Meant to be a hobo

Maybe I was meant to be a hobo.
Oh, sure, there were other Halloween costume possibilities.
I was a clown more than once, using a smelly, rubber mask that fit over the entire head. Wearing the mask was scarier than any other aspect of Halloween.
And it was always possible — back in the 1950s — to go as a cowboy. Every little boy seemed to have a cowboy outfit back then. (For all I know, it was a law during the Eisenhower administration, The Cowboy Heritage/Youth Indoctrination Act of 1953.)
But more years than I can count, I did my trick-or-treating rounds as a hobo.
None of the costumes in those days involved very much that was purchased at a store. My mother sewed the clown costumes, and the cowboy outfit was left over from Christmas morning.
But the hobo outfit was the easiest of all.
You simply went through the old clothes destined for the rag bin or the Salvation Army and re-purposed them. Pull a piece of clothesline through the belt loops of a pair of your big brother’s cast-off pants, and you’re on your way.
Grab an old flannel shirt that had been torn when you were climbing over some barbed wire while trespassing — what can I say, the statute of limitations has expired — and the costume was nearly complete.
It helped to have a hat, and — fortunately — men still wore hats in the 1950s.
Men still wear hats today, but it couldn’t be more different.
Today, we’re talking about “gimme” hats and seed company hats and other baseball-like hats with advertising on them, some of them worn backwards.
Then, we were talking about the hats worn by countless men who worked in offices or were salesmen or who always wore a hat to church, even if they didn’t wear one any other day. These hats were never — for the record — worn backwards.
The thing to do was to look in the closet for a hat that had outlived its usefulness but hadn’t yet left the house. Give it a few punches with a kid’s fist, pull down the brim, and — presto — with the rope-tied pants and patched flannel shirt, you were ready to hit the circuit as a hobo.
As a finishing touch, my mother — for reasons I can’t quite explain — had a bit of theatrical make-up in the house. It may have been left over from one of the earlier incarnations of civic theater in Jay County. At any rate, all it took was a touch of greasepaint to the cheek, and even the most well-scrubbed eight-year-old was a hobo.
It wasn’t until years later that I gave a thought to why dressing up as a hobo might have made sense at Halloween.
After all, Halloween is about scary characters — monsters, ghosts, vampires, and the like — and it wasn’t until some time later that I realized the hobo could also prompt anxiety and fear.
To me, a hobo was an iconic figure in comic strips and cartoons.
But to my parents’ generation, hobos and tramps were inexorably tied to memories of the Great Depression. They represented a scary time, and they were especially scary because they underlined the uncertainty of each family’s economic security. They were the walking embodiment of powerlessness and a sense of personal failure.
What — even today — could be scarier than that?
Hobos and tramps were a common sight in the 1930s, and family legend has it that a series of hobo secret signs led guys riding the rails through Jay County to my grandparents’ house on Pleasant Street where — the hobo signs told them — they would be offered a meal by my grandmother.
All of that was, of course, lost on me as a kid.
I dressed up as a hobo because it was easy and it got me out of having to wear the smelly, rubber clown mask. That was good enough for me.
Just the same, when trick-or-treaters come to the door tonight, I might just slip the ones dressed as hobos another piece of candy for old time’s sake.
I’m sure my grandmother would approve.[[In-content Ad]]