Hobo Marks

While reading Jimmy Carter’s book on his childhood a few years ago, I came across a reference to hobo marks. During the Great Depression Jimmy’s house was visited frequently by itinerant workers looking for food. His mother never turned them away and his family got a reputation for being people who would help. It was common practice among hobos to leave marks with chalk or coal on mailboxes, walls, or posts telling others of danger, safe havens, and sympathetic houses—hobo marks. Apparently, Jimmy’s mailbox was marked in such a way that it told other hobos that his family would give them food. With this underground advertising, Jimmy’s family was visited often.

I tend to think of hobos being a phenomenon that emerged from the Great Depression when so many people were out of work and were willing to travel to find it. It turns out that in the US, the hobo lifestyle developed out of the building of our railroad system after the Civil War. The railroads provided the transportation to allow people to travel, but they also provided the work they traveled to and opened up new destinations in the Wild West. In my less than exhaustive research on hobos I found that to many the term hobo represents a lifestyle, a conscious choice. There was, and still is, a hobo code and its first principle is to choose your own life. To some, the golden era of the hobo lasted from the 1880s to World War I—a time when the country was reconstructing after the Civil War, growing and modernizing. I can see how some might choose the hobo life at that time. The stock market crash a little over a decade after the end of World War I brought many men into the hobo lifestyle—probably more by necessity than choice. Still, even after World War II brought us out of the Great Depression hobos and the hobo lifestyle lived on and it continues today.

Because my social conscience developed so long after the heydays of hoboism, I’ve never really been fully aware of how important hobos and their lifestyle have been in shaping American culture. In fact, some of our most influential chroniclers of20th Century America spent time as hobos—Woody Guthrie, Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck, and Burl Ives. (Yep, Burl rode the rails.) My favorite line capturing what I envision as the sentiment among hobos during the Great Depression was written by Woody Guthrie in one of the “lost” verses of This Land is Your Land:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn't say nothing;
This land was made for you and me.


Hobos and their marks are still around today, and more than likely we lump them under the general, and usually pejorative, term homeless. Anyone who has thought about homeless people even a little bit realizes that it lumps a lot of people into a single category and the reasons for their current lifestyle are varied and complicated. Some are there purely because of economic circumstances, some because of substance abuse, others because of mental health problems, and at least some through a conscious choice to leave mainstream society. All of those reasons for homelessness reveal a simple fact—our society is dysfunctional.

If you haven’t quit reading this, you are probably wondering what brought this tangent out of me. Well, right after Halloween an old man in a wheelchair asked if he could rake my yard. I assume he was homeless, but I don’t know for sure. To my amazement, he raked my entire front yard piling the leaves at the curb in about an hour. It was impressive. I paid him what I would have paid the lawn guy to do the same work and also gave him some water. My kids gave him some candy. Since then, a few other guys that appear to be in similar situations have come to my door looking to rake the leaves. Two came just yesterday and one came today. Now maybe these guys are working the entire neighborhood, but I feel like we have been identified as a sympathetic household just like Jimmy Carter’s had been some 75 years ago. That realization made me think of the hobos and hobo signs.

It also has made me think about homelessness and poverty. Well honestly, the whole thing has been on my mind for a while thanks to my photographer wife. Internationally-acclaimed Dutch photographer Jan Banning was an artist in residence here at the university in the fall. While here he completed a project taking portraits of homeless people in Columbia. His plan is to display them in very oversized format on buildings in downtown Columbia—as a way of drawing attention to homelessness. I’ve seen the photos and they do what you would expect them to—they humanize homelessness and poverty. They also force the viewer to examine their stereotypes of homelessness.

The problem was shoved in my face again just the other day. I have been moonlighting as a valet for a local company, parking cars at nice restaurants. One night as I stood in front of a restaurant where people were spending hundreds of dollars on fine food and wine after driving up in very expensive cars I saw a homeless man with a shopping cart. He stopped at a trash can on the street, flopped open the lid, dug around inside, put something in his shopping cart, and moved on. The contrast between the people inside the restaurant and that man on the street was stark…and sad…largely unnoticed.

So, I’ve got homeless and poverty on my mind. There are no simple solutions, but if we ignore these problems nothing will change. Does it really take some guy from the Netherlands to care enough about a problem in our country to try to do something? If we leave things the way they are, Woody Guthrie’s question from another “lost” verse of This Land is Your Land is a good one:

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I'd seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?