Student films hobo convention for documentary

"Luther the Jet" hopped his last freight train in 1999, when he traveled from Chicago to Kansas City.

"A friend once told me to think of the United States as a large playground," he said, "and you have all these toys to play with."

This spirit is celebrated annually at the National Hobo Convention in Britt, Iowa, where University of Richmond senior Dan Shoemaker and his friend F.G. Rockwell drove 24 hours to film the convention for a documentary Shoemaker is planning to send to film festivals and galleries around Richmond.

The convention takes place annually in August, when locals close off the main road to celebrate the American migrant worker.

"It's a mix between a family reunion and a Boy Scout jamboree," Shoemaker said.

At the convention, participants crowned a hobo king and a hobo queen. The contestants gave two-minute speeches, and members of the audience applauded for the hobos they liked best.

The coronation was preceded by a parade, in which Shoemaker was able to participate because one of the hobos, nicknamed "Frog,"

invited him to film from the float. Rockwell held a second camera from the ground, Shoemaker said, so they could have alternate camera angles.

They were struck by Frog's kindness and his willingness to talk to them. A number of years ago, youths from one of the towns he visited crushed Frog's legs with baseball bats, leaving him permanently disabled.

The only national press Shoemaker said he had noticed at the event was a CBS news crew.

"It was painful to watch a national media treat human beings like a bizarre human interest story," he said.

While the news crew was staying in hotels, Shoemaker and Rockwell stayed in a tent in the Hobo Jungle by the tracks on the northeast side of Britt. They listened to hobos tell stories around a campfire and talked to people at Hob Nob, the local bar where hobos drank and danced.

"[The CBS crew was] showing how different hobos were," Shoemaker said, "but my aim was to show how they are the same. They are normal people who didn't want to live a normal life."

Rockwell and Shoemaker talked to hobos with their cameras turned off so they could get better interviews. One of the female hobos gave Shoemaker the hobo name "Tree Man" because he was climbing trees to get better shots of the convention.

One of the clips from the documentary shows a hobo talking about how Americans often think of hobos as alcoholic bums, despite the hobo ideal of traveling and working hard. Another clip shows a hobo playing the guitar and singing about his love for Jesus and for his country.

The hobo ideals are spelled out in the hobo code, a 16-point set of laws centered on themes of independence, hard work and respect for other people, which Shoemaker said showed that the negative American stereotype of the hobo was wrong.

"That person probably has more moral ground than you do," he said.

The hobo movement began during the Civil War and became popular during the Great Depression, when people would travel and send money home, Shoemaker said. Hobos would work in factories or harvest for a few weeks, and then hop a freight train to the next town.

For hobos, traveling by rail becomes an addiction.

"Everyone has the urge to get out of town," Shoemaker said, "but they actually did it. To them there is no other way to live."

Shoemaker also differentiated between "real" hobos, and "hobos at heart," people who identify with the hobo culture and spirit, but are not addicted to travel.

One of these hobos at heart is Cliff Williams, the philosophy chairman at Trinity International University and a historian of hobo culture who has attended the convention for the past 18 years. Shoemaker interviewed Williams for his documentary.

Williams first decided to attend the convention when he read an article about it in Chicago Tribune Magazine in 1990.

"Something in me said, 'I have to go there,'" he said. "And I went."

When he arrived at the convention, he said he had been struck by how welcoming everyone was, and he immediately discovered a poetry culture. He published several collections of hobo poetry, and gave all profits to the Hobo Museum in Britt.

"They're a nice community," Williams said. "They take care of each other. I'm a church person and sometimes it feels like the hobos are better than a church."

He said some hobos were wild in the sense that they did drugs or drank a lot and some of them didn't work. But that behavior goes against the hobo ideal.

"Hobos don't fit in with normal culture," he said. "They like to be free and move around. They're restless."

He estimated there was anywhere from 200 to 1,000 hobos in the country. The culture is thought to be dying because there are a lot fewer hobos than there used to be, he said.

"But as long as there are freight trains," he said, "there will be people to ride them."

He specified that there were three types of "real" hobos. The full-time hobo has no permanent home, the part-time hobo has a regular job and travels a few times a year and the former full-time hobo is retired.

Luther the Jet, whose real name is Luther Gette, is a friend of Williams and a former hobo living in Madison, Wis. Gette started hopping freight trains because he wanted to see the country.

He had hopped a few freight trains for short distances as a child, at a time when he said children had played in the railroad yards.

In 1977, Gette took a ferry from Frankfort, Mich. to a small town in Wisconsin. He then hopped a rail to Green Bay.

"I suddenly realized I could do this," Gette said about his first ride.

He later got a job at the admissions office at the University of Wisconsin, where he was able to work for a few weeks then take a few weeks off to travel.

Getting on a train is easier than getting off, Gette said, because a hobo can find a stopped train in a rail yard and wait for it to leave.

"I could sneak by and sort of get by without getting a whole lot of people excited," he said. The police caught him a few times, but he was never sent to jail because of it.

Now 70, Gette has retired from his job after 14 years. He said he had thought once he retired he would have more time to travel, but he ended up traveling less because hopping trains became more difficult as he got older.

He recalled a rail yard on the east side of Richmond, and he said: "Watch a train go by, and see if you don't come back with a different view of things. Don't you want to go see where that guy is going?"

Contact staff writer Kimberly Leonard at kimberly.leonard@richmond.edu