Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression

What kid hasn't dreamed of running away from home and hitting the road? If your father was a kid in the 1930s, chances are that's what he would have done, looking for work and adventure.Between 1929 and 1941, an estimated 4,000,000 Americans, desperate for food and lodging, roamed the land. Of this number, 250,000 were teenagers who rode the rails and grew up fast in speeding boxcars, living in hobo jungles, begging on the streets, and running from the police and club-wielding railroad guards.The restless youth of these boxcar boys and girls, many who went from "middle-class gentility to scrabble-ass poor" overnight, is recaptured in Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression by Errol Lincoln Uys. Based on the award-winning film and illustrated with over fifty black and white photographs, this book dispels the myths of a hobo existence and reveals the hard stories of a daring generation of American teenagers -- forgotten heroes -- who survived some of the hardest times in our nation's history.