Readers should be leery of the introduction to BOY AND GIRL TRAMPS OF AMERICA. Author Thomas Minehan didn’t write it. Susan Honeyman, a professor of English at the University of Nebraska, was the culprit, and it’s not clear when she wrote it. It’s stilted and overly scholarly, and I almost quit reading because of it.
Ironically Thomas Minehan, who was studying sociology at the University of Minnesota in the early thirties wanted to embed himself among the young transients and actually be one rather than observe them.
There were over 250,000 boy and girls on the road during the Depression. Minehan did keep records and take notes. For instance he interviewed and kept case histories of 1,377 boys and 88 girls during the time he spent with them.
Most of them left their homes because of hard times; in other words their parents couldn’t afford to take care of them, and they either volunteered to leave or were told to.
The first part of the books suffers from a lack of narrative. Minehan is mostly quoting individuals he encountered. They don’t really come to life. About the only one he met repeatedly was “Texas” who lost part of an ear to frost bite and wanted to return to the South as soon as possible.
The interesting parts of the book deal with how the transients were able to survive. Successful methods would be to go to a back door where they would usually encounter as woman and tell her they were hungry or cold and could they please have any scraps she was about to throw out. This usually got them a full meal and more to take with them. Minehan does not have much good to say about the religious missions who were supposed to help transients. The locals always came first, and they seemed to favor older tramps to the young. Their object seemed to be get the kids to return to their families. But most of them didn’t have families to return to.
Minehan talks about various methods tramps used to get clothing and food and other implements they might use on the road. One guy offered to sharpen knives for “customers”. He would collect the knives, then sell them. In order to get clothes some transients would wait until dark, then steal them off clotheslines. Overall though they tried to avoid overt stealing.
Minehan includes a segment on vagabondage in the past which was truly frightening. During the reign of Edward VI of England, vagabonds were whipped and branded. They seemed to have something against being poor.
I don’t think we have any where near the number of transients as there were during the Depression. It seems a bit harder to board a train without being caught for one thing. But I have been reading about a man near where I live who rides the trains every summer. There’s also a place in Iowa where they elect a king and queen of hobos. But Minehan centered his books on the young and not many of them are being booted out of their homes these days. Older tramps were sometimes feared as “wolves” or predatory homosexuals. Young girls were often promiscuous to a great extent. Minehan was worried one of them might get hurt and complained to authorities. She was angry with him.
The second half of the book is much more enlightening as Minehan includes narratives on “how they eat"; “where they get clothing”; and “their new education”. He also includes a glossary defining transient slang.
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