YES, I AM STILL HERE peeking out my window on Main Street, and I don’t remember exactly how my buddy and I started talking about hoboes, but maybe it was that old Roger Miller song “King of the Road.” My pal and I both liked Roger Miller and we had both conveniently memorized the words to the song even though we couldn’t remember the start-stop dates for the Civil War.
Roger humorously sang:
“I’m a man of means by no means, King of the Road.”
See, when we were kids the very idea of hopping an outgoing freight train wasn’t as foreign an idea as it is now. And at the time there were some men who didn’t have regular jobs and who traveled a lot — we thought — in order to stay out of John Law’s sight.
There were some female hoboes, too, but they were as scarce as hen’s teeth.
Our conversation eventually led to Goldie, the hobo who showed up here annually just before the peaches got ripe.
My memory was that for some unremembered reason I was askeered of Goldie, although he really wasn’t menacing. I heard he had summer residence here under the Mine Creek bridge on East Shepherd St. which was State Highway 27 at the time.
My pal thought Goldie had other digs — maybe cooler and cleaner — at other places in town in return for him sweeping and other chores.
Goldie was here because of peach activity, but that doesn’t mean he worked in the harvest. He just did odd jobs.
No one knew if Goldie had a last name. And I never heard how he got that Goldie nickname. Maybe he once had blonde hair; maybe he was totally bald. He was a little man, maybe less than five feet tall. He was short. To me he was scary.
What did Goldie do for entertainment in the days before color television and the internet?
Here’s what he did according to my observation.
After high school boys took their Saturday night girlfriends home by 11 like their dads said, the boys would gather up at a South Main Street service station.
Goldie would come, too, just to hear the boys tell lies and talk about the girls (please, we are no longer proud of this activity and we still don’t want the girls to know, so just keep yer trap shut when you’re around them).
The boys didn’t have a lot of time to lie and brag. They had to get the family car home by 11:30 like our dads said.
Overhearing this intellectual conversation about hoboes, another friend chipped in that Goldie wasn’t just here during peaches. He also showed up in town sometimes in colder months.
Kind business owners usually gave him a place to lay his head and get out of the cold when it got really bad, my second friend says.
Did he really get here by riding in an empty Missouri-Pacific boxcar? Or GN&A?
Or was it by hitch-hiking?
Goldie obviously traveled light. Among the few possessions he had were some medals he bragged he got by attending a hobo convention somewhere in Iowa. He couldn’t brag about the girls.
I asked Mr. Google, and he said that there really is an annual Hobo Days festival in August in Britt, Iowa, for ‘traveling workers.’
When a hobo died his traveling friends would say “He caught a westbound.”
You could probably wave at Goldie, now. I’ll bet he headed west long ago.
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MORE THINGS I LEARNED from opening an email: Borrow money from pessimists — they don’t expect it back.
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THANKS TO RFK, Jr., President Trump’s pick to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Secretary Kennedy fired many of the researchers who WOULD have been working to find a cure and preventative for the 35 cases of cyclosporiasis that have been recorded in Arkansas.
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REALLY HATE to even mention this because it will cause us to have more rain, BUT the annual Perseid Meteor Shower is underway.
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HE SAID: “Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than in bad company.” Booker T. Washington, educator and author
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SHE SAID: “Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see a shadow.” Helen Keller, teacher
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SWEET DREAMS, Baby
