Third boxcar, midnight train

Destination, Bangor, Maine

Long before those famous lines hit the top of the pop music charts in 1965, the Queen City had become a magnet for hoboes thanks to the convergence of the Maine Central and the Bangor and Aroostook railroads.

Hobohemia was along the banks of the Penobscot River from Hancock Street to Eastern Maine General Hospital and beyond. Ruth Lothrop remembered it well when she wrote “Me, Myself and I,” a charming account of her girlhood growing up in a wealthy family before World War I in Bangor.

“The railroad tracks to Canada ran along the river on a wide ledge below the hospital and often I’d sit on the bank among the exposed roots of the huge trees and watch the hoboes as they leapt off the slow moving freight trains. This, apparently, was one of their favorite stop-overs and I’d see them washing their clothes in the river and building bonfires to cook food. Sometimes there’d be half a dozen men lolling around laughing and talking and taking swigs out of bottles,” she remembered many years later.

She was always careful they didn’t see her because, as everybody knew, there were good and bad hoboes. Lothrop also made the proper distinction of the time between hoboes, who were looking for work, and tramps, who were just beggars.

To the Bangor police, hoboes and tramps were bad news. They were supposed to enforce Maine’s tramp law that could get a man sentenced to hard labor for begging for a place to place or sleeping in a barn uninvited. They got calls from Ruth Lothrop’s neighborhood to come drive out the drifters perched on the riverbank, and that explains their behavior a century ago in the spring and summer of 1905.

“Late on Thursday afternoon a telephone message was received by the police, stating that a gang of ‘hoboes’ – bad ones, the message said – were encamped on the stretch of river front known as Feley’s Shore, back of Eastern Maine General Hospital,” began a story about one of these raids on April 21, 1905 in the Bangor Daily News. “Immediately the patrol was driven to upper Hancock street where the officers separated, Patrolman Mackie striking directly for the river front and Capt. O’Donahue, accompanied by Patrolman Donovan, making a slight detour, hoping in this way to cut off the retreat of the gang.”

Mackie confronted “six burly tramps … ugly, aggressive, primed for a fight.” When the other two officers appeared, a bloody battle ensued and the “gang” were soon rounded up, save one who ran, and headed for the paddy wagon.

They were described as “professional beggars,” equipped with bottles of a chemical that would produce “artificial sores” along with “stacks of beggar’s cards.” One of them, however, it turned out had only one leg, raising questions about just how “primed for a fight” the gang was or whether it was any gang at all.

A story on May 21 described a raid in the area cooked up for publicity purposes. Reporters were invited to attend “a little picnic up around the pumping station.” One reporter declined, “remembering the violence that had accompanied the last picnic of this nature.”

After checking around the pumping station and finding nothing, the police headed north “past Mt. Hope” where they found “two scared [Weary] Willies” hiding in the bushes. They were sent “prancing up the railroad track toward Old Town assisted by diverse lifts from the toes of heavy boots.”

Even though the foray had accomplished little, it had yielded “encouraging results,” wrote a dutiful reporter. The city was fairly free of tramps and that was “good for the town.”

References to hoboes and tramps in the papers continued that summer as the problem seemed to escalate. An editorial on May 17 declared “the great tramp problem” would be solved not with more jails, but with techniques such as those used by the Salvation Army.

But, in Bangor, police patrols were increased, apparently because of political pressure from influential people in certain neighborhoods.

“Although there is nothing particularly desperate about the situation, Bangor is liberally sprinkled at present with bad hoboes and other scamps from the larger cities. They loiter about the streets, peer in the windows and one went so far Saturday night as to sandbag a man at his own gate,” according to a short story on Aug. 8.

The force of uniformed men in the residential districts had been doubled, and more plainclothesmen would be stationed on both the city’s east and west sides. A few days later, of the 20 men locked up at the police station for drunkenness, 17 or 18 were identified as “hoboes or semi-hoboes.” Other stories that appeared almost inevitably identified the perpetrators of assaults and thefts as hoboes, if a local suspect could not be collared immediately.

The age of the hobo lasted from the 1870s to World War II. During that period, their numbers ebbed and flowed depending on the health of the nation’s economy. They became objects of humor and romance, immortalized by cartoonists, writers and sociologists.

Homelessness today is viewed far differently. It is no longer romanticized. The bloody police raids into hobo jungles and tramp camps are a thing of the past, and Bangor’s hobohemia is gone forever.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.