The Palimpsest

Trumpold, Cliff

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Against the silhouette of a freight train, Amana station 
agent Herb Zuber (right) and Indian Joe Ferns, one of 
several hoboes Zuber recalls in the following sketches.
Hobo S ke tches by an 
A m ana  S ta tio n  A gen t
by Cliff Trumpold
H
UNDREDS of hobo wayfarers passed 
through the Amana Colonies in east­
ern Iowa every year. The Amanas 
were an oasis for the hobo, a place 
where lie could count on a handout from the 
communal kitchens in the seven colonies. 
Many times the church leaders had admon­
ished the Amana villagers: “Turn ye not away
when ye are asked. The doors were opened to 
all. When the Amana Colonies changed to a 
capitalist economy in 1932, the communal 
kitchens were closed. But townspeople con­
tinued the tradition of hospitality and gener­
osity, feeding hoboes from their private 
homes.
Most of those who came were nameless and
SUMMER 1989 103
lived in the fringes of a shadow world, asking 
only for a slice of bread. Nobody ever saw them 
arrive. They would just appear, hang around 
for a few days, and — as quietly as they had 
come — vanish. If a hobo abused the Amana 
hospitality by overstaying his visit, he would be 
offered a job, and, more often than not, 
would leave on the next train.
Hut some of the hoboes did accept jobs. 
Outside laborers were always in great demand 
to perform menial tasks, especially on the vil­
lage farms during planting and harvesting 
time. Thev became hired hands and received a
9
generous wage, a place to hang their hats, and
H aii breath Marry, photographed in 1934 at Britt.
three meals a day at a designated village 
kitchen. In the fall, after the hay had been 
stacked and the wheat and corn put up in the 
giant granaries, they would draw their pay, 
wrap up their few meager possessions, and 
leave for warmer regions.
Occasionally, some of the hoboes who were 
approaching middle age would realize that life 
on the open road was losing its fascination. 
They gradually tuned out the siren song of the 
locomotive whistle and settled in one of the 
Amana villages, where they quietly assimilated 
into the mainstream of the working class. 
When they died they were buried in the village 
cemetery, rarely noticed by more than a brief 
obituary. Their only legacy was a mute, con­
crete headstone. Their epitaph was a name and 
a date.
Most of the hoboes who passed through 
Amana during the first halfof this century were 
“pretty decent fellows,’ according to Herb 
Zuber, retired South Amana depot agent. He is 
quick to add that there were also some dis­
reputable individuals: "We had pickpockets 
and worse. You had to be careful. And I know 
we had hard, tough criminals hanging around 
in the jungle, west of Upper South.’’
Zuber’s tenure as station agent began in 1923 
and lasted for fifty years. The Great Board of9 /
Elders, Amana’s elite ruling body, had wanted 
him to become a teacher, but he politely 
ref used and was assigned the position of 
assistant agent and shortly afterward was pro­
moted to depot agent.
fhe job was not an easy one. “In those days 
everything came by rail,’ he recalls. The South 
Amana Depot was the interchange between 
the Hock Island Railroad in the village of Lower 
South Amana and the Chicago, Milwaukee and 
St. Paul in Upper South Amana. A tremendous 
amount of passenger and freight traffic passed 
th rough the villages every day. North- and 
southbound passengers from the Rock Island, 
and local travelers from Conroy, Marengo, and 
other nearby communities, would gather at the 
little depot. As they sat around the stove a hobo 
oftentimes would walk in to warm up. Remem­
bering the reaction of the passengers, Zuber 
laughs, “You know, some of those hoboes 
hadn’t had a bath in a year.
1 remember a hobo who called himself the
104 THE PALIMPSEST
King of Tramps. He cut his initials on every­
thing. Several times I told him that if I ever 
caught him cutting around the depot I would 
give him hell. I nailed him one day, Zuber re­
counts. “He had just finished cutting his name 
. . . about an inch deep on a slant, in a thick, 
solid oak door. 1 was about to reprimand him 
when I saw his knife. . . .  I thought about it a 
little. He had his name on the outhouses, on 
the freight doors on the south side of the depot, 
and on every telephone pole within five miles. 
I don t know how he found time to keep his 
knife sharp.”
Most of the hoboes sported self-styled nick­
names, and Zuber remembers many of them. 
In the following sketches, built from Zuber s 
memories and perceptions and recorded in an 
oral historv interview in Februarv 1989, the* J
hoboes who stopped in the Amanas emerge as 
individualists who led lives of great freedom — 
and great danger.
F
IRE DOWN WILLIAMS was a Welsh­
man, or possibly a Scot. He stemmed 
from well-to-do aristocracy and would 
have inherited a title and considerable 
wealth had he remained at home. He enjoyed a 
cup of wine occasionally but rarely drank to 
excess. His headquarters were in South Amana 
hut he spent a considerable amount of time in 
Middle Amana, where he frequently held 
court in one of the west-end wine cellars. He 
was very articulate and apparently well read, as 
he was up to date on most world events and had 
a studied opinion, always radical, on most of 
them.
W hen Firedown headed south, he never 
failed to stop in Wellman, Iowa, thirty miles 
away. He probably spent half his days in 
Amana and the other half in the Amish and 
Mennonite community in that area. His favor­
ite overnight hangout was the corncob bin next 
to the furnace in the basement of the Green 
Island country school. One winter morning in 
1940, a county maintenance crew running a 
snowplow discovered his body in a roadside
snowdrift.
Hairbreath Harry Ryan never wore anything
Pittsburg Blackie found contentment in his friendship 
with young Pat Kcllcnhcrger of South Amana (1952).
made of leather. To ward ofl the cold, he would 
wrap layer upon layer of gunnysacking around 
his feet and legs. One bitterly cold, winter day, 
Zuber went out to check on him. He walked 
along the tracks until he came to the stockyards 
where a pile of sand had been placed next to the 
loading chute to provide footing for the animals 
should the ground become ice-covered. Harry 
had built a big fire in the sand and was lying on 
his back, kicking his frozen bare feet in the hot 
flames of the fire.
One of Hairbreath Harry ’s treasured posses­
sions was an old tin cup that he dragged in front 
of him on a length of wire. He always walked 
backwards, the result of a childhood mental 
affliction.
Harry was moving out one day on top of a 
boxcar on a westbound freight train traveling 
downgrade at around fifty miles an hour. Prob­
ably daydreaming or getting his bearings, or 
maybe just enjoying the passing scenery, he 
didn t notice an approaching water tower, onto
SIMMER 1989 105
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which a previous train crew had inadvertently 
failed to secure a heavy swing chain suspended 
from the fill spout. The massive chain, whip­
ping merrily in the slipstream of the fast-mov­
ing train, just cleared the top of the cars, but 
left no room for anvone — such as Harry —
0  0
unfortunate enough to be riding there.
Indian Joe Ferns sported a full head of white 
hair, “thick like pig bristles,’ Zuber remem­
bers. Indian Joe had become a hobo after his 
wife and child had drowned in the Galveston 
Hood. He was a very heavv drinker, often to the 
point of physical insensibility. One December 
evening in 1936 after a full afternoon of serious 
drinking, he fell and passed out on the trail of 
the hobo jungle west of South Amana. A heavy 
snow fell that night, three or four feet, and after 
midnight the snow turned to rain. Early the 
next morning the wind shifted and the tem­
perature plummeted to four above. The story 
goes that Joe awoke, terror-stricken to find 
himself completely encapsulated by three feet 
of solid ice. Somehow he managed to free him­
self.
It’s unbelievable how much the human 
body can stand. He was a helluva good guy,” 
Zuber commented. “I would have trusted him
with my life. I have his Bible around here¥
someplace. I used to bring him down to my
house and he would read to my young son,
Tommy. He just quit coming around sometime
in the early fifties. I wrote to a lot of places
where he used to stay . . . even the universities
around the Midwest, you know, the cadaver
departments. He just disappeared offThe face
of the earth. Probably buried in some Potter s
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Field, unknown, like so many others.
Pittsburg Blackie was a confirmed hobo until 
he cast aside his cane and walking shoes and 
settled in South Amana when he was in his 
eighties. He died at ninety-five after spending 
the last years of his life living in an old wood­
shed owned by Al Kellenberger, a villager who 
looked after him. He now lies in the local ceme­
tery, not as Pittsburgh Blackie but as Henry 
Strasburger. He had spent nearly a full lifetime
on the road — the only life he ever really knew0 0
and the only life he loved.✓
Texas Ben frequently worked for the South
Amana farm and the old comm unitv kitchen.0
He didn’t reallv need the money because he
seemed to have a secret funding source. 
“Here, Herb,’ he’d say, peeling a bill off a fat 
roll wrapped in an old handkerchief. Here’s 
an old twenty for you.
Ben suffered a horrible end. He had climbed 
into an empty boxcar on a westbound freight 
one evening while it was parked in a yard sid­
ing. The door of the car was slightly ajar and 
Ben stuck his head through the narrow opening 
at the precise instant the locomotive “hit the 
string of cars. The sudden impact slammed the 
heavy door shut, instantly crushing Ben’s skull.
Mush Faker was a traveling umbrella repair­
man in the days when ladies carried parasols. 
He carried the tools of his trade in a quiver 
slung across his back. Occasionally he would 
stop at Zuber’s house and sing for his son, 
Tommy. His favorite song was “The Face on 
the Barroom Floor.
The freight train was the magic carpet for the 
hobo, but it often exacted the ultimate toll from 
the unlucky man who slipped and fell from his 
perch on the rods underneath, or lost his hold 
on the ladder while riding the couplings 
between the cars. One of these unfortunate 
hoboes was Frank Kane. Kane had been drink­
ing on one spring day in 1940, when the 9:40 
Rock Island passed through South Amana. 
Apparently he stood too close to the tracks as 
the high-speed train thundered by. The vortex 
spun him around and pulled him under the 
wheels.
The first to be notified was Zuber. He rushed 
to the scene of the accident. Realizing that 
another train was due shortly, he gathered up 
the arms, the legs, the head, and whatever else 
he could find. After placing everything in a 
neat pile, he took a last look at all that remained 
of Frank Kane, and left to call the coroner.
Zuber’s experiences present a fascinating 
interface of the hoboes and the Amana people. 
“I don’t think there’s anyone in the state of 
Iowa who knew more hoboes,’ he claims. 
“They came, got their wine and three square
meals a day. What more do you want? They had0 /  '
a place to sleep . . . and they were really 
wanted, he savs. “There was alwavs some 
work available for them. . . . One-eve Robertj
Norton summed it up one time: Herb, this is 
peaceful valley. It can’t be any better in 
heaven.’ ” D
106 THE PALIMPSEST


English

Hobo Sketches by an Amana Station Agent

Ludley, Everett

The Growing-Up Years: Memories of Farm and Town Life

The Palimpsest, vol.70 no.4, Winter 1989

Brose, David A

Treesump Tombstones in an Iowa Cemetery

The Palimpsest, vol.70 no.1, Spring 1989

Rorer, David

A Wolverine Among Hawkeyes: Excerpts from the Rorer Letters

Swaim, Ginalie

Witness the Delicate Balance

U n i  fl IS S IS, will yer please sew me
a Shirt on this Button? asks 
the fellow in the postcard cap­
tion on the front cover. The 
response of the woman on the doorstep isn’t 
clear. Will she slam the door at his imperti­
nence? Will she laugh warmly at his rather 
broad request and, instead of making a shirt for 
his button, give him an old shirt headed for the 
rag-bag and a sandwich from the kitchen? Is it 
trust or doubt in his eyes? What should we read 
in her raised hand?
This special section uncovers the am­
bivalence the American mainstream culture 
has historically demonstrated toward a smallerJ
segment of society — the vagabond. Titled 
Working and Wandering, ” the section looks at 
the nineteenth-century harvest hand during 
Iowa’s wheat-growing years; Britt’s first hobo 
convention in 1900; the tramp motif on picture 
postcards; the unemployed who searched for 
work in the twenties and thirties; individual 
hoboes who routinely stopped at the Amanas; 
and folk art practiced by itinerants and others 
with time on their hands.
The ambivalence of mainstream America has 
appeared on many levels. A society needs
J  J
migratory labor, and yet it fears the transient 
life-style. Elected legislators vote for strict 
vagrancy laws, while individuals continue to 
extend acts of personal kindness from their 
kitchen doors. Railroad management sets strict 
policies against those who hop freight trains, 
but railroad workers frequently offer them food 
and warmth. Small-town promoters host a 
national hobo convention, and the citizens lock 
their doors.
Perhaps the ambivalence arises from differ- 
ing attitudes about work. Nineteenth-centurv
America depended on a large pool of migratory 
laborers and itinerant craftspeople. Today 
most Americans earn a living in the conven­
tional manner, nine-to-five or three-to-eleven, 
and then return home. Likewise, some honor 
and obey the work ethic, while others choose to 
work sporadically. Still others, in both cen­
turies, have had to search for employment or 
struggle for decent wages.
In preparing this section, we encountered 
many who had personal stories of working and 
wandering, and we added sixteen pages to this 
Palimpsest to accommodate some of those sto­
ries. Probablv many of us remember wan-
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derers coming to the back door willing to do 
odd jobs in exchange for a meal. As children, 
we found X’s chalked on the sidewalk or side of 
the house, proof to the next wanderer of our 
generosity. Others of us remember the freight 
trains in the thirties crowded with men — and 
sometimes families — traveling to the Dakota 
wheat fields or the Washington orchards. Some 
of us may have been on those freight trains.
Behind the Great Depression stories and the 
nineteenth-century journalistic exaggerations, 
look for the spirit to survive and the search for 
personal dignity. We found it in Hamlin 
Garland’s accounts of migrant harvest hands, in 
early efforts of organized labor, in the acquired 
skill (despite incredible danger) of hopping 
freight trains, in a small town’s efforts to put 
itself on the map.
The following section culls from historical 
resources and oral histories the voices and 
experiences of the Americans who have wan­
dered and worked, and the varied attitudes of 
the mainstream society through which these 
individuals have moved.
— The Editor
SUMMER 1989 75


Working and Wandering

Davis, Merle

You Were Just One of the Unfortunate Ones'

Garrett, Evan

My Milwaukee
by Evan Garrett
T
HE OCCASION for these musings
was the absorption, in January 1986, 
of the Milwaukee Road into the Soo 
Line Railroad. The tracks of the Chi­
cago, Milwaukee, St. Paul &: Pacific Railroad 
once criss-crossed eastern Iowa and much of 
the Midwest and even stretched a long tenta­
cle, the “Pacific Extension, to the shores of 
Puget Sound. Changes in America’s economy 
and particularly the advent of the automobile 
and paved roads, however, reduced the need
for many of these rail routes. The Milwaukee✓
Road, in common with many other companies, 
sought survival through abandonment of 
unprofitable lines and finally merger, which 
cost the railroad its corporate identity.
Back in the time of my youth, the booming 
years following the Second World War, the 
C.M.St.P.&P. played a profound role in nur­
turing my awareness and love of the world of 
railroading. My memories took shape in and 
about the small southeastern Iowa prairie town 
of North English, on the line from Cedar 
Rapids to Ottumwa. One hundred years ago 
this trackage provided the Milwaukee Road’s 
initial link to Kansas City, but the indirect 
routing — in addition to frequent flooding, 
because of the many watercourses along which 
it was built — had long since relegated the line
to a secondarv status.✓
My thoughts reach back to summer after­
noons at my grandmother’s house, atop Cher­
okee Hill and overlooking the draw in which 
the railroad yard lay and, beyond that, the rest 
of the town. The wail of a southbound freight 
train’s whistle would bring me racing break­
neck to the foot of a giant elm, from whose 
vantage I drank in the sight of a venerable 
Mikado (a steam locomotive designed for 
freight service) drifting down into town with a 
mixed score of cars. More often than not, the 
crew would tie up on the long passing siding in 
front of the fading gray depot, then walk up the
Garrett drew these scenes from his 1977 photos.
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156 THE PALIMPSEST

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hill on Main Street to Coffman’s Cafe for
“beans.’’ There were on occasion as many as✓
three trains in town at once, a circumstance for 
which many a lonely railfan today might gladly 
sacrifice his eye teeth.
My grandfather had begun bis career as a 
section foreman for the Milwaukee at Amana. 
By the time I made my appearance in his life, 
he had settled down to a coal dealership in 
North English (people still bought that com­
modity by the truckload for home-heating pur­
poses) but he never forgot his connection with 
the railroad or his pride in the Milwaukee. 
Colorful calendars from the company graced 
his office walls, together with some from the 
Louisville & Nashville, which originated his 
consignments of Kentucky coal. Through his 
continued acquaintance with the railroaders on 
the division, I felt a certain affinity for the 
gentlemen in their white caps and striped over­
alls who indulged my hours of watching from 
the station platform as they shunted box cars 
and hoppers on the siding and team track.
My own bedroom window faced out over tbe 
rolling southern Iowa hills to where the track 
traversed the English River valley about one 
and a half miles distant. Many a night I lay with 
my ear pressed to the screen to hear a north­
bound train call for the crossing at Cuba, then 
square its shoulders and gather its breath for 
the assault on the long grade up out of the 
valley and over the hill into North English. My 
father recounted that on the curve at the foot of 
that grade, back before the First World War, a 
tank car had exploded and sent half of the tank 
slicing off into the adjoining woods. Years later, 
squirrel hunters employed the unrecovered 
debris as a shelter against bitter winter winds.
From the time that the railroads emerged as 
this country’s first self-conscious ‘great indus­
try, they left their physical mark upon the 
land. Even now, as farmers’ plows, highway 
realignments, and the inexorable march of 
nature strive to eradicate the right-of-way from 
which the last rails were removed in 1982, 
there are traces of the Milwaukee’s presence. 
When the road stretched across the rolling 
loam hills of Iowa and Keokuk counties in the 
1880s, the builders found good ballast in short 
supply. Consequently, the company inaugu-
Loeomotive 1005 heads under the overpass bridge.
rated an operation to dig gumbo clay from the 
English River bottomland at Cuba and fire it 
into a brick-like consistency. A century later 
the kilns and cookhouse, station and water tank 
have all long since vanished, but Cuba may still 
be identified by three quarter-mile-long 
“pits. At one time, the property owner 
pridefully mowed the grassy banks and stocked 
the collected waters with bullheads and blue- 
gills. Shady cottonwoods no longer overhang 
the pits, whose waters now are probably too 
silted and shallow to support fish anymore.
I think I first apprehended the significance of 
change when, about the time I was expected to 
forsake grammar school for the challenges of 
high school, suddenly the familiar, if somewhat 
mournful moan of Milwaukee steam whistles 
ceased to echo up out of the valley, displaced 
by the strident blat of what I knew to be die­
sels. For the next two weeks, before I caught 
the opportunity to look over the newcomers, 
my curiosity and imagination conjured images 
inspired by my grandfather’s calendars, of 
chrome-accented streamliners leading the 
Olympian Hiawatha. What disappointment I 
felt the day I rode down Main Street to spy an 
orange-and-black hood unit, the first of what 
would be many of these more prosaic ‘road- 
switchers’ in my train-watching future!
While I matured and went on to a larger 
world, the horizons of the railroad began to 
shrink. The only passenger service I re ­
member, a daily gas-electric “doodle-bug,” 
had been withdrawn before the advent of the 
diesels. The depot itself disappeared in a 1963 
fire from an explosion at a nearby bulk oil plant. 
Considering the decline in business already 
evident bv that time, the railroad chose not to 
rebuild but to let the last agent, Carl Zimmer­
man, conduct his business from the seat of a 
pickup truck. Service frequency diminished 
and eventually, with no remaining traffic 
source to detain a train from passing straight 
through town, all tracks but the main line were 
removed. Ranks of cornpickers and fertilizer 
wagons began to encroach upon the weedy 
verge, spilling over from trackside agribusiness 
firms.
In May 1977, I returned to Iowa for a family 
visit. The “Muscatine-Montezuma line of the 
Rock Island (which had performed the rest of
FALL 1989 159
my initiation into trainwatching) had dissolved 
during my absence, and 1 wanted to make cer­
tain that I saw “my’ Milwaukee before it, too, 
abandoned me. I was fortunate to choose a 
sunny, warm Thursday morning, the kind of 
spring day when you can smell the freshness of 
the grass and the rich aroma of recently plowed 
soil.
I first caught sight of the train as it leaned 
into the wide bend at Webster around 10:30 
a . m . On the point ran diesel locomotive 1005, 
a model GP30, long hood forward, with four 
box cars bound from Ottumwa to Amana and 
the requisite orange Milwaukee-built caboose. 
After a curt toot on the airhorns for the sole 
grade crossing in the small town, this shadow of 
what I had once known rolled past the Warder 
& Lee elevators. Iowa’s farmlands sometimes 
produce corn in such quantity that these grain 
bins will not hold it all; I have seen corn piled in 
the center of the street, fifteen feet high and a 
block long. But now the corn leaves Webster in 
trucks, not Milwaukee box cars or covered hop­
pers, and 1005 had no reason to slacken her 
pace.
This might be my last opportunity to follow a 
train on this line (as it proved to be), so I 
jumped into my station wagon and the chase 
was on. State Highway 149 took a tack away 
from the rail line, rejoining only about a mile 
from North English, but the train’s leisurely 
progress allowed me to get ahead. Near South 
English, in line with my bedroom window, I 
slowed to hear the whistle for Cuba — a
moment from mv childhood, never to be✓
repeated. Then, I sped on to the ‘overhead 
bridge.”
There was nothing particularly outstanding 
about this structure: it was just a two-lane high­
way bridge of cast concrete that was a bit too 
narrow and had to be approached on an abom­
inably tight S-curve. But in a land devoted to 
the monotonous regularity of a road describing 
each and every section line on the map, such an 
aberration becomes a local institution. The 
bridge provided for me a splendid vantage 
point from which to observe 1005 surmounting 
the grade up from the river valley. Her black- 
and-orange livery displayed a liberal dusting of 
limestone from the occasional application of 
fresh ballast along the line (no gumbo or cin­
ders in 1977). As a blue haze shot up from the 
turbo exhaust on the far side of the bridge, my 
mind sprang back momentarily to a day thirty 
years ago when my mother drove across the 
bridge just as a very hard-working and some­
what ill-fired Mikado passed below, engulfing 
our car in a cloud of black smoke and soot.
The overhead bridge marked the summit of 
the grade up from the English River; from 
there, it was downhill for a mile into North 
English. As the train would not be slowing for 
the town — let alone stopping — I dared not 
waste any time getting down to the former
station site, now indicated onlv bv a diminutive
*  *
signboard. The engineer was already blasting 
for the crossing as I knelt to frame the train 
beside that post in my camera’s viewfinder, 
fhe flashing of a shutter can do so much to 
capture a fragment of history or even to evoke 
memories of a whole way of life. I stood again 
and turned to watch as 1005 and her train 
receded to the east, past the sumac that 
reclaimed the acre my grandfather has used as 
a coal yard, and out of sight up the draw.
I was aware at the time of the historical 
potential of the image I had just recorded. That 
is the reason I had gone to chase the Milwaukee 
that morning. But I do not think I will ever be 
comfortable with the rate at which the changes 
occur. By 1982 every aspect of the railroad had 
vanished: the train, the track, the signboard, 
the crossbucks, even Home Lumber Com­
pany’s decrepit trackside elevator. A restruc­
turing Milwaukee Road abandoned the 
trackage south of Amana to Ottumwa in 1980, 
retired its CP30 diesels, and in 1985, the com­
pany itself merged into the Soo Line. In 1987 
the Highway Department eliminated the over­
head bridge and its S-curve. Like this particu­
lar railroad line, there is no reason for them any 
longer.
On the other hand, our experiences are a 
part of our reality. My memories of the Mil­
waukee during my childhood — and of the last 
brief but fond reacquaintance — will be with 
me forever. I come from a people who find it 
perfectly natural to give such directions as: “Go 
down to the corner and turn right where the 
seed house used to be. The “seed house” was 
demolished thirty years ago, but we still know 
where to turn. □
160 THE PALIMPSEST


My Milwaukee

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