Thanks for this one, Bob! Really enjoyed! I had seen short note on AOL - but this really tells the story.
I know everyone gets tired of my oldtimer tales, but you know when I was a kid, in the Depression, in South Texas, we really had REAL hobos like this and they were an actual part of my early life!
You see, Hoover was just going out of office and Roosevelt was coming in, and one of them (forget which) "signed" a bill or order or something that permitted young men out of work to ride on boxcars and trains - legally! - as long as they were not disorderly and were headed either South or West (to where the agricultural needs were - "Latin immigrants" being an unknown concept back then! LOL!) And so not far away (we were near the outskirts) from our home in Beaumont, TX, there was this big hobo jungle out along the railroad tracks, and we kids used to go there and the hobos were always friendly and treated us nice. (You never heard of all this molestation, etc. stuff like now). They lived in old tents and big sewer pipes lying on their sides and they cooked stews and everything just like your articles says here. And they told all kinds of tales! They had dogs, too, and my first dog, "Sport" - sort of a big terrier type - came to me via the hobos. ("Sport" had been given first to Jack my friend but Jack's mother said "Nix!' when we got home - and gave him to me, instead!). I loved that old pooch and he was my companion for many years. We used to go out in the woods and Sport would root possums out of stumps and we would go find blacks (Afro-person-persons, as we say today...Sigh) and tell them (Beaumont was about 85% black in those days!) and they would come get the possums and eat them!
We whites never ate them you see because they were just cracker food and it was said possums "were always around cemeteries where they dug into coffins and ate the dead". Stuff like that.
Not long after I had "Sport", I taught him to shake hands. Then he would sit out on our walk and when hobos came up to the door (they were always asking for handouts and meals - and my mom would feed them but always on back porch - and they would have to rake lawn or pickup stuff first.) Anyhow, "Sport" got so he would "shake hands" with every arriving hobo - (half of them were doubtless old pals of his anyhow! LOL) and my dad, who took a dim view of hobos about the place in general, used to look out the front window and shake his head and say to my mom: "Well, Berna (I'm named for her - my sister for my father! LOL!) - I see Bernard has gone and taught "Sport" to welcome every hobo in town to our doorstep!" LOL!
Hobos knew everything! They knew trains, and times they would pass, they knew the "bulls" (railroad police who patrolled "the yards"), they knew distant towns and orchards and everything! They showed us kids how they used blue carpenter's chalk and then when they went down the alley behind the homes, they made strange cabbalistic symbols on gates and telephone poles - symbols that meant: "Free meal here" or "Meal - but must work", or bad dog, good dog, owner has gun, - stuff like that... It was sort of a hieroglyphic lingua franca of the open road....
Yes, I remember hobos. They were a sort of backdrop to growing up when and where I did. My family then moved East to CT... no hobos, no "real" (steam) trains - just electrics - and people were very different...
Many hobos of course went into the Army (volunteer and draft both) as the Depression segued into WWII. I knew them there, too: hobos and highschool grads together were considered prime cannon fodder and we all went willy-nilly into the Infantry as the most "unknowing" of the troops! LOL! But I had one buddy - "Shorty" Metcalf. His bunk was right next to mine ("M" closely preceding "P" in the alphabet and that is how "buddies" formed in those days: their last names will alwas be found to be close letters in the alphabet.) He was some older than me - couple two, three years maybe - and he had been on the open road all his life. He was born in Indiana I remember. He had a guitar and knew every bawdy song that had ever been penned and sung by armies for the past two centuries, I think. After "lights out" every nite, "Shorty" would lie on his bunk softly strumming and singing and lull us all to sleep...
The last hobo I ever knew was Lee Madison. A Depression years kid, he, too had been turned out to wander when young. He was from Nebraska, and he drifted into the CCC - which took in many young men in those days. From there he had graduated to work crews on some of the big dams then being built in the Great Plains states across the rivers of our history: the South Platte, the Blue, the Upper Republican, the Judith, the Musselshell, and so on. In this way, he was in on the accidental discovery of many buried Indian sites - exposed as consequence of these efforts. In time, the Smithsonian became charged with trying to corral all this widespread destruction of these invaluable prehistoric finds (this was the River Basin Surveys end, the group I was later to work with). And this was how Lee had become a fulltime archaeological "dig" field hand.
I first met him as my tent-mate when I went West to South Dakota the Summer of 1950 to dig on my first Indian site as a shovel bum for the Smithsonian's "Bureau of American Ethnology," I think it was called. Lee was my first and best mentor, and he taught me more about proper archaeological field methods than any professional I've ever worked with since (and I have seen some prima donnas in my day!). And Lee often told many stories of his youth and being a hobo on the rails, too.
"Ridin' the rods and the brake bars!", as Hank Williams once sang it. Yep - never did it myself (though they taught us kids how to hop slow-moving boxcars on the run....) and this I mastered once...LOL! (My folks would have skinned me alive had they known!).
Hobos are as American as Apple Pie and Mom!
bernie