Free Republic

The usual jovial nature of the hobos subsided Friday morning as more than 50 gathered to honor and remember their friends and family who have “caught the westbound.” Silently walking in a circle, hobos tapped their sticks on the gravestones of the deceased buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Britt, while Cannonball Paul read their names and others observed. “This is to my darling granddaughter Angelina,” said Minneapolis Jewel reading from a letter she wrote to her 16-year-old deceased granddaughter Angie Dirty Feet. “Just for the record you are and were loved by many. Take a look around here for yourself.”...

This week hobos from all over the country are meeting in a north Iowa community. For 115 years, Britt has hosted the National Hobo Convention and believe it or not, along with those hobos comes a lot of money for area businesses. “I only have one word, explosive!” This is how Mary Jo Hughes describes Hobo Days. For two decades, she has served hundreds of hobos who come through the doors of her restaurant, Mary Jo’s Hobo House. “They love food, they live from meal to meal I’ll tell you that,” says Hughes. She says it takes some planning. Over...

On Reddit, he’s /u/huckstah, an administrator on /r/vagabond, a subreddit with nearly 10,000 members—many of them identify as “homeless”—who trade skills and stories. On “the road and the rails,” he’s Huck, and even after we speak twice by cellphone, he tells me he’d prefer I don’t print his real name. “People say, ‘Well, you chose to become homeless.’ But that’s wrong,” he says. Huck says he’s been a hobo for upward of 11 years and started hopping trains and hitching rides at 18. “I did not choose to become homeless. If you want to say I chose to become homeless...

As we edge closer to a cashless society, some consumers are quietly challenging the idea of money in the first place––by giving it up completely. Daniel Suelo, 50, traded his nine-to-five for dumpster diving and a cozy cave in Utah's canyonlands back in 2000. But even before Suelo, there was Germany native Heidemarie Schwermer. In her early 50s, Schwermer decided to see what it'd be like to leave her cushy job as a psychotherapist and live money-free, a journey that's been documented in the film "Living Without Money." Sixteen years later, she hasn't looked back. Schwermer, now pushing 70, recently...

A young couple hopping railroad cars across the country was found dead under a mound of coal at a Florida power plant. Christopher Artes, 25, and Medeana Hendershot, 22, shared a passion for illegally hopping freight trains and traveling the country without a set plan...

*Editor's Note: The Western Front does not condone train hopping. The activity is often romanticized, but, in fact, is illegal and dangerous.The train began to stop. Mike Talbott, 25, woke up to the sun beating down and the sound of crushing steel ahead. Talbott, lead singer of Bellingham band Muppet Fetish, missed his first train, and against his better judgment, took the only other train heading out of Cincinnati. Talbott did not buy a ticket. Instead, he hopped on a freight train. “This train was built up of a bunch of cars with giant spools of steel and open tops,...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Last summer, police responding to complaints about campfires under a highway overpass found dozens of homeless people living on public land along the Cumberland River. Eviction notices went up -- and then were suspended by Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, a Democrat, who said housing for the homeless should be found first. A year later, little has been found -- and Nashville, with help from local nonprofits, is now servicing a tent city, arranging for portable toilets, trash pickup, a mobile medical van and visits from social workers. Volunteers bring in firewood for the camp's 60 or so...

In 1929, James San Jule's father was a successful businessman in Tulsa, Oklahoma. San Jule graduated from Tulsa Central High School and had been accepted at Amherst college in Massachusetts, planning to go on to Harvard Law School. Because of his youth, his father wanted him to wait a year and arranged for him to work as an office boy in the Exchange National Bank at Tulsa. "I didn't think much of money in those days. It was just something we had," said San Jule. "My father was probably a millionaire. We owned fancy cars, a fancy house, fancy everything....

There it is. I have uttered those words so contemptible in modern society that the mere allusion to such a sentiment is beyond reproach. Please forgive me, but I no longer have the patience to deal with those who wish to remain mired in the lowest depths of the social order. Are there not means available to these people who perpetually contend for the scraps from the table of those of those who actually contribute to the betterment of our world? This is not to say that I have no compassion for those who are infirmed, whether it be in...

"We go out to drive the kids to school," he says, "and there's human poop between the cars." There must be many who are as fed up as Kiely, because politicians like Newsom are taking a tough stand. In an election year, you can bet he wouldn't go out on an unpopular limb. Now it will be interesting to see how the Board of Supervisors, traditionally progressive and more pro-homeless people, will react...

Steam Train Maury, who started life as Maurice W. Graham until a train whistle’s timeless lament compelled him to hop a freight to freedom and, much later, fame, as the first and only Grand Patriarch of the Hobos, died on Nov. 18 in Napoleon, Ohio, near Toledo. Mr. Graham was 89 and chief caretaker of the hobo myth, a cornerstone of which is the hobos’ term for death: “taking the westbound.” In his case, that last westbound freight left the yard when he suffered the last of several strokes and slipped into a coma, Phyllis Foos, manager of Walter Funeral...

DENVER — Arthur Sena spent years living in a hole that he had dug near the railroad tracks. He would probably still be there, defying offers of help from social workers and using cardboard to ward off the chill, if Denver had not adopted a radical strategy of putting homeless people into apartments of their own, no strings attached.

Say he moved in - and killed mom By ROBIN HAAS and RICHARD WEIR DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS Houseguest Tony Sexton confessed to killing Marie Rogers on Valentine's Day. A 33-year-old drifter has been busted for killing a Queens woman after her daughter invited him into their home - and he became the guest from hell, police said yesterday. Tony Sexton, who claimed to be a poet, confessed to detectives how he beat and suffocated Marie Rogers, 57, on Valentine's Day, wrapped her body in a plastic couch cover and stashed it in the back of her car, police said....