Tales Of An American Hobo

Reefer Charlie Fox rode the rails from 1928 to 1939; from 1939 to 1965 he hitched rides in automobiles and traveled by foot. From Indiana to British Columbia, from Arkansas to Texas, from Utah to Mexico, he was part of the grand hobo tradition that has all but passed away from American life. He camped in hobo jungles, slept under bridges and in sand houses at railroad yards, ate rattlesnake meat, fresh California grapes, and fish speared by the Indians of the Northwest. He quickly learned both the beauty and the dangers of his chosen way of life. One lesson learned early on was that there are distinct differences among hoboes, tramps, and bums. As the all-time king of hoboes, Jeff Davis, used to say, Hoboes will work, tramps won't, and bums can't. "Tales of an American Hobo" is a lasting legacy to conventional society, teaching about a bygone era of American history and a rare breed of humanity who chose to live by the rails and on the road.

Ever since track was first laid for the great locomotives, hobos have listened to the call of the rails, lured by the possibility of free transportation to another place-if they could make their way unnoticed and unharmed. They rode the rails for various reasons-to escape economic hardship, satisfy an urge for adventure, or simply to feed their wanderlust. Along the way, they developed their own culture. Mulligan Stew contains a variety of ingredients from the hobo culture: hobo life as it was lived at the turn of the twentieth century, women hobos, hobo heroes, hobo signs and symbols, contemporary hobos telling of their experiences, and hobo traditions from the National Hobo Convention in Britt, Iowa-an event that has opened a door into the hobo world every August for more than 100 years. The convention motto is "There's a Little Bit of Hobo in All of Us." Readers who are hobos at heart are invited to open this book and savor the stew. Praise for Mulligan Stew: No book I know has captured the varieties of hobo experience as well as Barbara Hacha's Mulligan Stew, and in a form that perfectly fits the phenomenon... -Luther the Jet, Hobo King 1995-96

Examines the life of Blackie, a hobo for sixty years, as he chooses to defend his life on the banks of the Sacramento and fight America's changing attitude toward the homeless.

During the Great Depression, Harry Partch rode the railways, following the fruit harvest across the country. From his experience among hoboes he found what he called ""a fountainhead of pure musical Americana."" Although he later wrote immense stage works for instruments of his own creation, he is still regularly called a hobo composer for the compositions that grew out of this period of his life. Yet few have questioned the label''s impact on his musical output, compositional life, and reception. Focusing on Partch the person alongside the cultural icon he represented, this study examines Par.

In the years following the Civil War, a veritable army of homeless men swept across America's "wageworkers' frontier" and forged a beguiling and bedeviling counterculture known as "hobohemia." Celebrating unfettered masculinity and jealously guarding the American road as the preserve of white manhood, hoboes took command of downtown districts and swaggered onto center stage of the new urban culture. Less obviously, perhaps, they also staked their own claims on the American polity, claims that would in fact transform the very entitlements of American citizenship. In this eye-opening work of American history, Todd DePastino tells the epic story of hobohemia's rise and fall, and crafts a stunning new interpretation of the "American century" in the process. Drawing on sources ranging from diaries, letters, and police reports to movies and memoirs, Citizen Hobo breathes life into the largely forgotten world of the road, but it also, crucially, shows how the hobo army so haunted the American body politic that it prompted the creation of an entirely new social order and political economy. DePastino shows how hoboes—with their reputation as dangers to civilization, sexual savages, and professional idlers—became a cultural and political force, influencing the creation of welfare state measures, the promotion of mass consumption, and the suburbanization of America. Citizen Hobo's sweeping retelling of American nationhood in light of enduring struggles over "home" does more than chart the change from "homelessness" to "houselessness." In its breadth and scope, the book offers nothing less than an essential new context for thinking about Americans' struggles against inequality and alienation.

On a cold, gray day in 1991, a kid named Eddy Joe Cotton left home with nothing but a warm jacket, some well-worn boots, and a few crumpled dollar bills. His father had just fired him, not for the first time, but for the last. He didn’t see his father again for two years. But this is not the story of a runaway—it is a tale of an unorthodox road to adulthood. By taking to the trains, Eddy Joe Cotton learned the difficulty of life lived on the margins, the fading importance of a once-celebrated American folk hero, and the ultimate meaning of freedom.

An American Hobo In Europe: A True Narrative Of The Adventures Of A Poor American At Home And In The Old Country This book is a result of an effort made by us towards making a contribution to the preservation and repair of original classic literature. In an attempt to preserve, improve and recreate the original content, we have worked towards: 1. Type-setting & Reformatting: The complete work has been re-designed via professional layout, formatting and type-setting tools to re-create the same edition with rich typography, graphics, high quality images, and table elements, giving our readers the feel of holding a 'fresh and newly' reprinted and/or revised edition, as opposed to other scanned & printed (Optical Character Recognition - OCR) reproductions. 2. Correction of imperfections: As the work was re-created from the scratch, therefore, it was vetted to rectify certain conventional norms with regard to typographical mistakes, hyphenations, punctuations, blurred images, missing content/pages, and/or other related subject matters, upon our consideration. Every attempt was made to rectify the imperfections related to omitted constructs in the original edition via other references. However, a few of such imperfections which could not be rectified due to intentional\unintentional omission of content in the original edition, were inherited and preserved from the original work to maintain the authenticity and construct, relevant to the work. We believe that this work holds historical, cultural and/or intellectual importance in the literary works community, therefore despite the oddities, we accounted the work for print as a part of our continuing effort towards preservation of literary work and our contribution towards the development of the society as a whole, driven by our beliefs. We are grateful to our readers for putting their faith in us and accepting our imperfections with regard to preservation of the historical content. HAPPY READING!