Hard Travellin’
The Hobo and His History
Kenneth Allsop
Contents
Part One: Strangers And Sojourners
1. Some people just got that roamin’ blood in them
2. King of the road
Part Two: Stones In My Passway
3. Extinct (Official)
4. Leatherstocking of the freight cars
5. The phantom deer arise
6. The pot of gold
7. In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted
8. Out into the kindly sunlight
9. Strict beauty of locomotive
10. A little strychnine or arsenic
11. The curse of our Yankee nation
12. The dream cinder dick
13. Weary Willy and Tired Tim
14. Father, fix the blinds so the bums can’t ride
15. The wand’ring boys
16. Roosevelt roosts
17. The abyss, the charnel-house
18. Sex and the single man
19. Hobo-trekkers that forever search
20. Voices calling in the night
21. Men without allegiances
Part Three: The Great Harp
22. Feet got to rolling like a wheel, yeah, like a wheel
23. The freezin’ ground was my foldin’ bed last night
24. If they had met God they would have asked Him for a bone
25. Ain’t it hard to stumble when you got no place to fall ?
Part Four: Join The Wob, Wob, Wobbly Band
26. Hallelujah, I’m a bum
27. Don’t waste time in mourning. Organize!
28. Agitators and pork-chop philosophers
Part Five: Goths And Vandals
29. The black shadow
Part Six: River’s A-Risin’
30. Wrap your troubles in dreams
31. They’d toughed it out just as long as they could take it
32. Who we gonna fight?
33. Dust can’t kill me
34. Rentaslave
Part Seven: Picture-Book Heroes
35. You’ve been to that town a thousand times
Part Eight: The Woods Are Full Of Wardens
36. The American spectre
Prefatory Note
The shock-trooper of the American expansion, the man with bed-roll on back who free-lanced beyond the community redoubts, building the canals and roads and rights-of-way, spiking rails, felling timber, drilling oil, digging mines, fencing prairie, harvesting wheat, was the hobo.
He was homeless and unmarried. He freeloaded on the freight trains whose tracks he laid and whose tunnels he blasted. He lived in bunk houses or tents or jungle camps or city flophouses. He was a marginal, alienated man, capriciously used and discarded by a callous but dynamic system, yet he was proud of the mode he devised out of an imperative mobility. He was a unique and indigenous American product.
He formed the moving labour corps which followed the advancing line across the continent, and he answered the market demand for manpower where none existed in the new, rough country. He staked down with his hammer the provisional frontier.
In one of his aspects he was the Ancient Mariner of this oceanic land, the albatross of failure hung about his neck. In his militant political role, as a Wobbly, a red card carrier of the Industrial Workers of the World, he was ‘half industrial slave, half vagabond adventurer … the francs tireurs of the class struggle’.
He often got drunk and squandered the money he had sweated for. He was a wild and recalcitrant wayfarer, bothersome to the settled citizen who disapproved of him and perhaps secretly envied him. Out there in the offing he developed his own distinct life and philosophy: tough, reckless, radical, sardonic. A romantic essence of the hobo’s style has impregnated American song, literature and outlook.
Considering the degree to which it has, he has been surprisingly neglected as a subject of study. Information about him is scattered, piecemeal, throughout seventy years of autobiography, fiction, poetry, folk song, sociology and economic surveys, yet his genesis was really much earlier, and few attempts have been made, and none in recent years, to examine his origins, the type and the influence of the wandering worker in America.
His habitat has changed but his habits have not, not all that much. For he is still there, a sundry part of the tidal restlessness of American life; and the hobo idea, or impulse, is even more widely present, the eagerly seized inheritance of the young of an urbanized society in which the hobo is theoretically obsolete.
There are no agreed forms or consistency for the plural and abbreviation of hobo. When the words occur within quotation marks I have kept to the originals, so that such variations as hobos and hoboes, bos and boes, ‘bo and bo occur in the text. Similarly: boxcar, box-car and box car. Pedantically, Skid Road is the correct early vernacular, but the corruption skid row is now normal, and this I have used. Okies - the Dust Bowl refugees from Oklahoma - is not infrequently misspelt as Oakies; when it occurs thus in quotation I have again kept to the original.
Part One
Strangers and Sojourners
The land is mine; for ye are
strangers and sojourners with me.
God To Moses: Leviticus, 25.23
... a nation of waifs and strays.
Evelyn Waugh
1 Some people just got that roamin’ blood in them
At worst, one is in motion; and at best,
Reaching no absolute, in which to rest,
One is always nearer by not keeping still.
Thorn Gunn: On The Move
Twelve miles from a crossroads store and gas station, given on the map the unwarranted importance of being named Spotted Horse, and fifty miles more from the nearest small town, a dilapidated 1950 Plymouth is juddering along the switchbacks of Highway 14 between the lean rocky hills of Wyoming. The Plymouth’s fender and chrome radiator grill hang and shake like a broken jaw, and across the flaking eau-de-Nil paintwork on the doors, boot and bonnet is stencilled in black capitals, six times over
Work
Wanted
Anything
The car’s driver has a two-day stubble and a sweat-blackened straw stetson is crushed down on his eyebrows. His name is Harold Myers. He is thirty-three. All his upper front teeth are missing (not because of decay, is the impression, but because of a collision some time or other with a hard object, perhaps a fist). He is wearing, as well as the stetson, a dirty grey work shirt, threadbare Levis secured by a wide leather belt with a swaggery silver buckle, and high tooled cowhand boots.
They call people like me rubber tyre tramps,’ Harold Myers says when he has drawn into the wayside. He tears off the zip opener from one of the Budweiser beer cans lined up along the back seat and takes a long swig. ‘I bought this heap three months ago in Milwaukee, thirty-five dollars. I paint this sign on whatever auto I have when I take to the road. Every spring I get this fever. Can’t sit no more. I have to get on the road again, and see people, hit new experiences. That sign’s my promoter. When the car breaks down I just leave it where it is and travel on the thumb.
‘I’ve got another sign in my suitcase: RIDE WANTED PLEASE. I hang out my shingle at the roadside. That shows courtesy and motorists respond.
‘Right now I been herding cattle, breaking horses, ploughing land, all that, here in Wyoming, and before that I was doing ranch work up at Kelispell, Montana, and now I got the urge again. Figured I’d go down to Florida, taking charter boats out with deep-sea fishermen for Captain White, down in Miami. I worked for him back in 1961.
‘I was born in Michigan but I been what you might call driftwood, just jetsam, since me and my wife split up in 1956, working through the fruit belt in California, through the wheat belt in
Kansas, farmhand in Virginia and Georgia, going out on the shrimp boats up the whole Eastern seaboard.
‘I don’t carry much, just a razor and a change of pants and shirt, and I have a picture of my wife and kids, and a little twenty-four hour prayer book which was my wife’s, it’s got twenty-four hour thoughts, prayers and meditations. Okay, I’m a hobo. A ramblin’ man ain’t too welcome in towns – not unless you got fifty bucks to spend, then you’re welcome, then you’re a goddam good boy and they don’t give a shit if you’re wanted for murder. But if you’re broke, if you don’t have that almighty dollar, the towns are cruel places.
‘That don’t worry me too much. You know what I think of the Good Life? It stinks, boy. I don’t want any part of this organized deal. Let me tell you, rubber tyre tramps like me are basically honest. If we see shit we don’t take it. We’re not running from fear. We’re running from the corrupt rotten standards this country has built up.
‘Automation is pushing a lot of good men outside society. This is modern America, not the supermarkets and Chambers of Commerce. Ranch hands like me just live like vagabonds. We live well if we’ve got the money. If we haven’t, well, there’s always another valley over the hill.
‘I get a lot of happiness out of this life, more satisfaction than the guys who’ve got this pisspoor deal of trying to squeeze along providing the milk and the corn, all the middlemen getting their rake-offs and cuts. I may be an outcast but I’ve cast myself out. I figure it’ll take me three weeks to get to Florida; but if it’s three months, I can spare the time.’
*
Fresno County, California, is the world’s most bountiful agricultural dominion: 6,000 square miles tightly patterned into 8,340 farms; 221 commercial crops with a turnover of one million dollars a day. There are many millionaires in the top echelon of Fresno agribusiness, the term used here to distinguish this scale of operation from old-fashioned farming.
In this transitional prelude to total mechanization agribusiness still needs human hands. In the peak three weeks of the year, the September grape crop, there is work for 50,000 seasonal immigrants. It is a hit-and-miss system. Now with the grape harvest yet to start there are 500 men around the town, without jobs or shelter.
One who has found both after a fashion is across in the derelicts’ quarter where the freeway overpass strides across on concrete stilts. On the Mission chapel wall, beneath a huge bleary mural of an open Bible, Edward Wayne Mollett is painstakingly painting in the words from the 107th Psalm: ‘They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no city to dwell in.’
He is a big sprawling man with cropped pepper-and-salt hair and a ravaged nice face. ‘I’m fifty-four,’ he says, ‘and I was doing swell until the war. I started out as a Western Union messenger. I went into the grocery business and rose from clerk to be manager of San Francisco’s first drive-in Safeway supermarket in 1937.
‘I went to night-school and qualified as a welder and earned some big money in the shipyards. I bought a 65,000 dollar apartment house and eight sets of flats. I was happily married for thirteen years. Then my wife and small son were killed in an automobile accident.
Through remorse and the tragedy I began drinking and for fifteen years I was on the wine. I went round the world twice on ships and sailed on a lumber schooner and oil tankers and I mooched around every state in the union on freight trains.
‘Part of the year I’d follow the vegetable harvests on the trains, to wherever I could drive a tractor or cut and bale hay. A crowd of us would go up to Chicago and get shipped 500 miles up into Michigan, living in a caboose doing pick and shovel labour on renewing track for a dollar-fifty a day. But you can’t do that kind of work if you drink. Your nerves are too shaky.
‘Down in Sacramento I cut up old autos with a torch and in summer I’d take off to pick apricots and cherries, then up picking apples in Washington. I’d get back into town with 500 dollars and just soak it up for a couple of months. Then I’d hit the trains again and probably get thrown in the hoosegow by the detectives, the rest of the time living in cardboard box jungles down by the riverside.
‘When you’ve got a gallon of wine you feel happy for a few hours, but it’s a sewer; it’s a dirty pointless life. You have no friends, only drinking acquaintances who, same as you, are frightened, discouraged men. You’re in a rut, stuck in the mud.
‘You say “Let’s go to Tucson, Arizona, let’s go to New York to look at the World Fair, let’s go up to Seattle” - but you take your troubles with you from state to state. It’s a life of a thousand jails and a thousand flophouses. All the time, wherever you go, you got your own skid row right there inside your head.’
2 King of the road
Oh, highway … you express me better than I can express
myself!
Walt Whitman
A few years ago I was in Florida with ten days spare before my next appointment in Los Angeles. I had been to the United States previously, to New York, to Chicago, to Los Angeles, to San Francisco, to Dallas, to New Orleans - but always these visits had been for specific, usually journalistic, reasons. There had never been free time for sloping off into impromptu exploration. I had been slotted into a jet at one metropolitan airport and shot back the same way. The immense hinterland of America remained utterly unknown to me, concealed and incommunicado under that cloud haze. It seemed to me a mystery, a secret continent which tantalized my imagination.
On that spring morning of 1962 I boarded a Greyhound bus which would take me from Fort Lauderdale across the Deep South, around the rim of the Gulf of Mexico and along the Mexican border, then tacking up across the West to California through ground floor America, bus station America. The great metal capsule pounded, day and night, between pine scrub and orange groves, cotton and rice fields where egrets fed, and endlessly through the billboards, sub-division housing, trailer parks, pennant-frilled gas stations, scrapped car heaps, and the motel, snack bar and supermarket signscape at the approach to every town - ‘like badger holes, ringed with trash’, is John Steinbeck’s phrase. Wherever we halted for refuelling and a meal break, whether an oil city with refinery tanks and pipe complexes, shimmering white satin in the sun, or a few streets of shabby greyish clapboard houses washed with mimosa, in each Greyhound Post House all around me was the swill and flux of this strange American life.
There in the concrete bazaar were always the banks of lockers, the news-stand racks displaying True Romances, Sad Sack, Stumbo the Giant and The Adventures of Jerry Lewis, luggage stickers and Confederate flag postcards. There was the lunch-counter offering cheeseburgers, hot roast beef sandwiches and DuB-L-Burgers. Around the ticket office and the big central precinct with its rows of benches was the tide of passengers, constantly replenished as it was drained off by the next connecting bus: mothers with babies, fathers with families, single girls and solo men, parties in seersuckers with smart matching fibreglass baggage sets and men in striped mechanics’ hats with haversacks of tools, soldiers with duffle bags and farm hands in straw slouch hats or carrying plaid mackinaws for the Northern woods. On the benches some were curled up asleep or slumped in a half-dozing daze, sitting it out for a dawn schedule; others weaved and strolled around the crowded, butt-smudged floor, swigging Cokes or chewing hot-dogs. Under the raw strip lights there was always the frowsty, stained look of an over-used transient place, the temporary shelter of travellers with fifty miles to go, or 3,000.
In the washroom at Mobile, after an all-night run, there were two men freshening up. One was sluicing cold water into his carroty hair, which he then combed and kneaded into Byzantine helixes. He was asking the other, in a white T-shirt emblazoned with racing cars and a DAYTONA BEACH crest, who was shaving with a plastic pocket kit open on the basin, if Route 80 would take him straight through to the West Coast, or would he have to go into New Orleans ? ‘Figured I’d see if there’s any pruning up there,’ he said.
The other gave him expert directions: ‘Baby, I been out to the Coast a hun
nerd times. Why spend your dough on a bus ? You could thumb your way right through. You’d make it in less than a week.’
This was America, the federal entity, the United States, but they talked of those sumless spaces fanning out North and West like two prospectors colliding in unconstituted territory.
Later I rode for a day through Texas with a boy who joined the bus at Baton Rouge and who was also bound for the Golden State. He wore a peaked cap and a shiny black mock-leather windcheater decorated with pretty flowers of verdigrised tin studs, and on the rack overhead he had a bed-roll tucked in at each end and tied with sash cord. He chain smoked king-size menthol cigarettes, a routine interrupted only when he scooped a harmonica from the zip breast pocket and sucked and blew some desolate hillbilly music. He was seventeen and, he said, had decided to split out of Louisiana. ‘My daddy used to ride the freight trains when he was a kid,’ he told me, ‘and he got around this country plenty. Felt I’d like to try it myself. I had enough money to buy a ticket as far as San Diego and after that I’ll do just what comes nat’rly. Man, I can’t wait to get to ole California. That’s where the gold is, everybody knows.’ He played a tune which he announced as Teardrops On Your Letter, learned from a very big record of 1959 by Hank Ballard and The Midnighters.
These brushes, the glimpses of an unbeholden truancy along just one strand of roadway, really began this book by momentarily bringing to life an essence of American life which had always fascinated me from a distance: the fluctuating ground swells Westward as the frontier was thrust back; the transcontinental zig-zagging by nomadic labouring men at the height of the hobo epoch when they rode the boxcars in hundreds of thousands; the Grapes of Wrath period when a million rural refugees, dispos—sessed by dust storms and slump, were on the road; the symbolism of the train, both as the way out to the possibility of better things and as the poignant reminder of a distant home, as in Thomas Wolfe’s
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