Iolans shared a full meal and warm company at Thursday’s hobo soup dinner, and in true hobo spirit all were welcomed. FOR HOUSER hoboing holds a special place in her heart. When she was younger she sang a popular song, “King of the Road,” and her father said “oh my God, another hobo song.”
A mixture of vegetable and beef soup was served alongside homemade biscuits and cornbread.
Iola Reads put on the dinner in conjunction with the program’s book “Moon Over Manifest.” In the novel the main character, Abilene Tucker, arrives in the small Kansas town of Manifest by railroad and encounters some hobos, which were men, sometimes women, who traveled across the country looking for work.
After the dinner a hobo whose nickname was “road kill,” played by Donna Houser, gave a presentation on the history of hoboing.
“Like Abilene said ‘you have to learn the language,’” Houser said.
Hobos had their own language. “Boil them up” meant when a person had so much lice that they had to take off their clothes and boil them, “bullets” were beans, the “bone orchard” was the graveyard and the list goes on.
Hoboing began in 1865 when the country was flooded by young men who served in the Civil War looking for work, but couldn’t find any, Houser said.
In 1873 and 1874, Civil War veterans turned hobos found they weren’t alone. With the financial crisis, the hobo population rose.
During this time thousands of jobless men road the friendly rails, which went very slowly through small towns, such as Iola and they would be able to hop on and off the train without getting hurt.
“Hobos always wanted to work. They didn’t take handouts. They never just asked for food, they asked if ‘you had any knives to sharpen,’” Houser said. “They weren’t people living off of society, they wanted to work.”
The need for a handy hobo took a hit with the industrial revolution. Machines took over many of the tasks hobos used to do to get a meal.
Houser couldn’t believe it. It was then that she found out that her father road the rails as a hobo for a year when he was a young man — he was the hobo known as “road kill.”
A lot of other small railroad town residents have similar experiences like Houser’s. Most towns had an area where hobos would go for food and shelter. In Iola, it was where Country Mart used to be on North State Street.
They could rent a room for 50 cents a day and would sleep with their California blankets, which were newspapers.
The hobo has long been a romanticized figure and can be read about in many books such as “Moon Over Manifest’ and can be heard in songs like “Box Car Blues.”
Warm memories, full stomachs
