On a Young Hobo

Hobo is one of those words of which we have no clear etymology. However, the word is in our vernacular and has been since the 19th Century. During the Great Depression in the United States, the roads and railways were clogged with young men (and a few women) who were traveling around looking for work, food, direction. With almost 25% unemployment, it’s no wonder why. My uncle Bubba (his name was Melville Carr Baker; that’s why everyone called him Bubba) told his tales of riding the rails in the 1930s from town to town.

Another young man who did this was one Arnold Samuelson. From Scandinavian stock in the American Middle West, Arnold had finished his college work and was, like most men aged 22, uncertain about his future. That’s when he decided to stick his thumb out on the highway and travel the United States, to see what there was of the amazingly large nation. Eventually, Arnold found himself sitting on top of a boxcar as it made its way down the bridges from Miami into Key West, Florida, the southernmost point in the nation on the East Coast. When he arrived in Key West, it was almost summer, the time when people at that time left Florida to escape the heat and mosquitos.

That first night in Key West, Arnold slept on the dock; the sea breeze kept the bugs at bay. But the next night, a couple of local policemen said he couldn’t sleep in public and offered to put him in their holding cell for the night. One rule of being a hobo, at least according to Uncle Bubba, was that you never said “no” to the police. So, Arnold went with them. That started several days of walking around the town during the light and sleeping in the mosquito-filled jail cell at night.

On one of his walks about the town, Arnold found himself in front of a large, older, typical Key West house. He knocked on the door, and a burly, shirtless, mustachioed man came out and confronted him. Arnold stammered hello, and the man asked him, brusquely, “Waddaya want?” Arnold sketched out his tale to the man, and he could see that, the more he explained his situation, the more relaxed the man became. “So, you just want to chew the fat?” the man said with a smile. Arnold nodded. The man said that he was busy, to come back the next morning and they would sit on the porch of the man’s house and have a proper talk. Arnold agreed. That began several days of Arnold waking up in the jail, scratching his new bug bites, then coming to the man’s house and having deep, meaningful conversations about life, love, art, and Arnold’s favorite topic, writing. The man was quite knowledgeable about many topics and filled with good advice and helpful life-tips for the young hobo.

“If I wished to learn about writing and about life,” Arnold asked him one day, “what books should I read?” The man got up and got a piece of paper and a pencil. He made a list of books for Arnold to get and peruse. “Those’ll teach you about what you need to know,” he told Arnold. One day, the man gave Arnold the news that he had to take his boat up the coast. He asked Arnold to do him a favor. “Say,” he said, “would you want to come along? You can live on the boat and watch out for it when I’m not on it.” Arnold eagerly agreed. He couldn’t believe his good fortune. He ran back to the police station and grabbed his tattered bag, thanked the cops, and ran back to the man’s house. That was the beginning of a whole year of sailing on the Caribbean with the man and his fishing buddies and other assorted guests. The man paid him a dollar a day, and Arnold was deliriously happy.

Arnold never did become a famous writer, but he did publish an interesting book about his experience there.

It’s called, With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba.

On a Boy’s Letter

In the National Archives of the United States, there are reams and reams of letters that people have sent to the occupant of the Oval Office over the years. The Archives are working tirelessly to digitize those letters. With permission, any American can access these records and see what people wrote to the various Chief Executives. Sometimes, people from other countries wrote to the American President.

We don’t know why the boy from the Caribbean island wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. Perhaps, as children do, he simply wanted to express his admiration for a man who seemed to be so inspirational at a time when the world was going mad with economic disaster and world war. For many, FDR represented one of the last bulwarks against the fascism that was sweeping the globe from Japan to Paris in the war’s first full year. Roosevelt had been recently re-elected for an unprecedented third term, and some breathed a sigh of relief that he was still in control of the last great democracy on earth save Great Britain.

The boy, aged 12, took a pencil and wrote the great man to express his admiration and to ask a favor. The letter begins, “Mr. Franklin Roosevelt, President of the United States, my good friend Roosevelt.” In broken English, he wrote to say that he had heard about FDR’s election win, and he expressed that he “was very happy to hear” the election results over the radio. It was that medium of radio that Roosevelt had utilized to speak directly to the people during the Great Depression and throughout the 1930s in a series of talks called the Fireside Chats. Those talks to the American public resonated beyond the US borders, carried by the airwaves into the Latin American sphere and the island nations like the one the boy came from.

In his letter, the boy’s grasp of English is obviously limited, but his admiration for the American President shines through. He admits that, “I don’t know very English,” and when he congratulates FDR on his reelection, the lad doesn’t know the English word “term.” So, he inserts his native Spanish word “periodo” instead. It’s an earnest and honest letter as well. Near the end, the boy makes an interesting request, however. He asks the American leader for a new $10 bill. He calls the note a “green American,” probably somehow confusing the term “greenback” as slang for an American bank note. He adds, “because never, I have not seen one,” the boy says by way of explanation.

It could be that the boy wrote the letter as part of a school exercise in his homeland. The letter is written on school stationery, and it has the school’s address in the upper left-hand corner. When he asks for the $10 bill, he repeats the address of the school as where the gift could be sent. Then, as the letter drew to a close, the boy reiterates that his English knowledge is limited, but he says that perhaps Roosevelt’s knowledge is Spanish was limited as well. “You are American,” he said, “but I am not American.” “Good by,” he says by way of signing off. And then, the boy signs the letter.

“Your friend,

Fidel Castro.”

On a Ridiculous Commission

Henry Graves, Jr., was from what we usually call “old money” because his ancestry traces back to some of the wealthiest member of the group who first settled Massachusetts. By the time he came into the family’s fortune in the late 1800s, he was ready to take that money and make more. And so, he did. He invested in railroads at exactly the right time in American History that maximized his earnings, and his shrewd financial insights more than doubled his family wealth.

As one of America’s wealthiest men, Graves, like others of his ilk, was incredibly competitive. One of his major rivals in business and in other things was James Packard, the creator of the famous Packard automobile. The two business tycoons competed to outdo the other one in profit but also in possessions. In 1925, looking to best his rival, Graves commissioned the creation of a personal item that would become the envy of everyone he knew–especially Packard.

What Graves commissioned would take three years to design and five more years to complete and deliver to the wealthy man. By the time the item was delivered, of course, the United States had been plunged into the depths of the Great Depression. What seemed like a harmless jab at a rival at the time Graves had placed his order had then become symbolic of the excesses of the wealthy. Those excesses were a part of what many people felt had caused the economic downturn in the first place.

And then word spread that the commission had cost Graves $320,000 at a time when most people wouldn’t have paid more than $70 for an item that accomplished the same thing.

Graves received a piece of work that had 920 separate and individual parts. Yet, the work only weighed a little more than a pound. It boasted almost 450 screws, over 100 wheels, and 120 levers. To top it off, the piece also featured over 70 valuable jewels. On the front, the item showed the night sky over Central Park in New York City, accurately depicted in detail. Truly, it was a piece of art to behold, the most extravagant and complicated item of its kind ever produced.

But people cursed Graves and the item despite its obvious craftsmanship and beauty. Graves ignored the curses, but then, something curious happened. Soon after the wealthy man took delivery of the piece, his best friend died. Then, a few days later, his own son was killed in a car crash. Not a few people shook their heads and felt that Graves was certainly paying for the extravagance in such a commission while most people in the nation–and the world–were suffering. It seemed like justice for such a ridiculous commission.

Graves decided to put the thing away. He died in 1953.

And in 2014, the Patek Philippe Graves Supercomplication watch he commissioned sold for a record $24,000,000.

On a Dam Coincidence

The title here is not a typo. The story is about the building of the structure that became known as the Hoover Dam. The name of the dam that was built on the Colorado River between Arizona and Nevada comes to us because the president at the time the funds were allocated for the construction was the much-maligned Herbert Hoover. Hoover, presiding over the worst economic downturn in American History, knew the construction of such a dam would have drastic and amazing consequences for the entire southwestern United States.

First of all, the influx of government money to the severely depressed region would be warmly welcomed. Jobs were created. The water collected by the dam led to an explosion of agriculture in an area that had largely been desert. Floods were controlled. Lake Mead was created. The electricity that the dam produced completely changed the lives of everyone in that part of the nation. And so on.

It is an amazing engineering feat. Hoover himself is the only professionally trained engineer to hold the presidency, so that tracks. In today’s money, the dam cost almost three-quarters of a billion dollars. Almost 3.5 million cubic yards of concrete was poured to construct it. And the building of the massive structure was so fraught with danger because of the scale of the venture that it eventually cost over 100 lives.

The first person to die at the building site was a man named John Tierney. He died in a flash flood that roared through the canyon where the dam would eventually be built while he and a survey party were scouting a possible suitable places to build. This happened on December 20, 1921, long before the dam’s plans and funding were approved.

Ironically, the last person to die during the dam’s construction happened 14 years later to the day. On December 20, 1935, a worker fell to his death between two of the intake towers in the dam. That coincidence was not lost on many who worked on the massive project.

Rumors abound to this day surrounding the build. Some say that there are workers who were accidently cemented inside the dam and their bodies never removed. Some say that the project was the first one in the world to have required hardhats be worn by all construction workers because of the deaths. Some say that the dam is haunted and therefore jinxed by those who lost their lives there. Of course, none of these is true.

And those rumors are peanuts compared to the coincidence of the first and last deaths that took place at the building site. The fact that both men died on the exact same date 14 years apart is amazing on its face. What makes it even more eerie–almost downright spooky–is the other coincidence about the deaths.

You see, the man who died 14 years later after John Tierney was named Patrick Tierney–a man who was John’s only son.

On An Exodus Route

The 1930s could be seen as the most pivotable decade of the incredibly violent and paradigm shifting 20th Century. Hitler (and Roosevelt, too) came to power. Japan invaded China. Italy attacked Ethiopia. All of that sets up World War 2 that began in 1939. None of those events begins to look at the absolute disaster that the worldwide Great Depression brought upon everyone.

It’s difficult to fathom 25% unemployment. We can’t imagine not being able to use banks for our economies. A large segment of the population simply not being able to eat is beyond our ken in most of the western world today. Yet, all of that happened in the United States in the 1930s. We have since learned that the Great Depression didn’t begin when the Stock Market crashed in 1929. The grim descent into economic collapse that bottomed out in early 1933 actually started for farmers a few years earlier.

Farmers began to feel extreme economic pressure in the 1920s due to several factors. First, small farmers were finding that they could not keep up with the emerging economy of scale as large, corporation-owned farms began to emerge and started to squeeze prices verses the costs of farming equipment. This forced many small farmers into bankruptcy. Secondly, the middle years of the 1920s saw extreme drought in much of the farm belt mid-west. Finally, outdated farming methods exhausted land and made it useless and unproductive. The result is known as the Dust Bowl, where farmers found that their land literally dried up and blew away.

One of the hardest hit areas was Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri. So, desperate for food and for ways to provide for their families, many of the farmers there simply abandoned their farms and moved to California. And the route these desperate people took to get to California was along a highway that was one of the first numbered roads in the United States when it was constructed in the early 1920s. It ran from Chicago to Santa Monica, almost 2,500 miles and through seven states.

When John Steinbeck wrote his epic novel, The Grapes of Wrath, he depicted the fate of these Dust Bowl farmers, and he used this same highway as a metaphor for what was happening to the people. He said it represented both despair (the place they were leaving) and hope (their destination), and he likened it to the route the Hebrews took in the Bible from slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land, a journey known as the Exodus. Steinbeck termed the route The Mother Road of America because it birthed a new way of living for these migrants who were so desperate for a start-over. Because they were united by the journey and, thus, the route, Steinbeck pointed out that the journey itself became a unifying experience, an shared moment in history, for these desperate farm families. Think of it as a poor, poverty-driven “on the road” story.

The highway, as you know, is labeled Route 66. Today, it is used by vacationers and tourists, cyclists and RV-ers, people who travel the route for fun and adventure. Most of these travelers probably do not realize that it was the road used by over 300,000 Americans in the 1930s who left behind a dry and barren land for the vision of a green and prosperous Promised Land during our version of the Exodus.

On a Slick Salesman

Bill Blythe got around.

That was the understatement of the century. First of all, Bill was a traveling salesman. For the majority of this sales career, Bill sold heavy machinery to contractors and builders and even state and local governments. Even during the Great Depression, Bill had a knack for sweet talking his way past the secretaries and into face to face meetings with the decision-makers on those types of purchases. Once he got past the secretaries, he said, the big bosses were easy because the equipment pretty much sold itself. The hard part was convincing the secretaries to let him in. So, Bill was an excellent salesman.

Then, when he died in 1946, he left behind him five wives and a whole slew of children from one side of the United States to another. In fact, all five of his wives were women he met as he traveled cross-country on sales trips. As I said, Bill was smooth when it came to the women his travels brought into his path. He sold himself, his personality, the way he sold his sales goods. And by smooth I mean manipulative and deceptive and, well, as we used to say back in Alabama, slick. So, a slick salesman and a slick talker. For Bill, the two were inextricably linked.

One minor nit to pick here, minor at least for Bill if not the law, was that he often didn’t get divorced from the previous wife before he would marry the next one. He married his last wife, Virginia, while still married to wife number four, a woman named Wanetta. Oh, and in an era when several states still had laws on the books that forbade adultery, Bill fathered some of his kids with a couple of his ex-wives after their divorces. That’s a smooth talker for sure.

But his marriage to Virginia seemed to mark a turning point in his life. Well, to be fair, perhaps it was his service in World War 2 in the African and Italian Theaters of War repairing heavy equipment like the type he used to sell. Travel–and war–can change a man. Bill returned from service determined to finally settle down. He bought a house in Chicago and told Virginia that he would soon come get her after he finished his very next sales trip. Virginia was also excited; she was 6 months pregnant with their only child and longed for a quiet life ahead for the little family.

Sadly for all three of them, it was not to be. You see, Bill’s car rolled over on a lonely stretch of highway and Bill was thrown into a ditch. There was less than 2 feet of water in the ditch, and the injured man was not able to extricate himself rom the water. He drowned. He never met the son that would be born three months later. While the world doesn’t really know about the personality of the smooth-selling, fast-talking, charming Bill Blythe, they would certainly come to know his son.

Well, the apple, as they say, don’t fall far from the tree. Bill’s son, William J. Blythe, III, would later adopt the name of his mother’s next husband, the boy’s step-dad.

You know that young slick talker as Bill Clinton.