Mostly True
The West’s Most Popular Hobo Graffiti Magazine
Microcosm Publishing
Bill Daniel
Odd stuff appears in my mailbox, and some days I wonder what the mail carrier thinks of me.
Today, this quirky paperback arrived. The small print on the cover claims this is The West’s Most Popular Hobo Graffiti Magazine, and I can’t argue that title. It’s a nicely-sized five by nine and a bit short of 200 pages. And interesting pages they are, with the themes of railroading, and more especially riding freight trains without permission. Liability, you know. The text is graphic heavy, with old photos and ads for model railroads supplies, books and rolling stock. The other element here concerns the technical business of riding on a train without permission of the rail line. That can be dangerous in many ways: falling off a car in motion, freezing to death in a box car, and starving. And then there’s getting beat up by the railroad “bulls,” more genteelly called “Safety Officers.” It’s a mostly male world, although a few females are out in this rough and tough life.
It’s a fascinating life, and this magazine takes you into the weeds of details. I was always interested in trains as a child, but for me the connectivity of the rails was the attraction. Here, it’s the mechanics of the rolling stock, and how to survive. I’m also taken by the graphics — pictures of trains in real life and in ads fill many pages, and a rather involved model railroad layout also drew my attention. But the heart of the book is the text. It’s mostly presented as scans of old mechanical typewriter tomes. A running theme in this book is the search for “Bozo Texino.” Perhaps real, perhaps fictional, his trademark is a simple sketch of a man in a Mexican sombrero sitting against a palm tree. It’s only a few strokes of a block of chalk, but it’s a symbol that appears in rail yards and similar gathering places for the down and out on the move.
I recommend this book for its excellent graphics, fascinating peeks into that hidden world, and its unpretentious “get along, go along” mindset. Perhaps the hobo life is for you, perhaps not. But here’s a view port into that world, and I invite you to take a peek.
