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RIDING THE RAILS: Teenagers on the Move

During the Great Depression

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At the height of the Great Depression, two hundred and fifty thousand teenage hoboes were roaming

America.

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Why Did They Leave Home?

1. Some left home because they felt they were a burden to their families

2. Some fled homes shattered by the shame of unemployment and poverty.

3. Some left because it seemed a great adventure.

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With the blessing of parents or as runaways, they hit the road and went

in search of a better life.

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Public perceptions of the road kids differed:

• There were people who saw the American pioneer spirit embodied in the young wanderers.

• There were others who feared them as the vanguard of an American rabble potentially as dangerous as the young Fascists then on the march in Germany.

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• By summer 1932, the "roving boy" had become a fixture on the American landscape.

• The occasional girl was sighted too, mostly passing unrecognized in male garb.

• Girls especially never took the decision to hit the road lightly, for they knew they were stepping into a world filled with danger.

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• It was the same for young African-Americans, for whom the beckoning rails could be doubly perilous should they lead into towns where the color of their skin would make them outcasts.

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• Girls traveled in pairs or threes, sometimes with a boy-friend, and not infrequently with a tribe of 10 or 12 boys.

Thomas Minehan, author of Boy and Girl Tramps of America, estimated that 10 per cent of those he met were girls.

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Minehan described "Kay," who was 15: "Her black eyes, fair hair, and pale

cheeks are girlish and delicate. Cinders, wind and frost have irritated but

not toughened that tender skin. Sickly and suffering from chronic under-

nourishment, she appears to subsist almost entirely upon her finger nails

which she gnaws habitually."

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• Eighty-five per cent of the white youths said they were seeking work;

• For the African-Americans the percentage was even higher at 98 per cent.

• Fifty percent of the African-Americans had been unemployed for two years or longer.

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Were these teenagers bums?

• Not unless you want to classify a massive section of the remainder of the country's population as such.

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• It was a thrill to ride the top of a boxcar running across the Great Plains or to catch the blinds of a famous flyer like The Twentieth Century Limited.

• It was also a ride accompanied by constant danger that could turn deadly in an instant.

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It Was Dangerous!

• The Interstate Commerce Commission's annual reports show that during the years 1929 to 1939, 24,647 trespassers were killed and 27,171 injured on railroad property.

• Since railroad agents placed the percentage of minors at one third, there can be no doubt that thousands of young nomads met a gruesome fate on the rails.

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• Hospitals treated transients only if they were seriously ill.

• They suffered diseases due to exposure, lack of cleanliness, vermin, contagion or infection.

• Ill-clad and undernourished, sometimes days would go by without food.

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"I was hungry all the time. Dreadfully hungry," remembered John Fawcett. "I'd never been hungry before. I went two or three days without anything to

eat. In a short time on the road, I lost 15 to 20 pounds. Your hunger hurts

physically."

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• In summer, boys followed the harvests in the West.

• A young hobo might start with the hay harvest in California and the Rocky Mountain states in early summer.

• Later on there was corn and wheat in the Mid-West; and in the early fall, hops, berries and fruits in the Pacific North-West.

• Winter could be spent in the cotton fields of Texas and the South-West.

• In early spring, a harvester might drift into Southern California for the vegetable and citrus crops.

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Franklin D. Roosevelt Saves Them:Franklin D. Roosevelt Saves Them:

• Before the close of his first month in office, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an act creating the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC.)

• Unemployed and unmarried men between the ages of 18 and 25 were eligible to enroll.

• They were to be paid $30 a month, of which $25 was to be sent directly to their needy and dependent families.

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• So urgent and volatile did the administration view the youth crisis that the first camp was set up on April 17, 1933 — just 12 days after the CCC was officially inaugurated.

• By early July, 250,000 young men were settled in 1,468 forest and park camps.

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"As there's no single answer to why boys leave home, there's no single

answer to what will keep them there after — and if — they go back," said

one case worker. "But if I had to make such an answer it would be

jobs. Just that. Honest-to-goodness jobs that would let a fellow feel that he's a man, running his own life."

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Another Difficult Chapter In The Another Difficult Chapter In The Lives Of These Boys:Lives Of These Boys:

• Those jobs would only come when the Great Depression ended as the country prepared for war.

• In 1942, even as the CCC camps were winding down, thousands of "Depression Teenagers," who had served in FDR's "Tree Army," were on their way to Europe and Africa to fight.

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• As trains carrying troops and materiel crossed the country day and night, the occasional rider was still glimpsed in a boxcar door or sitting on the catwalk.

• It was the end of the last hobo era.

• The boys and girls who rode the rails had gone to war.

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• Riding the rails was a rite of passage for a generation of young people and profoundly shaped the rest of their lives.

• Self-reliance, compassion, frugality, a love of freedom and country are at the heart of the lessons they learned.

• Their memories are a mixture of nostalgia and pain; their late musings still tinged with the fear of going broke again.

• At journey's end, the resiliency of these survivors is a testament to the indomitable strength of the human spirit.