My grandfather, Henry wrote this while riding the trains in the depression. It was written in his tiny scrawl, notes from his travels.. ~~

Excerpts from document marked "Urbana Illinois" June 6th, 1936

"... We hike up the road to where the tracks cross. He is brown and lean with a bristling moustache.  Slow and deliberate.  Artistic and spiritual.  Nice looking face and personality.  Colored paints on his sweater. Carries leather coat, small bundle and has small paint container tied on with a rope in German fashion. On this is painted SINGS in two colors. Age nearly fifty.  Talks as slow and meditatively as a professor but his frequent cuss words seem unnatural.  Two boys go for water and we talk alone in the twilight of the Oklahoma evening.

Married twice. Woman hater. Was given up to die with yellow jaundice (gallstones) cured himself by drinking unseasoned beet water.  Has fine time in Florida in winter.  People are going to suffer a great calamity by their sins.  Had made wide study of bible and held view similar to Russellism.

"Everything is a sin.  Even a weed is a sin."

"No" I said, "A weed is a nice and green and fresh and pretty. The cow eats it and we have fresh milk."

"No.  Grass is all right.  What I mean is thistles, etc."

He said he had bummed every conveyance except airplane and that was to be his final achievement..."

~~~

"That same afternoon, while waiting for the yard house, I heard someone singing about the loud noise of the refinery engine.  I looked up the RR and saw a giant of a negro coming slowly toward us with a gallon bucket.  He came up to us and sat his bucket down and started talking.  He talked the rest of the day whether anyone was listening or not.  One episode after another would roll from his happy boasting lips.  Here is a sample.

A lovely prostitute enticed him into her room.  She said she wanted him badly. She seemed okay so he leisurely unbuttoned his shirt and took off his clothes as she did the same. To make his story dramatic he slowly unbuttoned his shirt as he talked and went through the motions of taking down his pants as he talked.  Instead of getting in bed, she got on the edge of it with her feet resting on the floor.  Come on she said. "None of that for me".  "Oh yes. That's the way all the boys on 2^nd street do it. He then began to put his clothes on very leisurely.  She got angry and started to cuss him.  A little feller came running to help her. "I took that feller by the shoulder and socked him one just like that (hits his palm) and he went down and stayed there.  "Then I ups and out of that house and run.  And I don't mean run. I got clear over to this end of town and thought a car was following me.  But it wasn't.  I got in my boxcar and stayed there."

His home was in Chicago.  And he would have come north with us, but his clothes were in the hock shop.  The engine took away his little home (boxcar) that day.  He said that he had traveled a lot and liked it anywhere he could get enough to eat. He had fought a good bit and was powerful enough to make a real fighter.  But I think he liked to rim too well to be a fighter.  He was 22, weighted 218 and 6ft 5 in high.  And he was chocolate rather than black and the most handsome and stalwart negro I ever saw.  He was broad between the eyes and his features were well formed."

"... At Osage, we get a better car, all filled with wrapping paper.  I'll stay her a day or two. A man don't want to straddle too much. He'll run out of places to go.  We walk up main street 5:10 AM and three fellows are fighting for the cigar stubs which constitute their days supply of tobacco.  One, a permanent resident picks them up with a cane with a nail on the end. I eat and hurry to the yards in time to get freight.  Have a car all to myself.  We travel so fast there is no time to eat. See Jefferson City and the capital building in the distance. Down the old valley of the Missouri.  Rich farming country. Fine corn and wheat.  I fall asleep on my belly.

Awakened by hobo and told we have reached St Louis.  It is 10 PM. 586 miles in 26 hours.  The other hobos are off and Slim and I are left to find the city.  The night is dark, the engine is gone and we are way out in the country.  Finally we sight an interurban way off in the distance. We make our way to it and still wonder which cars are going to town and which away from town. We ask conductor and he says that he is going all the way in, so we pay ten cents and sit down..."

"...I get a room for fifty cents and a private fire escape.  Next morning I am off across the long, long bridge.  I like the smell that comes from the flour mills.  I get on a truck bound for Indiana. It breaks down and I find we are already in the town thru which passes the IC Railroad.  I take a sim bath, have lunch, send two cards, get a paper, and settle down for the evening.  Old peg-legged miner joins me and we get to talking.

He sits and unbuckles his leg. For twenty years he has worked 700 feet down in the local mine. He gets sixty cents a ton - during the war days he got eight six cents.  He loads about seven tons a day. His peak was eleven tons in one day.  Used to make as much as $2400 per year. Then depression came.  Mine went broke and he had to live on seven dollars worth of groceries per month.  Now mine is working two days per week.  He has to load each day what cars they send him.  His daughter a few miles away has to pay $7.50 per ton of coal.

He used to be a farmer and had a farm well stocked. Then he got a car.  His six children and wife wore it out in two years.  They forgot the farm work and were on the go all the time. Family finally got him to move into town. Now they are all gone and he batches alone.

He raised six kids on a peg leg.  Lost it in 1910 (?) when a horse fell on him.  He wears overalls and looks black with the coal soot.  He talks as though his throat was lined with soot.

"After I have staid out of the mine two weeks, I still spit up coal dust." That dust gets them all in time.  Mostly causes asthma and weak lungs.  The automobile has ruined the country.  I did well and we were all happy until I bought that first car.  Now my wife is over at Salem (6 miles) layin' up with another man.  My children are running everywhere.  My two young girls stay over with her most of the time. They want to go out every night in the week and I think four nights is enough for one week.  The young people are going to the devil.  All the young girls in this town, fifteen and sixteen years old, are fucking every night.  They are glad if they can get a dollar out of the older fellows.  The young fellows they screw for the fun of it.

"It is not fair for us fellows to dig the coal and have the one who sits in the office get most of the money.  We ought to rise up and change things so we would have our share and people could buy coal cheaper.  Our work is hard and it gets one in time.  And it is dangerous.  Two men were hurt today in the mine. But the change will not come in my time.  I'll not live to see it."

"I don't believe in eating too much. I had a quart of milk and some cookies for my supper.  In the mine, I generally take three sandwiches, which I eat at intervals hardly stopping work at all.  We have to dig the coal and shovel it into the wagons. An electric machine cuts pathways, or aisles through it every so many feet and we dig out the blocks left.  I go on saving coal.  Only used three tons last winter and it was very cold too."

Then as darkness draws on, my 8:17 train whistles.  He starts towards his home and I get between the cars.  It is a baggage train with three boxcars, several baggage cars and a coach or two at the rear.  It stops at every little station, but each place is deserted and there is no one to put me off. I get off to warm up.  Then I get up and lie flat on the top when we stop at stations.  I ride on top between two stations, but it's too cold and the cinders stick in my hair.  As I lie on top at the station, I hear a step beside me and a nigger boy lies down beside me.

At Effingham the lights startle me and they take a lot of stuff out of the car I am on.  I pass through Mattoon without knowing which place it is.  I enter Champaign (after ten years) on top of the car and when I recognize the station I climb down and get off.  The moon is full and I set out in vain search of my love.  I am tired and sleepy and the old familiar places look funny to me and I seem like a dreamer of ghost that has returned.  I return to station, I was up - sleep - eat breakfast and once again set out in the early dawn and awake my love, I go to her.

I love reading stuff like that. I have my great-grandfather's diary from when he worked in the western states at the turn of the 20th century herding sheep.

wow.

Wow, your grandfather was something else!  The things he noticed, the stories he told and what he felt and saw and heard, makes me think of epic journeys like the Oddyssey, Jason and the Argonauts, etc.

You can almost feel what it would be like to be lying up on top of a railway car, freezing, waiting for the authorities to leave so you could climb down out of the wind.

My mother was a child of the Depression, literally, she was born right in the middle of it.  I asked her once if our people here on the reservation suffered a lot from it, and she said, "Not really, we never lived by a cash economy much anyway, we grew or made everything we needed, and if we needed to buy something like shoes or boots, we either sold some of our crops, or cut a load of fence poles to sell."  So I guess our people were already so cash-poor but self-sustaining in other ways they never noticed the Depression much - except for the drought, it was baaaaad up here.  She talked about hauling water from the MO River with her dad in a buckboard wagon to water their gardens.  In the winter he would cut chunks of ice out, which they then hauled home for the root cellar.  Packed between layers of sawdust, the ice would keep food fresh and unspoiled all summer.

That story from the miner and your grampa's own journey to his love - man, we just don't know how good we have it today, huh?  I wish I could have had a good visit with your grampa - he must have been a fascinating person.

Thank you for sharing that with us, Elsa, I really enjoyed reading it.

Thanks so much for posting that Elsa! My gran had a lot of "hobos" come to her back door for a plate of food during the depression, she told me. There must have been a mark on a tree or something in her front yard that told them it was good to ask for food there.

My dad had a similar experience, peppermint. He was born in the mid-1920's & grew up on a farm. He grew strawberries and sold them, when a little kid, to make money.

In the 70's my family still traded stuff to our dentist and doctor for payment & it was not a big deal. 

I wonder about my parent's generation, Pluto in Cancer, since we're the times of a Pluto in Cancer/Capricorn axis. So many millions of those folks had their homes obliterated by WWII or left orphans or widows. :(

Elsa,

I love when you share on your grandfather, thank you for doing so.

In the words, there is an energy, that just draws me in.

The stories themselves are very interesting..but it is just something about his energy, or the energy shared between the two of you, that is deeply soothing to me, in some way.

So..thanks!

my greatgranma took in people who needed a bit of help pretty often.  back in those days a lot of people found themselves in places a little boost made a big difference.

it's dangerous to do that kind of thing nowadays.  the ways people damage themselves can be so much worse.  and more common.