Hard Travellin by Kenneth Allsop

Author:Kenneth Allsop [Allsop, Kenneth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 1967-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

19 Hobo-trekkers that forever search

A tightening net

traps all creatures

even the wildest

Too late

the young cry out,

and the innocent

who were not wild enough.

Peter Levi: The Gravel Ponds

The virtuoso booster hobo was perhaps Ben Benson, ‘Official King of the Hoboes’ (twice elected at the Britt ceremony) and President of the Hobo Fellowship Union of America. A printer by trade, he travelled with squares of cardboard in his knapsack, poised to dash off a portrait or a cartoon for a dime; he was also ‘road editor’ for the Hobo News and he described himself without visible justification as a poet. Benson is revealed in the few extant photographs as a tiny goblin with white curly locks and a doorknocker face. There seems no reason to doubt that he had hoboed hard.

He jumped his first freight when he ran away from home in New York City at fifteen in 1898, and remained in perpetual motion for the next forty-five years around the rail merry-go-round of the Union. He wore this experience like a heraldic coat-of-arms: encased by tattoo needle on his left forearm was a map of the United States, COAST KID underneath, and the initials SP, standing for Southern Pacific, a railroad which enjoyed his especial affection and, presumably, patronage.

A lifetime of riding the trains, either just above or in between the wheels, had by his sixties virtually destroyed his hearing, but his volubility remained unblunted and was oftener than not directed against other hobo lions whom he regarded as unentitled to attention from public and press. During his career on the road Benson had good coverage - that is, a prolific one, for he obviously always had a keen instinct for selling himself as ‘entertaining’ copy and listed ‘a few who have reported me favourably,’ Time Magazine, the Columbia Broadcasting System and the Los Angeles Times being mentioned together with fifteen other newspapers and radio stations.

His zeal for self-projection did not temper an incandescent contempt for others with a similar aim. ‘Fakirs [sic] of all kinds besiege Newspaper Offices and Magazine Editors,’ he writes in the preface to one of his autobiographical miscellanies, ‘claiming to be an authority on Hoboes and the road … cushion armchair and thumb-lifting would-be hoboes … hobo exploiters, cheap publicity hounds and conventional home-guards or town bums … Hoboing, like every other profession requires experience, and a “correspondence course” of a few months or a year or even years does not entitle one to a diploma, or right to be called King of the Hoboes.’

This particular booklet carries a full-page photograph of him in baggy white pants (there is another of him, regal in cardboard crown) with the announcement: ‘Hobo Benson is at liberty for talks, radio and movies.’ He also addressed this Open Letter to the public: ‘A few hoboes and would-be-hoboes are roaming the country posing as duly elected King of the Hoboes. Press, radio and the public are warned against the imposters, Hoboically yours, Ben (Hobo) Benson.’

When I first got my hands on some of this tramp broadsheet literature I could not at first nail down the recollection it stirred.

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