Riding the Rails : The Courage of a Coal Miner's Son

Arvel "Sunshine" Pearson's grandfather had living quarters behind the railroad station at Spadra, an Ozarks village five miles from Clarksville, Arkansas.  Arvel's father died before he was born and his mother moved into the depot, where she gave birth to her son in 1915. The first sounds the boy heard were the whistles of freight trains rolling down into Spadra.

Arvel's mother had been re-married to a coal miner. Beginning work as a waterboy in a strip mine at the age of 9, Arvel had been nicknamed "Sunshine" by the miners. By 1929, he had already been working underground for 18 months, when the Great Depression hit and the mine closed. He first rode the rails in 1930 and would continue to hop trains until 1942 as a migrant farm worker in summer and working in coal mines in winter. In 1939, when he was 24, Arvel attended a hobo convention still held annually at Britt, Iowa: he became the youngest hobo to be elected "King of the Hoboes."

His reign ended with the onset of World War II. After serving in the Pacific, he returned to civilian life and worked in the construction trades for the next 40 years. When Arvel finally retired as a pipe-fitter in 1987, he was making $18.75 an hour – as much as he earned in a week in a good season on the road during the 1930s. 

The closing of the mines left 1,200 miners out of work. In six months to a year, people who didn't have a place to raise their own food were practically starving. We were lucky in one respect. My stepfather bought a piece of land and built a house before things got rough.

I was considered a strapping kid though I weighed around 110 pounds. I heard people talking to my folks and saying things like, "Why should you feed him?" and "Why ain't he out workin'?" I made up my mind I wasn't going to be a burden on anybody, especially my parents.

My mother was apprehensive about my leaving but my stepfather said, "The kid knows his way around. Let him go." He thought I'd come home with my back-end dragging, tired and hungry but I was determined to make it one way or another.

My first day out, I caught a train at Van Buren, Arkansas. I rode freights all night and next morning I was in a small town, where I had some relatives.

"Any work pickin' strawberries?' I asked them and they said, "There'll be work in a few days."

I worked for 15 days and made 55 cents to two dollars a day, if everything went right. When that job finished, a guy said, "The strawberries will be gettin' ripe in the suburbs of Denver."

A month and a half after I left home, I was in Denver. After Denver, a guy said, "Why don't you try the wheat harvest in Kansas?"

I backtracked a few hundred miles and did some harvesting  in Kansas. -- "You can follow this wheat all the way into the Dakotas, if you want to go with it," I was told. -- When I finished in Kansas, I caught a train north through Nebraska into Wyoming and the Dakotas.

People advised me to go to California. I'd no desire to go there seeing that ninety percent of the people on the road were headed that way. My greatest ambition was to get to Alaska. I rode the rails to the north. A customs officer came aboard at the border. He asked where I was going. "To Alaska," I said. "You can't get there by train," he told me. A kid from the Ozarks who'd never read much geography didn't know that trains don't go to Alaska. -- It was 25 years before I ever visited Alaska.

That's the way I started. I picked up a lot from my stepfather who was an old time hobo who'd settled down. As I went along I learned from other experienced hoboes. Let me explain how a hobo caught a freight train back in the l930s:

When you see the train coming, you start running. When it gets level with you, you reach up with your right hand and grab on at the front of a car. Never catch the rear end 'cause it's liable to swing you in and hurt you, maybe run you over and kill you.

It's the same getting off. You don't swing around like a squirrel, but keep one hand holding on tightly. When the train gets to a speed where you can unload, just drop back and hop off. You have to hit the ground running or you could fall and break a leg.

Many times I rode overnight on the top of boxcars. I'd take my belt, pass it under the runner on the catwalk and hook it through my overalls. With no danger of falling off, I let the train rock me to sleep. I'd also hook myself on with my belt if I was riding on a tanker. It's awful tiresome bouncing up and down all night. You  might be holding on with one hand, pretty soon you get sleepy and down you come.

I would never "ride the rods." The old cars had rods under them, where people put boards and lay down. It was dangerous and dusty and once the train gets up speed, you have no way of leaving the rods without rolling off and practically killing yourself. I'd ride the top, I'd ride the engine, I'd even climb onto the caboose. I'd ride anywhere but the rods.

I'd always wait for another train rather than take a chance. I wasn't going to arrive at the harvest fields with one leg off.

Ninety per cent of the time I traveled alone. You can travel faster when you don't have to wait on someone else. A couple of times I had a partner but it didn't work out. If you get on a train and your partner doesn't catch it, what are you going to do? If it's not going too fast you can jump off. Otherwise you ride to the next stop and hope that in a day or two he'll get there and you can meet him.

I was a full-fledged hobo in less than two years. I knew enough about railroads to pass as a brakeman, fireman or engineer. I knew what the different hand signals, whistles and flags indicated. The old engines had two flags right up front. For example, a red ball on a white background indicated a fast freight -- a "red ball" was what you wanted to catch if you were traveling a long distance. You never hopped a local because it stopped everywhere to pick up things like milk cans. -- You might make 50 miles in a whole day.

Sometimes I put on a striped jacket and a railroad cap and stuck an empty lunch pail on my arm. I had dressed like this and was walking down the tracks at Laramie, Wyoming, when I met a railroad man. "Where ya going?" he asks. "I'm headin' over to Denver," I said. "Come and ride in the caboose with me," he said. All I had to do was make up a little bit of a story.

One winter, I was traveling with a partner, going from Kansas City to Joplin, Missouri. At 11 o'clock at night we went down to the railyards and climbed onto the tender of the Flying Crow, a passenger train going south. We had gone about 40 miles when the fireman found us. "OK, you so and so's, if you're gonna ride this train, you're gonna work," he said. We climbed down into the cab. My partner was a husky guy but he'd no experience on trains. The tender was rocking from side to side making it difficult to shovel coal into the firebox. Three shovels full and my partner had coal all over the cab. The fireman told me to take a turn. I don't think I missed more than two shovels in ten minutes. "Where did you learn to shovel coal, son?" the fireman asked. I told him I'd worked in the coal mines. "I can shovel coal through a ten-inch hole," I said.

There were nights I'd get homesick waiting for a train with nobody to talk to, sitting alone on a pile of ties under a water tank out in the middle of nowhere. You're only a kid and you get to dreaming about that warm bed back home and seeing the folks. As long as I was working, my thinking was that if I go back with 50 or 100 dollars, we'll all be in better shape.

I had a hard time getting a job because I still looked so much like a kid. Matter of fact, I was a kid. I'd walk up to a boss in a coal mine and ask for a job. He'd look me over and frown. "Kid, what do you think you can do?" I had to put a little brass on my face. "Just anything you got in this coal mine," I'd say. The boss would give me a job to make me prove myself. 'Course I had enough experience that I figured I could handle it. And I figured I didn't have anything to lose if he fired me. Nine times out of ten, I could do what I said.

I'd be working beside a person who was 50 years old. He was getting two dollars a day but because I was a kid they reckoned I wasn't worth more than a dollar. You're working just as hard and feel put down. Whenever possible, I tried to show them that I could do a man's work and get a man's wages.

My first year out on the road, I went as long as forty-five days without a dime in my pocket. Some people felt sorry for you and fed you, but others said, "Get this blasted kid outta here!"

The hardest thing for me was to tell a person that I was broke and hungry and ask for something to eat but when you go for days without food, you change your mind pretty quickly. Older hoboes gave me advice on what I had to do. For instance, if you ask a lady to mow a lawn make sure that it's a small lawn, not an acre and a half. That's going to take you hours and make you miss your train.

On a summer day in a small town in Kansas, I saw a lady sitting in a rocking chair on her porch, fanning herself with a newspaper and trying to keep cool. The train I was riding stopped a short distance away. I hopped off and walked over and asked if I could do a chore for a meal.

"Son, you can chop me some wood," she said. She pointed to a rain barrel that stood out in her yard, "When you've cut it, throw it in the barrel."

That lady's ax was awful dull. I was out there working and sweating, wiping and chopping for 20 minutes and I had about five or six sticks.

I saw the lady was in her kitchen fixing me a meal. When she wasn't looking, I grabbed the barrel and turned it upside down. I took the sticks and laid them crosswise over it.

The lady came outside. "That's enough, son," she said. "Come and eat."

When I took my last mouthful, I said, "Lady, I think I hear the train whistle, I'd better be going." I jumped off her porch and ran down the tracks. I guess she was frowning on the next hobo that came along.

"Let's go to the World's Fair at Chicago," a man says to me in Denver in l933.

"That's a heck of a long way," I said. "Why should we go there?"

"We can get jobs and see the fair."

He talked me into going to Chicago. Right away I got a job taking care of the elephants with a big shovel and helping to feed and water them. I was paid 50 cents a day and could sleep in the hay.

It was amazing to see people with money to spend, especially families with kids buying ice-cream and going on those rides.

"Boy, I sure would like to do that," I said. I had to shovel all that manure and couldn't go out there and play around.

Taking your childhood and going from a very small kid to an adult in a year or two is rough. By this time, I was a teenager, but there I was thinking of the same things as a nine-year-old kid 'cause I'd missed out on all that. Things like that bother you.

I'd worked in the Colorado strawberry harvest and saved $40, when I learned my folks were destitute. I rode a freight train back to Arkansas and persuaded them to move to Colorado.

My parents' old beat-up car broke down. I bought bus tickets for my mother and my sister. My stepfather, my nine-year-old half brother Luther and I traveled the rest of the way by freight train. I would put Luther on my back to catch a train on the run, my stepfather getting on first to help us aboard.

My stepfather and I found jobs at the mines in Western Colorado. We worked through the winter but then my mother got itchy feet to return to Arkansas. My stepfather wanted to stay and work in the fields in Spring but my mother refused. They were stuck down in Arkansas for four years before they could get out again.

I thought the Depression was going to go on forever. For six or seven years, it didn't look as though things were getting better. The people in Washington DC said they were, but ask the man on the road? He was hungry and his clothes were ragged and he didn't have a job. He didn't think things were picking up.

You leave home with good intentions and tell your folks you're going to come back a millionaire. You return with your head between your arms. You're broke and dirty and they see right away that you didn't make it. I'd stay a day or two and hit the road again because I felt so bad that I couldn't help them.

I was never so desperate that I wanted to commit suicide but I often felt put down. I realized it would take a while to change things. "I'm going to keep going," I said. "I may not end up a millionaire but someday I will be able to face people I used to beg for food." If I  didn't have hope I would have starved to death by the time I was 17.

In those days if we got a pound of bologna, we thought we were doing great. When I go to the store today, I pass the bologna and move over to the T-bone steaks. People see me driving a Cadillac and ask, "If you were on the road that long, how did you accumulate this?"

The road taught me that if I made a dollar, I had to save some of it. I used to have a ledger where I put down everything to see how I was progressing. During the 60s and 70s I was saving an average of $5,000 a year. That doesn't sound much today but over the years it mounts up. When you get to where you don't owe anybody a dime, that's the best feeling you'll ever have, if you live to be a hundred years old."

Note from the writer: Arvel "Sunshine" Pearson celebrates his 91st birthday this month!  A King of the Hoboes indeed!

See Part One on GATHER: Riding the Rails: A Rich Boy Runs Away

Excerpted from Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression by Errol Lincoln Uys (C) Errol Lincoln Uys 2006/Published by Routledge, New York

Captions: (1) In the boxcar door  (3) A weary boy's rest. Photos courtesy of the National Archives

Visit the writer's website to learn more about the boxcar boys and girls: http://www.erroluys.com