When Homeless Teens Rode the Rails.

For tens of thousands of kids in the Great Depression, a rolling boxcar was home

Hopping aboard a freight train wasn't something 17-year-old Gene Wadsworth had planned to do. Orphaned at 11, he had been living on an uncle's farm in the West. But food was scarce, and he was an extra mouth to feed. When his cousin asked why he stayed where he wasn't wanted, Gene stuffed his few possessions into a flour sack and headed down the road. As he recalls:

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 the black water, but I kept walking. A freight train was pulling out of a little town. I stopped to let it pass. I'll never know why I reached out and grabbed a rung of a boxcar ladder. I climbed to the catwalk and hung on for dear life. I'd never been on a train before, and was scared stiff.

With that impulsive action, Gene became one of thousands of homeless American teens who rode the rails--without train tickets--during the 1930s. The worldwide Great Depression was on, and in the United States, one-fourth of the work force--13 million people--had lost their jobs. As banks failed, people's life savings vanished, and many families became homeless. Millions of people hit the road, hoping life might be better beyond the horizon, and a large number of them were teenagers. They hopped onto freight trains like fleas on a dog, in search of a job, a handout, or a place to sleep.

Some estimates suggest that there were as many as 250,000 wandering teens. By the fall of 1932, the country was taking notice. The New York Times told in a picture caption of "A FREE RIDE ON A JOURNEY TO NOWHERE: HOMELESS OR RUNAWAY BOYS/Hopping Freight Cars on Their Endless Trek Across the Country."

But the travelers weren't only boys. Thomas Minehan, a University of Minnesota graduate student who took to the rails in the summers of 1932 and 1933 to study the young vagabonds, estimated that 10 percent were girls. It was hard to tell for sure, because sometimes the girls dressed as boys for their protection.

Some traveling kids were "scenery bums," spurred by the hope of adventure. But most were driven by economic need. Sometimes their travels brought them work. Rene Champion, who as a 16-year-old boy left Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to ride the rails, recalls:

I worked wherever I could, but seldom stayed anywhere very long. I picked string beans and tomatoes in New Jersey, strawberries in Maryland, oranges and grapefruit in Florida. I cut wheat in Kansas. I pulled peanuts in Texas and broomcorn in New Mexico. For a time, I also worked on a cattle ranch in New Mexico, a real live cowboy like my movie heroes.

But most such jobs paid poorly--a few pennies an hour. And often there was no work at all. That meant no money--and no food. "Your hunger hurts physically," said John Fawcett, who rode the rails in 1936. Another rider, Ed Shanholtzer, recalls his recipe for survival:

Almost all cafes brought you a glass of water. The tables had ketchup and crackers. I'd drink some water, pour ketchup in the glass, and mix in the crackers. It helped when it was your only meal of the day.

The nomadic life was filled with danger. Hundreds died or were injured on the rails, thrown from cars or crushed by shifting freight. Gene Wadsworth remembers one freezing night when his traveling companion lost his grip on the boxcar ladder:

I heard Jim let out a muffled moan as he fell. I whipped around and made a grab for him. I got his cap and a handful of blond hair. Jim was gone. Disappeared beneath the wheels.

One constant threat was the rail yard police--the "bulls." Although a Times editorial insisted that railway officials were "not hard" on boys--"The worst that happens is an order to move on"--kids themselves told a different story. They swapped warnings about Texas Slim, who boasted of having killed 17 hoboes. In Cheyenne, Wyoming, a bull clubbed a 12-year-old so hard that he knocked the boy's eye from its socket. Many a rider bore scars from beatings or injuries that came from being pushed from moving trains.

A migrant's life was lonely, too. Recalls Arvel Pearson, a coal miner's son who rode the rails at 15:

There were nights I'd get homesick waiting for a train, with nobody to talk to, sitting alone in a pile of ties under a water tank out in the middle of nowhere. You're only a kid, and you get to dreaming about that warm bed back home and seeing the folks.

After the election of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, the government took steps to address the problem. Older teens were helped by the Civilian Conservation Corps, which gave $30-a-month public-works jobs to men aged 18 to 25. In 10 years, the CCC put 2.5 million young men to work.

In 1935, Congress established the National Youth Administration, which gave high school students jobs as clerks, janitors, and gardeners for up to $6 a month. At its peak the following year, the NYA was helping more than half a million kids.

But only when World War II (1939-1945) brought the U.S. economy back to full vigor did the stream of wandering youth slow to a trickle. And for some, memories of life on the move sweetened with the years. Onetime farm boy Willard Berg remembers his migrant years as

one of the happiest periods of my life. Why? I believe it may be the freedom to do as one pleases and the challenge of living on the road-knowing one will survive, but gleefully anticipating the revelation of "how?"