off the leash

The History of Teens as Told Through Their Music

Posted on February 28, 2016 by Ken Dowell

Every surge of teenage identity has come with a soundtrack. The history of teen personas, of teenage style and teenage lifestyle, is always associated with if not defined by the music of the era.

New genres of popular music are invariably embraced initially by the young. The adult world more often than not looks at emerging musical styles with disdain if not outright hostility. In the 20^th century most of this new music came from America, and specifically from black America. Usually it came with a look, a dance and an attitude.

Perhaps the first example of this is ragtime. It first came into prominence in black communities like St. Louis. That’s where the Scott Joplin House is located and when I think of ragtime it’s Joplin compositions like the “Maple Leaf Rag” and “The Entertainer” that come to mind. Ragtime went mainstream with Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in 1911.

Ragtime brought teenagers to the dance halls, establishing what would be a standard of teen social life for the next several decades. Their parents hadn’t taught them any dances that worked with this kind of music, so they created and popularized the so-called animal dances: the chicken scratch, the turkey trot and the grizzly bear to name a few.

Still from the movie “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”

Ragtime faded from the scene with the emergence of jazz. Another musical style that was created by black Americans, jazz had its origins in New Orleans. Starting in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries you could hear jazz played by dance bands in bars and brothels and even by marching bands at New Orleans’ lavish funerals. Jelly Roll Morton used to play in Storyville, the town’s famous red light district. Jazz began to spread around the country as tourists came to New Orleans and heard these performances. Apparently Storyville was a pretty common destination for these tourists.

Ingenues, an American women’s jazz band

The Jazz Age was a key part of the Roaring 20’s. It was a time of prosperity and a time to emerge from the death and destruction of the Great War. It was also the time of Prohibition, but I suspect that the way that this ill-advised law was so freely disregarded only added to the sense of freedom.

Auther Jon Savage (Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture) calls jazz the “lingua franca” of American youth at the time and notes, “The young men and women of 1922 had found their cause…if drinking, dancing and jazz were to be excoriated by bishops, generals and politicians alike, then those activities would be their standard.”

The Jazz Age was also the time of the flapper. I’m not sure you can associate flappers with femimism but they surely represented an emergence of girls and young women out of their historic domestic roles. Flappers presented themselves as fun-loving and carefree and exuded an air of sexiness.

A lot of the fun came to a grinding halt in 1929 when the stock market crashed ushering in a decade of tough times. Perhaps it is appropriate that the popular music of the Depression was the sound of crooners like Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby.

Duke Ellington and His Orchestra

The tempo started to pick up toward the end of the decade with another new musical style coming out of the U.S., swing. It would be the dominant genre for popular music well into the 1940’s, led by big band leaders such as Benny Goodman, Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington.

Benny Goodman

Swing definitely brought along a style. The dance of the times was the Jitterbug. The uniform for girls, who would become known as bobby soxers, included saddle shoes, sweaters and skirts that you could twirl around in on the dance floor. The zoot suit for boys meant baggy pants and long jackets, topped perhaps with a pork pie hat. Much like jazz in the 20’s swing grew in popularity as prosperity returned and the world had escaped from the devastation of another world war.

The swing bands of the era also demonstrated the role of music in making some inroads in what was still a primarily racially segregated society. There were integrated swing and jazz bands long before there were integrated sports teams or military units. Or houses of Congress for that matter.

Up to this point, working class teens had yet to be heard from. That began to change by the 1950’s. Grace Paladino, author of Teenagers: An American History, describes a “growing underworld of working-class teenage ‘cats’ who had no intention of following adolescent rules. Both black and white, teenage cats dressed in dazzling shirts with oversized collars and flashy drape pants in color combinations like pink and black. They wore their hair long and swirled in the back with greasy pomade.” And they listened to rhythm and blues, once again adopting their musical accompaniment from black America.

James Dean

Few rock ‘n’ rollers will deny the influence of R&B on their music. Rock emerged as mainstream, at least as far as young people were concerned, in 1954 with Bill Haley & the Comets hit “Rock Around the Clock.” Rock ‘n’ roll in the fifties provided the theme songs for the teenage rebel. Like Elvis Presley and James Dean. Rebels wore leather jackets or jeans, the girls used too much makeup and donned tight skirts. And they spent a good part of their time hanging out on the street.

The Beatles

A decade later it was the Beatles who, in Paladino’s words, “made rock ‘n’ roll as acceptable as high school yearbooks. The Beatles drew their fans from affluent teenagers, kids who wanted to be rebels but not greasers.” A different kind of rebel emerged in the 60’s and 70’s. Instead of just rebelling against the social conventions that their predecessors showed such disdain for in the 50’s, they took an active role in the civil rights and antiwar movements. They stopped cutting their hair, paid little attention to their clothes and challenged authority at every turn.

The best musical representation of this is Bob Dylan, who, according to Paladino, “expertly tapped a bulging vein of teenage alienation.” That’s right about the time when I was a teenager. So here’s one of the anthems of my generation:

Photos used for this post are part of the New York Public Library digital collection of public domain images.

Posted in History, History of Teenagers, Uncategorized | Tagged Benny goodman, Bob Dylan, bobby soxers, dancing, flappers, history, jazz, music, ragtime, rock 'n' roll, Scott Joplin, swing, teenagers, The Beatles | 22 Comments

Will Nuclear Power Destroy the Neighborhood or Save Us From Global Warming?

Posted on February 22, 2016 by Ken Dowell

In 1979, a nuclear meltdown occurred at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Facility in Pennsylvania. The accident released radioactive gases into the environment although how much and to what effect has never been clearly determined.

A few years out of college at the time, I was already convinced that nuclear was a dirty word. It of course brought to mind the most devastating terror weapon that had ever been unleashed. And we were still in a Cold War world where some of the world’s leaders seemed more than willing to start an all-out war over territorial disputes in places like Southeast Asia or the Middle East. With the news of Three Mile Island, it seemed that we were also now on course to radiate ourselves.

Forty years later and we face a different threat that can potentially make Earth a much less pleasant place to inhabit: climate change. Last year’s Paris Climate Summit concluded with an agreement to set a goal of limiting global warming to lesss than 2 degrees Centigrade above pre-industrial levels. Doing that means limiting carbon emissions and nuclear energy is in fact clean energy, at least in terms of production.

(Daniel E. Musella)

Can you be an environmentalist without embracing nuclear energy? That was the question discussed earlier today by a Future Tense-sponsored panel in Washington.

Eleven percent of worldwide electricity is now produced by nuclear power. In the U.S. nukes account for 20% of electricity production. In France, it’s 70%. Some countries, notably China and India, are making major investment to develop nuclear energy.

Most of the nuclear reactors in the U.S. were built in the 60’s and 70’s. After that we got “cold feet,” according to Aaron VanDeventer, chief scientist of the Founders Fund, a VC firm that makes energy investments. He attributed our “cold feet” to the cinema generated “narrative of nuclear disaster” that caused us to overestimate the risk.

Robert Hill, technical director of nuclear energy R&D at Argonne National Laboratory, also downplayed the risk, suggesting that since Three Mile Island, “the safety record of the nuclear industry in the U.S. has been stellar.” Hill raised doubts about whether renewable energy sources like solar and wind will ever be enough to replace fossil fuels. He described the next generation of nuclear plants, reactors that have not yet been built, which will be designed to reduce costs and allow recycling of spent fuel. He also talked about the future development of smaller, modular reactors.

But the economics are working against nuclear energy in the opinion of Joseph Romm, founding editor of ClimateProgress.org. Over the past couple of decades Romm’s charts show a continuous decline in the costs of clean energy techniques including solar, battery, wind and LED. “Renewables have largely crossed over the price point they need to,” Romm said. At the same time costs for nuclear plants have steadily increased. Combine that with the low cost and wide availability of natural gas and the result is that utilities are in no rush to move to nuclear.

Despite the fact that “we’re going to get very desperate to reduce carbon pollution over the next decade,” Romm estimated that the best scenario for nuclear power by the year 2050 is that it will account for 17 or 18% of global electricity. He expects the solution to be wind, solar and hydropower because “nuclear has priced itself out of the market.”

Three Mile Island was of course not the last nuclear mishap. The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine had a catastrophic accident during a systems test in 1986. Fifty emergency workers died in the immediate aftermath of the accident and the World Health Organization reports that “about 4000 cases of thyroid cancer, mainly in children and adolescents at the time of the accident, have resulted from the accident’s contamination and at least nine children died of thyroid cancer.”

More recently, in 2006, damage from a tsunami produced three nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. Estimates of the fatalities that will be a result of that accident vary but some are as high as 10,000. A screening program in 2012 found that 35% of the children who lived in the area had abnormal growths on their thyroids.

I now live about 50 miles south of the Indian Point nuke in New York State. I’ve often worried that they might have built that one too close to the Ramapo Fault. And when I drive south to the Jersey Shore every summer I’m not happy to see the Oyster Creek Nuclear Plant located just off the Garden State Parkway and only a short distance from the beaches and ocean that the shore economy in based on. You can even see people swimming, boating or fishing within sight of the plant. I’m not anxious to get closer to either of them.

Future Tense is a partnership of the New America Foundation, Arizona State University and Slate magazine. You can view today’s event on the New America Web site.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged carbon emissions, electricity, energy, environment, Future Tense, global warming, nuclear energy, renewable energy, Three Mile Island | 2 Comments

The Western World Loses a Generation

Posted on February 21, 2016 by Ken Dowell

When we think of baby boomers we think of the people born after World War II. But there was also something of a baby boom after the First World War. In Great Britain, for example, the number of births between 1918 and 1920 increased 40 percent. For most of the Western World the number of births wasn’t higher than before the war but reflected significant increases over the depressed wartime levels.

If you were born in 1920, by the time you were about to turn ten a tremor that started on Wall Street had laid low the global economy. Your teen years may well have been spent with no job, no money and not much food. And the world only bounced out of that by going to war again. That same generation of young folks would now be 19 or 20, the ideal age to be conscripted and sent to the slaughter.

The World War I boomers, as teenagers and young adults, reacted to the times they were living in by immersing themselves in extremist politics, resorting to crime, or in some cases, hitting the open road.

In his book Teenage, British author Jon Savage notes that street clashes between Fascists and Communists became common in England in the 30’s. Several thousand young Englishmen traveled to Spain to join in the civil war against Franco.

Nowhere did extremist politics take hold of the country’s youth as thoroughly as in Germany. Young Germans were, according to Savage, “fodder for Fascist regimentation under the guise of self-rule.” The Nazis spun their twisted ideology as a triumph of youth. The Hitler Youth offered a sense of belonging and mission to a group who had known nothing but hard times. Eventually they had no choice.

Juvenile delinquency increased in most Western nations starting in the 30’s. Street gangs were a threat in both England and in the United States, in particular in New York. The term “wide boys” came into usage in the UK following the publication of a popular novel Wide Boys Never Work. That’s because they were criminals.

By the start of the Second World War, between 1939 and 1941, juvenile delinquency in Britain increased 100 percent, according to Savage. Venereal disease increased 70 percent and during the war years one-third of all babies were born out of wedlock. There was a spike in STDs and unwanted pregnancies in America as well, triggered in part by the “Victory Girls,” teenagers whose contribution to the war effort involved providing some short-term companionship for soldiers and sailors.

Whether it was the open space or their frontier heritage, American teens, or at least a quarter-million of them, responded to their situation by hitting the road (see Riding the Rails.) Many saw no other choice. Teenagers weren’t competitive in the job market. Even among high school graduates, less than one in ten could find a job. In the 1933-34 school year some 5,000 schools, with no resources to keep going, closed their doors. Of the 10 million Americans of high school age, only 4 million were in school.

A ‘Hooverville”

According to Grace Palladino, author of Teenagers: An American History, “Social workers reported that unemployed youth described themselves as discouraged, disgusted, sullen and bitter.” Some became “Hoover tourists.” However romantic the notion, riding the rails was generally not a good time. Thousands lost life or limb hopping on or off freight trains and those that survived were most often tired, cold, lonely and hungry. And if they were black, they faced the added problem of brutal racism.

One type of despair was soon to replace another as a decade of Depression ended with another world war. By now, the World War One baby boomers were to become the World War Two conscripts. The generation of 1920 was between 19 and 21 when their country went to war. Eight million British men were drafted into compulsory military service. Ten million American conscripts were signed into service. While most countries started with 18 or 21 as their minimum age, it was lowered as the war dragged on. While you had to be 18 to be conscripted in England, younger teens, some reportedly as young as 15, could enlist. In Germany, as defeat began to appear imminent they lowered the draft age to 16, thus sacrificing a larger portion of their youth.

There were between 60 and 80 million casualties in World War II. Not all were on the battlefields or the seas. Some 50 million were civilians, killed in acts of war, in crimes against humanity, and in the case of about 20 million, from famine and disease.

By 1945 the generation of 1920 had reached full adulthood. They had experienced little of the fun and carefree existence that we have come to associate with youth. They lost their adolescence and were now faced with a world in which 3% of the pre-war population had just been killed. A world in which the barbarities and inhumanities of the Nazis had now been brought to light. A world in which more than 100,000 Japanese civilians had been wiped out by two atomic bombs.

Those who survived produced a new generation of baby boomers. Through the forties and fifties, the now-middle-aged generation of 1920 were to prove a socially conservative lot. Their goals involved security, a nuclear family in a single family home in the suburbs. They were fearful of not just nuclear holocaust but of “subversives” everywhere. When you consider the times during which they grew up and came of age, its easy to understand.

Posted in History, History of Teenagers, Uncategorized | Tagged Depression, juvenile delinquency, Nazi Germany, teenagers, World War 2 | 19 Comments

This Ain’t No Disney

Posted on February 18, 2016 by Ken Dowell

Almost Portofino

Re-Imagining Harry Potter

A round with the Simpsons

Almost Bourbon Street

Photos from Univeral Studios, Islands of Adventure and Loews Portofino Bay Hotel in Orlando, Fla.

Posted in Travel | Tagged amusement parks, Florida, Harry Potter, Loews Hotels, Orlando, simpsons, theme parks, travel, Universal | 5 Comments

How Teens Won the War Between the Generations

Posted on February 8, 2016 by Ken Dowell

In 1900, nobody used the term teenager. If you were an adolescent boy in Europe, you were likely being prepared for the military. In the U.S., you would be expected to take your part in industry, as in maybe a factory job. And if you were a young girl, most preparation was aimed at marriage.

Seventy-five years later adolescents are now called teenagers. They hang around mostly with each other and set standards among their peers for music, style and behavior. They are, in the words of author Thomas Hine (The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager) “the future in your face.”

Throughout that 75-year period the adult world pretty consistently denounced the outward signs of the emerging teenage world. At the same time, they were forfeiting their influence and authority by screwing up both the peace and the prosperity, problems for which young people bore an inordinate amount of the consequences.

The earliest signs of a self-defined teen culture and style were in the 1920’s. Jazz, dance halls and flappers signaled an interest in the here and now and in having fun over and above any concern with preparing for an adulthood that seemed to matter only to the adults in their lives. And with each iteration of often musically-inspired teen culture, whether it be jazz or swing or rock ‘n’ roll, bobby socks, zoot suits or leather jackets, the adult world was there to greet it with scorn, if not outright panic. It has always been the case that, as Hine writes “teenagers bear an inordinate share of the blame for society’s failures.”

Consider these examples:

As early as 1898, the British press coined the term “hooligan” in response to the public’s panic over juvenile delinquency.
Once they were finished with the fiasco known as Prohibition, the religious right of the 1930’s turned their attention to denouncing movies, a preferred pastime of the young, and called for censorship.
In the late 30’s the Catholic bishop of Dubuque denounced swing as “evil” and “communistic.”
Meanwhile in Nazi Germany, the SS felt the need to specifically denounce Benny Goodman and George Gershwin.
One British commentator explained the rise in rates of venereal disease between 1939 and 1941 as a result of “the jungle rhythms heard by juveniles from morning till bedtime.“
And in Los Angeles, in 1944, the city council banned the zoot suit referring to it as a “badge of hoodlumism.”
Meanwhile in New York, the education commissioner blamed Frank Sinatra for making adolescents lose control.
In the 1950’s the town of Bridgeport, Conn., banned rock ‘n’ roll dances.
In 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, some Americans actually opined that this space race loss was proof of the link between teen culture and the Communist conspiracy.

A wary eye was cast on music and dancing and virtually any style that arose from the teen ranks. A non-orthodox appearance was associated with delinquency. We still haven’t gotten over that. But the delinquency was more perception than reality, as, for example, with the emergence of the rock ‘n’ roller. The press and the public bemoaned an associated rise in delinquency, but actual crime statistics suggest there was no real escalation.

Viewed from the perspective of the young, the adult world was rapidly losing credibility, not only because of their ridiculous focus on jazz and zoot suits, but because they were seriously making a mess of the world. All those European boys who were being trained for the military as the 20^th century started were likely sacrificed in the brutal and senseless Great War. Jon Savage, author of Teenage, described it this way: ““In this mass war, millions of adolescents would be involved together in the surrender of their youth, if not their life, a generational holocaust that would have unforeseen and long-lasting consequences.” He adds, “The Great War had forever destroyed the automatic obedience that elders had expected from youth.”

That scene would be replayed in the 40’s with the second World War and in America again in the 60’s in Vietnam where “American youth were expected to pay the highest price for this military adventure although no one could give them a good reason why,” according to Grace Palladino in Teenagers: An American History.

Then there were the adults who ran the economy. In 1929 they brought it down, ushering in a decade of hunger and desperation that for teens meant no money, no food and often no home as their families broke apart. Wall Street was to treat us to another economic debacle blow, albeit a lesser one, decades later as they redeployed their resources to back financial instruments built from sub-prime mortgages.

Even in the relatively good times of the 1920’s in America, young people lost considerable respect for the adult world and their laws thanks to Prohibition, a Constitutional amendment that most Americans didn’t want, didn’t respect and routinely violated.

While this was going on, another important factor in the emergence of teens as teens was their increased separation from adults. As high school became commonplace for most American teens, peers replaced parents as sources of influence. The growth of car ownership offered teens some privacy. And during the Second World War, with large numbers of young men conscripted into Europe and Asia, younger teens and girls entered the work force, drew paychecks, and afterwards were no longer willing to return to a dependent or domestic role.

There’s no better example of the growing disconnect between teens and their parents in the 20^th century than on the issue of sex. Teen sex was generally denied and denounced by the adult world. That is when they weren’t ignoring the topic altogether. In the meantime, the average age at which teens lost their virginity dropped with each generation.

By the 1970’s, Paladino writes, “The controversial counterculture of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll suggested the generation gap was now unbridgeable.” She adds “Teenagers in the 1970’s had won the battle for freedom that high school students had been waging since the 1930’s.”

Posted in History, History of Teenagers, Uncategorized | Tagged 20th century, adolescents, history, teenagers | 21 Comments

More Pictures of (and facts about) Newark

Posted on February 4, 2016 by Ken Dowell

The largest collection of flowering cherry blossom trees in the U.S. is not in Washington, it’s in Branch Brook Park, Newark

Guests at the Robert Treat Hotel, opened in Newark in 1916, have included 5 U.S. presidents and Albert Einstein.

Rutgers University Newark has the nation’s most ethnically diverse student body, according to U.S. News and World Report

In 1935 Amelia Earhart dedicated the terminal building at Newark Liberty International Airport.

(Newark facts are from Newark Happening and 50 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Newark.)

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged New Jersey, Newark, Photography | 7 Comments

The Invention of the Teenager

Posted on January 31, 2016 by Ken Dowell

The term “teenager” seems an obvious one, a way to describe the group of people between the ages of 13 and 19. So I was surprised to find that the word didn’t come into play until the 1940’s.

That wasn’t just because no one had really coined the word but because for most of our history, society didn’t recognize people in this age group as representing a distinct class of humanity. There is a tradition of numerous social and religious ceremonies marking the passage from childhood to adulthood. The Jewish Bar Mitzvah, for example, celebrates the transition of the 12-year-old boy into the 13-year-old man. It is only in the last 75 years that we concluded there is something in between.

In his book “The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager,” author Thomas Hine notes that “during most of the 19^th century 14-year-olds were viewed as inexperienced adults.” You went from being a mouth to feed to a worker who farmed or worked to help support the family. Hine notes that young people were more likely judged by size than by age.

The first half of the 20^th century was a tumultuous time, a global Depression sandwiched between two brutal world wars. The economic volatility combined with cultural changes eventually led us to the conclusion that there was a category of humans who were bigger, stronger and hornier than children, yet lacking some of the thought and behavioral attributes that we traditionally associate with maturity. They were teenagers.

Hine believes the first use of the word teenager was in Popular Sciemce magazine in 1941. With dollar signs flashing before their eyes it was quickly latched onto by marketers, people whose descendents are today lighting up the term millennials.

How were teenagers invented? A lot had to do with high school. In the 20’s high schools began to move beyond the traditional classic education of Latin and Greek and to offer courses that were of broader interest like typing, bookkeeping and home economics. When the Depression hit and young people were closed out of job prospects, some responded by staying in school longer. Enrollment of teenagers in high school in the U.S. was 28% in 1920, 47% in 1930 and 80% in 1941. Other than temporary events like war, it is the most significant ongoing factor in moving adolescents out of the home.

Grouped together with people their own age and in a co-educational environment, high schoolers took control of their own social life. Peers, not parents, became their primary influencers, at least when it came to the music, clothes and cars. And that’s what interested the marketers. Jon Savage, author of Teenage, notes that by 1944, “American youth had a spending capacity of $750 million; untold riches awaited those who plugged into this virtually untapped market.”

What emerged was a teenage culture that looked neither like childhood nor adulthood. It was instead, in the words of Grace Paladino, author of Teenagers: An American History, “a high school world of dating, dancing and drugstore antics afterschool.” Part of it came from the bottom up as teenagers themselves dictated the styles that would be in vogue, the music they would listen to, and the movies they would watch. And while most adults were not that enamored by this development, those businesses who were ready to exploit it played their part in promoting teen culture. Paladino writes: “Advertisers began to address high school students as teenagers on the prowl for a good time, not earnest adolescents in training for adulthood.”

Two events are often cited as heralding the emergence of teenagers. One was Frank Sinatra’s appearances at the Paramount Theater in New York in 1942 and 1943. One show drew 25,000 kids who virtually closed off midtown Manhattan. All were characterized by a screaming, frenzied audience. And it seems marketers were at work here as well hiring a few screamers to get the party started.

The other was the founding of Seventeen magazine in 1944. It quickly became the chronicler of this emergent teen culture. But its attraction was not only for the young as its advertising department promoted and quantified the market for the makers of everything from cars to pimple cream.

Swing music and jitterbugging, bobby socks and saddle shoes, souped-up cars and dates in the back seat were not for children. But they weren’t exactly for adults either. The concept of the teenager was invented to fill that gap.

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The Odd Wisdom of Werner Herzog

Posted on January 28, 2016 by Ken Dowell

Quotes from Werner Herzog’s TimesTalks interview at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this week.

“I find it odd that people are striving for happiness as a primary goal in life.”

“I’m really not into much the notion of being hopeful or not.”

“You find these people stepping into the bus with a frozen smile to show how happy they are. It’s just awful.”

“Equal rights for all humanity is a much more dignified goal than personal happiness.”

“Documentary film must divorce itself from journalism.”

“Most of my documentary films are feature films in disguise pretending to be a documentary.”

“Nobody can fully answer whether the Internet dreams of itself.”

“My public persona, of course, a lot of it is invention by today’s digital media.”

“In my private person, I’m a fluffy husband.”

And, from Lo and Behold, the Herzog documentary film being shown at Sundance: “Have the monks stopped meditating? Have they stopped praying? They all seem to be tweeting.”

The full video of Herzog’s interview, which also includes Joshua Oppenheimer, can be seen here.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged documentaries, film, movies, Sundance, Werner Herzog | 3 Comments

Riding the Rails, A Multimedia Review

Posted on January 25, 2016 by Ken Dowell

I picked up this book for a buck at a second hand bookstore. It was stamped “discarded,” by the Brown County Library in Nashville, Ind. I don’t know what the folks in Brown County are thinking about because this is a really good book.

Riding the Rails is the story of American teenagers during the Depression, some 250,000 of them. With no prospect of work, no perceived reason to stay in school and a desperately shrinking home environment, they hit the road. Or, to be more precise, the railroad. They jumped on, stowed away in and rode atop freight trains, travelling the country looking for fruit to pick, lumber to chop and grain to harvest. And maybe for a little adventure along the way.

This is first-hand history. WGBH/PBS produced a documentary called “Riding the Rails” in 1998 as part of the “American Experience” series. In researching that film, the producers solicited letters from survivors of the experience. They heard from about 3,000 of them. It was the content of those letters that was used to produce both the Peabody Award winning film and the book. So, oddly, this is a book that was based on a TV show. It was published by TV Books, a publisher whose goal was to do just that. They’ve since folded.

Those who survived a hobo adolescence in the 30’s remember it as a moving, life-changing experience. But at the time not a happy one. Hopping on and off trains is dangerous. Some lost their lives and some lost their limbs. Boxcar boys and girls were hungry, tired, broke and scared. Mostly they were hungry. As one of them noted: “One of the sad things about kids on the road was that they didn’t know how to play. Life was earnest, life was hard.”

(Tim Emerich)

Here are a few of the people I was introduced to in Riding the Rails.

Arvel Pearson lived behind a railroad station in an Ozark village. By the age of nine he was working in a strip mine. When the Depression hit, the mines closed. Arvel was on the road at age 15 and stayed there from 1930 to 1942 picking up a few days work here and there as a migrant farm worker in the summer and a coal miner in the winter. In 1939 the National Hobo Convention named him “King of the Hoboes.”
Clarence Lee was one of six children in a Baton Rouge, La., family that was forced through hard times to go into sharecropping. Clarence was sent out by his father who told him he could no longer support him. As a black teenager he had to confront racism as well as hunger, cold and danger. By working on a dairy farm for 10 cents an hour he was eventually able to buy his parents out of sharecropping. The film shows Clarence in his eighties still working as a groundskeeper at a school in California.
Unlike most of the kids who rode the rails, John Fawcett left a comfortable home in West Virginia looking for adventure. “I didn’t see suffering until I ran away from home. It would be a cold and unfeeling person who wouldn’t be stunned and angered at the squalor of the streets and migrant camps.” He devoted much of the rest of his life to fighting for human rights. A member of the ACLU, he was active in the antiwar, women’s rights and gay rights movements.

The movie includes interviews with many of these survivors. It also has 1930’s newsreel footage with some of the adolescent transients. The black and white images of the railroads, the Chicago Worlds Fair and a “hobo jungle” are accompanied by a score of blues and folk music of the era, including Woody Guthrie and Brownie McGhee. There’s also some original songs by “Guitar Whitey” who himself was riding the rails in the 30’s.

The book has a lot more detail than you can get into a one hour+ documentary. My only issue with the book is that it is imperfectly edited, with a couple instances of a missing word or broken off sentence. But it is so interesting. Reading it made me wonder why when history is taught in our schools they don’t teach high school kids the history of people their age. Surely it would be more compelling and more meaningful for them.

Riding the Rails is now more than 15 years old. You’re not going to find it on the front tables at the Barnes & Noble. The publisher is out of business but there are still quite a few copies available on Amazon both new and used. Or maybe your librarians had a little more appreciation for this story than the ones in Brown County, Indiana. The documentary is available on YouTube and through PBS.