Why does everyone forget about hobo joe

Every hobo has a moniker, a nickname grounded in habit or origin or appearance, like Redbird or Frisco Jack or Bookworm. Not every hobo wants to share his or her real name with the straights and the Square Johns, of which, with my notebook and recorder and wingtip shoes, I am decidedly one.

My hobo name is Seersucker. I wish I were kidding. So monikers it is. In a society of citizen consumers, to have nothing, to own nothing, by choice, might be the most radical politics of all. A hobo is homeless by choice. Even then, not every hobo is completely homeless.

Most these days have a semipermanent address somewhere for the winter. Especially the older hoppers. And of course the whole thing runs on talk, endless talk. And every story here begins as the same story. I did a lot of hitchhiking right after high school. And one time my brother was out hitchhiking in California, and some tramps got a hold of him and told him ride the trains instead of hitchhiking, and so he rode trains.

They came back, and that was in They were talking in a bar about riding out to see Evel Knievel jump the Snake River Canyon, and I started to listening to it, and I worked seasonal and stuff. I had some freedom there. I was in. And so my older brother There was 11 of us gone out of St. Cloud and hopping freights, and I fell in love with it right away. I mean, I like hitchhiking because you get to meet a lot of different people, but the freight-train riding was like the freedom, you know?

I first left home when I was 16, just to see the country and get out on my own for a while to see if I could do it. And I did. My father was a hobo, born in in Frog Level, North Carolina. Ran away from home when he was 12 or 13, rode freights for about 17 years. He was always the one to tuck me in bed at night. I had the honor of doing a directed writing course which I could choose the professor.

When I was a really young kid, I lived in a neighborhood in Houston close to a big train yard. I had a buddy named Dusty, and me and Dusty used to sneak out there in the field and watch the hobos.

We used to watch guys get on and off the trains all the time, so we kind of knew how it all worked. Dusty and I did catch a train, to Galveston. We just got on the train in the dark. Maybe half an hour later, there was a train going the other way, rolling real slow. We saw empties. We caught a train going the other way, and by sheer luck, it went right back to the same place we were at.

We were just really lucky. Britt is a small town in north-central Iowa. Maybe 2, souls. Tidy lawns and houses. A handful of shops and restaurants. A few vacant storefronts. Everything else this time of year is corn; corn to the distant edges of the world, corn and more corn, and the kind of immaculate farms for which Iowa is known. The train tracks run east-west through Britt.

First hobo probably rode through not long after. Paul line; then the Iowa, Chicago and Eastern. Mainly freight lines, carrying mostly grain. But the greatest of these, by far, is the parade. Everyone in town is either in the parade or watching the parade, or in it then watching it, or watching it then running around to get back in it. Entire high school classes come home to sit on a bale and ride a flatbed pulled by a tractor. Turns out the hobo convention is a reunion for the whole town.

The Iowa State Fair starts the day before, so everyone comes home. The history of the hobo is the history of modern America. There had always been a small floating population of agrarian workers, but they were limited by geography and technology. They were regional. The railroads change all that. As this is happening, America is industrializing too, and the need for a mobile work force, willing, adaptable and relatively inexpensive to transport, becomes evident.

The hobo. By the late 19th century, the heart of Hobohemia was the main drag in Chicago, where train lines radiated out into every corner of America.

It was easy to find work there in the slaughterhouses to make a buck before you caught out again; easy to go west and build a dam or go east and take a job in a new steel mill. There are four more: Light, Darkness, Seed, and Water. In the stained glass we see in Revelations, we see a child in a yellow dress holding her hands towards the sky and seemingly catching a lightning strike in them: this is Amaryllis.

She is seen as a Goddess in Stratoverse, associated with the Sun, and with the color yellow. Yellow is the color of royalty for Stratoverse.

From Amaryllis Isle, humankind spread all over Ecoverse where they would begin to discover more and more of Magic and build a society for the next years. Which is when the next two Mancers come in. Breaker of Chains. By the time Malus appeared, most of the magicless people had been forced into some form of slave labor for about years, with their magic Masters keeping hats and wands as a closely guarded secret.

Born a slave to magicless parents, Malus gained her Magic on her 13th birthday, apparently without a hat. Her magic is directly linked to another Element of the Hyacy Tradition, Water. We see her figure at the bottom of the glass mosaic, surrounded by waves and bearing five blue jewels on her forehead. This two year long revolution was ended by a girl born into a high ranking Magic household who was only sixteen when the revolution began.

Her name was Hyacinth and she soon rose to become the leader of the people that survived the revolution, preaching peace to them with great charisma. So why do we suspect her to be a Mancer? If you were attentive, you have already seen the motif representing all five within the comic. It appears that each Mancer corresponds to an element.

The others are more obvious than Hyacinth, but if you go by elimination you can figure out she should be the Seed mancer. The ease at which she unified the survivors, even the rarity of revolts against a former Master taking control, point towards her having mind affecting abilities of the Seed Attribute. Malus, despite no other magician being able to do more than slow her down, also implied that Hyacinth was stronger than herself, to the extent of refusing to fight her.

He mentions that they can affect the human mind, though no direct mention of it is made in his book. As the one who would have the same element humans supposedly belong to, Seed, and more specifically humans with plants on their heads, if any character has mind control, it is most likely her. She is the woman in the green dress and three green gems in our picture of all five.

She has a peaceful expression, emphasizing her role of bringing peace to the revolution. Furthermore, if you asked an Ecoversian living today, they would reply that both Hyacinth and Malus are still alive today, years later, but their whereabouts are unknown.

Their hair is different from the mural, but they are there as evidenced by the gems they wear and their locations. Alright, three done, two mancers to go. Their biggest argument? Amaryllis, they insisted, had Weather Sky Magic and was obviously very important to human history.

These Revisionists were given the newly discovered Stratoverse to avoid a civil war, and settled there. Of who, or what, we do not know. But that event seems to have changed Stratoverse forever, and caused them to only seek Weather magic.

This time, it was on a new landmass that would become known as Gloomverse. They decided to have Gloomverse become the land that would unite them once more, and rather than fight over the new continent, they decided to accept arrivals from both countries.

From these records, we learn of Asperitas sending in a very gifted Magician to keep the peace and manage the many arrivals. In the glass mural, she is the central figure, a hand holding up the Sun. Almost an adult when she first reached Gloomverse, she went by the name of Prisma. Prisma managed to do this very well for a few years and one of the first settlements is now called City of the Ancients.

Prisma is seen glowing and speaking with grey text right before she is murdered. She also carries a Sun-shaped scepter her wand? Though we know a little about her life, her abilities are largely unknown. This hidden one, who by elimination is the Darkness mancer. They are hiding behind Prisma in the purple mass perhaps representing the Storm, looking through to the side next to Amaryllis and holding something resembling a mask. Interestingly, their body is mostly hidden as well This is our prime suspect for the aforementioned Prisma Murder.

The figure shrouded in Darkness with red eyes, carrying a black wand and covered in rags. Husband of Petunia and father of Harold and the famous Wallis Gloom. We already know Hyacinth and Malus are likely to still be alive after years after all. Thank you for your time! A newer sign maybe? Smiley Joe Omohundro Omo the Hobo cowboy music sheet music. Sometimes the coolest things can by found in the unlikeliest of places. Take the Hobo Joe statue, for instance, in Buckeye.

He's a rather jovial and jaunty figure, and at 25 feet tall, the old-timey vagabond sticks out in more than one way from slaughterhouse behind him. Hobo Joe's a cement and clay statue that was crafted in as a mascot for the now-defunct Hobo Joe's coffee shops. Today, he sits on the edge of a dusty, trash-strewn parking less than 75 feet from the cattle pens of West Valley Processing.

So why the heck is the ginormous statue for a long-extinct restaurant chain still standing, and in front of a meat processing plant? No, the owners of the slaughterhouse didn't place the statue there as distraction for doomed cows waiting to meat, uh The explanation is actually a bit weirder, and even has ties to some of the characters involved in one of the Valley's classic murder cases. Hobo Joe's coffee shops were a sort of homespun version of Denny's with locations throughout Arizona.

The chain's namesake vagabond, Hobo Joe described as a "World Traveler, Philosopher and Connoisseur of Good Food" was featured throughout each restaurant -- adorning the menus and coffee mugs, and standing watch by the cash register in the form of a life-sized plaster statue. But like other throwback coffee shop chains around Phoenix including Bob's Big Boy and the unfortunately named Sambo's , Hobo Joe's began disappearing in the late s when the company went belly up. This financial downfall was partially due to some of its partners and proprietors' vast web of corruption, organized crime, and nastiness surrounding the notorious car-bomb assassination of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles in While the connection between Hobo Joe's and the Bolles murder is complicated as are most things associated with the case , it's oddly fascinating.

Per the epic tome The Arizona Project which documented the massive investigation behind the murder by the IRE , the chain's co-owner Herb Applegate embezzled more than a half-million dollars to build a swanky condo in Mesa meant to host sex parties for his mafia buddies, some of whom were being investigated by Bolles.

As a result, Hobo Joe's had something of a financial crunch, and couldn't afford to pay some of its debts.

That includes money owed to artist Marvin Ransdell , whose fiberglass manufacturing company created several foot Hobo Joe statues for the restaurant chain.