LITTLE ROCK — When Grover C. Bolin Sr. was a child, he’d often hop a train, but wouldn’t bother getting a ticket.
“He used to go down to the train yard when he was a little bitty kid and jump on a train ... get in a boxcar, just ride it until it ended,” said his son, Bob Bolin. “ They’d have to call Grandpa and say, ‘Come get this boy, he’s riding the train.’”
Grover Bolin, a railroad worker for 41 years, died in his sleep Sunday in his North Little Rock home from unknown causes, his son said.
He was 95.
Bolin was an athlete, playing football briefly for the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, the University of Texas and what is now the University of Central Arkansas.
A Razorback in 1935, Bolin chose not to wear a leather helmet.
“He said, ‘I played without a helmet because I couldn’t see out the side really good, so I just took it off,’” his son said. “You could look at his head, and it was just crushed, scars everywhere from where people cleated him.”
He graduated with a bachelor of arts degree from the now-closed Kemper Military School and Junior College in Boonville, Mo.
While at the school, he played football and boxed professionally for a few years.
“He’d fight at the drop of the hat,” Bob Bolin said. “He’d fight you no matter how big you were. He had a temper.”
He was a good boxer but took some licks, which resulted in broken bones and cauliflower ears, Bob Bolin said.
“When you fight long enough, they hit you so many times on your ears, they puff up and look like they’re swollen all the time,” his son said.
After getting “whipped” in a fight, he quit boxing and joined the U.S. Army, his son said. He was quickly discharged after being diagnosed with severe asthma and went to work for Missouri Pacific Railroad in North Little Rock in the 1940s.
He was primarily a brakeman, traveling with trains to Poplar Bluff, Mo.
“He had to walk the train,” his son said. “The train stopped, and he had to make sure the signals were right and the brakes were working.”
A tough man, Bolin would “fire those steam engines with coal. He’d come in and have all his eyebrows burned off,” his son said.
Bolin retired as a conductor for Amtrak.
From 1949 to the late 1950s, he tended to his 40-acre dairy farm in Little Rock. After selling the dairy business, the family continued to live on the farm and bought more than 1,000 acres for a cattle ranch near the Saline River in the early 1960s.
“He’d go on the railroad, and I’d feed the cows, then he’d come home and we’d bale hay,” Bob Bolin said. “A lot of times, he wouldn’t go to bed.”
He enjoyed owning horses and riding his favorite palomino stallion, Valiant.
“That horse was comical. He liked peanut butter and Coke,” Bob Bolin said. “He’d grab your hat, go out in the middle of the corral and stomp on it.”
Bob Bolin said one of Valiant’s offspring was used in the 1950s television show Annie Oakley.
Grover Bolin was a determined man who always finished what he set out to do, said his daughter-in-law, Carolyn Bolin.
“I heard him say a time or two, ‘You don’t give up. You give up, you fail.’” she said. “I’d say for 93 years, he never gave up, he just kept going.”
Arkansas, Pages 18 on 10/26/2011