Weary young hobo longs to go home

Nov. 15, 1903: A boy who said he was “not quite 11 years old” was in “a tramp’s cell in the City Jail” after making his way, he said, back home to California from New Orleans.

The Times described Carl Edward Lecody under the headline “Would ‘Lots Ruther’ Go to School; Lilliputian Hobo Says He’s Sick of Tramping It.”

The report described Lecody as “an excruciatingly dirty little boy who says he hails from Santa Barbara” and “is just finishing a postgraduate course in the itinerant school of hobodom.”

“A month and a half ago, he says, he had a rumpus with his schoolteacher in his Santa Barbara home and fearing parental wrath, he ‘hit the road’ at once. He has traveled in every fashion approved by the peripatetic gentry, from stealing sleepy rides on slow-moving freight trains to dashing dangerously across the country on the swinging brake beams of a fast passenger,” The Times said. “He is well-versed in all the tramp tricks and knows the slang of the pike better than he does his letters.”

As for formal schooling, Lecody said he’d rather return to it than the road.