The Hobo King

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And I promise we won't spam you. And after the episode, we hope you'll stick around because we've got more to the story. A little bonus content, a little conversation, some bloodthirsty stuff, right after the episode. Do you ever feel like just a cog in the machine, getting up every day, trudging to your job, working all day, only to come home too tired for much more than a meal and some TV?

Then the weekend comes, the chores and errands piled up, and by Sunday night, the scaries arrive, the dread of another week ahead just sinking in. Is this all there is, you think? Work and sleep and never enough money to get ahead? No time for yourself, ever? How is this a life, you ask yourself? And then you blink, and a decade has gone by.

Maybe this isn't the life you're supposed to live. Maybe you were born to be a wanderer, someone who isn't built to be a cog, someone whose spirit craves freedom and movement, someone who wasn't meant for mortgages and credit scores and tyrannical homeowner associations. If only you'd been born a hundred or more years ago, when the whistle of a freight train was like a siren's call.

That whistle meant freedom, it meant opportunity. You could follow that whistle, heave yourself onto that train, and leave the life you'd been born into behind, trading your fixed address for a rough kind of liberty, a nomad's life. What do you say, are you ready to become a hobo? True, weird stuff. Don't speak harshly to the next tramp who stops you on the street and asks for money, or who comes to the back door in search of a hearty meal.

The poor fellow is suffering from dromomania. This is official, as it comes from Dr. Ben L. Reitman of the Society of Universal Brotherhood, who knows more about tramps than does anyone else in the country. Dromomania is a disease peculiar to tramps. It manifests itself in an insane desire to wander. It is akin to wanderlust, only the latter is a natural desire to wander, while the former is a species of insanity.

Ben Reitman, born in 1879, was a wanderer, an anarchist, a physician, and the lover of one of the most famous radicals of her day, Emma Goldman. Reitman's life story reads more like a myth than a biography. He left home at age 12 to become a hobo, which back then meant something a lot different than it does today. Hobos were the unattached men and women traveling around looking for work.

Tramps, the unattached penniless ones tramping around for excitement and adventure, and bums who make up the third and smallest but most troublesome type of vagrant, the type addicted to drugs and to drink and who have lost all sense of respectability. No one really knows where the word hobo even comes from, but by the end of the 19th century it was the most common name given to migrant workers.

People have roamed from place to place picking up work wherever they could find it for as long as there have been people. But with the end of the Civil War and the explosive growth of the railroad in America, the modern idea of the hobo was born. And under a decade, from 1866 to 1873, more than 35,000 miles of new rail track was laid across the U.S., and most of that was part of the Transcontinental Railroad.

The railroad opened up a whole vast new world for people who found themselves unable or unwilling to settle down in one place. Some helped build the railroad, moving west with each new mile of track laid. Some just hopped trains as the need or the mood struck. How many people were riding the rails? The best way to get an idea of that is to look at the body count.

Between 1898 and 1902, the Interstate Commerce Commission documented about 48,000 people who'd been injured on trains, and another 48,000 killed. 48,000! That's a whole lot of people dying due to accidents on trains. And it's extra dramatic when you consider that the most common cause of death back then was pneumonia, tuberculosis, and diarrhea.

The injury and death toll was so high because there were just so many people riding the rails, and so many ways to get hurt. Some hobos rode the rods as in they stretched their bodies across the steel bars beneath the train and then hung on for dear life. That took skill and strength and timing, though it wasn't much easier to jump the blinds.

That's what they called the platforms on passenger trains, which tended to travel at higher speeds than freight trains. Your idea of the train-hopping hobo probably involves a boxcar, which was the most common way to go. And they say that some boxcars were so packed with riders that even if you could make the You'd have a hard time finding a spot inside to stand or crouch.

Riding the rails was dangerous, and not just because a person could fall off or be run over or freeze to death. You could actually suffocate in a boxcar if the train entered a long tunnel and took its sweet time finding the other end. Today, those tunnels are equipped with ventilation systems. Not so back in the early days.

And there were accidents, too, like this one in Chicago, July 1902. A freight train wreck on the North Shore and Michigan Railway at 90th Street resulted in the injury of seven men who were beating their way to Chicago. Beating. That's hobo slang for riding without a train ticket. Eight cars filled with tramps were telescoped and shouts of pain came from the men buried in the wreckage.

Many of them were not severely injured, and as soon as they gained their liberty, they ran away. Eight cars packed with illegal riders. Hard to imagine Amtrak not noticing that, much less allowing it. And hobos were also at risk of being robbed, beaten and even murdered. They made ideal victims, if you think about it.

Random strangers passing through towns, easy prey and no one to report them missing. It was well known that any train passing through town was bound to be carrying maybe dozens of hobos, and crime against them was rampant. Three holdups boarded a boxcar with 15 hobos on freight number 40. The hobos carried a flashlight, one a gun and one an iron club.

Ordering the hobos to stick them up, they proceeded to search. One Indian man, not understanding the command, failed to raise his hands as he was clouded over the head with the iron bar, cutting a deep gash in his head. The holdups secured $68.50 from one elderly man en route here from herding sheep in Wyoming. Hiding the money in his shoe was of no benefit, for each of the 15 were ordered to take off their shoes.

The holdups locked their victims in the boxcar and departed to parts unknown. Every cent on all of the men was taken, as little as four cents from some of the men, for a total of $92. $92, equivalent to just a tick under $2,300 today, taken from men who had literally nothing else and only the chanciest prospects of earning more.

But at least they survived the assault, because not every hobo did. Two holdup men killed an unidentified hobo while robbing 20 transients on a freight train near Worthington, Minnesota. The robbers killed the man and tossed his body from the train. Where was railroad security? Well, they were often as big a threat to a hobo as any random thief or killer.

Because in the early days, railroad companies hired detectives from the Pinkerton Agency to patrol their lines, capture train robbers, and prevent anyone from boarding without a paid ticket. When Alan Pinkerton died in 1884, the railroads decided they could manage on their own. So rail lines began deputizing pretty much any man with a taste for catching crooks and a willingness to fire a gun.

They called these railroad vigilantes bulls, and the bulls had all kinds of ways to make a hobo's life hell. They might look the other way as riders left onto the trains, only to later storm into a boxcar and rob them of what little money they might be carrying. Then again, the rail bulls could sometimes find the tables turned and the hobos running Like this hobo hijacking that went down in North Dakota in August 1898.

The great train robbery era in America was mostly over by the beginning of the 20th century. But the bulls, the railroad bulls, were busier than ever. With no more true outlaws to chase, the bulls doubled down on eliminating hobos from their trains. It wasn't a fair fight. The hobos were poor and sometimes sick and often half starved.

Thousands were murdered by bulls every year in the early 1900s. And then came the Great Depression, and the population of unemployed Americans exploded. More than two million men and women in search of work began jumping the trains just the way their ancestors had half a century earlier, because it was the easiest and fastest way for a migrant worker to move around the country.

The railroads responded in a few ways. They tried to keep hobos off their trains, a seemingly impossible challenge. They got creative with how they handled hobos already on board. One line vehemently denied using scouting steam to drive hobos out of their boxcars. And often, they simply stopped the train and tossed the hobos out.

A conductor on the Illinois Central Line train 33 heading southbound at 2.30 p.m. made seven complete stops within two blocks in Punchatoolah to rid his train of hobos. While Punchatoolah does not object to the Illinois Central keeping the hobos off their passenger trains or their freight trains either, it does not like to have five or six bums dumped in the town for the citizens to feed or to rob our stores.

Dumping hobos turned out to cause more controversy for the railroads than murdering them ever did. A number of the businessmen and citizens of Perryville, Maryland are registering indignation over the Pennsylvania Railroad's actions in ejecting hobo train riders in great numbers around that terminal. With the usual army of hobos being greatly swelled by the addition of many hundreds of intolerant laborers, job seekers, and hitchhikers, the floating population of the tow has been greatly increased by numerous ejections of these train riders.

Since about 75 percent of Maryland Division freight trains stopped at Perryville to take on water, the town made for a convenient dumping ground. Not every hobo tossed was alive. The dead hit the ground right along with the near-dead, the wounded, and the able-bodied. Merchants, housewives, and the town as a whole have been literally swamped with beggars.

When food is not doled out to these roamers, they make sure of not going hungry by stealing anything in sight. This was 1933, the height of the Great Depression. The U.S. economy was at the lowest point in history. The entire banking system had collapsed. One in four Americans were unemployed. We're talking nearly 13 million people without a job, without any means of providing for themselves or their families.

The hungry stood in long lines for bread. Children scoured the docks for scraps of spoiled produce and went door-to-door in affluent neighborhoods begging for scraps, anything, potato peels, stale bread, spoiled meat. It was this desperation that drove so many men and women to risk their lives riding the But what about the police, you ask?

Couldn't the police stop the railroad bulls from beating and killing people and dumping them? It's a fair question, and here is the nasty answer. The railroad bulls had figured out a lucrative little racket for themselves involving local law enforcement. Here's what that looked like in the state of Virginia. Most arrests in recent months have been made by special agents of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, which were running in the hobos and collecting a dollar apiece from the state of Virginia for each prisoner.

That $1 per hobo, that was the equivalent of $24.60 today. That was a whole lot of money during the Great Depression when the average salary, if you were lucky enough to even have a job, was $1,125 a year. The truth is, the railway bulls weren't the only ones profiting off of the arrest of hobos. At the same time, the magistrate swearing out the warrant was collecting a dollar from the state, and the sheriff was getting a turnkey fee of 50 cents, plus a per diem for caring for the men.

This eventually caught the attention of a circuit court judge named Julian Gunn, who did the math and realized that arresting hobos in just one county, the state of Virginia, was costing between $8,000 and $10,000 a year. That sounds like nothing to us, but Virginia was strapped and struggling, and to Judge Gunn, this seemed like an easy expense to cut.

The governor agreed, and after Judge Gunn leaned hard on the management of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, their policy immediately changed. No more arresting hobos allowed, at least not in Virginia. The idea of hobos and champs and bums having their own subculture in America, complete with codes of behavior, slang, hierarchies and leadership, might sound fantastical to us here in the year 2025.

Like, is this a John Steinbeck novel? Is this some kind of old black and white movie? Of course, that's how we see it. We were raised in a culture that shames people who don't have a job or a fixed place to live. A culture where late stage capitalism is eating us alive. Culture where there's not even one state in the entire country where a single person earning the minimum wage can comfortably survive.

Wait, what's that, Chad? They should get a better job? Well, we could argue all day about that, and I won't, because that argument is exactly what you want, and I'm allergic to giving chads exactly what they want. Just, I don't know, may you never know for yourself the devastation that the Great Depression brought your ancestors.

May your children never be forced to beg for scraps just to eat. May your older kids never be like the quarter million teenagers who rode the rails in the 1930s in hopes of making just enough money to keep going to the next paying gig. Don't take it from me, take it from someone who lived it. Mr. D.L. Young, who hailed from Arizona.

I stayed in thick timber, under bridges, in freight cars, haystacks, ditches. For food I ate Johnson grass stalks and roots, crawfish tails, sour duckweed, cut stove wood for a biscuit or cornbread, roasted corn, food, melon out of others' gardens, asked grocery stores for overripe fruit and damaged food, wild onions, mustard greens.

We would pick up pinto beans, one bean at a time, from the ground after the fields of farmers had been harvested. Our toothbrush was a small branch from elm tree and salt. I lost three teeth, kept a pocket slingshot with me. There were a lot of rabbits in the brush and often we boiled a roasted rabbit over a fire. I was pretty good with a slingshot.

A writer named Errol Lincoln Ace compiled a first-hand account of America's Depression era hobos taken from more than 3,000 letters written by the women and men themselves. I was riding a boxcar with an old man who had a pegged leg from his knee down. He saw how I boarded the boxcar and knew I did not know much about riding a freight.

Right then he showed me some safety tips to keep from getting killed. Told me to keep the forward end of the moving boxcar, unlock and open both sides of the doors a few inches so if a sudden stop, both doors slide in a different direction, would keep you from getting locked in. Try to keep a small horseshoe and wire it to the door that no one on the outside could slam it shut.

Pegged leg had got his leg blown off in World War I and had been hoboing ever since. We almost can't quite believe it and if we're honest, we don't want to because if it happened once freely and truly, then we're scared it can happen again, this time to us. Nearly every place I stopped and begged for work, they told me they had work to do but did not have the money or food to hire me.

Copious tears have been shed over the lamentable plight of our erstwhile, prosperous American sons during these soul-bleeding times we term the Depression, but nary a word do we hear concerning the female drifters, this army of painfully reticent women who walk the streets of every city in the country looking for work.

The rails were dangerous for everyone, but for women, of course, the dangers were multiplied. The lady hobo does not dare to forget for even a single moment that she is a lady, even when speculative masculine eyes in well-fed faces examine her appraisingly. The man can sleep on park benches, can prowl around the streets in the dead of night when he has nowhere else to go, but the woman must find a place that is more or less respectable.

She may go hungry without anyone suspecting, but she can never succumb to the almost irresistible urge to curl up on a bench, any kind of bench, and go to sleep, and forget the necessity of going again on the tiresome rounds of job hunting. You can get used to almost anything if you live with it long enough, and America soon got used to seeing not just men and women jumping the trains, but kids too, whole families even.

Headed north of a freight train with strange hobos is no thrill for Sybil Louise Hudson, age 6. It's just a routine experience for her. She is accustomed to life on the open road with all its dangers and excitement. The little girl, her four-year-old brother, and parents plan to catch a northbound Missouri Pacific freight on Sunday afternoon.

The father hoisted the little girl into an open boxcar. The train was moving very slowly at the time. As the mother tried to catch the train, though, her foot slipped and she fell. The father and the little boy stayed to care for her, and the train went on its journey taking the little girl. Imagine watching your six-year-old daughter disappearing down the tracks.

You'd lose your mind. Probably your daughter too once the police and social services got hold of you. And that's assuming the child survived the solo train ride. Other hobos in the boxcar took the little girl off the train when it stopped next and placed her in the custody of the station telegraph operator who turned her over to the justice of the peace.

Okay, I'm officially out of my mind with worry. No cell phones, no Life 360, no car to jump in to chase the train. Just your six-year-old daughter riding the rails with a pack of strangers. County Probation Officer Paul White took the girl home with him for the night. Sweet baby, Jesus and a Pullman car, I'm hyperventilating.

Another stranger, a strange man, has my baby girl? She didn't seem worried at all about being away from her parents. She took it all casually and seemed convinced that she'd run across her parents somehow. Paul White eventually located the girl's parents and turned her over to them. And that was that. Just another random Monday in America, Texas in this instance, in the year 1934.

That's how quickly it became normalized for hundreds of thousands of Americans to be out of work, hungry and often homeless. How quickly it became commonplace to see entire families sheltering in boxcars and train yards. How the idea of a child hobo went from horrifying to routine to humorous. Newspapers of the day would frequently run stories about boys running away to ride the Sometimes those stories would end with dirty and hungry boys chastened by the experience.

But too often, those stories would end in tragedy. The failure to make the leap onto the freight, the falling, both legs amputated by the wheels of the train, the boy bleeding out in the dirt beside the tracks. These were the people on the edges, in the shadows, all but invisible, unsightly and inconvenient, pushed from one place to the next.

To truly see them was to acknowledge both how big the problem was and how close disaster lurked at any man or woman's door. Yet these people had their champions and those champions became celebrities in their own right. Dr. Ben Reitman is called the king of Chicago's hobo land, but he is more than that. He's both a poet and a philosopher.

Reitman spent years in Chicago doing what he could to help the unfortunate people who washed up in the Windy City. I am especially interested in the solution of the unemployment problem. Tremendous strides in the machinery of production have displaced so many men that I believe a complete rearrangement of our economic system must take place before we can solve this problem.

Swap out the words machinery of production with artificial intelligence and Reitman could be talking about our own not so distant future. Anyway, they may have called Reitman the king of Chicago's hobo land, but the true and rightful king of the hobos was a man named Jeff Davis. Mr. Davis founded the Hoboes of America in 1908 and for 56 years thereafter preached the doctrine that hobos were a special breed.

The hobo does not believe that society owes him a living, but he does believe that society owes him chance to care for himself. Davis wasn't just talking. In 1913, he founded the first Hotel de Gink in Seattle. It operated more like a modern homeless shelter than a traditional hotel. It was staffed and run by the guests or residents, each required to volunteer on site for two days per week.

A hobo could check in and get a hot meal, a haircut, and a sheltered place to sleep, not in a bed, but on the floor with a clean blanket. Davis persuaded area restaurants and businesses to donate equipment for his hotel. Some men are born hobos, some achieve hoboism, and others have hoboism thrust upon them. The U.S. was in a deep recession in 1913 when Jeff Davis opened the first Hotel de Gink.

The Great Depression was still in the future. That was a nightmare no one had yet imagined. But high unemployment and homelessness kept the Hotel de Gink full. Davis soon opened others in Tacoma and Portland. And by 1914, he was ready to bring the Hotel de Gink to New York City. We're going to open a Hotel de Gink at Coney Island on Monday.

The best Hotel de Gink you ever heard of. Yes, absolutely first class. Absolutely 14 rooms, plenty of fresh air and sunshine. The New York location would also feature something very special. A shower bath. Bose had been installing it and every new patron would be required to stand under it for a time while his clothes are being fumigated.

And thanks to a $105 donation from a New York businessman, this Hotel de Gink would have real beds and even a telephone. Hobo steam fitters are busy making beds out of canvas and iron rods from quantities of pipe found in the building. Davis put in a cabaret and recruited hobos with musical talent to perform. Davis even wrote a little number himself.

He called it the de Gink One Step. It's the hobo dance. It's got them all a-guessing. It's a hobo tango stranglehold and not a dancing lesson. You learn it in the country roads and in the booby hatches. You'll dance a while then stop and smile and enjoy a few good scratches. Not everyone in New York was happy to have the hobo king bring his hotel to the Big Apple.

The city's superintendent of the Municipal Employment Bureau was against it. He was outraged that the city had rented Jeff Davis a five-story building for $1 per year. He declared that the Hotel de Gink would be nothing more than a magnet for every homeless and jobless man in the country. Which was fine, he said, for those cities out west, but not here.

New York, he said, had enough of its own hobos to care for and simply could not take on the burden of an entire nation's worth of hobos. One unhappy bureaucrat was no match for the hobo king, though. Davis had captured the public's imagination and their adoration. Then Davis took it a step further and offered his assistance to looking for a missing father or brother or husband.

If there's a member of your family missing who may be alive and hoboing, write his name on a slip of paper and description and whatever particulars you think are necessary. We will make an inquiry among the 150 guests at the Hotel de Gink and if they do not know him, they'll pass the word along. Now Davis had competition for the hobo throne in New York City.

A man named James Eads How. How was a millionaire who called himself a philosophical anarchist and called Davis a dyed-in-the-wool socialist. It came to a head in February 1913 at the annual convention of the International Brotherhood Welfare Association, which was a mutual aid society for hobos. Imagine that version of America.

The organization was based in the Midwest with chapters in at least 20 cities, including Philadelphia, Buffalo, and San Francisco. It aimed to educate hobos about everything from industrial and vagrancy laws to venereal disease. And it also published a newspaper called the Hobo News. Published in New York and circulated among hobos throughout the United States, here's a surprising article, How to Get to California Without a Dollar.

In it are listed the preferred lines of travel, details on where to change trains, and how to dodge detectives, advice on bumming meals and lodgings. Davis and How jockeyed for power and leadership for a solid decade. And it was at that convention in 1913 that New York's hobos threw their support behind Jeff Davis. The hobos appreciated Davis's insistence on using the term migratory workers.

Hobos hate it being characterized as shiftless or lazy. Davis stood before a sea of hobos and declared that a hobo was a working man and only ever begged when he had no other choice. Then to uproarious applause, he announced, Christopher Columbus was a water hobo. He said to Isabella, Queenie old gal, you'll have to stake me with a handout.

James How may have had wealth, but Jeff Davis had charisma. The Hotel de Gink and the adoration of the hobo community. He was beloved, so beloved that in 1919 his friends and supporters threw a massive gala for him, a ball and a fundraiser held at Tammany Hall. The funds being raised were intended to build a home in New York for the hobo king and his family.

One with a luxurious bathroom complete with sunken tub, a library and a grand entrance hall. The boys told me that I'd done so much in saving homes for others that they thought I should be given a home here in the city so that I can stay in New York with my wife and two kids and continue my work. Everybody who is anybody in hobo land was present along with a large representation from the theatrical world as well as the world's commercial and literary.

In this material world, we, all human beings, are more or less spiritually hobos. Our spirits wandering about through our corporeal bodies, Vindy day in the stress of material, striving for material things. James E. Chow, the millionaire hobo, as he is called, was not among the gay throng. He is of the old school of hoboing. He says that the world is losing consistency and that men no longer stand to an attitude and follow a cause into theist alley.

So he remained away, sulking in St. Louis, and the dance and laughter and jazz music went forward till dawn without him. You can be sure that this was no regular old stuffy high society shindig. Good old Mulligan stew was served. Boxcar reminiscences were dished up. The Ku Klux Klan was slammed. Tin cans were used for ornaments for weird costumes.

Strange dances were indulged in. And Jeff Davis made a rip roaring speech. The hobo king himself, dressed in soup stained denim and surrounded by his court, all of whom arrived in New York via boxcar. Frisco Nelly, queen of the hobos, in the squeak, snaggled tooth Lizzie and Tilly Hobontrap. Jeff Davis had dreamed of being an actor and a vaudeville performer and had some small success on the stage. But what he's remembered for his greatest accomplishment was the founding of the International Itinerant Migratory Workers Union. By 1936, there were more than eight hundred and forty six thousand members and forty thousand of those were women. The world calls us down and out, but we're not. The only man who is really down and out is the man who throws himself down.

Don't kick yourself down. Let the world do that and come back smiling. The more we don't ask for charity, only justice. Davis's natural showmanship and easy charm opened door after door, putting him in a position to advocate for the hobo, that beleaguered transient, always hoping that the next stop on the rails would lead to work that paid. There is dignity in labor. Encourage men who want to work for a meal and reward him in a manner that will not detract him from his self-respect. Scorn not the man who carries the role of blankets. In 1935, at the annual Hobo Convention held that year in Pittsburgh, Jeff Davis was voted hobo king for life. Just three years later, he was promoted to emperor and the Hoboes of America group was now being called the Knights of the Road, Air and Seven Seas.

As with James How, there was competition, but Jeff Davis was serenely untouchable. The emperor of hobos slapped down all challengers, including one man who attacked him on the grounds that Davis was married. No real hobo takes a wife, insisted Ben Benson, king of the Iowa hobos. But no criticism stuck, probably because no one was a fiercer protector and advocate for the hobo than Emperor Jeff Davis. Even the threat of World War in 1940 was met by Davis with enthusiastic support for his people. The hobo is loyal and would make a better soldier than any other group of men. Just one year later, hobo Emperor Davis urged America's hobos to get off the Iron Road, which will only leave the tramps and bums. Then the police can easily arrest those and make them go to work. He also declared with pride 40,000 American hobos and 22,000 Canadian hobos are serving in the armed forces. Jeff Davis had a brief and very failed flirtation with Hollywood, apparently a rite of passage for anyone in this country who brushes up against fame or infamy. And then he went right back to crisscrossing the U.S. on behalf of America's hobos. He kept going until his health started to fail. He retired at age 80 and died four years later in 1968. Davis had spent more than 50 years of his life preaching the virtues and dignity of the migrant worker. The hobo motto is you can never do for anyone who will never try to do for himself. The hobo conventions continued for a time after Davis's death, but the movement without its passionate and charismatic leader eventually faded away. It's hard to imagine living in our own extremely judgmental times, a story like this happening today.

We've romanticized the idea of the hobo riding the rails and gathering around a fire in a lonesome train yard, you know, like Glenn Campbell sang about in the song Gentle on My Mind. I dip my cup of soup back from a gurgling crackling cauldron in some train yard. My beard a rough and cold pile and dirty hat pulled low across my face.

Through cupped hands round the tin can I pretend to hold you to my breast and find that you're waiting from the back roads by the rivers of my memories, ever smiling, ever gentle on my mind. We like the dreamy romance of the olden days, the idea of hobos hopping boxcars, living free of landlines and landlords. What we don't like is the reality of the migratory unemployed. We try not to see them, keep our eyes focused straight ahead at the intersections and street corners and parking lots where they move like living ghosts. We think we know their stories, even as we don't want to hear them. And we're clueless about the debt we owe those now long gone hobos. Back in 1889, a group of hobos formed something called Tourist Union 63.

It was all about helping hobos find work. Their code of ethics included decide your own life. Don't let another person run or rule you and always try to find work, even if temporary, and always seek out jobs nobody wants. By doing so, you help a business along and help your fellow hobos whenever and wherever needed. You may need their help someday. They called it Tourist Union 63 in honor of the 63 hobos who founded it. Some of those hobos went on to form another organization in the 1920s. And this is one you've definitely heard of. That organization spent more than 50 years fighting for the repeal of outdated and oppressive laws against vagrancy. That organization is still out there right now, fighting to protect your civil liberties. But you never dreamed that the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, was created in part by rail riding, train jumping, migrating hobos. Hobos, people who believed in human dignity and freedom. It's just the plain truth, isn't it? That it always seems to be the folks on the bottom who fight for you and the folks at the top who fight to keep you down. Every last one of us is closer to the hobo life than we'll ever be to billionaire row. So let's raise our own battered tin cups to those near forgotten men and women, the hobos, America's wanderers, who left us a legacy of liberty.

However, and wherever we choose to roam. Transcribed by https://otter.ai Next time on True Weird Stuff. Hey, hey, animal lovers. Next time you pick up a bag of Purina pet food, take a look at that iconic red and white checkerboard logo. Bet you've never given it even one second's worth of thought, right? Well, that logo is the last surviving relic of a very, weird part of Purina's past. A past that included a lifestyle cult with its own town, its own language. And thanks to Purina, big heaping bowls of people chow.

That's on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode. Kary "Doc" Bowser, Erin Cox, Don Morgan, and Sam Moore, except his parts got stuck in my spam folder and I did his part until I found out too late. So Sherry, this is a fascinating story. A story that I'd never heard before. How did you stumble upon this?

I was. Thank you. It's such a good question. So I was reading an old copy of an old newspaper that no longer exists that was set back at the time of this party in New York City for the Hobo King, Jeff Davis. And so I'm reading something else and the next paragraph over catches my eye. And it's this wild story of like, you know, one eyed Nelly and all of this Hobo royalty that flooded into New York City for this party celebrating the Hobo King, Jeff Davis. And I'm reading this and sometimes, especially like in old newspapers, they would serialize books, like novels, fiction. And so as I'm reading this, I thought, oh, this must be one of those serial novels where this is. And then I went, wait a minute, this is a news story.

So I started digging and started digging. And I mean, honestly, like we could do we won't, I promise. But we could do probably four or five episodes about hobos and tramps in that whole chapter in American history because it's so rich and it's so broad and it's so connected to everyday people. Like growing up watching Looney Tunes cartoons, right? Those Warner Brothers cartoons. There are a lot of symbols. There's a lot of symbolism and imagery in those cartoons that comes from this chapter in American history. For example, growing up, I never saw a real human being run away from home with their possessions tied in like a kerchief to a stick. That's called a bindle. And those people were called bindlers. And that was like you were you were not a serious hobo or tramp if you were a bindler. That was like that was like a joke. And so we grew up that you've never seen it in real life either. Right. But it's like a it's like standard in the cartoons.

And so one of the things I got to thinking as I was working on this episode was how the writers of those old cartoons that Baby Boomers and Gen X kids grew up watching, they were writing what they had experienced in their own youth, which was literally millions of unemployed people hopping train lines in the desperate attempt for work. Let me give you another example.

We talked about this one day on our radio show. We were laughing about it in cartoons, whether it's Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester and Tweety, Bugs Bunny, whatever. There's a there's a plot device, a trope about someone baking a pie and putting it on a window sill to cool. Right. And a hobo steals it. How many times have you seen that? Many, many times.

And we're like, I remember we were talking on the show about one day and one of our co-workers said, have you ever heard of anyone having a pie stolen from a kitchen window sill who doesn't have screens? These little things that we kind of chuckle at and we're like, oh, that was so clever and creative. Those are messages from the past. That's time travel. Those writers and animators were showing us the things that they believed or maybe were scared of when they were children themselves. Isn't that a cool thing to think about? Right. Because that would make sense.

Yeah. So I was I as I began diving into and reading about this era in American history, all these things started flooding in and I went, that's all real. I thought that was just stuff, you know, like, haha, from the cartoons. Hobos were not what we could like. Now our vocabulary is if you're not housed or employed, you're a homeless person, you're a wretch, right?

Right. You're not a productive member of society. But back then there was a broader vocabulary. Hobos were people that were migrant workers. Tramps were adventurers, poets, pirates and Vikings. These were people that just could not to be held down. They went on ships too. Yeah. They had what Ben Reitman called, which is a real thing. It's a real diagnosis, dromomania, where they just could not stay still.

And then there were bums and bums were a separate category altogether. Hobos were proud migrant laborers. Tramps were poets and dreamers. Bums were people that were suffering from addiction. They weren't looking for work. They weren't looking for meaning. They were just on the margins of society for all the same reasons that they are today, right?

So it's this whole rich part of our history that we have completely and totally lost. So I'm really glad that you talked about these terms, bums, hobos, tramps. We've heard these, you know, we've heard these terms of our entire lives. I never knew there was any real differentiation between the three of them. I mean, I just figured a hobo was a bum who rode trains. I didn't realize that they were people who were willing to work, that sort of thing. They were actually migrant workers of some kind. That's all they wanted was to work. So you, I mean, on it in any given box car. And when you think about like on that one train that we talked about in the episode, eight cars packed to the rafters with illegal riders, I need you to think about like that happening. That's a lot of people. So, you know, in any given box car, you would find migrant workers, hobos, and you would find tramps, wanderers, you know, and you would find bums. I mean, you found that whole population, but you found men, you found women, you found children and families. You've a lot of young kids struck out on the rails, because they weren't hungry.

I mean, you can only when you can't feed your family. That level of desperation is not something it's in our DNA. It's in our ancestral memory. But it's something we don't know at a personal visceral level. And so it's easy to judge, right? It's easy to judge. How could you let your 14 year old leave home to hop a train? Well, he's hungry. Yeah. And so you know, judge not lest ye find yourself in that exact situation. There's a whole category I want to do it. I saved it for it deserves its whole own separate episode. I did not know that this existed.

And it's so fascinating. There is a category of migrant waitresses. They had a couple of different nicknames. These were women on typically younger because right in the rails. This was a hard physically demanding life. Yeah, this was not for the weak. This is not for the old or the infirm. These women went town to town waiting tables.

A whole population of migrant hobo waitresses. Well, amazing. It really is. I had, I mean, I really had no idea when we talk about a lot of these things. I imagined I didn't realize that this started in the 1800s. I imagined that the Great Depression is what brought this on. And it did fuel it. There's no question about that. But I figured that that's when all of this started because that's when mobile homes started. That's when that was the first time you had mobile homes, because some manufacturers said people are going from place to place in order to find work and they're taking their home with them. So that was when that industry started as well. So you can see that the Great Depression really had a great influence on, you know, what happened in in our society. I do. I also think that perhaps there is somebody you might put in the tramps category.

There are people that live in their vehicles like they have campers. Like I have a friend, we had him on one of our podcasts who he has he has an old ambulance and that's where he lives and he goes around the country and he does. Oh, I envy him. Yeah, he's got a cool life. He does little things here and there, but primarily he's making his money off doing a podcast. He's one of the few people in the country that apparently is making money off doing a podcast. But apparently, you know, he does do that. So I imagine that that's sort of the modern version of this that there's and there are a lot of people like him and they all hang out in Arizona in the in the wintertime. So I imagine, you know, it's just it's evolved through the course of time because I don't hear these terms bums, hobos or tramps anymore at all.

No, you really don't. This is I mean, you might hear someone go, Oh, what a bum. But tramp has come to mean something else, right? Then then a wanderer, right? And hobo. I mean, I just can't even the last time I saw the word hobo used in a sentence, it was describing a pocketbook like the hobo bag. So yeah, that that's changed. You know, we so zoom all the way back out. Because this did start in the mid 1800s, which does shock people that and that there were unions, the reunions of these migratory workers.

Mm hmm. Today, like it would be inconceivable to say to someone, well, we're forming a union of unhoused people be like, wait, what, like, no one would give you any credit at all for having sense. So once upon a time, there were more ways to live than just as a wage slave. And people craved different kinds of life. Back in America, in the mid 1800s, we were, you know, we were settling the West, we were grieving the Civil War, that we were building the railroad, we were expanding the frontier, people were homesteading, some people were making their living as farmers, some people were seeking out work and factories in the big city. But there was, there was a more general sort of openness to the idea that there was more than one way to live your life. And for the tramps in particular, and this is a this, this kind of thread came all the way forward into like the beat poet era.

Because Jack Kerouac, the writer Jack Kerouac, it can be described as a modern day tramp, modern, modern day wanderer, that there were people who were like, a nine to five, a lockdown life isn't for me. And so I'm gonna, I'm gonna make my way some other way. And in that America, that was an absolutely acceptable thing to demand. Because people were filing Homestead Act paperwork, right? People were were saying, I'm, I'm done with New York City, I'm heading west, right? People were thinking they were going to strike it rich, and start over. You know, the, the, the borders and the boundaries were, in some cases, just wild feats of imagination.

It was a different time in a different country, we were different people than we are now. Now, you know, we're, we're tied to jobs that barely pay the bills, if they pay the bills, our health insurance is tied to our employment. You know, we're not, we're not migratory the way we once were. And we have a real harsh negative judgment on people that don't follow the standard formula.

We want people to finish school, settle down, get a job, pay their bills, grow up, be adults, straighten up, let go of your childhood fantasies of wandering the world like we, we frown on that. And you and I happen to know a few people that have chosen to live more like modern tramps, then then wage slaves like us. And these people are considered to be fruit loops.

By Yeah, they are. Yeah. I mean, if, if you Yeah, if you think about what's happening today, I think that, you know, in our, in our lifetime, I mean, what's what's the worst economic downturn that we've had, that was the Great Recession. And nothing came anywhere near close to what they were experiencing during the Great Depression. Because not only did you have bad economic times, you also had all kinds of weather catastrophes that were happening during that time.

In the Midwest, they didn't know about farming and how to rotate fields and everything else, all the dust bowl, all of that stuff led to it wasn't just what was going on with the stock market and the economics. It was the fact that we also had all this other stuff that was going on, you know, at that time. I do think it's interesting that where I live, I live very close to railroad tracks. And it does seem like men who are homeless still hang out on the railroad tracks, that somehow that still is a place where they gather. And it was just interesting to me when you were talking about this, because whether they're trying to hop the trains or what's going on, it still seems like a gathering place.

Isn't it fascinating that that's sort of a lingering holdover? The Glen Campbell song that we had Jeff Davis, our Hobo King sing in this episode. You've probably heard that song, it's a classic, Gentle on My Mind. You've probably heard it a million times. But the next time you listen to it, really listen to it. Because the character that Glen Campbell is singing, that point of view, that's a hobo. He goes from place to place, drops his sleeping bag behind your couch. Did you ever stop and think about what he's singing about, Max?

You know, I didn't, I never really gave it a great deal of thought. But now that you mention it, you know, it's one of the, you know, a lot of pop songs, they just kind of fly over your head and just kind of go, well, you know, Gentle on My Mind. But I had never thought about the fact that in fact, I'm going to what I'm attempting to do while I'm pulling it up. So I'm attempting to do talking so you can hear a little bit of it.

So he starts off the song. I know your door's always open, your path's free to walk. Listen, listen. And then he goes on and he gets, well, listen, listen. Somebody said because they thought we fit together, walk in. It's just knowing that the world will not be cursing or forgiving when I walk along some railroad track and find that you're moving on the back roads by the rivers of my memory.

And for hours you're just gentle on my mind. Though the wheat fields and the clotheslines and the junkyards and the highways come between us. And some other woman's crying to her mother cause she turned and I was gone. I still might run in silence. Tears of joy might stain my face. And a summer sun might burn me till I'm blind.

But not to where I cannot see you walking on the back roads by the rivers flowing gentle on my mind. I dip my cup of soup back from a gurgling crackling cauldron in some train yard. And my beard a rough nimco pile and a dirty hat pull over across my face. Through cupped hands round the tin can I pretend to hold you to my breast and find that you're waiting from the back roads by the rivers of my memory.

Never smiling, never gentle on my mind. What do you think he's singing about? Cherry, I had never, I had never, I had never given it a thought before. I really hadn't. I've always, I do when I was sort of entranced by his, he is so smooth. Singing is one of the great and was one of the greatest session guitarists ever. Anyhow, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to get us off track.

You know, because I, of the way I grew up, we were, we didn't have TV or radio. We didn't have a phone in our house. We spent a lot of time crisscrossing the country in my parents' Chevy Malibu, back and forth from the East Coast to where we lived in Wyoming. And my father was very into artists like Glen Campbell, you know, the old true, like, and the old classic country artists.

And so I would sit in the back seat, you know, for what felt like 1000 hours, just listening to the words of these songs. And as a kid, I could not understand like, sir, why are you leaving your sleeping bag places? Don't you need it if you're camping? Yeah. Why are you drinking soup out of a can in a train yard? And I didn't really think much about it.

But as I was working on this episode, and going on these trips with these hobos and learning about Jeff Davis, I thought, oh, wait, that's like that old Glen Campbell song. He's a hobo. He's singing. Yeah, he's a tramp. He can't be held down to one place, one life, one love one story. Um, and, and there's a real, like, there's a really beautiful, essential fact of the American myth, and the American way of life that's embedded in the story of these hobos and tramps.

This idea, because our country is so vast, that during the Great Depression, specifically, people were like, things are hard here, things are bad. But this is a big country, they're bound to be better, further down the road. When you grow up, the writer Thomas Wolfe really nailed it about what it means to be an American, to be born into a nation that is so vast. Of course, we believe in second and third chances. All we got to do is pick up and move and we can start over. You're, you don't think of the world that way, when you're born in a very small country, a very small place, you know, you got to you got to, you got to be rooted, there aren't that many places to go. But America, especially during Manifest Destiny, which was when the hobo tramp movement began in the mid 1800s. America was a place of endless land, and equally endless opportunity. And so to have lost this, the knowledge of this part of our history, this central part of our American DNA is really, it's a big loss.

And Thomas, we're missing, and then when you go out and find this, and Thomas Wolfe says you never can go home again. Yeah, I mean, that it's just it's a huge loss to not recognize this in ourselves and to not be able to name this weird yearning that we feel that there's always something more around the next bend. You think that's just a human thing. And it is. But it's profoundly an American thing, too. Because we've always had that luxury of being able to go somewhere new, and start something new.

Sherry, do you have within you some fantasy that, that would romanticize doing this? And what is the thing that would prevent you from doing that? I, I do I have such like, you wouldn't, if you didn't know me very well, you wouldn't say, well, there's a patriotic person. I don't fly flags. I don't wear flag themed clothing.

I don't, you know, walk around shouting, America, my way or the highway. But I've such a love for all the ways that were so weird and quirky, and nutty and broken. The ways that were like dreamy children. Those are good things. Until they're not, of course, right? You got to eventually you have to grow up. What would stop me from doing that is this feeling that I owe people my responsibility. I don't know if that's what would stop you. But like, there are a lot of days, Max, when I just want to pick up and go. And why do you think I like road trips so much?

I could just crisscross this country all day every day and never get sick of it. Well, you and I are very similar in that way. I love I love a road trip. But mine is an absolute fear. A fear of all the unknown parts of that. And I suppose if I sat down and wrote it out, I could I could overcome those fears. But at the same time, I think it's fear that keeps me in a certain place. You know what I mean? I think you have to have a mentality in order to live that way. You have to have a real mentality of I'm going to take it as it comes, and I'm going to trust that it's all going to work out. The only thing is, when it's five o'clock and it's dinnertime, I don't want to scramble. I want to know that I can go in and get something, defrost it, cook it and eat it and not have to worry about that. That's one of the things, you know. And I think that it's the idea of I like the consistency of I'm very much a routine person. So I like the consistency of I'm going to sleep in this bed tonight. I'm going to eat here.

I'm going to see these people. I'm going to do my whatever my little routine is, because I'm much happier when I have a sense of routine. I love the idea of it, but the reality is I just don't think it would be for me. Well, you know, a lot of the people who took to the rails during the Great Depression, we'll stay specifically in the Great Depression, felt like you and I feel cozy homebodies who feel responsible to people and pets. But then you're literally not able to eat. You're not able to take care of yourself. And you just can't stay put anymore. I mean, you have nowhere to be, so you might as well be on the move. I think that if you look at what Ben Reitman says about the difference between hobos, tramps, and bums, if you look at what Jeff Davis says, tramps chose it before it was a necessity. Hobos chose it by necessity.

Right. Right. So you and I would not be, we would not make good tramps. We're far too conventional, and we're homebodies, and we're responsible and rooted. We are not born tramps. And even if I use the other definition of tramp, let me tell you, my husband would have to be the first to agree that I'm the furthest thing from a freaking tramp to his chagrin. And you and I would have to be hobos. We would have to be forced to migrate to survive. I don't think we would be.

To find work, because we'd have to work. We'd have to work. That's just, that's how it is. Because baby tramps like us, baby, we weren't born to run. We were not born to run. We were born to roost, okay? We were not born to run. It's just how it is. I think maybe another reason that we've memory hold this chapter of our national identity is because the depression was so terrible. And by the time people got out of it, it left scars.

Every person listening right now has a family member. In your case, it may have, depending on your age, it may have been an elderly grandparent. But every one of us has a family member that was scarred by the extreme poverty and deprivation of the Great Depression. But my mother especially was, just because she grew up with home with my alcoholic grandfather, who had been a telegraph operator. And then of course, he lost everything because of his alcoholism, including his family. And so my mother went to work when she was in high school, not because she was trying to earn money so she could have personal things. She was doing it because he needed to keep the electricity on.

Yeah. I mean, your mom, your mom would have been a hobo. She's not, we're not tramps, right? Right. I think that that experience was a bum. I don't know if he's listening anymore. Sorry. I have a bum parent, so I know. Yeah. I think we memory hold it because it was so painful. And we wanted a brighter, new future. And we didn't want to live in the past and remember or celebrate some of the things that people did just to survive. Because a lot of the people that rode the rails, they should be celebrated. They did what they had to, to feed themselves and their families. They just did what they had to do at a time when options were so limited.

But it was painful and ugly. And no sooner, I mean, look at what followed the Great Depression, everybody, World War II. I mean, you know, talk about a distraction, an event that's going to make it hard to focus. But we, this is part of who we are. This rugged, can do, I'll jump the rails and ride west into the sunset and start over as many times as I have to. That's part of, I think, who we are as a country. I think the one thing when you look at Jeff Davis and where the ACLU came from, and I don't want to get into political discussion, but I think the thing that was recognized was, these are human beings. And I think anytime somebody recognizes that we're dealing with human beings and they need to be treated as such, I think we're in a good place when we do that. And no matter what the situation is, yes, maybe they should be working and they can't work or whatever the situation is. If you recognize the fact that we're all in this together and these are human beings and need to be treated as such, I think we're in a good place when we do that. Well, we're at our best, you know, when we do that. And that's what, one of the most shocking things about this particular story is that it was, you know, the founders of the ACLU were hobos.

Sherry, that was the most shocking, when that part of the story came up, because I don't, I don't know what's coming. The first time I hear this story is when the narration goes on. So I had no idea that that was coming. That was an amazing thing. We live in judgmental times. So like in, you know, in one of my other incarnations, I'm a social worker, and we are very judgmental of poverty, because our, those bastard pinch-faced mofos, our Puritan forebears, considered poverty a moral and character failing, not an economic condition. And so, you know, poverty has been demonized in this country since the 1600s.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that we're demonizing it today. We, we look at people that are not following the late stage capitalist recipe, which is, you know, be a cog in the machine, like we started out in the beginning of the story. You know, make yourself into a worker, consume many, many products and services, try to consume slightly more products and services that you can afford, so that you're in a constant debt cycle. We celebrate that.

And then we demonize the person who says, nope, this isn't for me, I'm going to step out and try to live in an alternative way. Back in the day, those people were proud to call themselves hobos, they were proud to, to be migratory. They were, they were proud of their work ethic and proud of their ability to take care of themselves from place to place, town to town. And so many people who rode the rails were injured, abused, beaten, robbed and murdered. The, the crime rate, these people were victimized, like you absolutely, your jaw drops. And the railroad bulls, which they were like a lawless, they were law enforcement without any real law enforcement training or legitimacy.

They were just some folks with a taste for violence, who were willing to trade that taste for violence for a paycheck. That is who the railroad bulls were. And the railroads were like, that's what we're looking for. We're looking for folks with elastic morals and a real enthusiasm for a beating. And these railroad bulls brutalized the people riding the rails. And they were, they were indiscriminate. It didn't matter if you were a hobo jumping a train to get to the next state over in time for picking season, or if you were a bum drunk out of your mind, or a tramp strumming the guitar, that it was all the same to them. Like, we, we, we were pretty terrible. We were pretty terrible for a good long time. And because Americans are boundlessly creative when it comes to cooking up a racket. We, the railroad bulls were beating people and arresting people. And the towns like you saw what happened in the state of Virginia were delighted for it because they were taking taxpayer dollars, like as a bounty on every head.

Can you see how this got out of control and went dark really, really fast. And if you see any modern, if you're hearing any modern echoes, good for you. Because we, we don't invent anything new, we just play out the same story with new accessories and costumes over and over and over again. And as we, you know, you don't know what the future holds, right? What would this country do in another Great Depression scenario? I don't want to think about it.

Because we sure aren't set up to be jumping the trains again. No, I mean, what it's, plus, you know, we have cars and technology now, remember, they didn't have any of those things. And let's take a minute and talk about Jeff Davis and the Hotel de Genk. So, describe Max, the way like, like, sort of a typical homeless shelter for men operates.

But a lot of times you have them living in huge rooms, you have to, and also you have people, for most homeless shelters, they will not let you in. If you are overly disruptive, or you're under the influence, you can't be. And in fact, they'll drug test you and alcohol test you when you come back if you've been out and you come back. And so you sleep in big rooms, a lot of times the conditions are not good. They're really not. And it depends on the shelter, of course. And yes, you have shelter. And yes, you have access to food. But it's very difficult to live under those conditions. It really is.

And that's today. So let's go all the way back to 1913. When Jeff Davis opened the first Hotel de Genk. There weren't homeless shelters. People were stealing pies off of windows. And, and sleeping in fields and barns like there, we, we didn't have the, we didn't have the infrastructure to care for people that way. So what did Jeff Davis do? He basically created a very interesting, modern homeless shelter. So there was very little money, the how the the owner of a empty warehouse to take a few bucks rather than earn nothing and let it sit empty.

And there were no beds in the men, the hobos and tramps slept on the floor. But they did get clean blankets, they had the opportunity to bathe. And they had hot meals. But the price of that was you had to work at the shelter, you had to work in the Hotel de Genk. So Jeff Davis did something that, you know, in social work, we call empowerment practice.

He gathered these people together. And he said, you're not poor things. You're not the dregs of society. You're migrant workers. And here's a place you can stay and have dignity and food and hygiene. And all we ask in exchange is that you roll up your sleeves and lend a hand to your man and woman. And they did. That's kind of the same thing that they do with the Salvation Army today. I mean, I want to say that it started in England in the late 1800s. And I don't know that for sure. But I'm pretty sure that that's how that that goes. And when you go and you stay at the Salvation Army, you go into the program and you have to work for them in order to so that you're earning, you're earning what your keep is there. And then if you are available to get anything like Medicaid or disability or something, you have to contribute that to whatever the Salvation Army or the shelter, whatever it is that you're staying. But you do work for them.

And I've seen a lot of men successfully start to build self-esteem from the simple act of working, doing things, sorting clothes, whatever it is that the Salvation Army and then rebuilding their lives in ways that are absolutely remarkable. Well, it turns out it's kind of wild. But when you treat people like they're human beings, they often respond like human beings. Isn't that a trick? Jeff Davis understood that these were human beings who wanted to work, and they wanted to be clean and they wanted to be sheltered. And you know, things were just rough out there for everybody.

So when he brought the Hotel de Gink to New York City, and of course, he got the whole backyard crowd. They fought and fought and fought him. But Davis was a very compelling, very persuasive individual. And so he got that lease on this giant building in New York City for a dollar a year. And the building was, it wasn't empty, it was filled with like, all sorts of, you know, derelict plumbing and pipes and trash and whatever the previous tenants had left behind.

And the hobos that were working with Jeff Davis to rehab this building to be the Hotel de Gink for New York, were like, we don't need to haul this stuff off and throw it away. We can transform it, which is why the Hotel de Gink had beds. Those beds were made out of rusted old iron pipes that had been left behind. And instead of mattresses and box springs, the men tied like thick, um, navy, like sailcloth, canvas sailcloth to it to form like a cot. I mean, think about that.

They, this was all, you know, free labor, they were, they were helping to build something for themselves and people like them. And then Jeff Davis turns around, because there were so many World War II, people left home in search of work and a meal, and then just vanished. People lost track of their family members, no cell phones, no internet. If you can't buy a piece of bread, what are you doing? How are you managing to get a letter home? You know, and so Jeff Davis understood that that there were grieving families who, where's my son? Where's my brother? And so he started this kind of informal hobo news network, where he had people all over the country, passing messages along, looking for so and so he's from Boston. This is what he, you know, we don't have photographs. These were people with nothing. And yet here, there was all this like community and mutual aid and dignity and support. It's a beautiful story from an ugly time.

It's sad that we've kind of lost it. It would make a hell of a movie and why Woody Harrelson is not playing Hobo King Jeff Davis is a mystery. I'm never gonna you can see you in that part cancer. He would be such a good Hobo King. So yeah, um, this one really stayed with me. Because I kept thinking about all of the imagery that we grew up with the poems and stories and songs and cartoons that have all of this woven into it in the background. And we just don't know what we're looking at or hearing. We don't understand what we're seeing. And I think most people because they sure as hell don't teach it in school. Most people don't realize that hobos were migrant migratory workers. I mean, did you know that? No, no, didn't know that. Listen, we, we learn about less than 1% of what history is when we go to school. I mean, I've got to be honest. I mean, there's certain things we hit the high points, but there's a lot of stuff that's really lost. It's one of the reasons that I love I love being a part of this podcast. Well, what I like to think about a lot is because you know, I'm such a history nerd. And America is such a new country that you, you honestly can can get up to speed on a fair amount of American history without that much of an investment of your time.

We're only a couple hundred years old. It's not like we're going. And then in the dark ages, like there's none of that. When I think about like, what makes America, America, what makes America um, as a country, what made us exceptional or what made us special on the world stage. I don't think about missiles and bombs and tanks and, you know, speeches. I think about that, that grit that says, well shit, I can't find work and I can't feed myself.

I guess I'm hopping a train and going someplace else and starting over. I have to cough. Hang on. I'd get you some water, but you're a little far. I'm afflicted and my health insurance won't pay for me to go to the doctor anymore. No, I think what makes America, America and what makes us Americans is this inborn, ingrained, deep down conviction that you can take another shot.

This didn't work out. I kind of jacked this up. This is a mess. Let me dust myself off and try something else. Let me try again. And I actually, I think it's not just for us, but I think people from other still feel that way about this country. I mean, I, there are people that in the, where I live, there are people from all kinds of different places and they still go, I've got a dream and this is where I can still do that. And there's something about that that you say, well, for all the, all the flaws, all the things that this country doesn't seem to do, right. It does still seem to offer that to people. And so there's something that's kind of good about that. It really, if you sit with it for a second and think about this ingrained belief that, well, I'll just try something new. I'll take another shot at it. Maybe I'll get a second chance. Maybe I'll get a third chance. If you sit and really think about that, you can really see how that drives so much of who and what we are.

We just believe. I mean, think about you're a big, big, big sports fan and your baseball team, the Philadelphia Phillies, boy, they've had some glory. They've also had a lot of dog years. I've sat through a lot of really bad games that I've listened to. Just painful seasons, painful eras, right? But, and, and we used to work with a guy that wasn't a true fan. He was a fair weather fan. If the team is winning, he wants tickets. If the team is losing, he forgets they exist. And he used to give Max grief about being a fan of such a losing team. And Max is like, when you're a true fan, you know that things can turn around.

That's right. You might just go ahead and say, if you're a true American, you know that things can turn around. You, you will figure it out. Even if figuring it out means tying all your possessions and do a little kerchief on the stick, stealing a pie from a window sill and jumping a train. And that's why when people go, everything's political, everything in your life is political. Everything you touch, think about, dream, wear, consume, swallow, is, exists in an envelope of politics.

In America, we think of politics as a team sport. It's red versus blue, but your whole atmosphere, the fishbowl you swim in is politics and policy and economics and economic policy. And all of it shapes your day to day, shapes who you are, who you might be, who your grandchildren might be. There's no escaping that. And not knowing, ignorance of it, only robs you of the joy of knowing how rich and deep the story is. And it also robs you of the optimism of knowing that shit can get really, really, really bad. And you will figure out a way to come through. Your grandparents and great grandparents did. Some of us have uncles who disappeared off the family tree after they hopped those trains back in the 1930s, looking for work.

Some of us, we have lost whole sections of our identity because those people disappeared and started over, hopefully, right? There's no shame in knowing that. How does that make you feel anything other than badass? Like, well, I guess if I have to steal a pie, I just steal a pie. Now, I do worry about the future, Max, because when was the last time someone you know even baked a pie?

Well, that's true. I guess I got to steal a Hot Pocket out of your microwave. That's the modern hobo. So in an upcoming, I don't know when exactly, because we're working on some other things, including next week, when we'll be joined by our listener Brenna, whose curiosity about her own last name sent her down a batch of crazy rabbit hole involving Purina pet food. So that's next week on True Word Stuff. But we are going to tell you the story of the hobo waitresses.

Who went town to town waiting tables. Like, who even knew that was a thing? I had no idea that was a thing. And if you're wondering, but why did they go town to town? Why didn't they just stay in a town and get a job at the cafe? Well, here's why. Because they could make enough money working at the cafe to feed themselves, but not to house themselves.

And some of them, some of them were both hobos, migratory workers, and tramps. They wanted to wander. And for a woman in the 1930s to have that kind of freedom, can you even imagine how intoxicating that was? Suddenly, you're not on the farm anymore. You're not under your father's watchful eye. Everything's gone to hell because of the depression. And you're suddenly getting a chance to see the world a little bit as dangerous as it was to be a woman jumping a train late at night in the middle of nowhere. So that'll be on an upcoming True Word Stuff. Join us next week for People Chow. I'm not going to tell you right now, but People Chow still exists. In fact, some of y'all might have eaten it for breakfast today under a different name. Oh, I can't wait. It can't get here fast enough. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode, our fellow hobos and tramps. We'll see you on the next True Word Stuff. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate, and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website, trueweirdstuff.com, for show notes and photos and videos when we have it, and bonus content. Everything true weird is waiting for you at trueweirdstuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram.

True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr.

Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2025 Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered. you