Hard Travellin

by Kenneth Allsop

  ‘“If you aren’t interested you’re nothing but a bum, and I’m not going to take money from God’s people to feed a bum, so git! If you get drunk that’s your business but if you come here drunk that’s my business. We’ve sent a thousand men to jail for getting drunk. You can feed here and rest here and you come to church every day. I’m not trying to jam religion down your throat because if I did that you’d puke it up - but, brother, you come to church” That’s what I tell them.

  ‘We call them travellers. We don’t use the word hobo - unless I get mad at them. Why do they come here? Because of broken homes, because they’ve lost their jobs, because their firm moved someplace else, because they’re old.

  ‘Some are running from the law, some are running from themselves. Seventy per cent are drunks. The word goes round in the boxcars about our Mission. Only the other day, I was told, three men were eating some breakfast in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and one said he was heading South for winter, and another said “Be sure you hit Little Rock, Arkansas. The old man there’ll treat you right if you treat him right, and if you don’t he’ll beat the hell out of you.”’

  Uncle Purl chuckles. ‘The police don’t bother them. They work with me. They know these men won’t wander around the town panhandling and bumming money. We make sure they behave themselves while they’re here, then they move on. They ramble around. They got ants in their pants. Just ramble around. The freight trains bring them in and the freight trains take them out.’

  The previous night seven new travellers had checked in at the Little Rock Rescue Mission from five different states, two from Tennessee, two from Texas, and from Kentucky, Indiana and Oklahoma; the day before, ten men from seven different states; the day before that, eight from seven different states, the day before that, six from six different states, the day before that, seven from six different states, the day before that, fourteen from four different states, the day before that, eleven from seven different states. Among them were labourers, truck drivers, roofers, carpenters, sailors - whatever they chose to call themselves. As their ‘home’ they gave, for the register, the state where perhaps they had been born and may have seen since only when traversing it on a link freight or a redball passenger but not inside ‘on the cushions’.

  In Tulsa at a rail crossing a man in check cotton shirt and denims, and with a newspaper parcel under his arm, eyes the New Jersey licence plate on my car and strolls over, rolling a cigarette from a handful of dog ends.

  ‘Any work up there in New Jersey? Well, I just wondered. I’d try anywhere. I been on the road three years now. Maybe I just wanted to see what else there was. I’m a planer and floor polisher, just got in from California.

  ‘There were fifteen of us riding in that boxcar, and maybe another thirty on that train. I figure there’re more men on the road now than there ever was. I don’t know where I’ll head next. A lot of employers think you’re a loafer and it’s hard to convince them that you won’t quit after a coupla days. Anyway they give what jobs there are to local men, guess that’s understandable.

  ‘I hear there are jobs up in Chicago and New York but what happens if you arrive without a cent? You can’t walk through from one end of a city to another without a cent for car fare.’

  *

  Officially that man does not exist, not, at least, as a permanent transient. Men may move from one place to another, changing jobs, but they don’t hobo now. Not officially. The railroads have erased the hobo as a problem.

  The Association of American Railroads describes the present situation in this way: ‘In the days of steam locomotive operation the railroads were used rather extensively by hobos but the coming of diesel locomotive power and the newer types of cars, coupled with high speed train operations, have contributed greatly to a considerable curtailment of hobo traffile by rail.’

  Some scattered inquiries confirm that this official picture is general. From Mobile, Alabama, the Gulf, Mobile and Ohio Railroad Company reports: ‘This situation has changed materially in the past twenty years in that comparatively few hobos ride trains in this modern day. This is a rather minor duty of the Special Agents Department. The present type of person riding trains or loitering in out-of-the-way places around a railroad today could be classified as migrant labour although most of these are derelicts, alcoholics, and a very low class of the human race. Modern railroading in the United States does not lend itself the benefit of the old time transient who used to ride from one town to another or follow the harvest each year. This is a thing of the past.’

  J. L. Hastings, manager of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway System in Chicago, recalls: ‘I started with the Santa Fe in 1937 as a Special Officer at Needles, California, a freight and passenger division point. We used to handle between 600 and 1,000 transients riding our trains every month.

  ‘Our policy was to endeavour to sell them tickets on our passengertrains to discourage their riding. We would have had the jails full if we had arrested all of them. Some were arrested. This was a small town, and the railroad police department had keys to the city jail. We could lock up our own prisoners.

  ‘Our reasons for trying to discourage these people from riding was because some used to break into boxcars, and principally because of the possibility of their receiving personal injuries -some of which would turn out to be fatalities. We always endeavoured to take them off the trains and get them back on the highway rather than back on a freight train.

  ‘The economy of our country being as it is people are able to make some sort of living - but this was difficult during the depression years. Today at that same station I doubt that three active men would find more than fifty transients in any one month.’

  That might seem to be that. Furthermore as recently as 1966 Lou Menk, president of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, ordered the line’s police force to ‘forget about chasing hobos, concentrate instead on reducing freight damage’. Unarguably the streamlining of rolling stock has thinned out the freight train riders. The new locomotives - the diesel-electric, the gas-turbine which develops up to 8,500 horse power, the ignitron rectifier electric, the silicon rectifier electric and the diesel-hydraulic - are all hotshots, or fast runners. They stop infrequently for water or fuel; they pass at speeds defeating the most practised jumper. Also, America’s railroads are being trimmed and rationalized.

  Perhaps the solstice of the railroad age, and therefore also of the hobo, was 2 December 1927, when a million sightseers stormed a certain building in Detroit, when mounted police fought off crowds in Cleveland and a mob rushed the city hall in Kansas City.

  They were all there to worship the new tutelary god, the motorcar, personified by the unveiled Ford Model ‘A’. In 1919 there had been six million cars in the United States; ten years later there were twenty-three million. In that decade the face of America was re-cast.

  In 1923 the investigators of ‘Middletown’, the sociologists’ quintessential American community - it was Muncie, Indiana – found that already about half the working-class residents had cars, although many had no bath. This was not a luxury: it was the blessed new means of access to jobs and free-ranging animation for a mercurial people.

  The steam age gave way to the gasoline age. Instead of riding Pullman you rode Marmon or Pierce-Arrow, and the third-class passengers went by Model ‘A’.

  But the rods underneath the trains were still packed because the broad ramification of the railroads remained: the hobo could still span North, East, South and West in his customary scot-free style. But less and less could he exercise nuances of choice from a weft of local spurs and branchlets and from a skein of trunk lines of competing systems. His wings, if not quite clipped, were cramped, for unless he took to hitch-hiking, which few establishment sticklers were prepared to do, areas of the country fell out of reach, and he was increasingly canalized on to the remaining main lines.

  The slimming continues. Since 1959 the Interstate Commerce Commission has authorized eighteen railroad mergers i
nvolving thirty-four lines, and is investigating another nine requests for marriage, including the consolidation of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the nation’s biggest, and the New York Central, its third biggest.

  The Chesapeake and Ohio has integrated with the Baltimore and Ohio, the Norfolk and Western with the Wabash and Nickel Plate. Throughout the nation since the 1916 peak of 254,000 miles the railroads have been shedding their fat, 40,000 miles lopped off in the past fifty years.

  In 1911 there were 1,312 separate, privately owned railroads in America. Today there are fewer than a hundred. Once there were just two types of wooden freight car, flat and box, both mostly open and accessible. The modern freight car, forty feet long and capable of loads up to 300 tons, is built of steel or aluminium. There are tank cars, automatically regulated refrigerator cars, gondolas, open and closed-top hopper cars, well cars, container cars, poultry cars, furniture cars, ore cars, milk cars, pulpwood cars, cattle cars, cars made to carry highway trailers piggy-back, bi-level passenger cars and tri-level flat cars stacked with tiers of new automobiles and trucks - almost all locked, proofed and insulated.

  The marshalling grounds today are centralized, supervised by closed circuit television and IBM 360 computers, sorted by the yardmaster in his watchtower by remote-control switches, and linked with the yards of other cities by private microwave to dovetail and speed freight movements.

  Clearly the railroad hobo is being outsmarted by technology.

  All the same every day in the year there are about 15,000 freight trains wiggling about. On the 214,000 miles of track every one of the nearly two million serviceable freight cars averages more than 16,000 miles a year; there are about 50,000 freight terminals in moderate to hectic use; and, despite all the sleek manifest whizzers, you don’t have to cast your eye far down any line to see strings of the old hospitable side-door wooden boxcars rocking at a comfortable jog along a branch line or through a siding.

  The hobo still has the means of staying alive and moving. He is not utterly out of business yet. Persistently he has been declared to be.

  In the November 1922 issue of Hobo News was reprinted a ‘capitalist press idea of a bum’, an article from an unspecified capitalist newspaper in which an Arthur S. Hadaway completed his survey of hoboing: ‘With the disappearance of the American frontier, the hoped-for eradication of looseness and negligence in the operation of most of our railroads, and a tightening of the purse strings of the gullible and overcredulous honest worker … the bum may soon go the way of the stage driver and the Mississippi Pilot.’

  Milburn declares with melancholy certainty: ‘Both tramps and hobos are anachronisms bound for extinction. It does not take a particularly astute observer to see the imminent doom of the hobos, the migratory workers … for two years now, like the buffalo herds before them, the hobos have failed to come through. No especial determination or fortitude is required to qualify as a tramp nowadays, and presently the tramping fraternity, with all its lore, must break up.’

  In fact at the very time - 1929 - that Milburn was grieving at the dwindling away of his troubadours and for the wilting of ‘hobo poesy’, another great hobo resurgence, the waves of workless splattered in every direction from the Wall Street crash, was just about beginning.

  In 1938 Anderson reproved one Jeff Davis, who was running the International Itinerant Migratory Workers’ Union in Cincinnati, for ‘romanticizing the hobo’ (although he conceded that this was not ‘without a basis in reality, and his poetic interest in the species arose from experience’) for, like it or not, the hobo’s day was over. Davis, he complained, had ‘placed on a pedestal a man who belongs to the past’.

  Then in the 1961 reissue of his original study Anderson said that this ‘in-between worker’ - the man who completed the actual engineering of the territory overrun by 1890 - was already disappearing when his book appeared in 1923 : when the automobile came in, he went out.

  In the 1940s Ben Benson, on the road since 1898, was writing: ‘If this was the beginning of the century I was talking to you boys: I would advise you all to “hit the road”. For many men and boys who had the right stuff - sometimes called the American Rugged Individualism - made good. But, I regret to say, “them days are gone forever !” ‘

  Twenty years later De Grazia was saying, with a tinge of regret: There used to be a kind of person in America who openly proclaimed his aversion to work. The type, though not already gone from sight, seems to be going fast. He is or was called the hobo.’

  Almost from his embryo stage the hobo has regularly and finally been bade farewell. His numbers and habits have varied but he has created regular renewals of surprise as, like a social coelacanth, once again he swims into sight from the deeps of the past, an immanent creature.

  4 Leatherstocking of the freight cars

  It is a sacrament to walk the streets as an American citizen.

  Being an American is a sacred mission.

  From a Presbyterian circular of the 1900s.

  At Delano on Route 99, which slots a cement backbone up the middle of California, a man is standing beside a battered blue valise in the ferocious afternoon sun. At each approaching car he languidly flags a briefcase labelled SACRAMENTO, which is about 400 miles distant. Snappy blond moustache shaved down to a shrimp’s whisker, broad-brimmed straw sombrero, white windcheater and pistol tietack in black silk cravat, all combined with a round-shouldered spindliness and wavering blue eyes, give a curious indecisive air which is both dashing and disconsolate.

  Yet Thomas Carlson talks with confidence enough - with a stagey pokerfaced bitterness. ‘You could say I’m an artist on wings,’ he says. ‘I goof off all the time but I keep up my art work.’

  Riding along he unclips his briefcase and displays his art work, done around the skid row taverns and burlesques of Houston, Texas, his last port of call. They are vapid drawings of alcoholics, hobos, prostitutes and stockmen; he also has a separate sheaf of ‘pin-ups’, mildly erotic but inaccurate nudes.

  He is, he says, twenty-six, the son of an entomologist at the University of California. ‘I was born in Washington state and brought up at Woodland, beyond San Francisco. I’ve worked at a few things, I ran an art gallery and I was employed by a television station, but we were on strike most of the time. Mostly I do labouring, any odd jobs along the road, and selling my art work. I charge seventy dollars for a drawing. That’s my price. I won’t take any less.

  ‘I like to move, I like to have wings. I’m a gambler at heart.

  I take chances. I get bored staying in one place. For instance one night in Los Angeles I said to two guys I’d met “Man, I’d like to make a trip”, so we did right then. We goofed off up to Canada and Alaska, and did some travelling on dog-sledge, then turned around right through Nevada and Texas and down to Mexico City. I went back to Mexico a year later, went round the peninsula in a ship and we brought back a load of contraband stuff.

  ‘A lot of guys on the move are just bums, lush-heads. They drift from town to town, hiding from sight in the shadows, afraid of life, trying to hide themselves in a bottle. They bum, steal, kill, do anything. They’re crazy. That’s why I don’t ride the freights. I did when I was seventeen and got into a fight with a queer alcoholic in the same boxcar. I just dropped him over my shoulder out through the door. I never did know what happened to him. I’d never again go on a train, not without a gun.

  ‘I hitch-hike all the time but hiking days are about through in America. Motorists are afraid to pick you up because of crime. It’s a pisspoor attitude - they think anyone who hasn’t got a car is a bum. On this trip one night I sat beside the highway all night without getting a ride. Right now the last meal I had was a can of beans twenty-four hours ago.

  ‘You wanna know the reason people move around so much in this country? I’ll tell you. Because they’re restless, because they’ve done everything worth doing in the average squaresville. It’s the ones who stay put who become the bastards of the world, who give you the cold-shoul
der deal.

  ‘I’ve always been looking for something - yeah, that dream world we hear so much about - but I prefer to go it alone. You know how the timber wolf lives alone and just comes down out of the woods for food or a mate? That’s like me. But one of these days I’m gonna do it in style.’

  At Fresno he humps his cases across the verge to the freeway and the North-bound traffic, calling over his shoulder: ‘Take it easy and make like a timber wolf.’

  *

  The hobo matrix was as indivisibly a part of nineteenth-century American capitalism as John D. Rockefeller. The hobo was the unemployed spoil cast aside by a bold and ruthless laissez faire system. In 1879 Henry George wrote: ‘The “tramp” comes with the locomotive, and almshouses and prisons are as surely the marks of “material progress” as are costly dwellings, rich warehouses, and magnificent churches.’

  It was the size of the continent and its distant limbo of lumber camps and wheat prairies which allowed room for the hobo to spin off into a remote anonymity. It was the railroads which gave him his identity and style of life in a distinctive clan of homeless floating labourers. Yet the hobo became more than that. He became a tribal totem - and, what is most astonishing, remains so.

  It was the respectable citizen’s muddle of guilt and envy which elevated the hobo to both a folk and a culture hero. He saw the hobo as a betrayer of the open economy. There it was extending Horatio Alger’s ‘ladder to the stars’ for all with the diligence to climb it, and some pig-headedly stayed below rung one, poor and hungry, their only benefit being to substantiate social Darwinism’s postulate of hardy individualism and the survival of the fittest.

  At the same time, perhaps in his secret doubts the true-blue citizen saw the hobo as a reproach to the economy. Additionally he suspected, with covetous resentment, that the hobo had by unfair thaumaturgical means retained an independence which had somehow drained out of his own successful career. So in his more sentimental moods he indulged himself with wistful yearning for the vagabond contentment he erratically invested in the hobo.