Timmy's+Journey

Timmy's Journey by: Ryan Zapolski

My name is Timmy Smith, it is 1934 and I am seventeen years old. I am a teenage hobo from the Great Depression. My journey began in Boston last year when I was sixteen. I grew up in Boston with my mother Sarah, my father Robert, and my two brothers Scott and Phillip who were ten and thirteen years old when we left. Life was great until October 29, 1929, this was the day everything went wrong for the American families. One average day, I was out playing with my friends on the streets. Just a typical day, and when I got home, I knew something was wrong. My mother and father had a sack packed for me with some things and told me and my brothers that we had to leave and find jobs to help support our family. My father kept his job at the factory down the street, but we did not know how long he would have it for. He told us that our best chance was to ride the rails and head away from Boston. After that we said our goodbyes, which were not brief. Our mother took ten minutes to say goodbye to each of us, balling her eyes out, wondering if she would ever see us again. Our father shook our hands and said goodbye with a slight tremble in his voice; we never blamed him, it wasn’t his fault, it happened to every average American family out there. We knew that we had to provide for the family, and we wanted to do everything we could. At first we had no idea what to do, so we did as we were told and we went down to the rail yard and jumped into the first boxcar we could without being caught. I have not seen my friends, or my mom or dad ever since that moment when I left my house. I saw Johnny from my school, another boy my age that was forced to ride the rails for work. I was amazed that this was actually happening. The train was awful at first, we did our best to avoid the jungles because we were just kids and we wanted no trouble. Most of our advice was given to us by the older men that have been traveling for a while. The main advice we got was to avoid the bulls, which was the police force of the railroad. One time, we watched a man get beaten by a bull for the twenty five cents he held in his pocket. It’s a shame that this is what our country has come to now. We all thought that the bull saw us but we moved under cover as fast as we could when he finished his beating, and we hopped onto the train. Another problem was the food shortage; my brothers and I had to split whatever we would find. We first went out to New York which is where we first struck some luck, but did not last long because the adults that needed work got the jobs before us kids. As we headed further west, the best piece of luck we had was in Chicago. We were seen by a bull and we were taken off the rails. Some don’t like it but we were taken to the CCC. All three of us were put into the job field together and they did not separate us. We made things like parks and roads, and we got paid twenty five dollars a month and we each sent our parents twenty dollars a month, which was a whole sixty dollars for them! We felt great! Plus, we each had our own five dollars left over to do whatever we wanted! Life seemed to be getting better for us.