(The following story by Mary Bergin appeared on The Capital Times webiste on March 31.)
MADISON, Wisc. — When having a date with a hobo, maybe you wouldn’t expect to nibble on pitted dates and sip freshly brewed jasmine tea. His treat, at his house.
And the dwelling … it’s tidy and organized, with an artistic flourish. Beautiful antique furniture. No dust. No clutter.
Luther “the Jet” Gette wants to refer to a years-old newspaper clipping as we chat, so he turns to a neat box of files and in seconds finds the right folder. “Hobo Murders” is the label.
More about that later.
This hobo has a neatly trimmed beard. Impish grin. Slender frame. He has a Ph.D. in French literature and got weary of teaching. He attends the east side Greek Orthodox church.
“I never went out on the road because I was desperate,” Gette says. “It was because I wanted to see the country.”
As a kid in Pennsylvania, he loved watching coal trains whistle through town, and he noticed how much they had to slow down to round a curve. Brakemen showed the enamored boy how to hop on and off a boxcar. “It’s not like it’s an Olympic event, but there are a few basics,” Gette says.
His first ride was along four miles of track, and he caught hell from his mother after coming home with coal-dirtied clothes. The scolding didn’t deter him, especially upon finding a train engineer who was willing to let him ride along all day.
As an adult, Gette could afford travel by rail but grew dismayed as fewer and fewer passenger trains remained as options for travel. In 1977, at age 39 and as manager of Madison’s Capitol Hotel on King Street, he got word that the building would be demolished.
So Gette was out of a job, with at least 45 weeks of unemployment pay, and he began riding freight trains again, two or three weeks at a time. He’d travel light, but with a sleeping bag and “couple of foam rubber pads, if I had ’em.”
You learn fast to point your feet toward the front engine, he says, in case of a fast brake. That can mean the difference between breaking an ankle and skull, if you’re asleep.
Home and away
In 1979, Gette took a job in the admissions office at UW Hospitals, where he worked for 14 years. “It was seven days on, seven off,” he says, which made it possible to continue a hobo life, across the U.S., into Canada — and once into Mexico, with a woman called Gypsy Moon.
Some of his buddies have made a living as they ride, literally singing for their supper in taverns, or using another kind of talent or skill to make a wage before moving on. “I didn’t want to compete with a jukebox,” Gette says, with a shrug.
The memories are surreal, and his storytelling sharp.
He met a brother and friend in Montana, for a leg of a Milwaukee Road run from South Dakota to Seattle, in the summer of 1979. It was the railroad’s last run West. “I landed at the Hotel Montana, in Alberton, a little ghost town,” Gette recalls. “‘If you don’t see anyone, just sleep on the couch in the lobby,'” he was told, which is exactly what he did.
He talks of a fast-food restaurant worker in the Kansas City “Bottoms” who slipped him a free breakfast when he arrived crumpled and disheveled. “I have money,” he said, showing it. “No charge,” she insisted, with a hand pat. “It’s OK.”
With time, Gette got to know others on the railway circuits and eventually made his way to National Hobo Association conventions. Such groups have existed since 1900.
Each year the group selects a “King of the Hobos” as their leader. Gette campaigned for the job in 1994 and didn’t get it. The next year, he added a song to his two-minute candidate spiel and was elected.
It was not a low-profile term of office. Media coverage snowballed as one murdered hobo after another was found in boxcars or train tracks. Robert “Sidetrack” Silveria eventually earned another nickname — the Boxcar Killer — and confessed to the deaths of a dozen men. He was implicated in the murder of as many as four dozen.
Silveria’s capture in 1995 was thanks to the investigative work of Mike Quakenbush of the Salem, Ore., police department. Gette bestowed the persistent law enforcer with a Knight of the Hobo Order of Merit, the highest honor his group could offer. “You shouldn’t be asking police to a hobo convention,” some of the group scolded.
A chapter ends
It’s been nine years since Gette hopped a freight train, heading from Chicago toward Kansas City with “Connecticut Shorty” on a Blue Island freight. “It was the old Rock Island route — beautiful,” following the Illinois River, then the Mississippi for a bit. “Maybe that was a good way to wrap it up,” he muses.
Why stop?
“It rains, you can’t sleep — so many things can go wrong,” Gette says. He turns 70 this year, and this pastime tends to be more of a young person’s game.
“Old-timers are dropping off,” Gette says, but “it’s heartening to see the kids come in — they’re just as dirty as we used to be.”
It’s young women as well as men, typically traveling in small groups. He sometimes hangs out at train stations and recalls seeing older teens from Michigan, hopping off. “‘We want to go to Arkansas,’ they said, so we helped them figure out how. I wonder if they ever got there.”
The hobo life has been complicated by the Sept. 11 terrorist bombings. Since then, rail security has tightened, and some railroad companies offer employees rewards for turning in hobo riders.
So it’s harder to physically get onto a train, and it’s also harder to predict when a train will arrive. A one- or two-hour wait is considered relatively short, by Gette’s standards, but patience thins after sitting one or two days.
He mentions a well-known railway that used to have little more than two dozen police for its entire system nationwide. That made for a different and more free world, but not necessarily one that was safer.
People have all kinds of reasons for hopping a freight train, Gette observes, and some aren’t noble.
Work vs. passion
Why didn’t he simply work for a railroad? Gette reples that he thought about it, “but people said my fantasy would be ruined” by making his passion his work.
Then he refers to “Baltimore Red,” a Madison buddy who went from rail rider to employee on Amtrak’s California Zephyr, working the leg that goes through Colorado and the Sierra Mountains. Luther the Jet’s head nods with wonder and envy.
“Come on out,” the friend has urged, and odds are that will happen.
“I’ll go months without thinking about it,” life on the railways, Gette says. “But then this time of year comes …”