Riding the Rails - "It was the first time I saw my Dad cry."

When his father lost his job in 1931, Jim Mitchell saw his family slide to rock bottom in the "undeclared war of the Dirty Thirties," as he calls the Great Depression. The Mitchell's lived in Kenosha, Wisconsin where Jim remembered pulling a little red wagon through the streets to collect the family's relief food. In his sophomore year at high school, humiliated and taunted by classmates who derided his circumstances, Mitchell persuaded his buddy, Peter Lijinski -"Poke"--  to run away with him in winter 1933. The pair set their sights on Texas where they wanted to work as cowboys. From the moment they hopped their first train in the Kenosha yards,  the runaways experienced the best and worst of life on the bum in America.

Dad worked ten hours a day for six days a week before the Depression and things were fine. I remember the morning it happened. I was in the basement fooling around with my crystal set before school when Dad came home. I lost my job. I'm out of work," he told mother. It was the first time I saw my father cry.

Dad had to stand in unemployment lines. He'd get a job for a day or two and earn a buck or so. You could see his suffering. Dad wasn't a banker, he wasn't a machinist, he was a common laborer like hundreds of thousands of others. He put pieces of metal in a machine that went clunk. That's what my Dad did but he had his pride. -- Take away a man's pride and he's skin and bones. He is nothing.

Things went downhill. You lived off your relatives. You went to eat at grandmas and here and there until you hit rock bottom and went on relief.

Mother had to leave the house and find work. She did cleaning jobs and was a pastry cook in a restaurant.

Never once were my father or mother mean to me. I saw their struggle was slowly squeezing the life out of them. They were going nowhere. It tore the living hell out of you.

Those days you didn't get a check in the mail. You took a little red wagon and dragged it around and waited in line. The relief people threw in food as if they were feeding dogs. It was the most humiliating experience in the world for a 14-year-old kid.

You couldn't do things in school that other kids did. You had to buy milk but couldn't afford it. You wanted to belong to the Boy Scouts but didn't have 50 cents to join.

Everything closed in on me. One day I decked the principal and ran out of school. I sat down and said to myself, "You're no damn good to your family or anybody." I was just another mouth to feed at home. I'd lighten my parents' burden if I took off.

The quickest and easiest way to get out was to jump a train and go somewhere. -- We thought it was the magic carpet - the click of the rails - romance.

That winter morning I left a note on my pillow that said, "I'll write." I climbed out on the roof, down the apple tree and went to meet Poke. I don't think we were 20 miles down the road, cold and miserable, and I knew right then I had made a mistake. You are young and foolish and don't go home crying. You are going to see it through as far as you can.

Our first ride from Kenosha was on the blinds of a passenger train. A couple of stops down the line, a gaunt scruffy guy swung on holding a bag tied with rope. He reeked of rot-gut whiskey. With no space in the blind, his only option was the ladder at the back of the tender. "Watch my bag, kid," he growled at me, throwing his belonging up onto the tender. I'd all I could do to take care of myself.

The wind caught the bag and sent it crashing down, splitting apart against the side of the car and scattering its contents beneath the wheels.

"Damn you, kid, I told you to watch my bag."

The bum snatched a switchblade from his pocket. As it snapped open Poke grabbed the man's wrist. He slammed the man against the door of the car. The knife clattered to the rails.

The guy went white with fear. Quickly he slipped back to the tender ladder and never moved. At the next stop, he got off.

That was my first experience on the road. There were not many mean people but sometimes you ran into that sort of thing. It was not a safe or happy place and no place for a kid to be.

The freight out of Sioux City, Iowa started rolling. I spotted an empty car and made a beeline for it, grabbed the door guide and pulled myself up, then rolled back to give Poke a hand. My heart pounded frantically.  We rested a while to get our breath and collect our wits.

Poke put his rucksack under his head and dozed. While he slept, I sat in the door and dangled my feet over the side of the car. For an all-too-brief moment, I put aside the seamy side of bumming and took time to enjoy our journey.

The early afternoon sun occupied a cloudless sky. The trees and shrubs were fresh and green. This country had been spared the horror of the dust storms. I basked in the warm summer sun. As I looked across the prairie I recall thinking, "God, but America is big!"

For a while the tracks ran along the Missouri river. We rumbled through vast stretches of farmland. To my citified eye, the corn looked as if it couldn't miss being a good harvest.

Sleek horses pulling cultivators plodded slowly over the earth. In adjoining fields, well-groomed teams briskly pulled mowers, while farm workers laid the freshly cut hay in neat rows. I was puzzled. I knew times were rough on the farm. Why then, did the animals all look so fit?

Later I was to learn that although farmers were making little money; they didn't stint on feeding and caring for their animals.

The smell of fresh-mown hay swirled past. A girl about my age, bringing water to the field, waved. She, no doubt, had never been in the city. For sure, I'd never been on a farm. At that moment, I little realized that her life was as dire as mine."

You thought it would be a glamorous life. - "By God, we're going to find our fortune. Someone out there needs us." - The hell they did. You went on the road and exchanged one misery for another. If you could hold body and soul together you were doing a good job.

You never lost the basic virtues your family passed onto you. You wanted to remain honest and be decent to other people. You tried to keep yourself clean but could rarely take a bath. You were always filthy and constantly hungry.

You'd take whatever odd jobs you could. We did everything from mowing lawns to cleaning grease traps in restaurants. It was humiliating but sometimes you panhandled. "If they've got extra cash, they'll give it to you. If they don't. you won't get anything." That was Poke's attitude. "You're not stealing from them. You're just asking for a loan until better times come along."

We'd go to missions to get free meals. All your life you'd gone to Sunday school and you knew those people were speaking from their heart. They were preaching to me because they wanted to save my soul, which probably needed saving. I was there only because I wanted something to eat. I felt as though I was an interloper and I was ashamed.

Probably the most heartbreaking thing was seeing whole families on the road together. We ran into a mother and two or three children. We found out that a couple of days before the father had been killed 200 miles down the road. They'd been on their way to California. The mother and children had gotten on a box car and the father was trying to climb on. He slipped and fell in the path of an express train.

I don't know if I laid awake and cried that night but it just gripped at your guts. It was another clink in the armor of the so-called great adventure.

As long as you kept moving you were all right but you were going nowhere. You were just drifting. Nothing was happening and there was no direction in your life.

Sometimes you'd meet kids your age in a town and start talking with them. Their mothers would call them. They didn't want their kids talking to bums.

I remember once I was cutting a lawn. I started talking to this perfectly nice girl and her mother called her away. Boy, that really hurt. I was as good as her or anyone else.

I didn't want to live on the road and become a bum. You had to do something with your life. You couldn't roam around like a damn dog eating out of garbage cans. That's about what you were, a damn dog roaming the road.

Poke and I ran into an army officer in Lake City, Iowa. We told him we were on the road and had taken up with a carnival. "That's no life for kids," he said. "Why don't you join the CCC?" Poke was easily persuaded. I balked at the idea of having some army guys push me around. But I was sick to my guts of being footloose and went back to Kenosha with Poke. My grandfather talked me into joining the CCC.

Company 2616 was stationed at Camp Norwood on the banks of the Wisconsin River, nine miles north of Merrill, Wisconsin. We were trucked from a railroad depot to our new home which consisted of a group of long, low buildings covered with tarpaper in a clearing in the pines. Little did we realize that this stark encampment was the haven thousands of boys like ourselves needed.

There was a wonderful social mixture in the CCC. We lived 40 men to a barrack. Two bunks down there would be a farm kind who couldn't read or write. If he got a letter from home, somebody read it to him. You could go up a couple more bunks and find a medical student who dropped out of the University of Wisconsin.  Another boy's father had an automobile dealership that went bust. Some kids were literally hoods from the cities.

You had every race, every creed and color mixing in. Don't get me wrong, we had our personal problems but it never became a major factor. Once I remember that race was an issue. They called the white guys in camp together. "We can send these guys off to a colored camp if you want us to,' we were told. We said that would be ridiculous. "They're our buddies. They live and work with us and it is no problem. We want them to stay."

I found out what discipline was about. Captain Entringer who ran the camp held inspection every morning. Your bunk had to be neat. You had to be able to bounce a quarter off your blanket. Your foot-locker had to be in a precise place. There had to be no dust on your shoes. If you failed inspection, when you got off work that day you would have extra duty. You'd work in the kitchen or chop wood until 10 o'clock.

On the road you lived for yourself and to hell with everyone else. In the CCC you not only learned to live with other guys, you had to go out with a crew and haul logs together. You learned to work as a team.

You worked alongside state foresters who took no nonsense from you. They wanted a day's work and they got it. We had a thousand and one different jobs from climbing trees to surveying parks. You learned to do a job and do it well. It gave you confidence when you started to become accepted by your peers and to fit in with them.

You had three square meals a day with good food and a good place to sleep. On the road you spent all your time wondering about whether you were going to eat. If you worked it wasn't useful work but just for food. To this day I can go and see parks that we built in the CCC. I can see trees that we planted. It's a living legacy. You didn't have a living legacy on the road.

A cold fall day in 1934, they sent our crew to work in a tamarack swamp. Our job was to drag 20-foot long tamarack logs out of the muck and mire of 500-year-old loon dung. The day started with our getting wet to our belt buckles and it never got any better. It was a messy, dirty business. We slogged back to camp that night bone-weary and whipped.

As we passed the dispensary, Lt. Kuehl, the camp doctor, barked, "You!" I looked at him and he nodded. "Yes, you. Come here."

The last thing I wanted was a reaming from a shave-tail. I strutted over to him. ‘Yes, Sir,' I said sullenly.

He looked me over for a moment and then said in a concerned tone. "Where are you working, son?" I told him.

Our crew chief got a tongue-lashing for letting us work on the tamarack detail without hip boots. It was a solid lesson in comradeship and responsibility to your men.

I remember thinking to myself, "Thank God somebody cares about me."

The CCC shaped my life which had had no direction. Back home I'd had no role models to measure my life again. In the corps there were well-educated fellows whose goals had been interrupted. I wanted to be like them and knew I had to get an education to do so.

I stayed in the CCC for two years getting $30 a month. At last I could bring some help to my family. Ma's first letter gave me a big boost:

"Dear Son,

 I want you to know how grateful we are to you and proud, too. The $25 we get each month goes a long way in holding us together. It's good to look Dimitri in the eye and plunk down cash for groceries, and not to be obliged to Merriweather for the rent..."

For the first time I felt good about myself.

The CCC was to my mind the poor man's West Point. We learned everything a West Pointer learned about duty, honor and obligations and got thirty bucks a month in the bargain.

I was 19 when I went back to finish high school. I had classmates of 13 who were pulling in A's while I was struggling to get a C. I didn't let it bother me because I wanted to get a hold on my life. I wanted to go to college though at the time I didn't have a prayer. I didn't let that bother me either. I knew I would get there somehow and I did.

  Jim Mitchell went on to study at Ripon College, Wisconsin. After service in World War II, the GI Bill enabled him to earn a Master's Degree from the University of Wisconsin. His professional life was spent in producing promotional films for the auto industry.

To put the Great Depression in proper perspective one must bear in mind that most of the parents of my generation were fresh off the boat. America was the land of opportunity. Working in a factory for five dollars a day was heady stuff for an immigrant who but a few months ago left a homeland where poverty and destitution were the norm. The world was his oyster. All he had to do was work hard, obey the law and go to church on Sunday, and he had it made.

All of a sudden the bottom fell out. Why? No one had the answer. All too often one would hear: "There is work out there if only they will go looking for it." Many thought that it was they who had failed.

Our country was on the brink of hell. I ran into two types on the road. One type firmly believed in the American system. "By God, this is gonna work." The others, honest to God, I swear they were Marxist revolutionaries. They wanted to started the revolution now. Communism looked very attractive to people. "We are going to share everything. We are all going to be one big happy family." That was a lot of baloney but people were ready to believe anything. We were looking and searching for anything to get us out of that mess.

Then Franklin Roosevelt stepped in, this extremely wealthy man with his big smile and his cigarette holder. Back in my youth, aviation was a big thing. When Roosevelt came to Chicago, what did he do? He flew to the city. Can you imagine? The president-elect of the United States getting into an airplane and flying to Chicago. Wow! Things are going to happen with this guy, we told ourselves.

So when Roosevelt says, "My fellow Americans, you have nothing to fear but fear itself," we believed it. His fireside chats on the radio were never the folksy thing. You knew he was President...."I My fellow Americans I would like to talk to you about banking. I want to tell you what we have done this week, why we have done it and what the next stage will be."

 Roosevelt's attitude had the biggest effect on the country. Unless you were a dyed in the wool Republican, you thought he was the greatest guy since Galahad. The Depression hung on until the Second World War but people were going out and putting in a day's work on the WPA, in the CCC and other programs.

The youth of those fateful years were taken from the steamy streets of cities in economic turmoil and from our ravaged farmlands. In the CCC camps we learned values that gave meaning to our lives. When the Axis threatened all we had worked to preserve, we stood ready to serve again.

Despite all the horrors of the Depression, there was never a time that we didn't have hope. We didn't live in terror but looked ahead. We knew that down the road things were going to get better.

Excerpted from Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression by Errol Lincoln Uys (C) Errol Lincoln Uys 2007, Published by Routledge, New York

 

Visit the writer's website to learn more about the boxcar boys and girls: RIDING THE RAILS