The fall of 1932 to 33 was cold, winter’s icy grip having taken hold the first of November, clutching Greenfield and the rest of Franklin County in a frozen fist that seemed set on never letting up. That Thanksgiving, my sister and I were 7 and 9 years old. Our father had been employed by the federal government to run a relief agency for hobos on Miles Street next to the railroad tracks. The Miles Street Hotel had been taken over to house the hobos who came and went during the Great Depression, perpetually on the move in those bleak days — coming from places far away from Greenfield’s switching yards, then riding the rails to somewhere, anywhere, else.
The Federal Emergency Relief agency didn’t record these migrants as “bums” or “hobos.” They signed in at the hotel as “transients.” They didn’t peddle apples as some of their city partners did. They didn’t do anything. They came in for a bath, food and clothing, slept in a bed three or four nights, and then with no-one’s “by your leave,” were gone. My sister and I used to lie in bed nights with the lights out and try to count the cars on the long trains that hauled freight through town. I can’t remember now how long the longest train was, probably 80 or 90 cars. The “bulls,” as railroad police were called, looked the other way in those hard times, while most of the box cars carried a human freight as well as legitimate cargo.
Not without purpose
Hobos were not bums in the denigrating sense of that word. They were not shiftless, men without purpose. They were somewhat elevated, with a dignity that belied the fact that most of them didn’t have a penny in their pockets. Many transients were veterans of World War l, men who had seen the worse of hard times overseas on the bomb-blasted battlefields of Europe. Survivors, they were already toughened by experiences worse than those of the Depression. They were a cosmopolitan lot. Teachers, artists, skilled craftsmen, all educated by much travel, much contact with men who held to a common purpose: to land somewhere where there would be a job and money. Searching, ever searching, they traveled the railroad highways in a pattern that had regularity and rhythm: those here today and gone tomorrow replaced by more who’d stay a while and also be gone soon after.
There was, as I recollect it, no “criminal element” in this indigent lot. Maybe there wasn’t anything in Greenfield to attract serious crooks. The men who stayed at the Miles Hotel had only the clothes they were wearing. We never heard of foul play or dirty work. The story of the Depression is a long story, a decade’s worth of general impoverishment. Surely, we knew nobody who had anything. The level of shabbiness in clothing and footwear was such that we saw everyone on the street as an equal.
‘Bully beef’
In the Miles Hotel, canned “bully beef” invariably was the principal ingredient in the evening meal. It was a composition, an early facsimile of Spam and Dinty Moore stew combined, made to stick to your ribs. Eat and don’t complain. Bully beef was delivered to the Miles Hotel in big tins, bought and distributed by a Washington bureaucracy supplying these transient way stations. There was tons of it.
We had a food drive in school that November. Thanksgiving was at hand and we were called upon to remember those less fortunate than we were. My sister and I were much too young to weigh the distribution of “fortunate” and “less fortunate.” We had no idea where we’d have stood on that scale. When our teachers asked us to help the less fortunate, we responded. I volunteered 10 tins of bully beef. My teacher was impressed. This proved to be an embarrassment to our mother. She couldn’t take 10 tins of bully beef from the Miles kitchen without suffering Uncle Sam’s wrath.
Perhaps my sister and I caught on where we stood among the “fortunate” and “less fortunate” when Mother emptied her purse at the grocer’s for the canned food that got me off the hook in our school Thanksgiving drive to feed the hungry.