. Writer Ed Ainsworth owned a house here and ran an informal salon for his friends Bill Bender, Clyde Forsythe and others. Maynard Dixon spent time here at his cabin called Desert Camp; Carl Bray met him here along the track.

Indian Wells artist Carl Bray became a 40-year Southern Pacific brakeman and a painter of trains in the desert. He not only painted near Rosie’s station, he even built the railroad bridge in North Shore, which Rosie’s trains rumbled over. The area is plainly some sort of hub for vivid desert characters.

You can see why the outpost called Mortmar had started to figure prominently in my mental topography, but I still didn’t know exactly where it was.

An online search turned up a few references to an old siding and section house nine miles south of Mecca. The station once called Mortmere (Dead Sea) was moved higher inland due to flooding on the Sea in 1905-07, and later became an anchor for the North Shore community. A series of tropical storms in the 1970s would erase what was left of the second iteration of Mortmar.

My breakthrough came thanks to Mecca resident Ed Luna who as a child had lived in the Salton Sea railroad stations—called section stations—from Yuma to Palm Springs when his father worked as a laborer for the railroad. Talking to Luna brought me closer to a past world of railroading along the Salton Sea.

Best of all, he knew where the actual Mortmar station had stood. If you drive toward the Yacht Club in North Shore and look to your left, he said, there is a dirt lot with some pieces of old plumbing pipe. The section housing was straight ahead, the foreman’s house to the left. Sometimes Ed parks his car in the Tamarisk trees and remembers the long-gone station.

As he talked, I too could imagine Mortmar alive again beneath the trees. The wind, the trains, the briny scent of the Sea (it didn’t stink then), the shouts of children, the eternal clacking of Morse code and chatter from isolated stations along the shore. The telegrapher named Rosie was the keeper of gossip and news all the way from Mecca to Yuma.

 

Hungry for more Salton Sea railroad lore, I was looking through a book on my shelf, Beaumont Hill by John Signor, when I found a photo of the old Mortmar station by Richard Steinheimer. This was the only other image I’d seen of the station and it was a mirror of Rosie’s painting. When I ran it by Shirley Burman, even she had forgotten Steinheimer’s historic photo of Mortmar. Her husband, Richard Steinheimer (often called Stein), left a vast library of images.

Now the painting further challenged me. Did Rosie and Stein stand in the exact same spot at different times—both artists with a similar vision for trains and deserts? Or did Rosie model her painting on Stein’s?

Burman guesses that Rosie actually painted from Steinheimer’s photo.  Rosie adored the 6’6” photographer. The two met in the early 1970s when Steinheimer was stuck in a blizzard on Cajon Pass. Rosie– working as a telegrapher in a trailer at the summit–took him and a friend in. After the rescue, Steinheimer would visit now and then. “She just beamed when he’d come through the door,” Burman says.

 

When Rosie’s kids were small, she made do at the remote stations but the pay was low, the work was hard. In 1955 she applied for a better-paying job as a Southern Pacific agent and telegrapher at Saugus but she was turned down on the grounds that she could not lift heavy loads–which she was already doing in her current job. The job went to a man with less experience. Rosie would apply unsuccessfully eleven more times.

Finally–after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination on the basis of race or sex– Rosie was able to file a sex discrimination lawsuit against the railroad for refusing to promote her. Granddaughter Lancine says she wasn’t a feminist crusader and not all of the railroad women were happy about the lawsuit, feeling it might hurt their own chances for employment. Rosie proceeded anyway. In 1968 she won her landmark case and briefly became a celebrity, appearing on The Huntley-Brinkley report and other newscasts. Victorious at last, Rosie began thinking about retirement.

 

Even though she was leaving the desert she would leave a lasting presence here. Burman said Rosie always had a love for the desert. “She was interested in botany and spent a lot of time looking at plants and critters. She had a golf club that she used only for moving rattlesnakes away from her offices. She would never kill one, just moved it away.”

Rosie lived in and owned a house in Thermal that is still in the family today. Several sons and grandchildren continued to live there over the years. Rosie’s son Meyer went to work as a telegrapher at Mortmar after his mother left and remained till the station closed. “I blew out the lamp,” he once said.

Two of Rosie’s sons operated a palm tree farm in Thermal. At the time I was writing this one of Rosie’s grandchildren still lives in the house. To this day, if you meet a Rosenfeld in Mecca, Thermal or Indio you’ve likely met a descendant of Rosie the Telegrapher.

 

Rosie retired to Mariposa, a town at the entrance to Yosemite National Park. She had another career here as an animal advocate, founding the local animal shelter and taking in homeless animals. Family members who visited remember a crowd of talkative chickens in the bathtub and rescue horses roaming freely in the yard. There is a family story about Rosie driving around in a compact car with a rescued horse jammed inside, Lancine says: “I heard the story so many times.”

The animal rescuer would seem to be at odds with the hard-driving railroad mother who chased kids up trees. But an old friend, Diana Watkins, says Rosie was always tender-hearted toward strays—perhaps due to her own tumultuous childhood. “She was always rescuing lost cats and abandoned children,” Watkins says. “She rescued me.” Watkins had met Rosie when she was working on an archaeology dig in Cajon Pass near the Summit station where Rosie was then working as a telegrapher. Rosie took all the students under her wing. “She never turned down anyone looking for food, water or kindness.”

 

And what about the stash of paintings? I’d hoped there’d be a closet full of forgotten works and papers in Mariposa or in the old homestead in Thermal, but apparently not. Grandson Monty gave some of Rosie’s old train orders and papers to a Coachella Valley elementary school doing a project on her. Lancine says there were many paintings in the Thermal house at one time, but they were scattered among the large clan. At the time of Rosie’s death in 2006 she had more than 100 grandkids and great grandkids, so her legacy was well-dispersed.

I put out word to the family via Lancine—an interior decorator in Flower Mound, Texas–that I was looking for Rosie’s artwork and in trickled a few paintings, mostly of places the telegrapher had lived and worked. Her daughter Ruth had a baby’s quilt with an embroidered map made by Rosie. There was a painting of El Capitan, near her Mariposa home, a seascape and a painting of a small station in the California hills.

With no collected works and no rave reviews, Rosie was widening my vision for what is an “important” artist. This is something I always knew but perhaps forgot in this era of hyper-commercialized desert art. The early painters—ranch wives on farms in Imperial, telegraph operators on the Salton Sea—were sometimes disparaged as Sunday Painters but to me they had the real art spirit.

This is good news for artists struggling to be seen today amidst the endless glut of images on Instagram. Just notice what’s around you and paint your landmark hills, paint your lonely siding, paint your personal signal towers–and one day you may lead someone to a lost world.

 

To read more about Leah “Rosie” Rosenfeld and other railroad women, see Shirley Burman’s book Sisters of the Iron Road, available from the Southern Pacific Railroad History Center: https://splives.org/product/sisters-of-the-iron-road-by-shirley-burman-w-27/

The article title, Telegraph Days, is borrowed from a Larry McMurtry novel about a young woman telegrapher in an Oklahoma boom town.