What Ever Happened to Hobos?

Ok, this is totally random, but the other day I was thinking about how I dressed up as a hobo for Halloween when I was a kid. I wore a tweed cap, an old blazer of my dad’s which I think I was allowed to tear up a little, and his old, raggedy boots. I also smeared eye shadow on my face to look like beard stubble, and carried a bandanna on a stick, which I used to stash the candy I collected. If you look at the Wikipedia entry for hobo, you’ll see exactly the look I was going for. Except I also wore a pair of large plastic ears, I guess just to increase the pathos!

Now, a hobo is not exactly just a poor, homeless person. The term has slightly more romantic connotations, as hobos were known for riding railroad cars all over the country, and they had all these cool slang words and code symbols to help each other out. But still… hobos are poor and homeless.

So do kids still think it’s fun to play hobo, or to dress up as one on Halloween? But certainly no kid ever says “hey, I think I’ll be a grungy homeless person for Halloween,” right? Nowadays it seems like they all want to be something far more glamorous, and the life of a poor, itinerant person is no longer romanticized. But I don’t have kids, so I may be wrong… what do you think?

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