How could you use it? Maybe there isn’t a Hobo Code after all…

Sometimes you need to talk about how things aren’t what you thought they were. Or about how informal communication systems appear to fill gaps in formal ones. Or even about how important it is to simply?be seen.

If so, then?the story that serves as this week’s “How could you use it?”?is just for you:

Everything you thought you knew about ‘Hobo Code’ is wrong

So, yeah, the title takes the “you’re wrong about something” approach to draw you in (not my favorite), but the content of the article is both interesting and useful enough to warrant featuring it for you. It’s all about what’s known as “Hobo Code.”

The hobos in question are the folks who (illegally) hop freight trains to make their way around the US to follow opportunities for seasonal farm labor. If there was a heyday of hobos, it was in the earlier parts of the last century, but as this article makes clear, hobos still exist today.

For years, I’ve been fascinated by stories of the system of symbols that hobos used to communicate directions, guidance, and advice with each other. This article—especially with that title!—was clearly written for people like me.

Let’s dive in.

• The article opens with a present-day hobo, Connecticut Shorty, and how she first started learning about hopping freight trains in the 90s. Her guide? “A man known as Road Hog USA.” Her father, Connecticut Slim [don’t you just love the names?!], was a “legendary” hobo for 44 years (!), as was her great-uncle [rather disappointingly named Louis].
• We then discover that Shorty is Just Like Us, the reader, in that she knows about the code and knows what most of us believe about it: that it was a way for hobos to give “other rail riders who might want to locate them… an idea when they passed through and where they were headed”
• But, as the article says,?what Shorty thinks about when she thinks about the code may not be the same as what we, the non-hobos, think.
• The article describes what that non-hobo view is: “distinctive symbols to communicate vital information. They alerted other transient workers to trouble, such as an aggressive dog or hostile police force, but could also point the way to clean water or a hot meal. Three lines might mean a good place to camp; an upside-down triangle signaled a spoiled road; a cat was code for a kind woman.”
• The?author reveals her own personal connection to the code, that these often-impermanent symbols supposedly led hobos through the years to her grandparents’ house, where they’d receive a warm meal. For her, the code was “established as fact.” But was it? [I love how she questions what she believes to be true here…]
• Then we meet Charlie and Mike Wray, a father-son duo who founded?the American Graffiti Society, “an organization that preserves and records historical markings with a focus on those from the hobo era.”
• The “code” was even used in “anti-hobo campaigns. A 1912 article from The St. Louis Star-Times reported that Cincinnati police officers chalked the symbol for ‘unwelcome’ throughout the city in an effort to scare away hobos.” [I’m guessing that was entirely ineffective…]
• But Charlie and Mike Wray can find no substantiated evidence that the code exists. “The symbols said to be used by hobos are often contradictory,” and contemporary photographs in newspapers were “staged by the newspapers.” [Huh.]
• The big reveal:?“Modern Americans are convinced that hobo signs are authentic history, but the evidence against it definitely outweighs the evidence for it.”
• So where does the belief come from??Apparently, it started with a character named “Leon Ray Livingston, better known as ‘A-No. 1,’?arguably the most famous hobo in the late 19th century.” In his 12 [!] books about his life as a hobo, he included “wildly entertaining but exaggerated stories” about his life on the rails.
• He also included a “homemade chart of ‘signs used by tramps’”?and, while his stories were apparently taken with a grain of salt, the chart wasn’t, and Livingston’s tale of the code became established fact.
• But there aren’t any other contemporary accounts of that version of the code?or Livingston’s symbols, even by others who you’d think would mention it. Those include, most notably, the author Jack London, who wrote “detailed accounts of his life on the rails.”
• What those other contemporary accounts do mention are “monikers: markings with the hobo’s nickname, the date, and an indication of direction of travel.” London mentions those, too. We’re also told about “Tex, King of Tramps,” who in 1915 claimed to have left his moniker on “more than 3700 structures across the country.”
• And that?brings us back to Connecticut Shorty?and her understanding of the “code” which matches the moniker version of it, not the Livingston “communication system” version. As she notes, “some rail-riding friends have left messages under bridges, leaving their moniker, the date, and arrow pointing to the direction they were heading.”
• And where the American Graffiti Society has collected over 1,000 hobo marks—including monikers—they’ve never found any marks that match the Livingston “code.”
• The next turn in the article, perversely, delights me.?That’s where we hear from Jennifer Wilcox, curator at Maryland’s National Cryptologic Museum. She’s quoted as saying, “I tend to believe something existed…. Maybe it was not to the extent that scholars would like,?but it seems like, if it was just made up, hobo code would have died out a long time ago.”?[And to this I say, just, wow. I mean, aren’t there a ton of things that are totally made up but haven’t died out? The Loch Ness Monster? The Tooth Fairy? SANTA?!]
• That said, Wilcox mounted an exhibition about hobo code in 2007 that ran for 11 years longer than it was supposed to, given its popularity. Her research drew from contemporary newspaper accounts [which, again, the Wrays haven’t been able to substantiate or in some cases have shown to be false], the Hobo Museum in Britt, Iowa [you knew there had to be one…], and from her mother’s stories of the era, which matched the stories the author’s family told, too.
• [Wilcox takes the matchiness of the stories as proof that they’re real, but the?Mandela effect?is real, too.?There are all sorts of examples of whole populations of people having the same false memories.?Okay, so I have some opinions on this. ?? ]
• The Wrays think that?some of the beliefs about the code’s existence arose as a result of circumstance and happenstance?— hobos would “keep showing up” at certain houses because (a) there were a lot of them and (b) those houses were often near other resources, like a train station, Salvation Army, or hobo camp.
• And how did people know they might be welcome there??From the other source of information consistently mentioned in first-hand accounts: word-of-mouth.?As Wray explains, “That was the real language of the road. It was efficient and effective. There was no need for signs or symbols.”
• To back this up, and to close out the article, we meet another (retired) rail rider, Sol Jacobs.?He says he learned from talking with other more experienced riders?over the decade he hopped trains, and pays that forward to other, newer riders wanting to learn. [Don’t miss that the tip-off about his hobo ways are the words “RIDE FREE” tattooed across his knuckles!]
• Another important source of information verifiably shared among riders are “crew change guides,?closely-guarded documents detailing where to find a hop-out point, how to navigate specific train yards, best practices for avoiding the ‘bulls’ (security guards), and more.” Far from being in code, these are actual documents shared in “handwritten or printed form,” and nowadays, as digital files [natch].
• Sol also used a moniker, SOL?[giving more credence to that being the true “code” of hobos], not just because it’s a shortened form of his full name (Solamon), but because, as he shares, “when I’m on the road. I’m SOL, shit out of luck.”
• Sol also gives us the last insight about monikers and their role with this literally transient group:?“It’s not so much to let people know where you’re going. It’s to show you exist.”

How you could use it…

I opened this week’s post with three quick thoughts on how to use what’s in here. I think the story is a beautiful illustration of:

• How reality doesn’t always match legend
• The power of informal communication systems
• How important it is to simply?be seen

Wasn’t that all marvelous? I loved the twists and turns of the article, and how the various characters were introduced. In my mind, what looks like the “real” hobo code — monikers — is even more powerful as a symbol than the legendary version “A-No.1” started.

It’s a call, and a sign, to show that we’re?all human.