‘But there’s always the enjoyment of beating society, of winning over local law enforcement, of getting by when officially you’re not supposed to get by. The important thing is not to get entangled with people because if you meet somebody you could really get to like, male or female, and it ends, then you have a hard time getting over it.
‘It’s a lonely life but you have this picture in your mind that you’re battling against adversity all the time, and although that can make you feel bitter it’s also satisfying that you can win. I suppose every kid of seventeen or eighteen gets the idea of leaving home and hitch-hiking around the country for a bit - but he goes back. Usually a hobo has left for a different reason, because there was no home there to begin with, so he’s nowhere to return to. What’s the point of him trying to settle down somewhere? Suppose he gets a steady job and takes a room, what does he go back to at night? Just four empty walls around him. No, when you’re on the road, hitting the freights and jungles, there’s a feeling of brotherhood. You see a guy and say “Hey, Joe, we met up in Washington state”, and you remember he stood you a meal and this time you have a hundred dollars in your pocket after a rail job and you buy him a meal, and you talk over old times and you really have experiences in common that ordinary people just don’t know about.
‘Let me put it this way. In the hobo’s mind he’s the last of the pioneers and the last of the wandering minstrels. It gets tougher all the time. Everything’s getting automated, all those jobs he’s worked at, and he has to be careful he doesn’t become just a mission stiff. A hobo has to be something a little above average if he’s going to be successful. When he gets off a train in a small town he may look like he’s just crawled out of a coal yard, but he has to present a happy-go-lucky character to show he’s not ashamed of his appearance and that he really has something there.
‘He’s got to be open and forceful. A fly-by-night beginner gives up. You have to have nerve to approach people and show them that you’re not crawling, that you’re a man worth helping along. The toughest years for a hobo are between forty and sixty, because he’s too old to be given sympathy as a kid on the road and too young to be helped as an old man. Between those years people look at you and say “You should have made your money, don’t expect nothing from me, bud”. Aw, well, you can get by if you travel light and keep your wits about you. I travel light. West of the Mississippi you need a sleeping bag or a bed roll - couple of blankets or a quilt; a couple of shirts; spare pair of pants and socks; toothbrush, razor, soap, maybe some cooking utensils; but just the essentials.
‘A hobo gets wore out if he tries to carry too much. And he should never expect too much from others. I remember in one jungle in Montana beside the Northern Pacific Railroad, it was a very cold night and there was three of us around a fire, and one old timer beside his own fire, and a young hobo just off a train walks up to the old guy and says “Hey, pop, can I warm up around your fire?” The old timer pulls out a match and says “Go build yourself a fire.” The young hobo goes off and I says to the old timer “Why didn’t you let him warm up?” and he said “I could have done that, but what’ll he do when he’s on his own? He’ll freeze to death”. You see that philosophy.
‘I have my regrets about my way of life. I feel maybe I could have done something better. But you get to feel what has to be has to be. The hobo lives for today and tomorrow can take care of itself. When you lay down for sleep you think tonight will take care of all your troubles and tribulations, even if you are sleeping on a rough, hard floor. And next morning you again have the feeling to go on. Part of it’s the old traveller’s dream of things being better over the other side of the hill. You always have the feeling that that day you’ll meet someone who’ll give you a hand, even though most people in America say “Sure, I’d like to be travelling and seeing the country, too, but I have to work to support my wife and family, so why should you be gallivanting around? No, I don’t believe in helping people like you.”
‘On the other hand you often do meet people who feel in tune with you, even though they’re stuck somewhere: maybe they’ve done it themselves in their young days but anyway they know what it’s like because, being a young nation, they’re not so far removed from the difficulties of the pioneer days.
‘Like any profession you got to learn the technique. You get to know which is a hot town for law enforcement and to avoid it; you get to know that often the cops are friendly and the people aren’t, and vice-versa. You get to know the good railroads. Now the Southern Pacific is known as “the friendly SP”. They’re easygoing and they help you all they can. If an engineer sees you wandering around the freight yards he’ll call “Hey, where are you going?” And if you say Phoenix or somewhere he’ll say “Cross over to track twelve and there’s an empty boxcar on that train.” I remember in 1956 from Pasco. Washington, to Walla Walla, that’s just a branch line of the SP. there were 300 hobos riding on a freight train of fifteen cars but that engineer didn’t mind although he was pulling more tonnage of hobos than freight.
‘I been at a conservative estimate in jail 500 times, usually just overnight but also for two weeks at a time for what they call investigation. They’re bad conditions in city jails but the county jails are usually comfortable and well stocked up with food. One night in a town in Southern Illinois I couldn’t find anywhere to sleep, so I rang the bell of the deputy sheriff’s house and explained and he handed over his bunch of keys and said “Let yourself in the jail. There’s some kindling there, so build yourself a fire in the stove, and bring the keys back in the morning.”
‘You can survive when you’re treated decent occasionally. The authentic hobo, the man who does it because he just has to, has a rebounding mind. He may get the blues but an hour later he feels he’s going to fight back. However bad things are you don’t really believe it’s the end of the world. You feel “Well, I been hungry before, I know what the score is.” Even if you haven’t eaten for twelve hours and get off a freight feeling punch drunk - because you can take an awful pounding on them trains - and a guy in the main street says “Hey, help me unload this truck and I’ll give you a few dollars” you don’t tell him you haven’t had no breakfast. You do the work and eat after.
‘But, you know, during these twenty years it’s got tougher and tougher to make out. The cops all have instructions now to keep the hobo moving. They don’t want you around their town. They say “Get yourself back on that highway and keep moving.” At least with the new inter-state turnpikes you’re always sure of a long ride, but now you really have to know your railroads to ride the freights. You can’t snag rides the way you once could. On the steam trains you always jumped on an up gradient but the diesels make almost the same speed uphill, so you have to know those points where they take on fuel every 1,000 miles and get services every 500, or the crossings where the trains have to stop with a red block showing against them.
‘Still it hasn’t closed down. Not all the freights are metal. They still have to use the old wooden sliding-door cars on the grain trains because the grain would get too hot inside “metal, so you can get inside those. Or you can still ride the blinds, although you run the danger of being seen at stops. But you can’t ride the rods no more. There haven’t been rods on trains for years. But, sure, you can still, out in the West anyway, ride the trains.
‘The important thing is to have an aim in life. You have to decide when to quit a town because you know you’ve wore it out. You have to settle on a destination in your mind so that you don’t just wander aimlessly and feel that you’re in a daze. When you get to that point you’re finished, you’re just an old wino or mission stiff. So you always say ‘Im heading for ‘Frisco or Baltimore” to give yourself a goal.
‘But you know something? Eventually it comes into your mind that you must be crazy because you’ve been to that town a thousand times already and it’s difficult to convince yourself that it’s worthwhile going anywhere, and you begin to wonder if you should have grabbed so
me of the chances you had of settling down. It happened to me early in my career around Missoula in July one year, on my first trip out to the West Coast, and a couple in a Chrysler stopped right up in the Rocky Mountains. I told them I was heading for Seattle and they said they’d take me within 100 miles and we got on well.
‘Then a month later, coming back on that same road, I met them again and they were going to Minneapolis. They tried to talk me into staying with them. They said they had a spare room and that they’d get me a job in the local hospital and help me settle down. Well, I did stay with them for coupla nights. It was genuine hospitality. Then they said to me “What do you think?” and I said “Look, it’s okay, but I got to move on.” I didn’t feel ready to compose my mind. I was starting out on this hobo career and I felt I had to keep moving. If it had happened a few years later I’d have taken them up on it.
‘It’s a life that makes you able to get through anything. If you fall sick you just have to fight your way through it. In Pittsburgh I was working for the Salvation Army collecting articles door to door. I had holes in my shoes and there was snow on the ground. I woke up one morning with a fever, and in fact had a severe attack of bronchial pneumonia, but they got me up out of bed and gave me a couple of pills and I had to go out on that truck. Another time I was hitching out of New York and got a lift on a pickup truck, and the driver went into a spin and flipped the truck. I busted three ribs and was taken to hospital but they strapped me up and said “You can’t stay here. This is for local people and anyway you got no cash.” So they told me to hit the road. Those ribs never have set properly. But three months later I was working on the railroad again.
‘I’ve never felt I wanted to get myself organized politically or anything of that nature. You meet a lot of old Wobblies around the jungle fires and there’s a fair amount of political talk but it’s usually in a humorous vein, like “There ought to be a two-hour working day with an hour off for lunch.”
‘It may sound sort of funny but even as a hobo you do feel to have a share in the American system. You come off a railroad job with a couple of hundred dollars and even if you don’t exactly join the system you can enjoy the luxury for a couple of days. Cleaned up and with a new shirt, you can walk through the supermarket and say “I’ll have some of that and some of this”, just like everybody else.
‘Now, well I don’t know. I done just about every kind of job, from picking cotton to baling wheat, and you can always look forward to a happy time in the spring and summer, shipping out on a harvest or railroad gang with your old buddies, and a binge at the end of it, but automation’s caught up on the railroads and you have to be a regular payroll man to do much work for them. It’s not so easy these days to fix yourself up with a coupla hundred dollars, and there are these rubber tyre tramps who consider themselves a cut above the real hobo and who wouldn’t use a freight and who drive around for the harvest work.
‘Yeh, it’s tougher now. It’s easier to get ragged and dirty so you can’t recognize yourself, with everyone trying to drag you down to their level. Maybe now you either got to change your ways or resign to being just floating flotsam.’
Nathaniel Morgan is willowy and slight with a translucent tubercular look, but he has been living the hard roving life, ‘following the farm work around’, for twenty-four years since he was six. That goes back to the time when his father finished the hay crop down in Oklahoma and set off on the annual excursion, driving the family North in a rattletrap and picking up a few dollars where any flapped.
Nathaniel did like his daddy. In recent months he came up from Russellville, Arkansas, and was enlisted for the bean crop near Fayetteville. Beans in, he turned to grading birds in a turkey processing plant; 9,000 got oven-ready in an eight-hour day in that shop, he says with an admiring eye for such advanced technology from his precarious position on the agribusiness fringe.
The plant has now begun laying off, and Nathaniel is lounging on the boardwalk, very natty in country rover style, in a shirt of green-and-white candy stripes and chinos, and high, tight suede boots; his butter-hued hair is bunched and pasted in art nouveau whorls. ‘Just turning it over in my mind,’ he says, ‘whether to make it up to Michigan, or maybe even over to California again. Last year I stayed on in Michigan after the crops was through and fished, and that was real nice, so I may do that again. Sure, it’s an uncertain life - but isn’t any job? I just like travelling free, don’t know why, just like it. I’m just a drifter, I guess.’
Glyn Grant checked in at the employment office in Spring-dale, Arkansas, at five a.m. to see if any day hands were wanted. Although the heavy rain has abated it is now nine-thirty and no farmers have turned up or telephoned, for the bean crop is almost picked. Until the grape harvest begins in a month’s time there is unlikely to be much steady work, perhaps an occasional replacement needed in the peach orchards or in the turkey processing plant.
So Glyn Grant is just loafing, like a dozen other men outside the grocery store, while barefoot children play around the hutments where up to ten people sleep on pallets in each small room. Most of them are Okies and Arkies, poor whites from the old Dust Bowl area of the Oklahoma Panhandle and the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, but there are also some here from farther afield, from New Mexico, Texas, Kansas and Iowa.
Glyn Grant comes from Fort Smith, only seventy-five miles South. He is a vivacious young man with sculpted sideboards and dark hair coiffured in a dated high bouquet, early Elvis, and wearing a white T-shirt and black hunting boots with side buckles.
‘I been travelling since I was three years old, my parents used to go off most of the year through to Texas and California or Missouri and Michigan. When we went travelling there’d be seven or ten cars, all the family and kinfolk and neighbours.
‘Some folk call us road tramps but I don’t mind that too much. They also say that it’s rough on the kids but I don’t see that. The kids learn a whole lot from travelling, they learn history and geography and about farming. I reckon they learn a whole lot better that way than just settin’ in a school.
‘Myself, I been following the harvests for about fifteen years. I winter down home in Fort Smith for about two months around Christmas time. You can work around there then. There’s the arragation and there’s the peanut harvest and some boll-pulling, but I like the travelling. There’s the excitement and everything like that, the scenery and stuff like that. Best place I ever been to is Oregon, that’s the prettiest state I ever seen. I also been as far as the Michigan coast, cherry picking up there, and sometimes I drive a tractor for the wheat harvest.
‘Mostly I live in camps but if I hit a place where there ain’t no camp I just buy me a tarpaulin. Us harvest people are used to the weather, not that we like the bad weather but we can put up with it. I reckon that most of them who have a studying job would do this work if they could take the weather.
‘Yep, on the whole I enjoy the life. Sometimes you can make more money a week than you can in a steady job; sometimes you can double it. It just depends the way the crop is. I’m a drifter, I guess, but I’ve always liked it. Even if I get married I guess I’ll keep on with this life, travelling on. Just keep rolling.’
J. H. Kavanaugh, assistant manager in the Farm Labor Office at Bakersfield in the San Joaquin Valley of California, is happy that the cantaloup crop is in ahead of schedule, and that there are plenty of Portuguese, Swiss-Italians and Filipinos down from Los Banos and Dos Palos offering themselves for the grape-picking which is due to start.
‘It’s a tricky operation,’ he says, ‘keeping all the balls in the air. There are 2,021 farms in Kern County and farmers’ll cut their staff down to one man, then come round and say “I’m going to start the sprinklers Monday, get me men on the job.” That can be a headache sometimes.
‘Right now there are about 22,000 workers, permanent and casual, around here: that’s potato pickers and diesel mechanics, combine operators and unskilled field hands, a conglomeration, we get ‘em all in this of
fice. Every morning they’ll be waiting here from four a.m., Mexicans from Texas and Arizona, and bottom-of-the-barrel whites, too, teeth decayed, raggedy clothes, but if he can get up and down a sixteen-foot ladder with a fifty-pound sack round his neck for all the daylight hours, he can work. They say “Ah hoed weeds” or “Ah picked cotton”, and a lot of them can’t do much else.
‘I used to counsel these people and ask them why they floated but they just say “Ah was born this way and Ah like it.” Still, we don’t lower the boom on them unless they repeatedly show us that they can’t do a job or have whisky on their breath. Everyone gets a chance.
‘There are twenty buses owned by contractors which come in to collect workers around seven a.m. and you can see the crum-bums trying to get aboard. Some get up here in old wrecks with wired-up cylinders; some have got flatbed trucks with tents built on top for the whole family. They go out on Highway 58 into the sand dunes and start a little bonfire and cook their supper. Or they go up to Weed Patch - that’s an old time Western town or Cottonwood Row, where the houses are built out of five-gallon oil cans, and you can get drunk cheap in those nickel bars.
‘But they’re not as dumb as they look. They can make twenty-five to thirty dollars a day on speciality crops so it’s worth them coming up from Tennessee or New Mexico.’
Professor Paul S. Taylor, of the Department of Economics, University of California, at Berkeley, has been enfilading the ‘streamlined plantation system of the West’ for many years: a land-ownership pattern which, he says, has denuded the country of people.
‘The biggest land-owners in America are in the Kern County Land Corporation, here in California. Back in the Eighties they cut off the water of the little men and cleared them out. They wanted slaves who vanish at the right moment and return when the next crop’s due. This is the California story.
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