As a young teenager near the end of World War II, I applied for a job as an usher in a local theater. I came away enriched with more than just a job. A large poster on the theater office wall proclaimed, “The steam that blows the whistle will never turn the wheel.” Remembering the sounds made by old steam trains that ran near our house in my childhood, the saying caught my fancy. I tucked it away in my mind’s work ethic folder in which my grandmother’s constant repeating had already firmly filed away “What ever your hands find to do, do with your might; things done by halves are never done right.” After fifty years of incubation the saying evoked the following lines:

​The Steam That Blows the Whistle . . .

​The old time trains relied on steam
For motion and for sound,
And for each toot, it turned their wheels
Ten thousand times around;
But men, in use of energy,
Find sound of more appeal;
But the steam that blows the whistle
Will never turn the wheel.

​What mighty acts and noble deeds
Our tongues, in words, can tell,
Yet most become mere paving blocks
To line the streets of Hell;
Too often words are all we use
To show the way we feel,
But the steam that blows the whistle
Will never turn the wheel.

​Mere talk will never feed the poor,
No matter how sincere,
Nor will the naked one be clothed
By sounds that soothe the ear,
For talk is only noise-filled air,
And naught but deeds are real,
For the steam that blows the whistle
Will never turn the wheel.

​It takes no skill of eye to see
That this world is turned upside-down,
And all that's good and right are mocked,
While evil wears the crown;
The best of words won't set it straight;
Let actions show your zeal,
For the steam that blows the whistle
Will never turn the wheel.