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Riding the Rails

Hobo Letters

About the Writer

Interview

Reviews

Links

Brazil

Video

A

GREAT DEPRESSION

BOOKSHELF

Recommended Reading

THE BLOG

GAME OF CHOICE

"We thought it was the magic carpet...
the click of the rails...romance."

"The end of the rainbow was always
somewhere else and it kept us moving."

"Most of all I remember the loneliness.
More than once I cried. I felt so sad,
so utterly alone."

During the Great Depression, more than a quarter of a million teenagers left their homes and hopped freight trains looking for work or adventure. This is their story.

I first became interested in the boxcar boys and girls when I read Boy and Girl Tramps of America by Thomas Minehan, who rode the rails with the young nomads in summer 1932. I suggested to my son, Michael, a film maker, that the subject would make a powerful documentary. The suggestion led to the award-winning PBS "American Experience" film, Riding the Rails, made by Michael and his wife, Lexy Lovell.

In the book, I draw on 3,000 letters from former boxcar boys and girls sent to the documentary makers. I had access to 40 hours of filmed interviews with 20 men and women chosen as potential candidates for the film.

Many letters are handwritten, as from old friends sharing honest-to-God stories. Time and again, I held a letter in my hand and felt a connection to a lonely boy or girl standing beside the tracks 60 years ago. It left me with a deep sense of the inner strength and faith of ordinary Americans and their belief in this land.

Studs Terkel has said that the story of the boxcar boys and girls is "one of the vital, terribly neglected sagas of the Thirties. With today's homeless kids, it is a contemporary story of overwhelming importance."

The lessons learned by this "forgotten" generation of America's children who rode the rails in search of a better life are a powerful reminder of what might turn up around the next curve. They are an inspiration to all who share a nostalgia for the road and the freedoms sought there.

REVIEWS

THE BOSTON GLOBE
"Riding the Rails" is a riveting document of hope and hardship during one of this nation's bleakest eras. For all that has been written about the Depression, the travails of those under the age of 18 have been sorely underrepresented. Gripping and well-researched, this book by Errol Lincoln Uys is a companion piece to the award-winning 1997 documentary of the same name. With more than 500 interviews and stunning archival photographs by Walker Evans, Gordon Parks and Dorothea Lange, Uys so thoroughly recreates the wretched conditions the boxcar boys and girls endured that the reader can all but hear the cadence of the trains on the tracks and the lonesome wail at every whistle stop."

THE LIBRARY JOURNAL
This is an elegantly presented and quietly moving collection of firsthand reminiscences, capturing a unique moment in American history. Uys, a veteran writer and editor, is the author of the historical novel Brazil. Enthusiastically recommended for all public libraries.

AMAZON.COM
Whether you're a "gaycat" (novice rider) or a "dingbat" (seasoned hobo), Riding the Rails is entertaining and inspiring, recapturing a time when the country was "dying by inches." -- Sunny Delaney, History Editor

KANSAS CITY STAR

A remarkable story

SACRAMENTO BEE

One of the most poignant memories of the wandering youth of the Great Depression

DENVER POST

As gripping as it is well researched...

TULSA WORLD

Riding the Rails sets out to tell about a few of the 250,000 teenagers who hopped freights and lived the hobo life in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash...paints a brisk, colorful, fast-paced portrait of lean times and high hopes.

Read a selection of letters from boxcar boys and girls...