Honest Amelia Dirt - Because She's a DANCER

Amelia Dunham stood near center stage and stared down at her choreographer.  George, the hated "boss" of the 1936 Rockettes had just given her an ultimatum:  If he saw her en pointe one more time, not only would she be fired, but she would "never work in this town again."  She was a Rockette, dammit, and there was no place in a Rockettes show for that "hoity-toity ballerina baloney."

She felt her face go red.  This was the first paid work she'd ever had, and although she hated it, she had found that it came naturally to her - and with the Great Depression dragging on, she desperately needed the money.  An argument erupted in her mind.  Income that comes with a creepy boss who was positively made of hands, or a return to homelessness.  She had been pretty good at homelessness, and her hobo life had only ended a year earlier, so the prospect was not as terrifying as it might have been to a nineteen-year old girl who lacked such experience.  She missed her trees and her freedom, but she had learned to love the hot water in her studio apartment, unreliable though it was, and would miss her afternoons spent getting lost in Macy's.  She let the internal debate play out for a moment, and inhaled deeply.

To say that Amelia was not fond of ultimatums was like saying that the stock market on October 29th, 1929 was "in the red."  She was once expelled from the second grade for defying her teacher's final warning, and wearing her handmade tutu of leaves instead of her school uniform one time too many.  A couple of schools later, in the seventh grade, she was expelled for her ongoing refusal to speak.   

Her most severe ultimatum had come from her mother.  By her fourteenth year, Amelia had long-since decided that she was a wood nymph, preferring to loiter and dance alone in the woods near her Corbin, Kentucky home, rather than study, or do her chores, or play with others, or even to talk.  Her mother had arranged a job for Amelia, working as an office clerk for the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, in town.

On her first day, when her mother sent one of the wood nymph's miserable little brothers to fetch her for breakfast, Amelia was nowhere to be found.  Later that day, she strolled back into the house, muddy, sweaty and tiredly happy from hours of dancing and cavorting with "her trees," in the thick woods that lined the railroad tracks near the Dunhams' home.  Her mother was too angry to look at Amelia, and her father was working a double shift at the locomotive shop that night, so it was left to the wretched little brothers to deliver the ultimatum.  Show up for work tomorrow - dressed as a normal person - or get out and never come back, they told her.

Before her father got home, that night, she packed some of her homemade skirts and halters and dresses - all of which exposed shocking amounts of skin, especially for the early 1930's - into a couple of pillowcases and danced out the front door without a word.

Dances With Trees

The four years she spent as the hobo Honest Amelia Dirt were the hardest and happiest of her young life.  She made her way south, carefully avoiding people as much as possible, until she found a climate warm enough for her scantily-clad wood nymph lifestyle.  She adopted a small pine forest along the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad near Jacksonville, and lived and danced among the trees, speaking only to them.  

Her hobo years were more difficult than they could have been, were it not for Amelia's strict adherence to a no-stealing policy.  Of the few fellow drifters she met, even fewer were kind-hearted enough to try to teach her anything useful, and whenever their lectures came around to theft, she would shake her head vigorously.  That, coupled with her unflinching penchant for answering truthfully (using head nods/shakes and pantomime, mostly), and an obvious affinity for having maximum earth on her skin, led rather directly to her hobo name.

Life on the road and in the adjoining woods was not easy.  Being a tall, slim, barely-clothed and long-legged dancing teenage human wood nymph in the early 30s was basically living, breathing pornography to most of her fellow hoboes.  She was assaulted more often than she could recall, by the end of it.  The first time, her naïveté had allowed her attacker to take her by surprise by first teaching her a couple of legitimate hobo lessons, and she barely escaped him.  After that, she was more cautious, and although she was thin and not particularly strong, she was light on her feet, and could kick a man in the nose before he knew her foot had left the ground.

In the 1930s, there were no "teenagers," or "'tweens."  If your age had two digits, you were basically an adult.  Amelia was given no special consideration.  At best, she was respected as a woman of the road, staunchly honest and not as easy to rape as she looked.  But beyond the assaults, she also endured a number of awkward proposals of marriage from men from eleven to eleventy. 

She quickly learned to accept this reality, and spent most of her time communing with her trees.  She taught herself to trap, kill, skin, cook and stomach small game, as well as to catch, gut, bone, cook and appreciate fish.  She learned to build her campfires in deep holes, to minimize the chances of rude middle-of-the-night awakenings to bandits or worse.  She made slightly more substantial patchwork clothing for the chilly northern Florida winter nights.  And her thin, muscled arms and legs became tanned, and her eventually hip-length auburn hair lightened, and she danced.  

She taught herself the few classical moves she knew, though she didn't know their names.  She found herself simply moving from her campsite to the stream en point - dancing everywhere she went, every waking minute.  She danced through her conversations with the trees.  She danced through her suitors' mesmerized propositions.  She could not imagine a state of being that didn't include dancing.  

Her leap from life among the trees by the tracks was not by her design.  She had been in the woods of northeast Florida for over three years when she developed pneumonia.  Frog-Eatin' Lou, her only true friend in Hobo Nation, found her unconscious and barely breathing when he came to check on her one January night.  He carried her to a hospital for the poor in Jacksonville.  She slept and absorbed intravenous saline and drugs for a week.  When she woke, she stretched and stripped and found her leafy skirt and started dancing.  She pirouetted through the front door without a word.

As she left the hospital late that night, a pudgy, creepily-imposing little man was dropping an opium-sickened hooker outside the emergency room doors.  He glimpsed Amelia's dancing, weakened though it was by her illness, and was entranced.  He offered her a job - not an audition, a job - with the Rockettes, who would be moving to Radio City Music Hall in New York, that spring.  Honest Amelia Dirt thought about it, and found that she had to admit that life as a dancer with a place to live sounded like something worth trying.  Within a month, she was living in the big city and doing that famous Rockettes leg-kick with two dozen strangers, in front of a theater packed with whooping and howling men.

The city excited her, and one of her biggest fears - having to talk to people - proved false, as it turned out that she could get through an average day without uttering a complete sentence aloud.  The dancing was routine and not nearly natural enough to give her any satisfaction, but it paid for a one-room apartment in the Bronx, and food, and that was enough.  For a while.  As her job became increasingly tedious, she began to add some of her own balletic flourishes.  The Rockettes were - and still are - all about precision in unison, so Amelia's extra-curricular activity was immediately problematic.

She had a choice.  Dance the steps exactly as choreographed, or go back to income-less drifting.  George's tiny face glared at her.  She glared at him.  She took a deep breath.  

She leapt over the orchestra pit and landed, still en pointe, in front of George.  She thought about kicking him in the nose, as she had so many men, including George, over the past five years, but opted instead for a dramatically-loud slap across his oily face.

"I quit."  She scampered to the dressing room to fetch her bag, then danced out the front door without another word.
         

When Fear Was Fun

It's Flashback Friday, gang.  Why not?  Recently, I've been finding magic in unusual places.  Tonight's story, however, is real.  It occurred in the late 1970s, during one of my family's August trips to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.  It is sad.  It is creepy.  It is kind of gross.  And it is a childhood memory which simply refuses to leave me.

We arrived for our two-week stay, unloaded the car and helped Mom make the beds as quickly as humanly possible.  Then, all six of us headed down to the Boardwalk before our annual first-night dinner at the Crab Pot, to assess what was new since last year.  My brothers and I were mostly interested in mini-golf, arcades and rides, while our parents lamented the demise of the old chicken stand.  But something weird was in the air.  I didn't notice it until my older brother pointed it out, but then it immediately became palpable, even to my ten(ish)-year old senses.

Instead of the usual happily-milling crowds, we found a couple of hundred people gathered at the edge of the Boardwalk near Rehoboth Avenue.  They were all watching a hovering helicopter and several small boats very close to shore.  Three black-suited divers were in the water, disappearing for a couple of minutes at a time, just beyond the waves.  Word was efficiently passed from mother to mother that a boy had disappeared in those waves not two hours prior, and the operation was now focused on finding his body. 

They did not find a body that night, and the next day the search was called off. Grownups seemed sad.  The big kids were fascinated.  Little kids - like me and my younger brother - were spooked.  Playing in the waves had a new potential hazard, as we were sure at any moment a dead kid would brush against our feet.  Our father explained as carefully as he could just how a submerged body works - rolling on the ocean floor, potentially catching a current that takes it many miles away, and so forth.  Still, we were afraid.

We went about our vacation, but there was a haunted quality to everything.  Even the magical boardwalk, with its rides, arcades, cotton candy and Nick's Pizza, was different.  That body was out there in the ocean. 

We stubbornly went ahead with our nightly family walks on the beach, and there were plenty of chilling moments there, too.  Any odd shadow in the sand or surf looked liked a body, and some were quite convincing until proven to be otherwise.  I secretly hoped we would be the ones to find the body, and I assumed it would be at night, for maximum creepiness.  I gave myself more than one nightmare, thinking about it night after night.  What would it look like?  Smell like?  Would the eyes be open?  Would stuff already be living in it?  It terrified me, but it also lit a new spark in my young imagination, because it was real - finding that body was not impossible.  Now, I know boys are stupid, but rest assured, Mom made sure we all had the proper appreciation and respect for the fact that a boy - not that much older than myself - had been playing one minute and dead the next, that his parents were devastated, that it could have been one of us, and that it wasn't "neat."  Still, it kind of was.  It was electrifying, in spite of all the negatives.

About a week after the drowning, my brothers and I were in our beds in the awesome front bedroom of our rented Philadelphia Street house when a beach patrol truck (they weren't called SUVs, yet) roared past, headed toward the beach.  It was followed immediately by an ambulance (no sirens) and several police cars (again - no sirens).  We knew.  The body had been found.  Also, confirming our creepiest fears, it was found at the end of OUR street, where we'd been playing in the surf for a week, and where we had poked a washed-up jellyfish with a stick that very evening.

The fact that a boy had drowned was not fun, even to a little kid, but this vacation enjoys special status in my memory.  It was exciting to be that creeped-out by something real, at that age.  It gave our whole family a common ground we didn't often enjoy.  We were all spooked, and somehow that unified us - especially me and my brothers.  It wasn't exactly Stand By Me, but it was still very cool and utterly unforgettable.  Somehow, death had become magic.  Dark magic, perhaps, but magic nonetheless.

The only way it could have been more gross would have been for us to find the body.  The only way it could have been scarier would have been for the body to have never been found.  ::shudder::

There.  This concludes our flashback.  I'm going to go watch a bunch of cartoons or a Will Ferrell movie or something.  See ya!

Sand On The Tracks - A Bum Finds His Beach

It started in a rail yard in 1930...

East Brunswick, Maryland

A hobo was being escorted from the property for the umpteenth and final time.  Scabpicker Rump, whose name is not important, had worked for the B&O, and had helped build and maintain some of the bridges and viaducts that carried the rails over the creeks and rivers that feed the Potomac.  He had been fired for insubordination.

His parents had abandoned him when he was ten, because they had grown tired of his "unflagging need for supper, every single night."  He later learned that they had both been killed in a bizarre ice skating accident the police had labeled "suspicious."  

As he was kicked out of Brunswick yard that chilly fall evening, Lemmy, the burly watchman, who Rump had known for years, gave him a piece of advice that would change his life.  "I know times are tough, old friend, but if you're gonna be a hobo, you gotta head south in the winter - like the snowbirds that migrate from New York City to Florida every fall.  And I hear they still need labor to maintain the FEC's Key West extension."

"That's a mighty long way from here, Lemmy," Scabpicker sighed.

"Think about it, buddy.  Parts of it get washed out by hurricanes every other year, seems to me, and it's all bridges.  They could probably use a man like you."

"Thanks for the tip.  I'll think about it."

Three months of hard hobo-ing later, Scabpicker Rump was working again, helping to maintain, among three dozen others, this bridge...

The old Bahia Honda Bridge, connecting Bahia Honda Key with Spanish Harbor Key - Photo by [Maris]

It didn't take long for him to prove the old "once a hobo, always a hobo" adage I just made up, and within a year, he was fired - for insubordination.  But he had fallen in love with both the Overseas Railroad and the beach.  He occasionally stowed away on trains, but mostly he walked the rails and "his bridges" between Key Largo and Key West.  His hobo name was amended slightly, and he came to be known, down here at the end of road, as Scabpicker Sandy Rump.

And he sat.  He sat on the sand - actually crushed coral, in most cases - and drank and fished and stole coconuts and stone crabs.  Gradually, his hobo life transformed into that of a beach bum.  When the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 destroyed most of Henry Flagler's beloved overseas railroad - this time beyond repair - Scabpicker Sandy Rump stayed in Key West, where he lived his remaining years in challenging but happy homelessness.  

In 1937, his old friend Lemmy received a long, rambling letter from Scabpicker.  Much of it was nearly incomprehensible, drunken blather, but it had one paragraph of clarity:

"People come to these beaches and marvel at the white sand and the iridescent water, but I hardly pay those things any mind.  I love the AIR at the land's end.  I find it utterly delicious.  I am reborn with every breath of it.  It's salty and warm, sure, but there's more to it, down here.  At the beach, even with hardly a wave in sight, the air is filled with sound.  At some beaches, when the wind turns around, the air is filled with sea life aromas that send the snowbirds scurrying back to their hotels, but I love that rotten smell; to me, it smells of life.  During Key West summers, the air is heavy and sticky and the clouds get unruly, but I love that, too.  For it's not just salt or heat or fish, nor is it simply that this place is becoming a playground.  There is something in the air here that I feel blessed and privileged to sense.  This air, my friend, is absolutely soaked through with MAGIC."

Magic Key West Air

[This post was written in response to a prompt - a writing prompt - from my friends at Studio Thirty Plus.  Please stop by and check out some of the fine writers who hang out at S30P!]



                    

Obligatory Valentine's Message From Gallant: Sometimes, They Do

My Dearest [Soul Mate],

     I pray this letter finds you well, I hope that you have opened it, this time, and further allow myself to dream that you are reading it.  Yes, I still walk beside the silver ribbons of commerce and transportation.  No, I won't be home for this year's St. Valentine's Day.  Yes, I wish I could be.  I mean to be there, but not until I can tell you that I am once more gainfully-employed.  I promise you that I am trying.

If you are still reading this, I can hear you as you make that little "tut-tut" sound and say - aloud, to the cat - "Hoboes never keep their promises."  Angel of my heart, know this:  Sometimes, they do.  I have faltered, these past four years, and allowed destitution, sickness and despair to rule my world.  But Sweetness, it cannot be said that I'm not trying to mend my broken life.

Lest you forget, there have been other times you've bandied that word about - never.  "I'll never find a soul mate, for there is no such thing as one perfect mate for any soul," you said.  "No one finds a perfect match."  With my help, you later admitted that yes, sometimes, they do.

I remember your friends (and mine), back in '26, telling you not to wait for me.  Do you recall what they said, O Light of My Heart?  "A man will never ever marry his mistress," they said.  Well, while I must admit that that is generally true, sometimes, they do.

Then they said that a love such as ours wouldn't last a week.  It did.  Some gave us a year.  My mother, bless her soul, gave us two.  "Such marriages don't last," we were told.  Well, sometimes, they do.

My friends along the tracks have told me that a woman like you has surely declared her husband dead, or had the marriage annulled, and long-since remarried by now.  I should accept that my "walk around the block for a breath of fresh air," now nearly four years long, was the end of us.  Beautiful, smart, strong women such as yourself never take back their wayward men.  As I type this letter (don't ask what I had to do in order to borrow a typewriter), I can only pray that sometimes, they do.

You see, my angel, my dawn, my light, while I won't be home in time for St. Valentine's, I estimate that I will be there by the sixteenth.  I'll understand if you have gone, or refuse to see me, but I promised you I would find my way back to you.  I know they say that "Hoboes never keep their promises," and I have no doubt that it's true.

But sometimes, they do.

With all of my heart,
Your Gallant

P.S. - It's Reginald, if you had failed to surmise.  Gallant is my hobo name.  

Not exactly Depression-era wardrobe, but she's always been fashion-forward.

       
-- for [Maris]

Four Words Of Hope And Renewal

Punxsutawney Phil has spoken, and this year, he declareth unto us that spring will arrive early.  YAY!!

Whatever, Phil.  Look - you're fuzzy and cute, and I'm sure your hometown is adorable.  I also have no doubt that February 2nd is blast for those who come to eat, drink, dance and freeze in the predawn Pennsylvania frost, awaiting your man-made "prognostication."  

We all know you're a fraud.  I've watched on TV as you allegedly saw your shadow in the pouring rain - twice.  Come to think of it, shouldn't you see your shadow every single year, what with all those bright lights on you?  Still, you're cute and the whole thing is fun and harmless.  Plus, most of us will take whatever hope we can from your prediction of a quick end to winter.

I have to admit, I have my own traditional harbinger of spring.  I share it with millions.  It's coming next week, starting on February 12th, and while it doesn't have anything to say about when or how spring will arrive (early vs. late, wild vs. mild etc.), it does declare that the wheels are in motion and the change of seasons will happen.  It comes in the form of four simple, magical words.

PITCHERS  AND  CATCHERS  REPORT

As in, pitchers and catchers report for spring training.  One does not have to give a tenth of a hoot about baseball in order to appreciate this late-winter milestone for its implications beyond "dur, sports."  Having lived my whole four (ahem - and a half) decades in the DC suburbs, with three years in Baltimore thrown in for good measure, I have LOTS of practice in appreciating these words for their non-baseball message.  For much of my life the baseball implication was simply, "Here comes another miserable season for the Orioles [and more recently, the Nationals]."  So it was natural for me to focus on the underlying "Here comes SPRING!" message and nothing more.

Until now.

This year, for the first time in many, many years, I can look forward not just to spring and its blessed warmth - and energy and salt-free roads and flowers and green stuff and the shortening of the skirts and sleeves and the lengthening of the days and the outdoor cooking etc. - but also to the baseball season.  

My Nationals are considered a top contender for the first time in franchise history, and my over-performing secondary team, the O's, should at least be competitive again, this season.  I'm not accustomed to this feeling.  I don't dread an interminable season of losing.  I'm excited for these guys, and looking forward to getting to the ballpark. 

So this year, I can add "Pitchers and catchers report" to what that furry little rodent said, and it's like the perfect storm of HOPE.

        

Super Bowl Monday - An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Ouuuuuuch...

How were you feeling, this morning?  Yeah - same here.  I've been saying this for years, and now I believe it is time for us, as a nation, to act.  The time has come to make Super Bowl Monday a national holiday.

This holiday, like the day that precedes it, is not just for football fans - although obviously they need it as much as the rest of the country.  Every year, two major cities have significant portions of their workforces call in sick*, or go to work or school exhausted and/or hung-over and - be they the happily-tired fans or the bitterly-tired ones - completely unproductive.  There's also the matter of cleaning up after the riots, and going shopping for new buses and/or police cruisers, in one of the cities, if not both. 

It's not just the cities of the two competing teams that suffer, nor is this wretched day-after effect limited to sports fans.  The Super Bowl is a lot like Thanksgiving.  It's more than a football game.  A large chunk of our population is eating more than it usually does, drinking more than it should and staying up late on a school night.  

This brings me to the heart of my argument in favor of making Super Bowl Monday a national holiday.  Sure, the massive loss of productivity and school/workplace misery of the adult population is reason enough to act, but I want you to think about the children.

That's right, the kids.  If you have young children, it's very likely that they ate a ton of junk food and stayed up way later than they usually do, last night.  Getting them up and processed for delivery to their places of learning was worse today than any other day of their little school year, wasn't it?

And if you're a teacher, not only is it likely that you yourself are feeling the ill-effects of last night, but now you've got these tired, grumpy, unfocused and possibly tummy-achy kids to try to imbue with knowledge.  I don't know what that's like, but it sounds rough.

And if, like me, you don't have children and aren't a teacher, you still have to hear how awful the poor things are to deal with on the day after the Super Bowl.  And yes, before you even start, I have no doubt that hearing about them is NOTHING compared to having to deal with them, today.  It's just another little symptom that's out there doing what symptoms do.

So, my fellow citizens, has not the time come?  Should we not just cut our collective losses and make Super Bowl Monday a national holiday?  I know some will argue that it's too close to Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Presidents Day.  It's true that it falls right between the two, but think about it - It's the middle of winter in the US.  Parts of the country have snow to shovel, and in every classroom, factory, store and office, people have the flu.  I figure, the more three-day weekends we can squeeze into January and February, the better it will be for everyone.

Super Bowl Monday.  Do it for the children.

* Yes, I called in sick, today - but I wasn't hung-over.  That would probably have been less unpleasant.  :(
         

Thundertwine: A Fable In Three Parts

I'm often asked by no one if there were ever any hoboes who reentered civilized society - any who made it.  While there were a handful who tried, and a couple who sort of drifted back and forth between the two worlds, only one ever really made it big.  His name was Hobo Hank.  Following one of my posts about how hoboes got their hobo names, I was asked by no one if any of them ever changed their names, as their hobo lives progressed.  Again, only one that I know of, and again, that was Hobo Hank.

It all began, as everything does, with one simple idea.  Twine. Hoboes used twine - a lot of it.  They used it to secure their meager belongings in sticks-and-bindles.  They used it hold their ratty shoes together, and to hold up their makeshift tents, if they were lucky enough to possess either of those luxuries.  But most of all, they used twine to hold up their trousers.

As the Great Depression entered its third year - and the hobo population was nearing its peak - twine was becoming scarce.  It was easy to make, if one had access to cotton or hemp, but those crops were becoming better-guarded as thieves had grown increasingly desperate.  Hank began to see hoboes with their pants at half-mast and untied shoes and, knowing that the twine was the problem, was smacked upside the head with his simple idea.

"I'm gonna make twine outta somethin' else, and make it strong enough to last through these awful times," he declared one day to the caboose of a Norfolk and Western coal train.  Hank was the only son of Irish immigrants - a dancer and a welder - who had come to America in 1910, when he was one year old.  His father had worked himself to death, building ships in Maine, by Hank's sixth birthday.  His mother raised him until she was accidentally electrocuted by an ungrounded stand of lights left touching a metal backstage staircase.  He was fourteen, so it was high time he left home and got a job, anyway.  

He worked for several years at the shipyard in Portland, but the constant threat of decapitation or worse began to wear on him, and he found work at a textile mill in North Carolina - until the economy collapsed and he joined the ranks of the rail-wandering-barely-alive.  Like most hoboes, he made few friends, but he was clever.  He could make useful things out of useless junk, cook the inedible into the sort of edible, and fix the unfixable.  Over time, he came to be well-known for his handiness, in his small circle.

It didn't take long for him to figure out how to make cheaper, stronger twine.  Horses were being expelled from the cities in huge numbers, in part because of the depressed economy, but also due to the rise of the electric streetcar and the automobile.  They didn't miss a few hairs from their tails, and the ones at the slaughterhouses (hey - it was the depression!) had no use for tails at all.  Hobo Hank stole horse tails, and made his twine out of a blend of that hair and lint (hoboes had no shortage of uses for lint, but that's another story).  And it was strong.  He hadn't the tools to test it, but he estimated it to have the tensile strength of cast iron - about 200 megapascals.

It also didn't take long for word to get around Hobo Nation that Hank had invented the strongest twine known, using "free" materials he kept secret.  He was a generous man, and was more than happy to make twine for his fellow tramps.  He would trade his product, which he began calling "thundertwine," with his comrades for food or clothes or fire-starters.  He was content with this arrangement, and he no intention of taking his little project any further than the confines of Hobo Nation.

Fate, it seemed, had other plans in store for Hank, who after a few months of making and trading his invention had found himself renamed.  The hoboes were calling him Thundertwine.  Word of his new string made it beyond their realm and into the real world, where it caught the eye of one Randolph Mortimer Moneysaks, one of the last great textile barons of the Mid-Atlantic.  Like almost everyone else in the country, Moneysaks was struggling.  He had shuttered all but one of his twenty-plus mills and factories, and found himself downsized from mansion to house to apartment - but he still had a lot of cash and an eye for opportunity.

I know what you're thinking, and no, Mr. Moneysaks did not steal Thundertwine's idea and make millions with it.  He was an honest man.  He spent four months trying to track down Thundertwine, and when at last he succeeded, he made the hobo his partner.  "Fifty-fifty," he had said, "For this is nothing without your invention, and nothing without my capital, but with both together, it is everything."

Overnight, Thundertwine went from being a filthy homeless drifter to a businessman with an apartment and a checking account.  Twine, it turned out, was in widespread use throughout the destitute nation, and the tough, inexpensive Thundertwine was a massive success. 

Within six months, both Moneysaks and Thundertwine - now being called MISTER Thundertwine - went from apartments to houses to mansions.  The former hobo had it all - cars, maids, a butler, women.  He wore the finest silk suits, although it is worth noting that he never stopped holding his trousers up with twine.  He was, in the last few years of the Great Depression, a rich man.  And while he did live it up quite a bit, he was not stupid.  He closely guarded his secret recipe for super-strong cheap twine, sharing it only with Moneysaks and their closest confidants.

Unfortunately, one of those close confidants was Thurmond Moneysaks, a bastard in every sense of the word.  He did, in fact, take the secret and run, starting a rival company and running the ex-hobo and his benefactor into the ground, having found that cotton could be added to the blend of fibers, making the twine cheaper to produce, nearly as strong, and slightly better-smelling. 

Thundertwine and the senior Moneysaks sued Thurmond, but the trial was long and costly, and in the end they won only the Thundertwine name, which wasn't worth much anymore, especially with the court ruling that the bastard's company would be permitted to continue calling its product "Better Than Thundertwine."

Three years after he had left the world of the hobo, Thundertwine was again homeless.  He was a little more bitter now, having tasted the good life, but he did what hoboes do, and survived as best he could.  He continued to be known as Thundertwine, because he couldn't make his fellow hoboes go back to calling him Hank.  Every time he heard his name, a little spark of disappointment flashed through his tired heart.

He wandered track-side with his stick-and-bindle and resumed trading his twine for whatever he needed, and his trousers were never held up by any other means.