Two hobos walking along railroad tracks after being put off a train. One is carrying a bindle. (Commons image credit)
HOMELESSNESS IN TODAY’S AMERICA AND THROUGHOUT THE WORLD ALL RESULT FROM A WELL-PLANNED, GLOBAL OPPRESSION
A tramp is a demeaning word which labels a person’s morals vs his life’s conditions. JonAk
The Hobo Trails
The faces of vagrancy in our modern world are very different from those from the late 1800s thru the 1960s. Transportation and technologies have expedited the movement of consumer products and people. Without these social advancements, distance would keep man on a long and wandering trail. So, can we honestly label a person say that a So, a person traveling thru uncertainties during the late 1800s and 1960s was possibly labeled as a wanderer, trying to get from point A to point B including looking to start a new life or job.
Freight hopping was the perfect convenience for many stranded wanders during the modern era of which the majority of them were men.
Who put a clown face on hobos?
Maybe there is an explanation as to how a wandering traveler became a hobo and blatantly associated with a circus clown.
Certainly dusty wandering travelers began to show similar characteristics: dirty clothes, dirty hair (and hat), dirty face and dirty ring-circled mouth, dirty bare-feet (or shoes). Some people may have found this human state as comical and maybe many wanderers that were needing work were lucky to join a circus act. And, if this not a reasonable happenstance, Hollywood endorsed these same characteristics and labeled traveling wanders of America Hobos and Clowns.
A historical consensus tells us that:
A hobo [was] a migrant worker or homeless vagrant, especially one who is impoverished. The term originated in the Western—probably Northwestern—United States around 1890. Unlike a “tramp”, who works only when forced to, and a “bum”, who does not work at all, a “hobo” is a traveling worker.
Hobo King Dutch, who first set out to ride the rails when he was 10 years old, meets up at the festival’s boxcar with Britt resident John Pratt. (Alyssa Schukar). Source
The spokesman. com
THE LAST OF THE GREAT AMERICAN HOBOS
Hop a train to Iowa, where proud vagabonds gather every summer to crown the new king and queen of the rails
BY JEFF MACGREGOR; PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALYSSA SCHUKAR
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE |
There’s a kind of late summer Midwestern sunset, maybe you’ve seen one, so beautiful and so strange it’s dislocating. From end to end the whole sky goes rose pink, and a giant sun hovers out there like a live coal over the corn. For a while, nothing moves. Not that sun, not the moon, not the stars. Time stops. It’s dusk in farm country, coming up on twilight, but there’s something of eternity in it.
Not long ago out in Britt, Iowa, they were watching that big sun hang behind the grain elevators while the orange light from the campfire flickered up in the hobo jungle. This is by the railroad tracks off Diagonal Street, just over from the cemetery and a couple of blocks down Main Avenue from the center of town. And after dinner, once the pots and pans are washed and stacked, the hobos will sit and smoke and sing a few choruses of what sounds like “Hobo’s Lullaby.” Not far away, at the foot of the boxcar, in the Sinner’s Camp, they’ll tell stories and drink beer in the lengthening shadows. Read full article at source
American literature.com
America On Coffee 