belgianexperts asked: hi topher - aug 19 food desert story was excellent! 4 women are organizing a series of events re the woman's land army movement of wwI to prompt discussion about role women can play to bring about healthy food for all in illinois in the years to come. (oct 5-7). we'd like to invite you and Rev Al Sampson to attend. events to be at u of chicago, hull house museum, windy city harvest, botanic garden, adlai stevenson center and prairie crossing - can you send emails I'll send link to site! thx wendy

To whom am I writing?

tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR EARLIEST HUMAN MEMORY?

I can still remember the day my little sister came home from the hospital…February 1987…I had just turned four years old. My brother and I had been staying two counties away at my grandparents’ house while we awaited our mother’s return from the hospital with the new baby. I can remember my grandparents’ old farmhouse, with the spindly stairs. Then we got back to our little house in Defiance, and there she was waiting, Joni, this golden little baby. “Look boys,” my mother said.

Photos by Bekki Wasmuth, www.bekkiyphotography.com

His name is John Wilson, but all the other hobos call him Stretch. A lanky 6’5” in an Australian floppy hat, black Army boots and blue mailman shorts, he looks the part of someone who’s spent 500,000 miles hopping freight trains. His skin is darkly tanned and his shirt and shorts are dirty from the road, even if his ride to the Pullman Hobo Fest was in a pickup this time. “I’ve slacked off a little this year, haven’t been on a freight since April,” he says. 

Now 42 years old, Stretch has spent his life on the rails, going place to place, looking for work in odd jobs like a hobo straight out of the Great Depression. “I got thrown out of my house at 13; that was in Salem, Massachusetts. I climbed into an empty boxcar and woke up in Albany, New York. This was 1981,” Stretch says. “By the time I was 21, I got all the way to the West Coast.” He got his name not because of his height, he says, but because he had a knack in his younger years of stretching out to catch moving freight trains. He works picking up landscaping and construction gigs or driving a truck. But these days he spends much of his time trekking to hobo parties. He arrived at Pullman after waking up in Dubuque, Iowa; he spent the previous weekend across the Mississippi River at a festival in Cassville, Wisconsin.

He set up camp Friday behind the clock tower at the Pullman State Historic Site, cooking cobs of corn over a campfire of sawed-up 2x4’s ringed with rocks. Stretch kept a can of Natural Ice in hand and his trusty mutt Burlington by his side. “He was born on a freight train,” Stretch says, so he named him after the railroad, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe. He never goes anywhere without that shaggy orange dog.  

His fellow hobo chef Medicine Man, who looked a bit like Ernest Hemingway, cooked meat and potatoes on a camp stove as the corn boiled. “He’s cooking some wild game — let’s put it that way,” Stretch says. By the look on his face, you’d think he was implying that Medicine Man was roasting up some kind of roadkill, possum or raccoon, but it turned out to be elk he kept in his cooler from a hunt on an Iowa game farm. Stretch could not actually eat the delicious corn he shared with the rest of us. He’s missing most of his teeth. 

Most of the people who come to the Pullman Hobo Fest for a weekend each August are not, in fact hobos — they just wish they were. Medicine Man — aka, Gene Ecklor of Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, only became interested in hobos after his wife saw a special about the National Hobo Convention in Britt, Iowa, on “Good Morning America.” His “hobo name” comes from his time as an Army medic in Vietnam; the only trains he ever rode were the rickety passenger trains that took him home on leave back in the ’60s. At Pullman, he pulled a travel trailer behind his pickup, and others came in cars or RVs. No one rode in on the rails to Pullman this year, not even bona fide hobos like Stretch. He still rides the rails a lot in the winter months, but in summer, he prefers a hop in an air-conditioned car to a ride in an overheated boxcar.

“There aren’t too many of the young riders who are real hobos like Stretch, who ride and work and ride and work,” says Gypsy Moon, a vagabond from Indiana, who’s known him for about six years. “Stretch is the real deal.” Gypsy Moon has authored a book on hobos, but claims not to be a true hobo herself, despite riding the rails and hitchhiking across the country in her youth. Even last fall, now in her 60s, she hitchhiked through the Copper Canyon in Chihuahua, Mexico. “My father was a hobo. I’m a free spirit like my father.”

Her father carried a guitar with him on the rails, and hobos cannot have a proper campfire without music. Stretch says they all sang “City of New Orleans” on Saturday night in between the telling of tall tales. The Arlo Guthrie hit, penned by Chicago native Steve Goodman, laments the decline of railroading in America. 

As the hobo lifestyle dies out, these festivals may attract more voyeurs than genuine nomads, but the real hobos accept anyone interested in keeping their camaraderie alive. “They’re remarkably tight,” said Mike Wagenbach, the caretaker of the Pullman clock tower and what remains of the factory grounds. “It really is all about a bond, a way of life, which has no tangible qualities.” The Pullman Hobo Fest has drawn about 40 people, many of them locals, to the South Side for almost two decades. The site is special to hobos because it’s thrown on the factory grounds of the defunct Pullman Co., which manufactured train cars for 100 years until it went bankrupt in 1981. Each year, besides sitting round the campfire, the hobos have a spaghetti supper and cook a mulligan stew after a hobo church service.

Stretch was crowned the 2008-2009 “King of the Hobos” two Augusts ago at the national convention in Iowa. He pledged to all hobos gathered there to do what he could to keep hobo culture alive through the 10 or 12 weekend gatherings spread out across the country. He works very little these days, but strives to hit up all the hobo fests across the country, including three in August.

He says after 9/11 it got harder to be a hobo, or even a tramp (a freight-hopper not looking for work). Security is tighter, and there are more railroad police. He’s also not getting any younger, and his dog Burlington can’t take the heat in the summer much anymore. But come October, he’ll hop a freight and winter down south.

The fire dies as the sun sets on Sunday and it was time to break camp. Stretch kills one last beer and loads up Burlington in the truck of his fellow rail rider, Jumpoff John, bound for Milwaukee, Stretch’s favorite place to crash. The few hangers-on still gathering are mostly residents of the Pullman neighborhood. He exchanges hugs and handshakes and tells them all, “Down the road!” Hobos never say goodbye. 

One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.