Hobo: A Depression Odyssey
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About the Book
At the height of the Great Depression the narrator loses his job in the Butte copper mines and leaves home to look for work despite the fact that there are eighteen million unemployed and his chances are slim. He hoboes 10,000 miles throughout the West, stealing rides in boxcars and passenger trains, hitchhiking on the roads. He stops at hobo jungle and Hoovervilles, encounters sadistic railroad security and – always capitalized – the Law. He digs potatoes for a quarter a day, washes cars for a penny each, boxes in a carnival for two dollars a fight. He is picked up as a vagrant, beds down in a brothel, watches a hanging, and winds up in the county jail on suspicion of murder. Because his story is largely autobiographical, every word rings true. He is a Depression-era pilgrim and the people he meets comprise the face of America in despair. There are authentic and persuasive portraits of people trying to find their way through one of the most desperate times in history. O’Malley’s graphic, first-hand account will tell you what it was really like.
About the Author
With the middle name of Kilroy, it’s not surprising he turned up everywhere. Richard Kilroy O’Malley was there: in the Butte copper mines, in the boxing ring, singing in college dance bands, hoboing during the Great Depression, covering world news for the Associated Press. Born of newspaper parents, he began his journalistic career in Missoula, Montana, and went from there to become an AP war correspondent, roaming the Pacific from the Phillippines to the deck of the battleship Missouri at the Japanese surrender in 1945. Then north to Korea, where suspicious Russians arrested him for going beyond the 38th Parallel; west to Berlin where he covered the Soviet blockade of the city; and on to Moscow where the Russians objected to his reporting and expelled him. Then followed Cyprus during the bloody EOKA uprising against the British, Paris, North Africa in the savage days of the Algerian rebellion against France, the Belgian Congo, and finally back to Germany. He headed the Associated Press bureau in Frankfurt supervising operations in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Rumania. He retired to live on the shores of Lough Corrib in western Ireland for fifteen years before returning to make his home in Sun City, Arizona.