Fathers Day: Dads remember riding the rails

["Errol Lincoln Uys" <erroluys@mediaone.net>]

During the Great Depression, more than 250,000 children left their homes and
hopped freight trains criss-crossing the country. They were looking for work
and adventure; some wanted to leave their homes, and some had to. They grew
up in speeding boxcars, living in hobo jungles, begging on the streets, and
running from the police and club-wielding railroad guards.

The restless youth of these boxcar boys -- and girls -- is recaptured in
"Riding the Rails:Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression" by
Errol Lincoln Uys. http://erroluys.com/frontpage.htm This unforgettable
narrative dispels the myths of a hobo existence and reveals the lives of a
daring generation of American teenagers -- forgotten heroes -- who survived
some of the hardest times in our nation's history.

The "Riding the Rails" website has ten oral histories from the book:
colorful, sometimes funny, often poignant and tragic stories of America's
wild kids of the road in the glorious age of steam!

"It was a terrible way to live. It was rough and dangerous but there was
also a mystical quality. The sound and moan of a whistle in the silent
darkness echoing in the hills. The smell of the cars and the clicking of the
rails. The ding, ding, ding at the crossings. The excitement of avoiding the
bulls and brakies. The open prairies, the mountains and the clear skies
above you. For all the hardships, you feel a faint longing to do it
again...I wouldn't do it for anything." (Don Snyder)

"I was about as low as a kid could get, as I walked over the Snake River
Bridge. I was thinking of suicide, looking down into that black water, but I
kept walking. A freight train was just pulling out of a little town. I
stopped to let it pass...I'll never know why I reached out and grabbed the
rung of a boxcar ladder. I climbed the catwalk. I lay on my stomach and hung
on for dear life, as we rumbled off into the night. I was scared stiff.
(Gene Wadsworth.)

"I was sitting on a railroad track, somewhere in Montana, waiting for a
freight train. I was nineteen years old. It was getting dark, and as I
looked down at the village below, I saw a Christmas tree lit up in a window
and children playing around it. Tears ran down my cheeks as I remembered
Christmas Day when I was the age of those children." (Donald Newhouser)

To read their stories, please visit the website
http://erroluys.com/frontpage.htm




---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.256 / Virus Database: 129 - Release Date: 5/31/2001