Goose of Terrytoons fame

Usage examples of gandy.

I had worked that winter in the mountains of Mofo, Georgia, slugging it out as a gandy dancer, a man who pounds twelve-inch spikes with a fifteen-pound sledge.

The Atcheson Topeka and Santa Fe laid five hundred miles of steel rails, and the gandy dancers unwittingly served as racial separationists.

Successful city political bosses held open court all through the twentieth century, leaving wide their office doors and listening to any gandy dancer or bindlestiff who came in.

I worked as a gandy dancer at a construction site where we used railroad ties to shore up the buildings.

He lingered two weeks and then won great obituaries as the most popular track foreman, boss gandy dancer, on the New York Central line.

He worked as water boy on a road construction crew, graduated to tool-room assistant, worked as a short-order cook, roughneck, gandy dancer, shrimp-boat hand, door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, swamper in a mine, wheat harvester, supplier of ink and needles to tattoo parlors, partner in a tire repair shop, and inmate in the Jim Hogg County jail for throwing a deputy sheriff out of a bar and grill, through a door that he hadn't observed was closed.

They reminded me of the groups of black men called gandy dancers in the Old South, who would come along the railroad track chanting, nodding, stepping forward and back in unison, banging out a rhythm with their steel rods, captivating children and moving on before you realized they had also, incidentally, repaired the track.

For seventeen years the drovers and gandy dancers who thawed their boots here and heard Nigger George speculate on the meaning of the Dead Horse Arroyo bones had a clearer idea of the prehistory of their continent than did all the certified brains of the Department of Physical Anthropology of the National Museum.

It was aimed dead at a railroad switchman who was staring in at them through the open door of the boxcar, who was cupping his hands, who was screeching at a group of gandy dancers farther down the tracks.