By: W.C. Reader

How many of you can trace your youthful years back to the days when the hitchhiker was "King of the Road"? Not many, we would guess, and that's a shame, because the chance to meet and study some colorful characters passed you by. We were more fortunate because we grew up alongside the SP railroad and old State Hwy 16, - during the Depression Years - helping our parents run a little old filling station. This station in life afforded us a front row seat to study economics, geography, human nature, social problems, and the like as a portion of world activities unfolded on the traffic arteries in front of us. But so much for preliminaries, and lets get on with the basic subject under consideration.

According to the dictionary, a hitchhiker is nothing more than someone who travels by asking for rides along the way. They ply their trade by walking along the roadside and jerking up their thumbs at passing motorists, hoping that one of them will be considerate enough to stop his car and invite the voyager to get aboard and join the driver for a ride as he travels for varying distances down the highways and byways. True enough, but as we have studied the characteristics of these itinerant travelers, we have discovered that they fall into two general categories. We assigned the label of "tramp" to one of them, while "hobo" was assigned to the other.

Now for the most part, the tramp is a person who has accepted his status in life by choice. He travels through life on railroad boxcars and the cars of kindly motorists. He never is too proud to beg for food - as long as it does not involve work - and he always is alert tot he possibility of a "handout". If there be a few of you who fell the term "tramp" is too harsh to assign to one of God's children, you might use the term "free-spirited vagabond".

On the other hand - and in our opinion - the hobo is on a higher social level. His appearance in the ranks of the hitchhikers was not a matter of choice, but more a matter of necessity. He was in his heyday during the days of the great Depression, and continued until the onslaught of World War II. Many of the people "took to the roads" in those days, simply because the economic downturn had robbed them of their jobs and farms, and most of their worldly goods. Rather than suffer through the ignominy of depending on their friends and organizations for help, they took to the road, hoping to come upon better things along the way. We still remember a number of them coming up to the house, offering to do odd jobs in exchange for a morsel of food. You could look in their eyes and see that they were not tramps by any stretch of the imagination. They were just people without regular jobs who took to the roads to seek a change in their fortunes.

Well, folks, these are just a few opinions that we gathered about a group of unfortunate people who passed our way at a time when we were selling gasoline at .19 cents a gallon. What are your thoughts? While you still are around you ought to share them with your children and grandchildren about the hitchhiker and his upraised thumb. In this day and age, he is something that is "Gone with the Wind".

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