AI For Me

“You need this.” Daughter, Joanna, mentioned “artificial intelligence” (AI) and opined that AI would match my curiosity with a stipulation, “It can be a rabbit hole.”

There is a subject I’ve never completed. That he was a distant relative is incidental. Arrington Bomar Phillips’ disappearing act was “a rabbit hole” with no bottom.

He and my grandfather, Joe Phillips, were separated by three years. Their mother, Josephine Bomar Phillips, died a week after Joe’s birth, leaving their father, Elijah, with three children to raise. In 1873 he married Nancy Elliott and created a line of seven children.

Bomar was home-schooled by his uncle, Ephraim Pray, a Civil Engineer.

The 1880 Census shows Bomar in Georgia, but his next appearance was in 1900 as a twenty-nine-year-old railroad worker in Fresnal Canyon of Otero County, New Mexico.

Skip forward to February of 1935 and sixty-five-year-old Bomar Phillips is in Santa Margarita Hospital in Guadalajara, Mexico, busy dying of an “abscess of the stomach.”

(AI) “The Post Office was established in 1894 as Felix, New Mexico, with A.B. Phillips as its first Postmaster…”

(AI ) “After Otero County was created in 1899 Bomar became one of the first sheriffs overseeing law enforcement over a vast area of desert and mountains.”

(JP) Bomar worked for the Alamogordo Lumber Company as “Superintendent of Construction and Roadmaster.” Lumber companies built railroads to bring logs from the mountains to the mill. Deep canyons were crossed by trestles built in ascending curves, hugging mountain sides.

(AI ) El Paso Herald, February 22, 1901 “A.B. Phillips of Toboggan, general foreman of construction of train and railway service for Alamogordo Lumber Company, is in the city. Mr. Phillips is after laborers.”

(AI) Charles Eddy, owner of the timber business in Alamogordo, . . . mentions Eddy’s business partner Pat Garrett, who shot “Billy the Kid.”

(AI) May 1908 “Railway and Locomotive Engineering” p215: “Mr. A.B. Phillips has been appointed superintendent of motive power, in charge of machinery, shops, and rolling stock equipment on the Tonopah and Goldfield Railroad with headquarters in Tonopah, Nev.”

(AI) “El Paso Herald” April 26, 1916: “Bomar Phillips, former sheriff of Otero County, recently took 25 lumbermen to Cloudcroft and is expected to have 250 cutting timber in the Sacramento Mountains within the next 30 days.”

In March of 1927, he joined the Durango Lumber Company at $300 per month plus a $600 bonus. The average pay for a middle railroad manager was about $4500 a year. Bomar’s pay was just under 100K$ in today’s money.

Bomar bounced around but always worked with railroad rolling stock or construction.

(JP) Bomar was in Mexico building a railroad tunnel through a mountain.

Bomar Phillips was buried in the American sector of the City Cemetery in Guadalajara. joenphillips@yahoo.com