Word: tramp
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...wild and recalcitrant wayfarer, bothersome to the settled citizen." But he was also "a unique and indigenous American product," and the settled citizen secretly envied him. Something inside every proper American, says Allsop, reponds to the haunting echo of a train whistle or a harmonica chorus of Road Tramp Blues...
...Bootleggers-often seems as rambling as its subject. Like its heroes, it travels at a leisurely pace. But by and large, its heroes are amiable men to travel with. Even the self-righteous Allan Pinkerton, whose railroad detectives were the bane of post-Civil War hoboes, was a tramp once himself, and he never quite got over it. While the Pinks were running down the men they called "miserable communistic outcasts," Pinkerton himself felt compelled to confess "an irrepressible impulse to go a-tramping" again. He went so far as to argue that the Bible is "full of illustrious...
...kicks by galloping along a slow-moving freight taking pot shots at hoboes with his six-gun. Those who survived ran into a different danger in trackside camps. Homosexuality was rampant, and Allsop insists that The Big Rock Candy Mountain, the hobo's anthem, is really "a homosexual tramp serenade," one of "the 'ghost stories' the accomplished seducer spins to entice a child away with him on the next train...
...admit that economic necessity by no means explains why men take to the road. Within the hobo there usually lurked a slightly mad Huck Finn-a fellow with his own restless ideology. He was a tough, radical, reckless, sardonic character who was a hardbitten distant cousin to Walt ("I tramp a perpetual journey") Whitman...
...lots of adventures," he says. "I worked on a tramp freighter. You didn't have to worry about being stabbed in the back by a Chinese Communist in those days. So I went all the way around the world...