(The following report by Bobby Ampezzan appeared on the Times Herald website on September 20.)
PORT HURON, Mich. — This year’s Down by the Depot Hobo Fest in Port Huron will be one for the ages.
“Banjo Fred” Starner, a retired economics professor who has played his banjo before audiences across the nation and attended more than 35 hobo gatherings, will be filming the music and poetry of Hobo Fest as part of a documentary film project he expects to file with the Library of Congress.
Starner, who lives in Los Angeles, has put up $18,000 of his own money for the documentary project, tentatively titled “That’s the Ticket, Roadhog.” He expects it to be released early next year.
Like “jungles,” or hobo slang for meeting places, “roadhog,” Starner said, may mean either “locomotive” or “engineer.”
In the early part of the last century, Port Huron was a major Grand Trunk Western Railroad depot for travelers from Toronto to Chicago, said Joe Ann Burgett, site manager of the Thomas Edison Depot Museum. Additionally, before the Civil War, Port Huron was the second largest port of entry for immigrants coming into the United States.
It was the immigrant population, Starner said, that brought the minstrel tradition from Europe to the United States. Today’s “hobos” travel less for work than for adventure. Still, the population is the focal point of Starner’s documentary.
Starner is interested in cataloging the contemporary hobo scene – its actors, activities and themes. Filming will wrap up next weekend at the Railroad Museum of Long Island in New York.
What brings him to Port Huron is, in part, the Port Huron Museum’s invitation. Several railroad museum curators across the country have taken issue with railroad museum-sponsored hobo festivals.
Part of Starner’s research includes gathering letters denouncing such festivals.
In one letter to the Railroad Museum of Long Island, a Delaware museum curator wrote, “promoting hobos is really about the same as promoting tagging,” the practice of spray-painting words and art on the sides of rail cars.
Railroad companies, Starner said, have a long history of “institutionalized hatred of these people,” and that’s an important part of the hobo tradition.
Likewise, Starner is interested in filming anecdotes this weekend from any area residents who might have had a first-hand experience with hobo culture, “especially anyone with a negative experience.”