A Life Shaped by the Tracks The foundations of Stan Masters’ world were laid in a modest one-room section house in downtown Kirkwood, Missouri. This home, owned by the Missouri Pacific Railroad, sat so close to the tracks that trains thundered past his porch within a mere six feet. Growing up during the Great Depression, he lived without the comforts of running water or electricity, a childhood defined by the rhythmic presence of the locomotives that passed his door. He was a child of railroad workers, carrying the legacy of his father and grandfather in the very air he breathed. War eventual…