A Hobo Odyssey

"A Hobo Odyssey" is an historical novel depicting life in the South during the 1930’s taken from stories the author had heard his dad tell when he was growing up. This book will touch the lives of people far and wide. Even though it is a story about the South, it is also a story that anyone affected by the Great Depression will relate to. The story takes place in 1935 and takes the reader on a daily account of the two men’s learning to overcome the risks of hitching rides on freight trains and becoming daredevils as they leap onto moving trains where one miss-step would land the hobo beneath the black, smoking behemoth and being crushed by the huge steel wheels as it moved mercilessly along the ribbons of steel that stretch across the country. The home life of a family trying to survive the Great Depression provides the background of their being forced from their farm and moving from South Carolina to Missouri in 1915 to find their fortune. When that fails, they relocate back to York to work in the cotton mills there. Young Steve Wright, a skilled baseball player and a Golden Gloves boxing champion deals with the consequences of a devastating fight with Brownie, a black man who had been his friend but had cheated him out of some money he had supposedly won, forcing a fight in which he beats the larger man half to death. The fight forces him to struggle with internal family issues and the ultimate loss of Evelyn, a girl who he thought would someday be his wife. At the same time that Steve loses one girl, he falls in love with Marie, a mysterious raven-haired woman dressed in green velvet. He swears that in spite of the fact that he has never officially met her, he is going to marry her. His days of riding the rails are filled with excitement, and his nighttime dreams are filled with a longing to know more about The Lady In Green and his need to ultimately find her. The story takes twisting turns as the two hoboes take a diversion into the world of a traveling circus and a fighter named Mongo, The Mauler, who tries to pressure the smaller Steve into the ring where virtually no one survives the pounding fists of The Mauler. Steve and Eddie’s Odyssey which takes them on a dangerous freight train ride across half of the United States is paralleled by that of a schizophrenic serial killer, who goes by the name of Slim, who is murdering hoboes on the very same railroad routes they are traveling. The lives of many helpless men are at stake. Read this thrilling account of these two adventure seekers and what happens when their paths finally cross with that of a heinous killer.