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| Lined up to rejoin the main. Photo by Joe - 2001 |
If had a nickel for every time no one asked me about the mental health issues of the American hoboes, I'd have all the nickels in the Mariana Trench. Of course hoboes endured all kinds of mental illness; they were people. As you might expect, they experienced such maladies with much greater frequency than did the general population. They were homeless, malnourished, often the victims of violence, and they spent a lot of time alone. Alcoholism, schizophrenia, lint addiction, depression, and anxiety were common. Less prevalent was the disorder we now call hoarding.
This is primarily due to the fact that hoboes tended to carry all their worldly possessions on their person - usually in sacks, or stick-and-bindles - so as a practical matter, it was hard to hoard anything much larger than pennies or lint. But it wasn't impossible. In an amazing coincidence I just made up, two of John Hodgman's documented hoboes knew each other, and were friends.
Bingo-Balls Nick Chintz grew up as only child Nicholas Schmidt in Charleston, West Virginia. His father operated the coal tipple at a nearby mine, and his mother was a homemaker who dabbled in freelance laundry cleaning, a job that became full-time when the Depression hit. In 1931, when young Nick was sixteen, Mr. Schmidt ate a pound of anthracite coal on a bet, and died of a bowel obstruction - or complications thereof. Nick's mother remarried a few months later, desperate to keep a roof over their heads. Her new husband, an undertaker, was a broken veteran of The Great War, and terrifyingly abusive. Within a year, Nick and his mother fled their house of horrors and joined the ranks of the wandering poor. Nick took to the hobo life rather easily, but despite his best efforts, he couldn't keep his mother from returning to that awful man. He walked on, assuming the worst. When she left him, she gifted him with a bingo ball (B-11), which his father had swiped from the church and given to her after bingo night - their first date.
The rest, as they say, is history. For reasons known only to him, Nick began stealing bingo balls, one at a time, from churches from Maine to Missouri, bent on acquiring a complete set. He carried them in an old flour sack, and though they weighed very little, after a while the bag became rather bulky. It is believed that he didn't stop collecting when he completed one set of balls; he just kept acquiring. And acquiring, and acquiring. He was hoarding bingo balls.
He met Fourteen-Bindlestick Frank in East St. Louis, Illinois in 1933, and they immediately became friends. Frank was busy collecting more bindlesticks than he could carry, and Bingo Balls Nick Chintz had more bingo balls than he could carry. Together, they helped each other's hoarding disorder grow and thrive. In an interesting (to me) twist, Fourteen-Bindlestick Frank's path from child to hobo was exactly like Nick's, except that when Frank's dad died. it was from watermelons, and he gave his widow a bindlestick as a first-date keepsake, and when she remarried following his death, the new husband was an absolute sweetheart.
Word of Frank and Nick and their co-enabled hoarding habits spread, which is a testament to the busybody network of hobo comms, as it really shouldn't have concerned anyone else. Eventually, their case came to the attention of one Dr. Nobel Dynamite, the renowned hobo shrink and slight-of-hand magician. "I must cure them," he declared to the hobo media, who promptly misquoted him and made him sound weak and stupid (out of context).
A meeting was arranged. Ol' Barb Stab-You-Quick provided security, although at first, no one knew why that was necessary. The three men met behind the B&O's "HO" tower, in Hancock, Maryland. "Fellas, I aim to cure you of your destructive neurological disorder, and free you from the shackles of mental illness," The doctor declared grandly. With that, he grabbed as many of Frank's fourteen bindlesticks as he could carry - including the one containing Nick's bingo balls - and ran away, laughing. Ol' Barb prevented them from giving chase.
"You're cured!" the good doctor yelled as he ran off through the woods.
"He's just lucky I keep Ma's souvenir B-11 ball in my trousers," Nick said.
"I'm grateful that he left me with one stick-and-bindle," said Frank.
"Well, looks like we'll have to get back to collecting."
"We sure will, pal. We sure will."
