When Homeless Teens Rode the Rails.

• Author: SCHAUMBURG, RON
• Position: Youth homelessness in Great Depression era

For tens of thousands of kids in the Great Depression, a rolling boxcar was home

Hopping aboard a freight train wasn't something 17-year-old Gene Wadsworth had planned to do. Orphaned at 11, he had been living on an uncle's farm in the West. But food was scarce, and he was an extra mouth to feed. When his cousin asked why he stayed where he wasn't wanted, Gene stuffed his few possessions into a flour sack and headed down the road. As he recalls:

I was about as low as a kid could get as I walked over the Snake River Bridge. I was thinking of suicide, looking down into the black water, but I kept walking. A freight train was pulling out of a little town. I stopped to let it pass. I'll never know why I reached out and grabbed a rung of a boxcar ladder. I climbed to the catwalk and hung on for dear life. I'd never been on a train before, and was scared stiff.

With that impulsive action, Gene became one of thousands of homeless American teens who rode the rails--without train tickets--during the 1930s. The worldwide Great Depression was on, and in the United States, one-fourth of the work force--13 million people--had lost their jobs. As banks failed, people's life savings vanished, and many families became homeless. Millions of people hit the road, hoping life might be better beyond the horizon, and a large number of them were teenagers. They hopped onto freight trains like fleas on a dog, in search of a job, a handout, or a place to sleep.

Some estimates suggest that there were as many as 250,000 wandering teens. By the fall of 1932, the country was taking notice. The New York Times told in a picture caption of "A FREE RIDE ON A JOURNEY TO NOWHERE: HOMELESS OR RUNAWAY BOYS/Hopping Freight Cars on Their Endless Trek Across the Country."

But the travelers weren't only boys. Thomas Minehan, a University of Minnesota graduate student who took to the rails in the summers of 1932 and 1933 to study the young vagabonds, estimated that 10 percent were girls. It was hard to tell for sure, because sometimes the girls dressed as boys for their protection.

Some traveling kids were "scenery bums," spurred by the hope of adventure. But most were driven by economic need. Sometimes their travels brought them work. Rene Champion, who as a 16-year-old boy left Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to ride the rails, recalls:

I worked wherever I could, but seldom stayed anywhere very long. I picked string beans and tomatoes in New Jersey, strawberries in Maryland, oranges and...