Homeless, Houseless, Helpless — Are They Criminals?

When I was growing up as a kid in the 1950s and 60s, you never ever heard the word “homeless.” Not that there weren’t people who didn’t have normal homes, like us farmers. There were gypsies and “carnies” (carnival workers) who lived in traveling homes, I was told by my elders, and then there were hobos.

To my understanding, hobos were folks, mainly men, who “rode the rails” which meant that they hopped freight trains and went from one section of the country to another and they’d live in hobo camps near the railroad tracks when they weren’t actually in the train’s box cars. Sometimes you’d see scenes of these camps and their inhabitants in the movies. For me, personally, what I’d consider a homeless person were, also, the migrants from the Southwest and Mexico who followed the ripening summer crops in May and June, from the orange groves in Southern California and up to late apple harvests in Oregon and Washington at the end of the summer.

Once more, as I understood it, these people actually did have permanent houses down south, where they lived during our winter, when we didn’t have any crops to harvest.

They would come to our Almaden Valley every summer and camp out or take up residence in some simple, small cabins on the farmer’s land. Entire families, sometimes spanning maybe four or five generations, would pile into overloaded station wagons and trucks and trundle from one newly ripening crop to another, as each of the mature crops were picked clean. Every summer we had the same collection of families come to our ranches for a month or two at a time then they’d move on. We got to know them by name and watched their kids grow up a little more, every summer.

We were always told by our elders to not use slang names or make derogatory comments about the “migrants.” They might be poor but they did have their pride. Our small community of farms couldn’t afford to have any of these old relationships with our traveling work force take offense and maybe leave us high and dry when they were needed most. On the coast of California in these days, there were ample crops so any migrant workers could always find work in the summer. That was their leverage. They could just pack up and leave, letting our fruit rot on the trees.

It was sort of a tradition in the Santa Clara Valley, to travel from the many outlying farms on Friday nights, and make the short pilgrimage to the only real downtown in the Valley, with high buildings, dozens of stop lights, a half-dozen, neon lit-up movie theaters and all that other “city stuff” and that was San Jose. Willow Glen and Palo Alto were really just small towns, none of them had that real “big city downtown” feel.

Friday night downtown was really as much of a social event as a shopping errand. Families that only saw each other just every few months would bump into each other on the sidewalk or in the locally owned department stores and have a nice, friendly chat, updating each other about their recent goings on.

My dad would park our car behind the Studio Theater (which is still there, a porno house now) and next door to the theater was a Payless drug store. We’d enter it from the back where all the fishing gear and tackle were and there was a popcorn machine right nearby. Pop would get us two little kids big bags of yellow popcorn and we’d munch from these red and white, grease stained bags as we made our way up one side of First Street. We’d reach Santa Clara Street, where we’d cross the street and walk back towards the car on the other side of First Street. It would take a couple of hours to make the circuit, as my mom would have to stop at every other shop’s window and take in the newest fashions. As we made our way, we would recognize another family coming towards us, a family we might have met at a cub scout function or at a PTA meeting, or some such, and the two families would hang out on the clean, swept sidewalk and chat for awhile. It was a leisurely and relaxing way to spend a Friday night, and really, except for two bags of popcorn, it really didn’t have to cost the family anything.

The thing was, for as many times as we went downtown, I never remember seeing any gypsies, hobos or migrants down there. I don’t remember seeing any “homeless” people there. Mainly, it was the farmer’s families all dressed up and ready to socialize. Certainly, there wasn’t any apprehension or discomfort as we passed the other people, there, on First Street.

Sometimes, if Pop was home on a Saturday night, we’d pop and bag the popcorn at home then take it to a drive-in movie where me and my sister would always fall asleep before the end of the second feature. That’s why my mom had us wear our pajamas in the car on movie nights. We’d never see gypsies or hobos there, either. Nor any “homeless.”

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