As I mentioned before, I have an affinity for hoboes and bums . . reason probably being that as a kid growing up in Tucson AZ, at 218 North Third Avenue ( now an empy lot ), the house was located just one-and-a-half blocks from the Southern Pacific Railroad, where my father worked as a machinist. He bought the house so he could walk to work in the roundhouse where they made the parts and worked on the trains.
I remember many times hoboes would hop off the boxcars and flat cars and hang around and sleep at a hobo jungle, ( about two square blocks of desert, right in town ! ) located right alongside the train tracks. It just so happened that the hobo jungle, which was right in the city was our playground where you could hunt for gophers, cotton-tail and jack rabbits, gila monsters, lizards, horned toads, scorpions, spiders and a few other animals that would make great targets for our homemade sling shots . . . we were the "big game hunters" . . . . the hoboes, bums and tramps, as we called them then, were usually from the east and would show up like clockwork for the winter . . . at about 10-12 years old I started hanging around the hobo jungle and some of them would make a fire and cook a Mulligan stew in an empty gallon tin can . . . man, it smelled good . .
To me they were NOT homeless people and I don't think that THEY thought of themselves as " homeless" . . . they were " hoboes" . . . free spirits . . . travelers . . . lost souls with wanderlust in their DNA . . many preferred a cheap red wine instead of a meal. That was sad.
The word always got out which houses would cheerfully give you a meal. They would know exactly almost when my mother would be making lunch or dinner on a Saturday usually, I don't know why. They could tell by smelling when the meal was ready to serve. They would politely knock on the door, politely ask if we had anything to eat since they hadn't eaten in days , and my mother would bring them out a bowl of stew or chicken soup or whatever to the porch and they would eat outside . . They knew, that it was best to do this alone, otherwise it could be considered rude to show up with two or more . .
I found out years later that these hoboes would make a mark with chalk on the curb in front of the house that would give you a meal. In fact this bit of trivia was mentioned in a comic book about hoboes that the great Harvey Kurtzman illustrated in the 80's. I wish I knew the title.
This is my tie-in to cartooning that is relevant all from this cartoon about bums ! . . . e-r-rr-r homeless people .
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