William (Buck) R. Buckingham - Part 3, The Hobo

On June 1st of 1935 Dad began one of the great adventures of his life. He had just graduated from Ball State teachers college, and for want of a little adventrue, started to hitch-hike and hobo across the country. Mom once said that he kept a journal about the trip but destroyed it after Don and I were born because he didn’t want us to see it.

I don’t know why he told her that. I found it in the attic years later, and there were no skeletons in his closet. The journal was written in an old composition booklet from his recently finished college days. The first four or five pages were a combination of notes from a math class, names and addresses of a dozen fellow students, and doodles. He then began his journal.

Dad’s itinerary shows he made it to California and back in just thirty-three days. It started out with a list of where he stayed each night. Many entries refer to “box car”, so he apparently was in transit on those nights.  He wrote quite a lot on the first two days of his trek, but sadly it ends there. He added nothing more other than the list of places he stayed at each night.

The following is a lightly edited version of what he wrote.

Saturday, June 1, 1935 - Box car in Greencastle, Indiana.
Sunday, June 2 - St. Louis Monday, June 3 - Kansas City, MO
Tuesday, June 4 - Junction City, KS
Wednesday, June 5 - Driving
Thursday, June 7 thru June 9 - Denver (Probably stayed with Aunt Lelah Buckingham)
Monday, June 10 - Box car
Tuesday, June 11 - Salt Lake City, UT
Wednesday, June 12 - Box car
Thursday, June 13 thru June 19 - Maryville, CA (Stayed with brother, George Buckingham.)
Thursday, June 20 - Fresno, CA Friday, June 21 - Long Beach, CA
Saturday, June 22 and 23 - San Diego, CA
Sunday, June 24 - Yuma, AZ
Monday, June 25 thru June 27 - Box car
Friday, June 28 - Tucumcari, NM
Saturday, June 29 - Amarillo, TX
Sunday, June 30 - CCC Camp
Monday, July 1 - East St. Louis, MO
Tuesday, July 2 - Indianapolis, IN
Wednesday, July 3 - Home

“June 1. Started today. 1st ride took me to Milton - Fellow had another hitch-hiker. A guy in a milk truck picked us up next (Fellow hitch-hiker and myself), and took us to Dublin as he was only going to Cambridge. He was just one of those helpful hands.
 
Baking truck stalled. Mechanic too dumb to fix it - I fixed the fuel pump for fellow who was very pleased, and gave me two pies which I put in my pocket as I was not very hungry at the time. Got my clothes greasy! I next got a ride into Greenfield in a stock truck with neighbor Earl Abernathy. He gave me some donuts. They also went into my pockets.
 
I didn’t have to wait very long in Greenfield as I was soon picked up by a drug salesman and I was very glad when he took me clear thru Indianapolis to some small town on the other side. And who do you suppose picked me up there? No one but my teacher, Billy Crone, who took me about 5 miles out in the country where he left me - out in the dark. At last I got another ride, this time with a couple of fellows going to Greencastle, although it was out of my way. They were a cheerful lot - told me about a pal of theirs who had served on the notorious Georgia chain gang because they had caught him hitch-hiking thru that state. They advised me to catch a freight out of Greencastle and were so obliging to even take me down to the yards.
 
Thought I would catch myself a “side-door” Pullman in Terra Haute that night and inquiries told me that one would be thru the yards in about two hours. Well I got into an empty box car and laid down to wait - That’s all.”

“June 2nd - I was awakened by a freight train pulling out but I was too late. I got up and walked the tracks a distance along an upgrade so I could easily catch the next one because it would be going slower uphill. I laid down under a tree with my little suit case as a pillow and went to sleep.

Again I was awakened by a freight train pulling out, but it was day light now so I hopped on this one. I saw a hobo riding just ahead of me so I ran up and started to talk to him. The first thing I learned from him was that I was on the wrong train - this train was headed south.

It was a rough old road but it seemed to be plenty fast. I road upon the top, and after a short time it started to rain. The fellow bo (hobo) was pretty friendly after he found that it was my first experience. He explained where the “dicks” would be found; mostly at the division yards. I met my first “dick” in Bloomington. It was raining like hell and he ordered me out of my dry place and out of the yard. It sure was raining and I stood under a tree just outside the yard. Although there were none there at the time, it was a bo’s jungle. As soon as the train gave the hi-ball (two sharp blasts of the whistle) I made across the yard for it. I had been told of this by my fellow “bo”. I stayed with this freight until I came to the town in southern Indiana where the B&O lines crossed the Marmon lines. (I was on the Marmon). It was not yet noon when I arrived here - My first thought was to clean up, particularly to shave, but I didn’t care to spend the money for a hotel.

I went out to the yards and there a “brakie” showed me where I could get some water. He was real friendly after he found that I wanted to clean. He even let me use his own private wash room. Well, I went down town and got something to eat. I sure was hungry. That afternoon I met several bos down around the railroad track. They all seemed to be gambling - using the old army game. One fellow seemed crazy. They all told me how hard the “dicks” were out west.

That afternoon I saw passenger trains “blinded” - that is, to ride right in back of the engine. It looked real good and fast riding to me, so I “blinded” the next passenger train going west. Three CCC boys had already “blinded” it , but they were just going a short distance. They were just kids but good fellows. They were dressed up and were they black. The four of us stood in a space about the size of a doorway.

After about 50 miles they left me and the next 250 miles sure was hell. I did everything but stand on my head After riding about six hours we got into St Louis. I didn’t know enough then to get off - went across the Mississippi. It looked a mile wide, and then into a damned tunnel. I came out of there sweating and black, and right into the railroad yards. I got off and made for the streets. I was in negro town - I stopped some negro (that’s all there were) and asked him where the transient camp was. He, thinking I was a negro also, directed me to the negro transient camp. I soon found out my mistake or rather the negro’s mistake, but I had to show the fellows in the transient camp that I wasn’t a negro by pulling up my sleeve. They told me where the white camp was a couple of miles up town.

I walked the longest distance without seeing anyone as it was after midnight. I finally saw a white fellow and ask him where the transient camp was and he said he was going up by it. We walked along and he asked me a million questions. I finally asked him if he knew where there was a cheap hotel as I said I didn’t care to go through the red tape of getting into one of the transient camps. He took me to a good clean hotel were I got a room for 25 cents. He was leaving me he showed me that I had been in good company - he was a plain clothes man (a policeman??). I went into the hotel and asked for a room and was given it. I then asked for the bath room. After I had cleaned up I went to the lobby and the clerk called me to the desk and changed my room. It seemed that because of my dirty appearance he thought that I was one of those kind of bums who never take a bath and he had put me in the section with them. He apologized and gave me another bed, and although it looked the same I noticed that the fellows around me were much cleaner.

They kidded me about looking like a negro before I cleaned up. They agreed that the “blind” was not a very good place to ride, and I was thoroughly fed up with trains. I resolved to go back to hitch-hiking the next day. I went out and got something to eat - a greasy stew.”

Monday, June 3, I awoke about 7 o’clock.”

His journal ended there telling only about those first two days. His trip lasted another 31 days. Mom told about how he hitched a ride for several days with a guy who drove a vehicle with a frame only, no body, and they sat on wooden boxes. The guy stopped at night and syphoned gas from filling station tanks.  There were probably other adventures - lost now, never to be told. I wish he had completed his journal. It would have made a great story.
GO TO: Part 4, The Father I Knew

William (Buck) R. Buckingham - Part 2, His Parents



Dorma Leora Manlove

My grandfather, John Harrison Buckingham, a cabinetmaker, was employed for many years as a woodworker in an Auto body factory in Connersville. The second born in 1881 in Franklin County, Indiana, he was the only male child in a family of five siblings. I know he was tall, slender, had red hair and gray eyes because that info was listed on his WWI draft card in 1918. He was also deaf in his last years, but I don’t know for how long. I know little more about him. He died of cancer in 1939, six months before I was born.

I’ve never seen a photo of him. I spoke to my Aunt Martha a few months before she died in 1998. She was the youngest, probably her father's pet, spoke warmly of him, and said she had many family photos and was going to send them to me. She had suffered a stroke a few years earlier, and wanted to get someone to write names and dates on the backs of the photos. Sadly, she passed shortly thereafter, and I don’t know what happened to her collection.
My Grandmother, nee Dorma Leora Manlove, was a big woman, tall, broad, and stiff of body. She carried herself as if her spine was fused throughout its length. Grandma had "lockjaw" (tetanus) when she was a child, so her jaw emited a clicking sound when she chewed food.

Brother Don and I visited Grandma Buckingham several times in the mid-1940s. I have little memory of her other than those visits. Her house was a big two storied building with covered porches, on the front and one side. It sat back a ways off the road. Two old trees near the gravel road shaded the front yard.

Grandma rented one side to a family who had a boy named Larry. He was our age and the three of us played in the creek (below) just down the road. I doubt that things had changed a whole lot in the thirty years since Dad was a boy. Grandma lost the farm in 1950 and moved to California to live with her daughter, Annis. She died there in 1962.

By the time I became aware of life it seemed that nearly everybody referred to Dad as “Buck”. I don’t know when that nick-name became common, but it was probably after he left home because there were too many in the family for all of them to be called “Buck”.

Dad graduated 3rd out of a class of 110 in 1930 from Connersville High School. Four years later he managed to graduate from Ball State Teacher’s College. His sister Annis attended college in Muncie Indiana also and graduated the year before him. It was in the middle of the Great Depression and I never heard how the two financed their higher education, but they probably worked their way through college. Aunt Annis’s daughter, Sarah said that, “My mother often talked about her college days. She worked as an au pair to the college administrators and their families. She never mentioned to me that Uncle Bill was there at the same time she was, odd.” Aunt Annis moved to California in 1937.
 GO TO: Part 3, The Hobo

William (Buck) R. Buckingham - Part 1, Childhood in Harrisburg, Indiana

Dad was born in Connersville, Indiana, but grew up on a small farm between there and Harrisburg, a nearby village. The farm was probably no more than three or four acres. They had a couple of cows and some chickens, but their place was mainly a residence, not a working farm. Dad grew to be tall and lanky. At six-foot three he bested his two older brothers by several inches. Tom, the oldest, was born in 1907. George followed in 1909, and then Annis in 1911. Dad came a year later in 1912, and the family was complete with the birth of Martha in 1918.

The Trees and our 1936 Ford in front of Dad's Childhood home

I don’t remember Dad relating a single thing about his childhood. I’ve spoken to several cousins and they tell the same tale. There was a curious silence from dad and his siblings about their formative years. The four older were in their teens during the 1920’s, but little has filtered down to us about the farm, how they did in school, life around Connersville and Harrisburg, who they hung around with, or what they did. Mom told of Dad’s interest in radio at a time when broadcasting was in its infancy. He built “crystal” radios and strung antenna wires crisscrossing the attic. Cousin Sarah, Aunt Annis’s daughter, wrote, “My mother always told me how smart he (Dad) was and what a great memory he had…their father let the kids each have one animal pet (chicken, pig, etc.) on the farm… and a charity bought them Christmas gifts one year and dad sawed the head off the doll my mother was given”. That is the extent of what I know about my father’s childhood.

The 1930 US census in Indiana listed all the family in residence except George. He was, apparently, the first to leave the hearth. George would have been twenty-one that year, and had enlisted in the Army, The 1930 Census listed him in the Vancouver Barracks, and indicated he was in the “guard house”. His daughter, Mary Ann, thought of him as being the “black sheep” of the family. He settled in northern California, living around Oroville and Marysville until his death in 1980. Tom, the oldest, moved to Norfolk, Virginia. Annis got a degree at Ball State and migrated ot California by 1935, and Dad moved to Kokomo in 1937. Martha, the youngest, was the only one to remain close to home.
GO TO: Part 2, His Parents

The Life of Della Jacobs - Part 3f, Bert Frank

When Prohibition was enacted in 1919 it did not stop Bert Frank from drinking, it only redirected the way he went about it. He made his own corn whiskey, and as he produced more then he could consume, he naturally fell into the entrepreneurial spirit of the country and began marketing it.

He set up his still in the basement of their house in Hooven. He made five or six batches a month and that produced three gallons of White Lightening. Mom didn't remember much about the still or its operation, but recalled he used lightening rods off barns for something. One time he got drunk and went to sleep so Mom’s brother Charlie finished distilling the whiskey. Grandma (below) delivered quart bottles of the stuff to a dentist or doctor in Cincinnati. She took the train and was usually accompanied by a neighbor lady.
The drinking got worse, his mental state steadily deteriorated. The violent spells became more frequent, and the family lived in constant fear. Mom said she came to hate him. He beat Grandma, sometimes brutally, and one time he made the three kids sit in chairs while he sharpened his straight razor. He was drunk, and repeatedly threatened to cut their throats, one by one. Mom remembered being so frightened that her mouth went dry. She sat there afraid to move, afraid to draw attention to herself. All she could think about was how thirsty and scared she was.

The family moved to Connersville, Indiana in July 1922. Bert got a good job as the fireman at the electric plant. He worked there for a couple of years and quit. He mostly roamed around, and Mom didn't think he had any kind of a permanent job after that. She knew that Grandma didn’t get any support as she had to take in boarders and do laundry to make ends meet.

His mental condition kept getting worse, eventually degenerating to the point where he won't eat anything Grandma cooked. On one occasion he tore up most of the furniture in the house. The most violent episode occurred in 1924. He threw the dinner out into the yard and beat Grandma and his oldest son, Charlie. Later he woke thinking he had killed Grandma.

Mom’s half-brother, Art Lancaster, got the family back together. The following Sunday while the rest were at the grocery, Art confronted Grandpa about his drinking. Bert threw an iron at him. It bounced off the wall and stuck in the floor. Art hit him over the head with a glass bowl. They wrestled to the floor and Art ended on top and choked Pop into submission. Grandpa laid on a cot in the basement for a day or two and then his son, Joe, drove him to his brother’s home in Whitewater, OH. The family didn't see much of him after that.

He may have come back to Connersville one more time. One night during an electrical storm with lots of lightening and thunder, they a saw man that resembled my Grandfather standing on the street corner. He stood there in the rain a long time looking at the house, and finally moved on. Pieces of news came their way. Someone said he was hanging out at rough beer joints along the Ohio River, places called “Speak Easies” during Prohibition.

He probably drank anything with alcohol in it, and eventually got hold of some bad stuff. A popular drink during Prohibition was made from an extract of Jamaica Ginger. In the U.S. the concoction was called “Jake”. Some bootleggers laced it with a substance meant to fool import regulators at the Treasury Department. The additive was thought to be harmless, but many unlucky consumers discovered it to be toxic. It caused a paralysis known as "Jake Leg", a condition in which the afflicted walked with a odd gait in which the toe touched the ground before the heel. He never recovered. Bert Frank died at the University of Cincinnati Hospital on June 24, 1935. He was 54 years old.
GO TO: Part 4a, The Move to Kokomo, Indiana

The Life of Calla Della (Lancaster, Frank) Jacobs - Part 2, Grandma’s first husband - John P. Lancaster

Grandma Della married John P. Lancaster (above) around 1902. John, also born in May of 1883, was nearly the same age as his young wife. They were both born and raised in the Catawba area so its likely they grew up knowing each other, maybe they were longtime sweethearts. That would be speculation as nothing about their marriage has yet been found, not even their marriage date.
I know more about his parents than I do of him. John N. Lancaster, his father, was born in Kentucky in 1840 and was living in Pendleton County by the time he was ten years old. He was still at home in 1860, but joined the Union Army in October of 1861, served in Company A, Kentucky 18th Infantry Regiment throughout the war. John N. was discharged in July 1865, and returned to Pendleton County to marry the widow Elizabeth Morgan Bowling shortly thereafter. I don’t know whether Elizabeth’s first husband, William Bowling, died in the war, but he was born in Virginia, and might have served for the Confederates in a Kentucky Mounted Infantry company.

John N married Elizabeth in 1866 or 1867 and raised her three young children. Elizabeth had twelve children to reach adulthood. Nine of them were with John N. Lancaster. John P. was next to the youngest. He appeared only in the 1900 US Census, and was living with his parents and younger brother Arthur.1903 must have been a terrible year for Grandma. Her brother Ben (above) came down with a mysterious illness. He was closest to her, both in age and companionship. Grandma nursed him, even though she was pregnant, but there was nothing to be done. He lay in bed with a fever for several months before he died. His parents buried him in their backyard in Catawba. Shortly after that Grandma had her baby, Mom’s half-brother Arthur. Her husband died just before or just after the birth, and she was left a widow with a young child to support and no way to make a living.

Grandma’s first born, Arthur Clarence Lancaster, was most certainly named after his two uncles. “Arthur” after John P. Lancaster’s younger brother, and “Clarence” after Grandma’s older brother, whose nickname was Bud. It’s a mystery as to why he was not named after Ben, in memory of the brother, so dear to her, and who had just passed.

I think Grandma moved back with her parents after John died. My Uncle Arthur grew up in the family home, and his Grandparents helped to raise him. The 1910 US Census listed Arthur living with Grandma’s parents, Charles and Julia Jacobs. Her brother, Clarence (Bud), was still living with them. Both grandparents died two years later.

Uncle Art and Uncle Charlie, Grandma’s oldest, were with great grandmother Julia when she died. The three had taken the horse and buggy to the country to get eggs. She had a stroke on the way back. It was in July and a thunderstorm was raging. The boys, ages nine and six, were frantic but the old horse took its head and brought them all home. Grandpa followed her that December. Arthur was living with Bud, his wife Minnie, and two year old daughter, Mildred, in Catawba in 1920 (per US Census). It seems Bud had inherited the family home and started his blacksmith business. Sometime in the 1920’s Art moved to Connersville, Indiana to be with his mother and three half-siblings, Charlie, George (Joe), and Hazel (my mother). He married in about 1928 to Marjorie Louise May of Orange, Indiana. All my memories of Uncle Art and Aunt Marj are centered around their little farm on the edge of Orange. (Photo page 5 - Grandma, Uncle Art, and me)
There is no telling now, but I can’t help to think that her life might have been happier if John P. had lived longer than the few years allotted him. Her second husband looked promising on the surface, but appearances can be deceiving.
GO TO: Part 3a, Grandfather Bert Frank