An Occasional Hobo
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robErt ito AN OCCASIONAL HOBO JOSIAH FLYNT WILLARD’s JOURNEY from TRAMP to AMErica’s LEADING EXPErt ON HOBOLAND to ENEMY OF THE TRAMPS Discussed: Riding the Rails, Excessive Use of Stimulants, Harry Houdini’s Childhood Home, Doting Mothers, Unceasing Cussedness, Remorse Best Not Described, Pocketfuls of Doughnuts, Drubbings and Other Hardships, Wayward Boys, Swampy Things, Tolstoy’s Tobacco Addiction, Hapless Persecution, Riffraff, Circus Men, The Sensation of Being Vainly Hunted, Tamerlane’s Tomb, Shudderful Joy n 1900, Josiah Flynt Willard, than a tramp? As it turns out, they’re not writer, amateur sociologist, all that different from the rest of us. When and sometime hobo, published young, they like “dime novels and sto- Notes of an Itinerant Policeman. ries of adventure”; later, they graduate to In the book, he describes the pulps, for their “spicy articles and glaring Ioften-unsavory world of fin de siècle pictures.” Detective stories are popular, as American tramps: their begging strate- are the works of Charles Dickens, Victor gies, their caste systems and codes, their hot tempers and Hugo, and William Thackeray, even if, as one tramp tells underdeveloped intellects, their reasons for becoming Willard, Vanity Fair could have been much improved had tramps in the first place (number one: liquor). One of the it been “choked off in the middle.” book’s more compelling chapters is entitled What Tramps One author these wandering readers might not have Read. This is one facet of tramp life one might not im- cared for, however, was Willard himself. At nineteen, the mediately think of, but its inclusion in the book makes Illinois native embarked on an eight-month tramp through a lot of sense. Because, really, who has more time to read several states, riding the rails, begging for meals and clothes, 3 Willard in his “Garb of The Road” in St. Petersburg, ca. 1895 Image from Willard’s My Life, 1908 learning the hobo’s arcane language. notably, a near-insatiable “go- fever” eyes, a shift in speech so that the lis- Over the next decade, Willard en- that called to him throughout tener “could scarce understand one tered college, left college, tramped his relatively short lifetime. “For word in five,” Willard, the acclaimed through Germany, Italy, and Russia, nearly forty years,” Willard wrote, author, became “ Cigarette,” Amer- met Ibsen and Tolstoy, then tramped “I chased the Beyond—that misty ican hobo. Following his death, some more. Under the pen name and slippery sorceress, ever beck- colleagues wondered whether the “Josiah Flynt,” Willard wrote stories oning onward to the wanderer, yet man had “gone native,” or simply lost of his adventures for magazines and never satisfying, never showing her- himself in his adopted role. None of journals of the day. By the time self in her true deceitful colors, until his friends, however, commented Willard published his first book, after long years of acquaintance.” about his transformation from friend Tramping with Tramps, in 1899, he It was this ambivalence toward of the tramps, and a tramp himself, was the country’s foremost authority tramping that brought Willard to to one who had few moral qualms on the subject. Van Wyck Brooks, lead the most peculiar of double about hunting them. Pulitzer Prize–winning author of lives. At twenty-eight, after years The Flowering of New England, called spent riding the rails, Willard be- illard was born in 1869 him the Audubon of the tramp came a railroad “bull,” spying on and in Appleton, Wisconsin, world. Jack London dedicated his ratting out his former colleagues as W the childhood home own tramp diary, The Road, to Wil- a patrolman and detective. When he of Harry Houdini and site of the lard, describing him as “the real wasn’t pursuing them, Willard wrote state’s first telephone. His father, Oli- thing, blowed in the glass.”1 about them, denouncing them in ver Willard, was editor in chief of a In his works, Willard neither ro- newspapers and journals as the bas- daily newspaper; his mother, Mary manticized tramp life nor defended est of men. “At the bottom of their Bannister Willard, was the daughter it. If, as Todd DePastino noted in hearts,” he wrote, “they know that of a divinity professor and a devout Citizen Hobo: How a Century of theirs is a low world, boasting noth- Methodist. Willard was small for his Homelessness Shaped America, “Wil- ing that can compare with the one age, with delicate features and a mop lard challenged the middle class’s which they criticize and carp at.” He of thick brown hair. In a photo taken conventional wisdom about tramps, called for restrictions on their travel, when he was thirteen, the boy ap- overturning fearsome stereotypes and more brutal jail sentences for pears no more than nine or ten. His that had been born during the cri- the lawbreakers among them. All the mother doted on him, and he on her. sis years of the 1870s,” it was hardly while, he befriended them, supped “When after supper mother had set- intentional. For Willard, these men with them. In at least one instance, a tled herself in one of the large chairs and boys were lost souls: too lazy fellow tramp saved his life. near the stove, I would climb into to work, too cowardly to steal, When Willard died in a Chicago her lap and say: ‘Hug me, mother, addicted to tramping in the same hotel room at thirty-seven— I need it,’” he wrote. “Probably no desperate manner that others be- “condemned to an early death by lad ever needed mothering more came hooked on alcohol and an excessive use of stimulants,” one than I did.” tobacco. Willard was a lot like them, friend wrote—a flurry of post- At the age of four or five, Wil- as one might expect, and shared mortems followed. Friends and lard was beaten by his nurse “for many of their shortcomings, most peers remarked on Willard’s uncanny some slight offense.” The boy fled ability to transform himself from the his home and attacker, eventu- man they thought they knew into ally ending up on the village’s main 1 London was likely being facetious here, but someone, something, unrecogniz- street. “No child ever had a greater his dedication reveals his acknowledgment of Willard’s status as the “authentic” hobo of his day, able. With but a change in his gait measure of unalloyed joy in his soul even if that status was, to London, unearned. and the way he moved his hands and than I did when I dashed down 4 that village lane,” he recalled, “and out any warning in the dead of guages. An essay contest, one of the no later escapade has ever brought night.” Forced stays in a small town biggest events of the school year, be- me quite the same fine shade of sat- in western Nebraska—“A good came an obsession for Willard, who isfaction.” It was Willard’s earliest roughing-it may bring him to his spent every spare hour “religiously memory, and his account of it is like senses,” advised a family friend— devoted to that wonderful essay.” that of a junkie after his first and best and at an Illinois boarding house On the night of the contest, the trio fix, the high forever chased after but did little good. “When I think of of competitors faced the judges. By never attained. Before long, a police my almost unceasing cussedness Willard’s account, his essay was the officer found the boy and took him throughout [my mother’s] struggle,” finest, his friends assuring him that he to the local prison, which doubled as he wrote, “a remorse comes over had won “hands down” over his two the town’s fire station. Willard’s con- me which is best not described.” outmatched foes. He finished third. finement was an easy one, much of Not all of Willard’s cussedness Inconsolable, Willard holed himself it spent eating candy in the station’s came on the road. “Indeed, I recall up in his room. The president of the engine room. “Nevertheless, it was a most cruel thing I did to a little college came one day to cheer him imprisonment of a kind,” he wrote baby girl, living near our old brown up, but to no avail. Willard left school of the ordeal, “and I knew it.” house,” he wrote. The girl was the the following day, never to return. In 1877, Willard’s father died. baby sister of a friend, two or three The ensuing years were unre- Willard, who was eight at the time, years old, “a chubby little creature markable ones. On a whim, Willard remembered little about his father with fat, red cheeks, and large blue stole a horse and buggy “standing beyond an incident in which he eyes like saucers.” When no one idle in one of the thoroughfares” loudly cursed his displeasure after was looking, Willard would steal of Buffalo, New York, for reasons sitting on a brood of newborn into the girl’s room and pinch her “I cannot say, even now.” After sell- kittens. Willard’s mother and grand- cheeks, hard, over and over again, ing them to a friend, he stole another. mother took on the task of raising until she wailed out in pain. “As The constables soon arrested him, him. The following year, Willard was I look back over the disgraceful af- and Willard was sentenced to a year smoking, cussing, lying, and “pilfer- fair now, it seems to me one of the in reform school.