Lives Derailed : Hobos Near the End of the Line

Ramblin’ Rudy and Fishbones were in town the other weekend. So were Steam Train Maury, Gas Can Paddy, Frisco Jack, Charlie Tuna and A Man Named John. Honorable men all, and no matter that they’d been chased off the rails by “cinder dicks” in a dozen places and been turned down more times than a bed sheet when they knocked on a back door, looking for a meal.

They set up their camp by the tracks of the Soo Line, gathered some logs for a fire and started mixing up the biggest pot of mulligan stew you’ve ever seen. Someone brought out a harmonica and soon the night was thick with nostalgia for the yesterdays when they were not part of a vanishing America as they are today, but, in the words of John Steinbeck, “the last free men.”

Need to Roam

The hobos lived their lives--or at least the traveling part of their lives--without a plan, suspended in a timeless vacuum that carried them down the tracks of the nation’s railroads for no particular reason except the need to roam. They went everywhere and nowhere, year after year, mile after rattling mile, masters of survival who sooner or later always found an open box car that would bring them to Britt.

“People’ve asked me if I didn’t waste my life hoboing and I tell ‘em: ‘No sir,’ ” said Gas Can Paddy, 71, who now lives quietly in southern Illinois. “Nowhere I’d rather be than on the rails. When I met a woman back after the war and tried to spend some time at home, I’ll tell you, I had a helluva time. I just had to get out and hit the road.”

So Paddy and his friends were back in Britt. And no wonder. Britt may be the only town in the country that has built its public image--what there is of it--on welcoming hobos as American originals.

World Famous

Ask a swagman in Australia or a vagabond in France where the hobo capital of the world is, and just as surely as a sermon comes with a free mission meal, the answer is: “Britt, Iowa.”

Britt started courting hobos with an August weekend festival in their honor way back in 1900, and today there’s free food for everyone who shows up. The town is turning its shuttered Chief movie theater into a hobo museum, and out in the cemetery on 2nd Street are tombstones for Mountain Dew (“He traveled on the railroads that he loved”) and the Hard Rock Kid. A red bandanna rests atop each.

“When we were burying Hard Rock in ‘77,” said Steam Train Maury Graham, 71, of Toledo, “a train comes through on the Milwaukee Road tracks alongside the cemetery and the engineer pulls that old whistle half way down, like he knows what’s happening, and keeps it there clear across the prairie and it sounded like this: whooooo-who-whoooo . . . “ He mimicked the wailing salute until his own voice faded away like a lost memory.

Britt (population 2,500) is a quiet, friendly town, two hours north of Des Moines, and although Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper died in a plane crash about 60 corn fields east in 1959 and Britt’s 1973 football team won the state championship, not much happens here except the annual hobo convention. And that helps explain Britt’s fascination with hobos--a fascination so substantial that the Hancock County Historical Society keeps two of the Hard Rock Kid’s denim shirts on display as item No. 2003.

“The hobo convention puts Britt on the map, and that helps put bread on the table,” said Mayor Patricia Byers, a nurse. Indeed, about 20,000 visitors jam the town for the weekend festival, when Main Street is blocked off for a parade and carnival, and a hobo king and queen are crowned. The town’s only motel is sold out months in advance and the Red Rooster Lounge stocks up with more than $4,000 worth of Budweiser beer--and usually has to send out for more.

Increasingly, though, the hobos who come here each August are retired wanderers who now travel in vans, live settled lives and are as respectable as your next-door neighbor. They remember the best hobo jungles--under the 20th Street bridge in Denver, along the Columbia River in Wenatchee, Wash.--and they can recall every curve on the Billy Route from Seattle to Minnie Hopeless (Minneapolis) and every sally (Salvation Army) from Lousy Anna (Louisiana) to Shakeytown (Los Angeles). But true hoboing--aimlessly riding the freights and trading an occasional day’s work for a meal or a few dollars--is an occupation that is not being passed on to a new generation

Caste System

(In the caste system of the road, the hobo far outranks the tramp, who travels but doesn’t work, and the bum, who hangs about and devotes his energies to wine.)

“The old days are gone,” said the El Paso Kid (Joe Wells, of no permanent address), a wiry, fiftyish man who still rides full-time and makes a dandelion stew fit for a king. “No one’d go to the front door for a meal any more. You wouldn’t even go to the back door. There’s probably a Doberman pinscher in there.

“I’ve been terribly dirty in my life and I will be again, but you see how I keep myself when I can? My hair’s short, my nails are clipped. There’s no grime under my toe nails. You get work that way. Yesterday I went out and chopped some grain for a man. Immediately I got his name and put it in my little book for the next time I’m through, because there isn’t that much work around for laborers now.”

No one knows where the word “hobo” came from. Some say it is derived from the rail yards in Hoboken, N.J., or from the Latin words “homo” (man) and “bonus” (good) or from “hoe boys,” as early migrant workers were known. The practice began after the Civil War when soldiers looking for work hopped freights heading west. The number of hobos traditionally increases in economically depressed times and by the 1930s, the nation’s freight cars were home to more than 100,000 Americans.

Free they have have been, but most also were (and are) prisoners of the poverty, rootlessness and self-centeredness that comes with that freedom. Hobos are strangers wherever they go, no matter how many faces they recognize in the jungles along the way. Theirs is a special, isolated world reserved for those who cannot or will not compete and produce in a structured society.

“I became a tramp, well, because of the life that was in me, of the wanderlust in my blood that would not let me rest,” wrote Jack London in “The Road” in 1907. He credited his hobo experiences with influencing him to get an education and become a socialist. “I went on the road because I could not keep away from it, because I hadn’t the price of a railroad fare in my jeans.”

Boom Is Over

Few old-timers think hoboing will ever boom again. The number of branch lines and box cars are fewer these days, and the doors of cars are kept shut even when empty to reduce drag and conserve diesel fuel. Security is tighter in rail yards, the number of toughs and petty criminals hanging out in hobo jungles is higher and jumping freights is a dangerous, unforgiving pastime. The Assn. of American Railroads listed 582 deaths and 673 serious injuries last year to trespassers on railroad property.

“A lot has been written about the free-wandering, free-spirited souls on the rails” said Todd (Adman) Waters, 40, of Minneapolis, who left his advertising agency and sold everything in 1974 to become a hobo, much in the same way New York professionals moved to Vermont and Maine that decade to find a purer life. “But most of the people I met out there were pretty damn desperate.

“They weren’t free at all. You’re not free if you’re dependent on a bottle of alcohol. Or if you’re one of the mental patients us liberals put on the street because we said it wasn’t right to keep them in institutions. Sure, there are still people who ride for the adventure, but a lot of the people out there today tend to be reclusive and paranoid. They’re simply men who don’t fit in. They’ve made a choice to live on the rails mainly because the other choices they had were so horrible.”

Waters--the first of the yuppie hobos--lasted nearly two years on the road and is now back in Minneapolis, running a successful advertising agency. He said: “You go through some terrible loneliness on the road that wrestles you to the ground. You lose all sense of time. There is no such thing as 3 p.m. Pretty soon you’re not traveling with a plan, you’re just drifting. You live in an intellectual valley.”

It was perhaps symptomatic of the times that the hobos crowned with a tin coffee can in Britt this year--the spectators’ applause decided the matter--were King Fishbones (Irving Stevens, 79, of Corinna, Me.), who got off his last freight in 1939 and drove to the coronation in a Ford Escort, and Queen Would-Be Hobo (Lynne Vermace, 37, of Iowa City), who has never ridden a freight but hopes to.

A couple hundred of Britt’s townspeople walked over to the jungle in the evening after the coronation. They set up aluminum lawn chairs around the campfire, a few feet from the Soo Line tracks. In the darkening shadows, the grain elevator towered overhead, and on a nearby spur waited a box car with an open door, beckoning old men back into the past. Cardboard, who had ridden a freight in from Sacramento, dozed behind a shed, complaining of the flu, his can of mosquito repellent close at hand.

Mournful Whistle

Harmonica Mike stood up and began playing “You Are My Sunshine.” East Coast Charlie, Alabama Hobo, Steam Train and the other men in this dwindling little fraternity fell very quiet, until down the track, like a ghostly reminder from yesterday, came a mournful whistle, louder by the second, then a blinding light cutting through the night and the approaching, clickety-clack din of metal wheels rushing over metal tracks.

The men pressed close to the tracks as the Soo Line freight rumbled by, hauling a quarter-mile of covered grain hoppers. They peered at a blurred silhouette as though expecting something, or someone, and sure enough, crouched there between cars, ready to jump, a day late but still in time for some mulligan stew, were Seattle Slim and Bear Grease.