Tramping with Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life

by Josiah Flynt

I did, and it helped me as much as anything else in getting in with the real hoboes. I have known them, now, for ten years, and feel abundantly qualified to describe their diet and dress.

VI

In the first place, they eat three good warm meals every day—breakfast from seven to eight o'clock, dinner at twelve, and supper at six. These are the set-downs[5] in tramp life, and it is the duty of every professional to find them regularly. The breakfast is very similar to the poke-out tramp's breakfast, the main additions being oatmeal and pancakes, if the beggar is willing to look for them. They can be found with a little perseverance. There are also some hoboes who want pie for breakfast, and they have it almost constantly. I once traveled with a Maine tramp who simply would not consider his breakfast complete until he had had his usual piece of apple-pie. And he actually had the nerve to go to houses and ask for that alone. During our companionship, which lasted over a week, he failed but once to get it, and then it was because he had to make a train.

The dinner is a more elaborate affair, and the tramp must often visit a number of houses before he finds the various dishes he desires. I remember well a hunt I had for a dinner in St. Louis. A Western tramp was my comrade at the time, and we had both decided upon our bill of fare. He wanted meat and potatoes, "punk 'n' plaster," some kind of dessert (pudding preferred), and three cups of coffee. I wanted the same things minus the dessert, and I had to visit fifteen houses before my appetite was satisfied. But, as my companion said, the point is that I finally got my dinner. He too was successful, even to the kind of pudding he wished.

Not all tramps are so particular as my Western pal, but they must have the "substanshuls" (meat and potatoes and bread and butter) anyhow. Unless they get them they are angry, and scold everything and everybody. I once knew a vagabond to call down all sorts of plagues and miseries on a certain house because he could not get enough potatoes there. He prayed that it might be cursed with smallpox, all the fevers that he knew, and every loathsome disease—and he meant it, too.

There are a number of hoboes who occasionally take their dinners in the form of what they call the "made-to-order scoff." It is something they have invented themselves, and for many reasons is their happiest meal. It takes place at the hang-out, and a more appropriate environment could not be found. When the scoff is on the program, the vagabonds gather together and decide who shall beg the meat, the potatoes, the onions, the corn, the bread and butter, the tea and coffee, and the desserts, if they are procurable. Then each one starts out on his separate errand, and if all goes well they return before long and hand their winnings over to the cook. This official, meanwhile, has collected the fire-wood and the old tin cans for frying and boiling the food. While the meal is cooking, the tramps sit around the fire on the stolen railroad-ties and compare jokes and experiences. Pretty soon dinner is announced, and they begin. They have no forks and often no knives, but that does not matter. "Fingers were made before forks." Sometimes they sharpen little sticks and use them, but fingers are more popular. The table manners of the Eskimos compare favorably with those of these picnicking hoboes, and I have often seen a tramp eat meat in a way that would bring a dusky blush to the cheek of the primeval Alaskan. It is remarkable, however, that no matter how carelessly they eat their food, they seldom have dyspepsia. I have known only a few cases, and even then the sufferers were easily cured.

Supper is seldom much of a meal among hoboes, and mainly because it has to be looked for, during the greater part of the year, just about dark, the time when the hobo is either preparing his night's hang-out, or making arrangements for his night's journey, and the hunt for supper often occasions unpleasant delays. But he nevertheless looks for it if he can possibly spare the time. He considers it his bounden duty to eat regularly, and feels ashamed if he neglects to do it. I have heard him scold himself for an hour just because he failed to get a meal at the proper time, although he really did not care for it. Bohemian that he is, he still respects times and seasons, which is the more surprising since in other matters he is as reckless as a fool. In quarrels, for example, he regards neither sense nor custom, and has his own private point of view every time. But at the very moment that he is planning some senseless and useless fight, he will look for a meal as conscientiously as the laborer works for one, although he may not need it.

For supper he usually has about what other people have—potatoes (usually fried) and beefsteak, tea or coffee, bread and butter, and some kind of sauce. For three months of my time on the road I had almost exactly this bill of fare, and became so accustomed to it that I was considerably surprised if I found anything else. I mention these various items to show how closely the tramp's "hot diet" resembles that of most people. A great mistake is made in thinking that these men, as a class, have to eat things both uncommon and peculiar. Some of them do, but all of the set-downers eat about the same things that the respectable and worthy portion of the community eats.

In Pennsylvania, the "fattenin'-up State,"[6] or "P. A.," as the hobo calls it, apple-butter is his chief delicacy. I have seen him put it on his bread, meat, and potatoes, and one beggar that I knew wanted it "raw." I happened to be with this man one afternoon in the town of Bethlehem, and while we were sitting on a little bridge crossing the canal on the outskirts of the town, a Pennsylvania Dutchman hove in sight. My pal, being a beggar who liked to improve every opportunity, immediately said to me, in a professional sort of voice:

"Keep quiet, Cig, 'n' I'll tackle 'im."