Word: hoboes
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...lives with his parents in Tacoma, Wash., and, though he contributes successfully to the American Mercury, he has not yet succumbed to the green mists that often steam up from pages of print to obscure a new writer's picture of himself. Appanoose is still at heart the hobo team-hand that he labored to become as a brawny lad of 15 in the hard-rock camps of Montana, Idaho and California, only instead of drawling his story aloud as he learned to do in tumbled bunk-shacks, glaring bars and chilly boxcars, he now puts it on paper...
Author Williamson, only 32, has already been hobo, sailor, sheepherder, circus hand, newspaper reporter, wrestling instructor, prison official (finger prints), social worker, Harvard M. A., professor, translator, research ethnologist and author of a first novel (Run Sheep Run) that was universally hailed as "impressive, fascinating, vigorous, sinister, virile, etc., etc." He was born of mixed Welsh†, French, Irish and Norwegian stock on an Indian reservation. The collection of novels he intends to write he calls "The American Panorama...
Last week, with spring imminent and travel growing daily more pleasant, the Hobo College of Chicago drew its sessions to a close, held graduating exercises. Of an alleged 20,000 students enrolled in the past year, some 150 "sons of the road" filed to the rostrum for mimeographed diplomas witnessing the fact that they had taken courses in a curriculum limited chiefly to liberal subjects like public speaking, art appreciation, musicales, readings of literature. There were a baccalaureate address and "a class song rendered in the quaint idiom of the freight...
...hobo is far from being the comic figure he is often thought to be. In the first place, as we are often reminded, he is not to be confused with a tramp: he rides on freight trains, true enough, and often panhandles a meal; but he expects to work for a living; is, in fact, a migratory laborer. In the second place, although many of us do not realize it, he is an almost indispensable unit in the economic structure of the country. He is the gentleman who picks our oranges, lemons and grapefruit in Florida and California...
...What socially valuable function is performed by the hobo? (See EDUCATION...