Posted on 10/16/2026 7:20:12 PM PDT by DoodleBob
It was once all too common to drive down a two-lane highway and spot a stranger on the side of the road, thumb out, a bag slung over their shoulder or resting by their side.
During the Great Depression, jobless Americans thumbed rides from strangers as they traveled far and wide in search of opportunity. Amid World War II, picking up a hitchhiking soldier became a patriotic duty. The practice later became associated with the hippie lifestyle of the counterculture movement—a chance to break free from the status quo.
“For quite a number of decades, it was not considered a particularly dangerous thing to do,” says Ginger Strand, author of Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate. “It was simply a way of sharing resources.”
….
In the 1960s and '70s, enforcement of stricter state laws and local ordinances sought to regulate or limit hitchhiking, and federal law enforcement agencies began actively warning about its dangers. One FBI poster depicted a well-dressed hitchhiker and informed motorists that a stranger could be a “friendly traveler or a vicious murderer.” In reality, Reid says, “It was less about hitchhiking and more about, how do we get rid of this countercultural presence?”
By the mid-1970s, hitchhiking began to decline in the United States, …Stopping and pulling over was suddenly more dangerous. All the while, the counterculture movement was dying down.
…
It didn’t help hitchhiking’s cause that a few high-profile murder cases involving hitchhikers became media sensations, and the warnings proliferated. At the same time, the high way killer quickly became a common trope in American culture, Strand says.
“It becomes a theme in movies,” Strand says. “Before that, hitchhiking was typically only used in Hollywood movies as a meet-cute. Then it becomes a way of introducing mayhem.”
(Excerpt) Read more at history.com ...
The hitchhiker told the driver “Why did you pick me up? I could be a homicidal maniac.”
“The driver said “Wow. What the odds there would be two of us in the same car?”
One Friday evening while at Jump School in Columbus, Georgia I wanted to see my girl in Houston and decided to see if I could hitch to Houston and back in time for morning formation on Monday, I made it to formation with minutes to spare, that was a trip made in uniform.
1 interstates
2 air conditioned cars
3 moral breakdown
4 de-regulation of airlines
Criminologists and historians view the 1970s and 1980s as the “golden age of serial murder,” and the sharp decline in hitchhiking directly removed one of their most prolific hunting grounds.
During the 1960s and 1970s, hitchhiking was a culturally mainstream, budget-friendly way to travel. This created an abundance of what criminologists call “high-risk targets” e.g. individuals who were alone, isolated in a stranger’s vehicle, and traveling without anyone knowing their exact route.
Ironically, it was the highly publicized media coverage of these gruesome crimes that terrified the public and effectively killed off the American hitchhiking culture by the late 1980s.
CCR - Sweet Hitchhiker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHHEUyWJXhM
Forgot about that one. Thanks.
The Pros and Cons is a great album. Roger Waters is a complete dick hole.
Statistics show those who violate those laws don't live long enough to do much hitchhiking.
Should have taken up Soros funded protesting instead.
I’d just turned 17 . We’d ordered tickets via mail . My buddy and I hitched rides from northeastern CT to the Woodstock Music Festival in August 1969 . We’d hitchhiked locally before but this way my first ( and last ) long haul experience . I’d lied to my parents telling them we had a ride to and back .
It was going to be the Pink Floyd follow-up to The Wall, the rest of the band had already agreed to do it, and then The Falklands War happened, and Roger decided to do The Final Cut, instead.
Sounds like your parents were totally unreasonable. < /sarc>
There’s a killer on the road
His brain is squirmin’ like a toad
Take a long holiday
Let your children play
If you give this man a ride
Sweet memory will die
Killer on the road, yeah
“[Jack Kerouc’s] On the Road was later selected as one of the 100 most important novels of the 20th Century.
_________________________________________________________
Much like the Noble Prize award winner Sound and Fury by Faulkner, Kerouac’s novel has not aged well. He tried to be ‘cutting edge’ those long years ago. Meh.
I picked up a guy 10 days ago. Gave him a ride for 20 miles. 25 years old and clueless.
35 years ago in Texas I gave a 35ish Hispanic guy a ride. This was south of San Antonio and the guy was headed north of Waco someplace. He was going to a job breaking horses. I inquired as to how he learned to do that. He said he learned it in Huntsville’s prison. This was his first day out.
I asked how he broke into prison. He said he killed a guy, “but it was just a big misunderstanding.” No issues. He had all he owned in a clear plastic bag the prison furnished him. 40 miles later, our paths diverged. He said “thanks.” I wished him luck.
So there, Jack Kerouac, that was a worthwhile story.
When I was perhaps four or five back around 1961 I guess, I recall that when my father was on a destroyer out of Newport, RI, my mother had all of us kids in the family car driving us home from somewhere. There were six of us kids in the car, and my mother was driving. Up ahead, we saw a sailor in his blues with a seabag and his thumb out, and my mom pulled over to give him a lift. That was very unusual. My mom was very good looking in those days, an officer’s wife (My dad was the XO on the USS Bristol DD-857) and I recall thinking how interesting this all was! As they chatted, it turned out the very clean-cut young sailor was on my Dad’s ship!
I still remember looking at the back of his crewcut head as he and my mother chatted, and from behind, looking closely at the dark blue tar flap with the stars on each corner and the white piping...it really left an impression on me. It wasn’t the first time I saw it, but it was the first time I had seen it that close!
I hitchhiked all the time in the early Seventies as a young teenager, most often with my best friend before we both got our driver’s license.
I recall my buddy and I meeting a bunch of Color Guard girls from St. Patrick’s of Stoneham (Massachusetts) at a CYO competition, and we we so smitten with them, we got up at the crack of dawn one Sunday morning and hitchhiked about 30 miles to their house, showing up there at around 10 AM.
When we knocked on the door, one of the girls answered and we could both see immediately that she did not expect us to actually pay her an unannounced visit! Talk about misreading the room! Being good Catholic girls that they were, they stammered something about going to church, and we took the hint. The things boys will do to be with some girls...:)
Another time, in March of 1975, my buddy and I hitchhiked somewhere, and it was a bad choice. There was a cold spell, and nasty, wet, freezing slush everywhere, and we were stupidly wearing Keds and light jackets.
We were frozen, soaked to the skin, and covered with nasty slush thrown up by passing cars, numb hands and feet, shivering cold. We ended up stranded on some secondary highway for hours, and nobody would pick us up.
We must have looked as pathetically wretched and miserable as we looked, and some guy in a VW bug stopped for us (we had been stuck there, maybe ten miles from home all that time) and gave us a ride.
In conversation, we told him we were going into the Navy together in the Fall after we graduated, and he got really unhinged angry. He was angry we were joining the Navy, for some reason. I cannot remember why, for the life of me.
You know how people get so angry that they are turned around in the driver seat yelling at you, and...you can see the road, but...they cannot. That was the only time I ever felt scared hitchhiking.
We stammered that “This is where we’re going, you can let us out here”, and he drove away, and there we were again, freezing and wet on the side of the road, but...we looked at each other with wide eyes and were both happy to be out in the sleet, rain and slush.
“WTF was that all about?” I have to ask him about that next time I see him...:)
In the Navy, stationed in Jacksonville, FL I did some hitchhiking there too, but...that was always tough. Nobody picked up sailors.
As an adult in the Eighties, I had notoriously unreliable cars and found myself stranded more often than I can relate. I even remembered having to hitchhike to work a few times, and could get a ride home afterwards.
The last time I hitchhiked, I was wearing a shirt and tie, and had to make a sign that basically would make people understand I wasn’t an axe-murderer, but some guy going to work. I can’t recall how old I was, but I think I was in my late twenties.
That was in the Eighties, and hitchhiking was getting hard to do. I don’t miss it.
I also would never turn my back. I made it a point never to pick up a hitchhiker walking with his thumb out and his back to traffic.
Nice story, many of the people who picked me up I’ll remember all my life and this goes back to before my teens, I can’t explain it but they are a part of me and my life and some of them I think about frequently and am thankful that I met them.
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