The Film & More
Enhanced Transcript
DAVID McCULLOUGH, Host:. Hello and welcome to The American
Experience. I'm David McCullough.
They hit the road because they wanted adventure, wanted to see "the big wide
world" out there. Or, to escape unhappiness at home. Or, as one of them
painfully recalls in our film, because a destitute father with too many mouths
to feed told him he had to go.
It was the 1930's, hard times, and in all there may have been a quarter of a
million young Americans, teenagers "on the bum," walking, hitch-hiking, hopping
freight trains--"riding the rails" on the Great Northern, the Southern, the
Nickelplate, the Santa Fe, names they'd never ever forget.
To a lot of them the box car seemed a magic carpet. But the hardships proved
severe, the dangers extreme. There was hardly a one who wasn't penniless and
half starved much of the time. Nearly all were looking for work, but in a
country laid low--work of any kind was almost impossible to find.
Sixty years later, two documentary film makers from Brooklyn, Lexy Lovell and
Michael Uys, who had read a book from the 30's called Boy and Girl Tramps of America,
put a notice in Modern Maturity, the magazine published by the American
Association of Retired Persons. "If you or someone you know "rode the rails"
during the Great Depression, please write," the notice said. Three thousand
letters poured in.
The film that follows is a very different view of the Depression, a side of the
story that's been almost entirely forgotten.
That so little was done to help these young people, until the Civilian
Conservation Corps got under way, seems hard to imagine. That what they
experienced remains so vivid in memory after so many years, is, however, in no
way surprising...
RIDING THE RAILS
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