Britt, Iowa's Hobo Days made Sunday's travel headline.
Hobos find haven, immortality in Iowa town
The Iowa festival aims to develop understanding and appreciation for the hobo culture
with museum exhibits, mulligan stew in the park, and a parade and coronation. Complete with a memorial for those who've caught the "westbound train", it all sounds like a circus thrill.

I grew up under the influence of a hobo, alias King of the Road, Fee Bee and Possum Fred. The floorboards would shake as my grandad intoned the hisses of a locomotive in his rich tenor whine about the unfortunates who were speeding through the night to their fateful destination onboard the Hellbound Train.

As early as three years old, Fred was lifted off the Knickerbocker, a Big Four train as the conductor gave the signal to pull away from the Daleville, Indiana station.
From his memory of 1899: "One day a freight train was setting on the switch. On the back end of the caboose a string was hanging down. I took hold of the string and at the same time the train started backing up. I thought I was pulling the train backwards."
By the time he graduated ninth grade and turned sixteen, Fred went from running small town streets to riding rails. Crossing the country, working wherever, and loving the adventure, he hummed the songs to later enchant grandchildren and gathered more stories than he could tell the rest of his lifetime.

"He crossed rivers and forests and many a plain
As he bounced around on that smokey train.
He brushed all kinds, mean and sweet
Doing many odd chores and shockin' the wheat.
Through Iowa, Kansas to the Montana fields
He rode on those clickety clackety wheels."
(excerpt from "We Called Him HoHo" by his son, Ben)

Even after marrying Edith, "his queen" who was content to cultivate vegetables and raise chickens, the siren of greener grass would still call grandad from his settled down life. He'd wake up in Wisconsin, Arizona, or South Carolina, wife and kids in tow, chasing itinerant jobs to earn the bucks to buy the farm.

In his last refrain, after Edith died too soon, grandad sought refuge in Maple Lane, the acres of pasture, orchard and stream where his family sprouted and scraped and survived the Depression. With a felt tip pen, he scrawled letters mailed to my college dorm by a roundabout scheme of exotic postmarks from far flung stops like Hell, Norway, and the Cook Islands. Indian heroes, battle scenes and artifacts of America's western frontier covered his walls. He showed school children the arrowheads found in his fields. Named "most frequent visitor" to the county library, he read dictionaries cover to cover and challenged his prolific descendants with prodigious obscurities.

And Fred never passed up an invitation to sing his repetoire mix of hymns and hobo rap about his wistful yearning for Somewhere to Belong.