Hobos are drifters who manage to survive by their wits, working when necessary, but tending not to. The word “hobo” is a contraction of the salutation “Ho” and the ironic “Beau.” “Ho Beau” is an old fashioned precursor to the current “Hey Dude.” These are sarcastic appellations because they are directed at persons who are neither beaus nor dudes.
Another explanation claims that the word stems from “Hoe Boy.” After the Civil War (1861-1865) migrant farm workers carried their own hoes. The plural is as dichotomous as the etymology; it is spelled “hobos” or “hoboes.”
Hobos were, in effect, a temporary work force that was highly mobile. They traveled by freight train because it was free, accessible, and went everywhere. To make their connections they congregated near rail yards, where they could jump off one train and catch another. Trains slow down at the yards and made access and egress fairly easy.
The large rail yard here in southeastern Norwich was an ideal place to transfer trains and to find work and supplies nearby. In operation from 1868 to 1957, this yard belonged to the New York, Ontario & Western Railway (O&W), but did connect with the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western (DL&W). Today the high and middle schools and the Norwich Court apartments now stand where the rail yards once stood. The brown CWS building used to be the O&W freight house.
While waiting between trains, or to bed down while working nearby, the hobos stayed in areas known as “jungles,” where they could rest and eat. Sometimes they spent several weeks in these jungles. Jungles were aptly named because they were often cesspools of Darwinian survival. It took a lot of guts for a lone man to walk into one of these places, where he would be surrounded by strangers and the only law would be theirs. A successful hobo had to be sly or tough or both.
The photo shows the location of what used to be a hobo jungle in Norwich, or so I am led to believe. It was the area northwest of where the DL&W crossed over the Canasawacta Creek on the Black Bridge. I took the photo from the bridge and a girder shows on the right. In the foreground is the Creek. To the left of the girder is Marlene Meadows and that long blue building to its left is Norwich Aero. If I had a wide screen shot, McDonald’s would be on the far left. O’Hara Drive does not show but it runs between Aero and Marlene. This area has been filled in with dirt and rubble. Between the jungle and State Route 12 was an auto junk yard. Where McDonald’s is now was a gas station and before that the house where the junk dealer lived.
I have never seen this jungle and am relying on hearsay and on the Sanborn Insurance Maps. I heard that there were other jungles in the vicinity. One was by the short O&W bridge over Johnson Creek, just south of where Maple Grove trailer park is now. Another was north of the city and the river where the O&W once crossed.
Hobos were written about in the now classic books of local lore. George W. Walter, in his 1962 book, “Chenango Valley Tales,” has a chapter on “Knights of the Road” (page 123). Roy Gallinger, in his 1970 book, “Smoke Rings Over the Valley” has a chapter on “The Vanishing Breed” (page 158). He heralds the 1930s as “when hoboing was at its best in Chenango County.” He places the jungle south of the city about where the Sav-A-Lot shopping plaza is now. These jungles seem to have been in several places.
Jim Rahn got me interested in hobos when he told me about the hobo jungle that was here in the 1930s, the one in the photo. Jim’s father worked on the railroad and would come home with copies of “The Hobo News,” a now famous newspaper that had its origins in 1915. It can be found online at www.hobonickles.org/thenews.htm . On its front page it states that “a hobo will work - a tramp won’t work - a bum can’t work.”
My personal experience with hobos stems from when I was a stevedore in the gigantic Proviso railroad yards, west of Chicago, where we always worked with hobos. They were an entertaining bunch of guys, but you could never trust them, especially after being paid cash at day’s end. In my adventurous youth I worked with all kinds of strange people; in fact, I sought them out and I still fondly remember many of them. Their nearby jungle was on the outskirts of an enormous garbage dump. The hobos fabricated shacks out of wood salvaged from boxes and it looked like a slummy makeshift village.
When Jim put me into hobos I did some research. The best and most recent scholarly book is “Citizen Hobo. How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America,” by Todd DePastino, published in 2003. This book is a fascinating sociological study of hobos. It is available at Guernsey Library (305.568 Depa). On page 65 the nomenclature is clarified thusly. A hobo is a migratory worker; a tramp is a migratory non-worker, and a bum is a stationary non-worker.
Essentially, hobos are smart, but usually lack credentials and seem unable to fit into mainstream society. The heyday of the hobo coincided with the Great Depression (1929-1939) when jobs were scarce and migratory behavior in search of something better made more sense than suffering in one place. Some hobos were well educated and they wrote profusely about their experiences. Consequently, there are many books and magazine articles about hobos.
Every one of these books tells about hobo marking symbols. Hobos were door to door beggars and whenever someone was kind enough to feed them, they would leave an inconspicuous mark to guide future hobos to soft touches. No good deed ever goes unpunished. A booklet, “The Hobo and His Codes” by Jackie Hoag and Shirley Edwards, is available at the county Historical Museum for a buck.
The fascination with hobos is that many of us are metaphorical hobos. We wander through life catching whatever fate train runs by. Then we hop on the next one, and so on. We struggle to survive in our own personal jungles. In spite of family and friends, we are often lonely souls confronting menacing strangers and discomforting situations. We get by on our wits, or our luck, or not. Moreover, we actually do prefer the guidance of fate to the sedentary stability of ordinary routines.