In truth hobo poesy - and one can judge only by that which has found publication in the subterranean hobo newspapers and broadsides - is puerile, although it almost always has a throb of genuine indignation or derision; but when composing for print the didactic tramp strains for an august and bookish style. This is missing from his songs, usually cynical, caustic parodies of the hymns forced upon him when left no choice but a mission’s bleak charity.
A crowd of calloused men conditioned by enmity, molestation and harsh treatment into cunning, bitterness and violent retaliation, do not go in much for poesy. Theirs is not quite the jollity of Robert Burns’s The Jolly Beggars:
See the smoking bowl before us,
Mark our jovial ragged ring,
Round and round take up the chorus,
And in raptures let us sing.
Sometimes lachrymose but oftener cockily proclaiming the hobo’s status as the man of the open road and the big country, the womanless rover occasionally rueing his loneliness but also proud of his skill at staying whole and separate by means of wits and hands and feet, spikily conscious of his cowboy reputation and his wild, runagate legend - the hobo’s songs are bawdy, tart and, when not sentimental, as hard-hearted about themselves as about others. In The Dying Hobo, as his head falls back in the cold, bare boxcar after bidding, his chum a tender farewell, in the last line, with utterly practical adjustment: His pardner swiped his shirt and coat and hopped the eastbound train.
The mood in which they are sung is usually enkindled by hooch of some kind, wine or whisky if it can be bought, otherwise derail or dehorn - alcohol ingeniously derived from some other source, such as that favoured by ‘gas hounds’ of the Sterno Club. Sterno, a heating liquid, has carried large numbers of hobos through the privations of fourteen years of national Prohibition and through many a dry state and country. The wood alcohol can, after a style, be separated from the paraffin by emptying the contents into a handkerchief and wringing it into a cup. Topped up with a Coke, soda pop or water, it is a short cut to drunkenness, a slightly longer one to brain damage and poisoning. With a squeeze of lemon and a drop of iodine added, it is known as smoke: the impact and the repercussions are similar.
The jungle also is the kindergarten for the road kid and the academy for all. Here are learned the techniques of survival and even enjoyment. There is, at the simplest stage, the two-times table of tramping: the shorthand code of symbols which the floater’s eye picks up on a town’s signboard cr gatepost, the half-moons and triangles and interlinked circles and crossed lines which indicate in hieroglyphic detail the reception a hobo can expect and the potentials for working or bumming.
He learns how to use the hobo’s poste restante, the division point or fuelling-stop water tank, where everyone passing through by boxcar who wants to keep in touch with buddies dispersed elsewhere writes or carves up his name, destination and date. The water tank is to the hobo what the Rotary Club is to a travelling businessman, grapevine and life-line linking him with his particular brotherhood. (The one-time Hobo Fellowship Union of America called its branches ‘tanks’.)
The water tank works like a bush telegraph, and an answering service combined; even if a trailer is not himself trying to join up with a friend, he keeps a mental note of the latest monikers chalked up where he caught his freight, and can pass on the information in the next jungle he hits to men who have come in from other directions. One song collected by Milburn relates how a hobo leaves the Coast for Chicago and is ditched from the freight in ‘a burg the other side of Fargo’. Naturally he goes down to the water tank to see who’s around, and
there were stiffs from every state
From Frisco to New York,
among them Houston Bahney, Big Mike Devanney, Denver Flip and Baltimore Tip, Mush Fake Tom and Big Sim Long, Snowbird and York Skew Hip, K. C. Jack and Mobile Mac, Spokane Slim and Biff ‘n’ Bim, Wingey Ed and young Chi Red, Porkey Tim, Poison Face Sim and Toledo Slim, and a highbrown boogie called Jap Tokey, old Shervoo and Kalamazoo, and a kid called Hokey Pokey, Wino Bill and Burly Hil, Printer Ted and Painter Red, Pete Shellaber and Dick the Stabber and a bo called Winnepeg Ed. And others.
He must have felt at home.
With the fall and the end of open air summer work some hobos decide to cross the Rockies, over The Hump, into the Californian sunshine. Others, like Florida-bound vacationers, scoot South - but not many for the vagrant is given few inches of toleration below the Mason-Dixon line, where rigidity of class, colour and station in life has always been closely observed, and the hobo’s winter quarters down there are likely to be on the country farm or in a road-maintenance chain gang, in the turpentine swamps or down the coalmines.
Hence the hobo is likelier to head for a Northern city, to blue his wad on real drink and real food, to sleep again in a bed for a short break, and to cast around for the next job. His centre is the main stem. The Bowery in New York, West Madison Street in Chicago, Pratt Street in Baltimore, Twelfth Street in Kansas City, South Main Street in Los Angeles, Third Street in San Francisco, Scollay Square in Boston - wherever it happens to be it has the same rancid smell and the same sleazy carousel air, and it makes little difference. They are all skid row, the honkytonk farrow of Seattle’s old Skid Road, where in the early days the Yesler Company’s log-slide came down the hill, through the town and to the waterfront. Oxen hauled the timber across pole ‘skids’, and it was there, on the original skid road, that there congregated the boardwalk bars, dance-halls, brothels, employment agencies, and cubicle hotels for the itinerant foresters, miners and railroaders.
In any skid row there is the ‘slave market’, the rows of commission shops where chalked notices advertise out-of-town jobs for unskilled labour - ‘free transportation, bunkhouse provided’ - the clearing houses for the nations’s unorganized manpower. The ‘sharks’ who collect high fees, the saloon keepers with job lists who charge a percentage of the first pay packet as commission, and the public labour exchanges - all, although responding to the economy’s peculiar demands, stimulate the casualization of labour.
All operate on a three-scale assumption: those at work on a job, those quitting, those filtering in as replacements, for there is no expectation that many of the men will be ‘long-stake’ candidates. A random list of fifteen men taken from the Chicago Federal Labour Exchange for less than six months in the Twenties shows that the fewest number of jobs worked by any of them in that period was ten, that one had twenty-one jobs, two twenty and most of the others nearly that number.
Says Lescohier: ‘The casual… has acquired a standard or scale of work and life that makes it almost impossible for him to restore himself to steady employment. He lacks the desire, the will power, self-control, ambition and habits of industry which are essential to it.’
Those habits, however, have never been cultivated in the migratory worker. He has been given a role and he has fostered his own beau ideal, the properties which give a certain mien as well as Lgic to a person who has had to break off diplomatic relations with polite, pensionable society.
So the hobo who has hit town strolls the main stem, his Piccadilly or Fifth Avenue of rooming houses and burlesques; tattoo-booths and cinemas which advertise ‘Stay as long as you like’ trading on an audience which knows it cannot find warmth and shelter, and even some entertainment, so cheaply anywhere else; the second-hand clothes shops and the missions; the barbers’ schools and the liquor stores; the barrelhouse saloons and the whorehouses.
The food in the myriad of never-close eating joints, chop sueys and chili parlours is not exactly Escoffier, but it is better than he has been getting in the jungles or in the sawmill chuckwagon. At least he can choose between liver and onions, hamburger with Spanish sauce, baked macaroni, kidney stew, pigs’ snouts and kraut, pigs’ brains, ham shank and cabbage, and eggs in a dozen guises.
He window shops: casting a judicious eye across the gaudy posters and the blackboard postscripts of the latest shipments, and listening to the ‘man-cat
cher’ touts who stroll the sidewalks soliciting thousand-mile tickets, keeping up the volume of 250,000
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homeless nomads who passed through Chicago’s employment agencies alone in one year in the Twenties.
Chicago was at this time (and still qualifies) the down-and-outs’ capital, the centre of hobohemia, the temporary port of vagabonds and fugitives and hands for hire, the driftwood - the moochers, stewbums and dingbats - as well as the job-hunters and the working stiffs. West Madison Street is the slave market area, Clark Street is the Rialto of the slum - in Zorbaugh’s description the ‘Zone of instability and change - the tidelands of city life … an all-night street which harbors the criminal, the radical, the bohemian, the migratory worker, the immigrant, the unsuccessful, the queer, and the unadjusted’.
This dumping ground, with accelerated change, has prolonged in Chicago the atmosphere of the frontier town it had so recently been. This leads to an atomization of social relationships, the swill of the shipwrecked and unadjusted through their half-life, their world apart: that quality of the adventitious which they seek yet which makes despair and detachment easier, but which also gives the life its element of chance and adventure, and stimulates behaviour that is like ‘the attraction of the flame for the moth, a sort of tropism’.
This is the scene which meets Chaplin’s eyes when he hits Chicago’s slave market in the slump of 1914: ‘… the streets swarming with migratory workers resting up between jobs or ready to ship out - loggers, gandy dancers, lake seamen, harvest hands … “barrel-house stiffs” and human derelicts … “No Shipments” signs. Every freight train that reached Chicago dumped jobless odd-job workers on the already crowded “skid road”. The huge immigrant population of the foreign sections and the “ghetto” slopped over into the industrial and downtown districts … Unemployed men and women were begging shelter at the police stations or sleeping on park benches. The police were busy with their clubs driving what the newspapers called “wharf rats” from lumber and freight yards along the river front … Hunger riots … in Halstead Street, plain-clothesmen charged with upraised “billies”, smashing right and left through the crowd.’
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Tired Tim, Weary Willie, Happy Hooligan, the moss-grown bridges and sunlit water, and the chats with Rip Van Winkles at roadside inns enjoyed by the happy Order of the Walkers - deceptive though appearances are, they and Chicago’s skid row are one and the same.
15 The wand’ring boys
It’s the railroad for my pillow,
This jungle for my happy home
Brother Son Bonds: Old Bachelor Blues
Banian Sa Pugao Lanin is on at the Linda Lea Cinema, ‘Home of Filipino and Japanese Films’. The jukebox music blaring out of the bars is Latin-American. The strippers in the photographs outside the Girly-Go-Round Follies Theatre are racially unidentifiable but unarguably girls. The food is everything, from shrimp chili and Roger’s Gigantic Submarine Sandwich to the pungent Mexican reek from El Progresso and the Lopez Café. The pawnbrokers - ’Money To Loan on Everything’, ‘We Loan the Most’ - also cater for all.
So does the Union Rescue Mission, standing aggressively whitewashed among the sleazy clutter of South Main Street, Los Angeles’s skid row, a few blocks out of the financial district and the Civic Centre. About 850 transients a week float into the Mission for food, bed and the obligatory religious service, from as far as the East coast, and there are still, says the superintendent, a few like the sixteen-year-old who just hitch-hiked in from Tennessee to crash Hollywood and star in the movies.
Samuel Taylor has no such ambition. He is twenty-five, and plump, and a rolypoly jollity is thinly spread over a sulphurous contempt. He arrived three weeks ago after a month picking plums in the San Joaquin Valley, where he happened to be dropped off flat broke from a lift. Since then he has been ‘on vacation’.
‘I wanted to be a hobo and that’s what I am. I don’t panhandle: I work, when I have to. I’ve been a bellhop in Columbus, Ohio, I’ve hauled lumber in Chicago, I’ve been a barman in Amarillo, Texas, I’ve taken jobs as a plumber, electrician and carpenter. Actually, I’m a communications engineer. I was six months in Alaska with Operation White Alice, and I worked in Cape Canaveral on tracking equipment, and in New Orleans for a missile plant. I’m a tramp but I work my way.
‘I was born in the Philippine Islands of American parents. I don’t know who they were - as far as I know they were killed. I was in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. We were taken over by the Marines and evacuated. I was in Boys’ Town in Nebraska until I was eight, and then raised by a Mormon family in Salt Lake City. What were they like, my foster parents? Oh, they thought I was God. Yes, every time I went in it was “God, you’re ugly!” or “God, you’re stupid!”
‘I kept running off. At fourteen I got a lift out here to Los Angeles, and was working for a hot dog stall when the cops grabbed me and sent me back. Three months later I hopped a freight train for Augusta, Georgia, and was put in the cooler. Next time I set off for New York and got as far as Dayton, Ohio, before I was picked up. I was sent to a house of detention. But every time I was returned to Salt Lake City. Once I’d finished school I got out for good.
‘I always go by road now. I have an air bag and a brown suit and a pair of Pan-American wings I pin on. That gives a vague impression of being a serviceman and motorists come across with lifts. My story’s always the same: my father’s dying in Michigan or wherever I’m heading. Beautiful!
‘I have no friends and don’t want any. I don’t want people to depend on me and I don’t want to depend on anyone else. Everyone I’ve ever tried to have a close relationship with has either hurt me or I’ve hurt them. My emotional problem is that I can’t stay put. I get bored, restless.
‘Of course I regard myself as a failure. I must be, mustn’t I? I don’t owe the bank 3,000 dollars for a car and I’m not killing myself to meet 300 dollars a month repayments on a house so naturally I’m a failure. Beautiful!
‘When I was eighteen I made up my mind never to put down roots, to spend the rest of my life just travelling around. Well, that won’t take too long. In the next five years the world will destroy itself anyway, so I might just as well see it while I can. Sooner or later someone’s going to push the button. Until then I live from day to day. Name anything better.’
*
In 1877 the pastor of Plainfield, New Jersey, the Reverend Robert Lowry, already a successful producer of hit hymns (I Need Thee Every Hour, with Annie S. Hawks, and Something for Jesus, with the Reverend Sylvanus D. Phelps) wrote both the words and the music of a song which impaled America.
It was entitled Where Is My Wand’ring Boy Tonight? and dealt with a prodigal son not yet repentant and returned, but which was wistfully hopeful that rectitude and temperance would prevail in his absent heart. The song was eventually enshrined as the climax of Denman Thompson’s The Old Homestead. This was a Victorian sobbie, first staged in 1896, which became a perennial repertory piece of the touring river-boat and tent show troupes, along with other dependable box office melodramas such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Ten Nights In A Bar Room and Lottie Blair Parker’s Way Down East.
The Old Homestead has been crowned ‘the world’s hokiest play’, and Denman Thompson made a career from the part of Josh Whitcomb - twenty years without interruption. In 1908 when ‘mellers’ had given ground to dollar-top farce and comedy, The Old Homestead was being promoted with the assurance ‘not a thing in the play has been changed or brought up to date’, which indicates that, however straight the cast still treated it, an element of sardonic irreverence had entered the audience attitude.
Even so the reason for the imperishability of both the play and its crescendo song is because both, however hammed up, had a genuine poignant reality for a huge number of families in America, where this plaint of a mother whose son has gone into oblivion has had much greater application than the sinister ballads and nursery jingles about kidnapping gipsies ever had in Britain.
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From the start the pop song about faraway hearths and nostalgic mooning about the old folks at home has been central to American music, going back as far as William Billings, the Colonial psalm-singer, to the touring musical families and parties, and to the minstrel shows.
Always homelessness and distance have most quickly and sharply touched American emotions. My Lodging Is On the Cold Ground in 1775 was one of the first indigenous American popular songs. The lyrics of Home, Sweet Home were set by John Howard Payne, a New Yorker, to a Sicilian air, and later he wrote it into the libretto for the opera Clari. ‘It is the song of my native village,’ exclaims the heroine, ‘the hymn of the lowly heart, which dwells on every lip there and like a spell word brings back to its home the affection which e’er has been betrayed to wander from it. It is the first word heard by infancy in its cradle; and our cottagers, blending it with all their earliest and tenderest recollections, never cease to live.’ Not too easily understood, but the general message got through. Home Sweet Home not only became the most famous of pre-Civil War sentimental ballads, but its title entered the language as a phrase guaranteed to prick an eye with tears.
Whar Did ‘You Cum From?
Poor Wayfaring Stranger
Railroad Chorus
(Singing through the mountains, buzzing o’er the vale. Bless me, this is ‘pleasure, α-riding on a rail)
Lament of the Irish Emigrant
My Old Kentucky Home
Do They Miss Me at Home?
The Arkansas Traveler
Dixie
Maryland my Maryland
My Southern Home
California Gold
Carry Me Back To Old Virginny
Traveling Back to Alabam’
Way Up Yonder
Hard Travellin Page 17