Hail the Hobo - "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum!"
Pullman’s fifth annual concert celebrates the songs and poetry of traveling vagabonds
Daily Southtown Newspaper
June 10, 2001
By Elizabeth Kaufman
It's their patch of hobo heaven, a couple of languid hours where the notions of wanderlust will be explored in poetry and song.
The Grand Hobo Concert, at 4 p.m. June 17 (free, with requested donations), has called Pullman United Methodist Church, 11211 S. St. Lawrence Ave. its home for all of five years.
It is a natural choice, says concert organizer and headliner Luther "The Jet" Gette. After all, he writes in a concert news release, Pullman was a community created to house the workmen fashioning the Pullman sleeping cars, and, he writes, “many of them (hoboes) have memories of riding the tops of the sleeping cars, or hanging on beside the “blinds” (canvas diaphragms between the cars) to get from one town to the next.”
On the phone from his home in Madison, Wis., Gette, known in Hobo circles as Luther the Jet, personifies the amiable nature expressed in his writing.
The 62-year-old retired rail rider readily offers how he began his hobo lifestyle. As a boy, the Phillipsburg, Pa., native would “put my bike down, talk to the railroad men and talk to the hoboes.”
His fascination with the traveling life continued into the early ‘70s, when, after graduating with a master’s degree in French from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, “I took a ride on one of the old ferry boats that took the cars across, … They pulled a string of old box cars. I went down and asked the guy in the caboose ‘Is it OK to ride in one?’ … I started running around the country.”
Since that day, Gette has clocked in about 75,000 miles by freight.
“I just love ridin’ the trains,” he says, a bit wistfully. It's a lifestyle, he says, that has changed for a couple of primary reasons.
First, as recently as the mid-‘70s, Gette said, the passenger trains started disappearing, especially in the Midwest. The largest percentage of hoboes, he said, can be found in the warmer areas. “I was out in Dunnsboro, Calif., and the box car was full of Mexicans,” trying to escape immigration, he said.
Gette is amazed that young people still ride the rails. “There’s a group, the punk anarchists, they show up at the conventions. They’ve given us a new lease on life,” he says.
Sometimes hoboes have reason to fear each other, and that fear, he said, has derailed many a hobo.
In 1999, after eluding police for two years, Angel Maturino Resendez, known as the Railroad Killer because he would hop freight trains as his getaway and murder people living close to the tracks (as many as nine victims have been counted), finally was apprehended.
Anyone who questions such danger just needs to talk to Frog.
It was 1995, and Frog (known to the non-hobo world as Jerry) was in Castleton, N.D., when a group of teens out to rob him “shattered my leg from the kneecap down and stabbed me five times in the back and left me to die.” Railroad employees, he said, saved his life.
Frog recounts this piece of news by phone from the home of his hobo queen, Minneapolis Jewels, with whom he is staying in Minneapolis. “She's taking a nap right now. I've gt two 20-year men with me,” he says, referring to the ruckus in the background.
Frog was elected king (a yearlong honor Gette has had twice) and Minneapolis Jewels queen at one of the Britt, Iowa, national hobo conventions, winning with a vote of applause from his peers after a two-minute presentation.
"Oh, why don't you work like other men do?"
It’s all a part of a community Frog embraces, a family he looks forward to reuniting with in Pullman. Going to Pullman, he says, is one of his rare chances to see some great friends. It is ironic, he admits, that he knows so much about some of these people, yet knows many of them only by their adopted Damon Runyonesque railroad names.
Frog will take the last freight ride of his career to attend the concert, he says.
“I'll be riding into Bensenville – hop a Canadian Pacific from there – and from there I have to get the Metra. I'm bringing this T-shirt with me that says I've had my last ride.”
Frog can’t count the number of freight trains he’s jumped. “I'm a million-miler,” he says.
“By 1958 (at age 8), I had such a lust for traveling that I started running away,” says the 51-year-old. He was a heavy hitchhiker until 1970, when he hopped his first freight train by default.
Police had arrested him for vagrancy in a small Florida town and he needed to meove fast. “I was trying to hitch a ride, and I met this man named Pinky. He said, ‘You’ll never get out of here that way. Why don’t you catch out with me?’’ “Catch out” means to hop a train, and the two became riding partners. “I laid in a gondola car – it’s a regular train car with half of it cut off – and at night I was just awestruck by the stars going by. I got laughed at by the other hoboes.
The music of the rails
Like Gette, Frog plays music. He started with a harmonica when he was in a boxcar by himself. It was a way, he said, to keep himself company.
“There’s a tradition going back quite a ways of people riding the rails and making music,” Gette said.
Of the music hoboes make, “If it has uniqueness, it’s in the subject matter,” Gette said. “Any railroad song” is a hobo song, he said.
“(Famed folk singer) Woody Guthrie, he was a rail rider. He spent some time in Texas and Mexico, where he was working. He ran out of luck and got on a train.”
Today hobo musicians perform on street corners or at gathering such as the Pullman festival, or the 100-year-old annual Britt convention, conducted each August. Gette says there are about four or five large gatherings a year.
Ironically, Gette said, “I don’t play anything I can carry around. No harmonica.”
But he has recorded a CD, a soon-to-be-released acoustic compilation of his own songs on Utah Phillips’ No Guff label.
Phillips, who is not listed to attend the Pullman gathering, discusses the vast terrain of hobo life in a weekly one-hour Pacifica Radio Network show, “Loafer’s Glory … the hobo jungle of the mind …” broadcast Saturdays from his hometown of Nevada City, Calif.
Like many self-professed hoboes, Phillips is known as a folk artist, archivist, historian, activist, and philosopher.
Beyond the conventions, the National Hobo Association of Nisswa, Minn., produces a magazine, “periodically depending on when the funds are available,” known as The Hobo Times. The NHA has completed recently “Compass In the Blood,” a one-hour documentary narrated by actor Ernest Borgnine.
Interviews with hoboes past and present include the musings of author James Michener on his own time on the trains, and the music and traveling stories of country musician Merle Haggard.
Enrichment from the rails
Hoboes are not just homeless people, Jette said, though some are. But he knows doctors and lawyers who have gained hobo status by hopping a train or two.
Some of the more learned colleagues are students of the hobo way of life. Joe Hickerson, who will be a featured guest at the Pullman concert, belongs to that group. Hickerson, now retired, spent his career at the Folk Life Center of the Library of Congress, where he edited and produced songs. He will discuss his work, as well as perform some of his own music at the concert.
Events prior to the concert will include a get-together Friday at the Lucky Lady Pub, 115th Street and St. Lawrence Avenue; a poetry reading at 3 p.m. Saturday in Pullman Park; and a spaghetti dinner Saturday night at the Lucky Lady Pub. Hoboes will sing at a special Father’s Day service at 11 a.m. June 17 at the Pullman United Methodist Church. A tour of the Pullman Gardens by the Pullman Garden Club, an event sponsor, will be from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., with hoboes singing in the church herb garden and an artifact and recording sale during Sunday school at the church.
Scheduled performers at the concert include one of Gette’s favorites, retired truck (ED: MISSING PORTION HERE)… Penn. also known as … “He’s infatuated with the …”, Gette said. (ED: PORTION MISSING HERE). “It’s (his songwriting) simple in the best sense. And effective. He has a real knack for finding good imagery, the lonesome whistle. He somehow finds new images.”
Others include Banjo Fred Starner; Liberty Justice; Mountain Lion Kid; and the Hobo King and Queen of 2001, Mad Mary and Hobo Grump.
“We have a nice cross-section coming, but you never know how many of these people will be here,” Gette said, laughing.
Transcribed from scanned original in Pullman State Historic Site Digital Archives: Record 12687
http://www.pullman-museum.org/cgi-bin/pvm/mainRecordDisplayXML2.pl?recordid=12687
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