Education Of a Wandering Man (1990) (2 page)

Education should provide the tools for a widening and deepening of life, for increased appreciation of all one sees or experiences. It should equip a person to live life well, to understand what is happening about him, for to live life well one must live with awareness.

No one can "get" an education, for of necessity education is a continuing process.

If it does nothing else, it should provide students with the tools for learning, acquaint them with methods of study and research, methods of pursuing an idea. We can only hope they come upon an idea they wish to pursue.

In the United States we have concentrated tremendous sums of money on the educational plant, seemingly with the idea that the right number of buildings will turn out the right number of graduates. Yet the teachers who actually instruct the future citizens of our country are more often than not miserably paid. If in the future we find ourselves with a lot of fourth-rate citizens, we have only ourselves to blame.

Education depends on the quality of the teacher, not the site or beauty of the buildings-- nor, I might add, does it depend on the winning record of the football team, and I like football.

It is constantly reiterated that education begins in the home, as indeed it does, but what is often forgotten is that morality begins in the home also.

It also begins in the car seat, where many a budding criminal career is born when the child not only watches his parent repeatedly break traffic laws, but hears him lie about it when caught. The example is not, supposedly, expected to influence the child.

My own education, which is the one I know most about, has been haphazard, a hit-and-miss affair that was and continues to be thoroughly delightful.

I came into the world with two priceless advantages: good health and a love of learning.

When I left school at the age of fifteen I was halfway through the tenth grade. I left for two reasons, economic necessity being the first of them. More important was that school was interfering with my education.

Due to circumstances, it was essential that I go to work and try to support myself. This was no sacrifice, for it had been uppermost in my mind for some time. Several factors contributed to my discontent.

My first job was as messenger boy for the Western Union, a good job for a boy in my hometown. I got the job when I was twelve, and it was in the telegraph office that I first began to type. I cannot say that I learned to type--I began with two fingers and work with them still. It has been called the hunt-and-peck system, but over the years my fingers have become so used to the typewriter that I hunt very little and peck a lot.

Also, I was growing rapidly. At twelve I was the size of most other boys; at thirteen and a half I was my present height, which is six feet and one inch. The very effort of growing left me often tired. Through the first six grades my own grades were good, always at the top or close to the top. As a matter of fact, I was usually second, third, or fourfor in the class, except in math. In my sixth grade, where we had a teacher who loved math, I several times made an A, or what corresponded to it.

Moving into the seventh grade, I discovered I had several compulsory subjects in which I considered myself qualified, at least to the extent provided by the school text. It was essential that I take a semester in ancient history, and I had already done much reading in the area.

I wished to skip the subject and take modern history, of which I knew very little. I also wished to skip general science and take chemistry. At the time I had helped build several crystal radio sets and had done some electroplating. At the library I had read from books on botany and geology.

Actually, the book on general science I read in the city library was much better, as well as much more interesting, than the school text, but the rules made no provisions for exceptions. I did not look forward to spending time studying subjects already covered.

Ours was a family in which everybody was constantly reading, and where literature, politics, history, and the events of the prize ring were discussed at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We grew up with the names of H. G.

Wells, George Bernard Shaw, John L. Sullivan, Bob Fitzsimmons, and Jack Dempsey as familiar to us as those of our own family, right along with Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse.

The Apache wars of which I was to write later occurred far away to the southwest, but the Sioux were close by. They had killed and scalped my own great-grandfather while he was with the Sibley command, pursuing the Santee Sioux out across Dakota in the aftermath of the bloody Little Crow massacre of 1862.

My education in domestic and foreign affairs began at home. My sister Edna was attending Jamestown College, and my two older brothers and a second sister were in school, constantly discussing and arguing about schoolwork, reciting poetry, and talking of books they were reading.

How many books we had in our home I do not remember, and doubt if anyone ever counted.

We had collections of Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, and Emerson, as well as the Stoddard lectures on travel. All of us had library cards, and they were always in use.

Reading was as natural to us as breathing.

When I moved on from children's books and fairy tales, one of the first books I read was Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.

I had begun reading earlier than most, because my sister Emmy Lou, no doubt to keep me from bothering her, decided it was easier to teach me to read stories to myself rather than to read them to me, as she had been doing.

What books I read immediately after that, or their progression, I do not remember, but certainly they were for a time the simplest of children's books. I do know that when I was in the fifth grade my father told me he would give me a three-volume History of the World if I would read it. The books had come as a premium with a subscription to Collier's magazine, if I recall correctly. For the next few months, when my father came home I would sit on his knee and tell him what I had read during the day.

The books had a buff binding, a good many pictures, and fairly large print, so they must have been very general indeed.

Other books remembered from those years were Black Beauty, a similar book about a dog called Beautiful Joe (who was not beautiful at all), Little Lord Fauntleroy, Pilgrim's Progress (which I found very dull), John Hallifax, Gentleman, and two old favorites, Cudjo's Cave and The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come.

My older brothers had left behind a dozen Horatio Alger novels, which I read, but I remember only three titles:

Brave and Bold, Do and Dare, and Jed, the Poorhouse Boy.

About the same time, I read at least a dozen novels by G. A. Henty, a British author. The only two recalled offhand were The Lion of the North, about Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, and With Clive in India. Aside from teaching much more about aspects of history studied in school, they provided at least a passing familiarity with events our schools did not touch upon. These deepened my interest in history and brought not questions but rather a desire to know more about what actually happened and why.

Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more. Due to such books, and later reading, I found that no matter what country I visited or whom I met, I knew something of the history or romance of the country, or about a person's homeland.

My father, who was a veterinarian working mostly with horses and cattle, was a great storyteller. In small towns in those days nearly every public official had some other business, and my father was at various times a deputy sheriff, a policeman, a Juvenile Commissioner, and for many years was alderman of the First Ward, the largest in the city. At one time he even ran for mayor but was defeated by a good friend.

He told stories of his boyhood in the lumber woods, of a pet bear and deer he owned, of a Huron Indian boy with whom he played. My mother, too, told stories, usually of her relatives in Minnesota or of her father, a veteran of the Civil and Indian Wars who lived with us when I was very small.

Supposedly I was too young to remember him well, but often when we were alone he drew diagrams on a slate and told me how the great battles of histroy were fought, and about some of his own wars. I should not have remembered, but years later I could draw a diagram of how the Battle of Cannae was won, and I did not study that until later.

Before that day in Singapore I had skinned dead cattle in Texas, baled hay in New Mexico, worked as a roustabout with the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus, and in between times had boxed a couple of exhibitions in small towns and won a few fights. I had hoboed across Texas on the Southern Pacific and shipped out to the West Indies as a seaman and, later, on another ship, to Liverpool and Manchester, England.

Returning, I had planted fruit trees near Phoenix, worked as caretaker of a mine in the Bradshaws, and spent three very rough months "on the beach" in San Pedro.

Riding a freight train out of El Paso, I had my first contact with the Little Blue Books. Another hobo was reading one, and when he finished he gave it to me.

The Little Blue Books were a godsend to wandering men and no doubt to many others.

Published in Girard, Kansas, by Haldeman-Julius, they were slightly larger than a playing card and had sky-blue paper covers with heavy black print titles.

I believe there were something more than three thousand titles in all and they were sold on newsstands for 5 or 10 cents each. Often in the years following, I carried ten to fifteen of them in my pockets, reading when I could.

Among the books available were the plays of Shakespeare, collections of short stories by De Maupassant, Poe, Jack London, Gogol, Gorky, Kipling, Gautier, Henry James, and Balzac.

There were collections of essays by Voltaire, Emerson, and Charles Lamb, among others.

There were books on the history of music and architecture, painting, the principles of electricity; and, generally speaking, the books offered a wide range of literature and ideas. I do not recall exactly, but I believe the first Blue Book given me on that freight train was Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde.

In subsequent years I read several hundred of the Little Blue Books, including books by Tom Paine, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Huxley.

To properly understand the situation in America before the Depression, one must realize there was a great demand for seasonal labor, and much of this was supplied by men called hoboes.

Over the years the terms applied to wanderers have been confused until all meaning has been lost. To begin with, a bum was a local man who did not want to work. A tramp was a wanderer of the same kind, but a hobo was a wandering worker and essential to the nation's economy.

In the days before the big combines it was the hobo who "shocked" the grain, picking up the bundles dropped by a binder and stacking them to be picked up by men on hayracks.

Many hoboes would start working the harvest in Texas and follow the ripening grain north through Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska into the Dakotas. During the harvest season, when the demand for farm labor was great, the freight trains permitted the hoboes to ride, as the railroads were to ship the harvested grain and it was in their interest to see that labor was provided.

Often this lot of wandering workers was mixed with college boys earning enough money for school or working to get in shape for football. Some simply drifted because they enjoyed the life, the work in the open fields, the variety of towns and experiences, and the chance to see the country. By and large these harvest workers were Anglo-Saxon and Irish, as most of the early pioneers had been, but there was a good mixture of blacks and immigrants of European extraction.

Latinos were rarely seen except in the southwestern states.

The Depression brought a different kind of drifter to the railroads and highways, and only one who bridged that period can grasp the depth of the change. The Depression hoboes had little of that carefree, cheerful attitude of the earlier hobo. They were serious, often frightened men. They had come from towns where work was no longer available, and were, as we all were, seeking work. Often these men had families to whom they wrote when they could afford the postage.

The criminal element in either segment was small indeed. The fact of the matter is that poor men do not often steal, and when they do, it is petty theft, something to eat or perhaps an item of clothing to keep them from the cold.

Thieves are usually those who have something and want more. They steal not for food but for flashier clothers, a better watch, a handsome car. They steal for money to spend on flash, on women or drugs. Hungry men are without power, without leverage, and so are vulnerable to any kind of bullying and are constantly suspected of crimes they rarely commit.

The years before the Depression were the heyday of the hobo. His labor was much in demand and he, loving to wander, rarely stayed long on a job.

For years there had been a surplus of labor in the United States, but it was largely unrecognized because so many were constantly shifting jobs. There were at least four or five men for every job, but with the constant turnover, some of them were working all the time; when the Depression came it was like a game of musical chairs.