Errol Uys Riding the Rails October 13, 2000 Back to main page

René Champion

Listen to a phone interview with Rene Champion (approximately 45 minutes) Windows Media | Real Audio

"I looked at the hill behind our house and at the blue sky above. I wanted to reach the other side of the hill and see what was there."

The impulse that drove René Champion to leave Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1937 at age 16 kept him on the road for the next four years. René was born to an unwed mother in Paris in 1921. When he was eight months old, his mother placed him in a children's home and emigrated to America. He did not see her again until she sent for him in September 1929. Arriving in the United States on the eve of the Great Depression, René's boyhood years were marked by want and poverty.

I can understand why my mother left me in France. In those days it was scandalous for a woman to be an unmarried mother. But at eight-and-a-half years, I never knew what it was like to grow up with a mother and my mother didn't know how to raise a child.

I was raised in what would today be called a dysfunctional family. My mother was a high-strung person, strong and demanding. She never realized her ambition to be a fashion designer, which left her frustrated. One result was constant warfare between her and me. 'I'd never amount to anything,' she would say. I was just a 'bum' and a 'no-good.'

My mother let out her anger toward me by hitting me with whatever she happened to have in her hand like a pot or a pan. More than once she came at me with a knife but restrained herself. Rare were the times that I went to school without a couple of lumps on my head or black and blue marks.

"There was no question that the Depression was a big factor. Had we been living in happier times economically, I think things would have been different. My stepfather was 24 years older than my mother. He lost his business in the 1929 Crash and became a traveling salesman. He later worked on a WPA project. There was very little money coming in, which added to my mother's unhappiness. We went on relief until my father found a $10-a-week job in a department store, hardly enough for us to live on but it was better than nothing.

It was a humiliation for my mother to accept charity. I remember my mother and I going to steal coal in the Johnstown rail yards. We nailed a wooden keg onto a sled and pulled this to the tipple, where we filled the keg with lumps of coal. I climbed on top of loaded cars and throw coal down to my mother. I was always afraid my school mates would see me at the tipple.

I had to wear hand-me-down clothes given to us by charitable organizations. Kids were not nearly as fashion-conscious as they are today but they could tell a shirt or a pair of pants that was 20 years out of style. I remember being forced to wear girl's shoes because they were the only pair in a package of clothing given to us. The kids at school made fun of me. I told them that the shoes were the latest fashion but they knew I was lying. I got into a couple of fistfights trying to defend myself.

I used to run away for two or three days. The police would pick me up and bring me back. I'd stay home for two or three weeks, then run away again. Eventually I was taken to juvenile court, where a judge decided that I was incorrigible and sent me to the Cambria County Children's Home for two months.

My first day at reform school I was sitting at a long bench table at breakfast. I turned to my neighbor to ask a question. Bingo! Next thing I knew I was lying on the floor with a terrible pain in my side. A guard stood above me holding a long stick which he used to knock me off the bench. "We don't talk at meals," he said. I had to watch every move I made in the next two months.

One thing I give my mother credit for: She instilled in me a respect for education that made me stick things out until I got my high school diploma. After graduation, I decided to run away for good. It wasn't only my unhappiness at home but a yen for wandering. The horizon has always had an irresistible lure for me. Running away so many times, I learned a lot of street smarts that would be very useful to me as a hobo.

I remember the day I left home. It was sunny and bright. My heart was light and I felt a certain freedom. I was finally getting away.

I was drawn to the West by the cowboy movies I'd seen filled with romantic images of the great plains, the mesas and monuments and the immense vistas of the horizon miles and miles away. Coming from the eastern part of the United States and suddenly emerging on those vast open spaces, I realized this was a world I was in tune with. It filled me with a special joy and made me feel at home.

The first time I tried to hop a freight train outside Johnstown I was lucky not to be injured. The train was going too fast and I didn't grab on tightly enough. My body hit the side of the car and I was thrown head-first into the cinders. My face and hands were cut up and my clothes torn. I decided to hitch hike. Leaving the railroad tracks, I had to wade through a stream polluted by effluent from a steel mill. When I finally stuck my thumb out on the road, I was such a sight that nobody stopped for me.

I walked 50 or 60 miles before I got a ride with a trucker outside Harrisburg. He was heading for Philadelphia and that's where I went. If he'd been going to New York or Toronto, it would have made no difference. I was ready to go in any direction.

I hitchhiked Route 22, the William Penn Highway, to Chicago and then took Route 66 through Illinois, Missouri and Oklahoma down to the Texas Panhandle. When I got into Arizona and New Mexico there were so few cars that I had no choice but to ride freight trains to travel further west.

Experienced hobos taught me how to hop a boxcar safely. Most of the hobos were older: in their mid-20s and 30s. You'd see 12 or 15 hoboes sunning themselves on top of a boxcar, sometimes as many as 200 or 300 together on a train looking very much like lines of blackbirds on telephone wires. Two trains would frequently cross each other on adjoining tracks, with some hoboes going west, some going east, all looking for jobs.

I worked whenever I could but seldom stayed anywhere very long. I did a lot of migratory farm work. I picked string beans and tomatoes in New Jersey, strawberries in Maryland, oranges and grapefruit in Florida. I cut wheat in Kansas. I pulled peanuts in Texas and broom corn in New Mexico. For a time, I also worked on a cattle ranch in New Mexico, a real live cowboy like my movie heroes.

One of the most moving memories of my days on the road is of a young couple with a baby who rode with us on a Southern Pacific freight. There were probably a hundred hoboes on the train when we pulled into Yuma early in the morning. The train was scheduled to stop for a few hours.

Everyone except the family with the baby got off. The hoboes went up town to beg for food. They came back with milk, cereal, fruit and bread which they gave to the young parents.

It was like 100 Magi instead of three bringing gifts to the infant.

One Sunday I climbed off a boxcar in San Jon, a small town in New Mexico. At the local general store, where I offered to work for some food, I learned that Pearl Rasnick, an old widow who lived 10 miles down the road, was looking for a farmhand. I walked out to her ranch and got the job. She couldn't afford to pay me but would give me food and a roof over my head.

Pearl Rasnick was a devoutly religious woman whose one pleasure besides reading the Bible was to attend revival meetings. San Jon was literally a wide place in the road, Route 66 its main street, with seven churches in town.

Pearl had an old Model T in which I drove her to a revival meeting at the Methodist Church. This was the biggest church in San Jon and had the largest congregation. The revivals were conducted by itinerant evangelists, "Elmer Gantry" types, who could be very persuasive.

I was listening to the evangelist's harangue, when all of a sudden I felt a surge of electricity go through my body. I felt a force lift me out of my seat and drive me up to the altar. I had tears running down my eyes. The evangelist saw how moved I was and didn't stop me from addressing his audience. I appealed to the congregation to rededicate themselves to Christ. Usually half a dozen people would go up to the altar but that night practically everybody came forward.

The congregation knew that I was a young hobo who had hopped off a freight train a few weeks before. When the evangelist left, they asked the regular minister, Reverend Tossel, if he would let me preach to them. He was responsible for three churches and needed help so he agreed.

At 17, I became a lay preacher and spoke in one of the churches each Sunday. I felt at peace with myself, even believing that this was what I was seeking in my life as a vagabond.

But I was also a person who needs a rational explanation for things. I started asking myself how I could preach the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-beneficent God? What proof did I have of His existence? I didn't realize it but that question was the first crack in my faith.

I told Reverend Tossel that I'd begun to feel insincere. "It's the devil testing you," he said. "It happens to all of us. Fight it. Don't let it get the best of you."

I was losing the battle. More and more I asked myself questions that I couldn't answer, until I could no longer live with my doubts. I woke up one night in the middle of the night, packed my few belongings and walked out of San Jon ending my brief career as a preacher.

I knew hunger and cold, nights in jail for vagrancy and beatings by railroad bulls but most people realized I wasn't a hardened hobo. I looked young and was polite and well spoken. People took pity on me, more than they would with older men. Women on the farms where I worked felt maternal toward me.

My experiences on the road gave me a great appreciation for this country -- both its physical beauty and for many of the people I met: Honest hard-working people with a good sense of values, who were kind and generous to me on the road.

I remember getting off a train outside Tucumcari with another hobo. The Tucumcari railroad bull had a reputation of being a killer. Neither of us knew whether this was true or false but we weren't taking any chances. We left the freight two miles out of town and walked the rest of the way. The first building we saw on the outskirts of Tucumcari was a diner.

The owner stood in the doorway wearing a white apron that came down below his knees. He called us over.

"I've been watching you walk up that road," he said. "You have a hungry walk about you."

My boxcar partner and I had come from Los Angeles and hadn't eaten for a long time. As we rode together we'd been telling each other what we would buy if we had a dollar. I wanted a deep-dish apple pie or a half a dozen hamburgers.

The owner of the diner had set out food for us. We offered to work for our meal, but he said no. "I know what it's like to be hungry. I'm glad to help you," he said. It was heartwarming to know that a total stranger cared for you.

I would go back to Johnstown periodically and spend a month or so at home. Johnstown lay in a hollow surrounded by hills blackened by soot and slag from the coal mines and mills. It wasn't long before I'd begin to think of the great open spaces and the sunlit Western ranges that I'd traveled. The wanderlust seized me again.

Hoboing is a lonely business. You're far from the town that you grew up in. You're removed from the people and friends that you knew. You're among strangers, each of them going his own way.

The wide open spaces of the West enhance the feeling of loneliness. When I was hitchhiking in Texas and New Mexico, I would sometimes be picked up on the highway and given a ride that ended five or six miles down a dirt road. "Here's where I turn off to my place," I'd be told. I'd be stranded there all night with not a single winking human light in sight, overwhelmed by that immense star-studded sky. The night silence is so dense that it attached itself to you like a second skin. It was tough, very tough. More than once I cried. I felt so sad, so utterly alone.

I could characterize my social life while I was riding the rails in one word: non-existent. You're constantly on the move and don't establish relationships, certainly not with women. Firstly, there weren't many women riding freight trains. And secondly, women in the villages and towns where we passed didn't want to have anything to do with us. We were hoboes willing to work but we were viewed as bums. We dressed like bums, we looked like bums, we smelled like bums.

I have often been asked, "What kept you going? What kept you alive?" I knew hunger, cold, nights in jail after being picked up for vagrancy by railroad bulls. I was lonely all the time, sometimes to the point of being unbearable.

What kept me going was the freedom of it -- And my curiosity to see what lay on the other side of the mountain or beyond the next horizon.

In 1940, while hitchhiking in New Mexico, 19-year-old René Champion was picked up by a dean of the University of New Mexico, who convinced him to attend the college. He tutored French to pay for his tuition and worked in the dining hall for his meals. The year he spent at the University of New Mexico sparked an interest in anthropology, which would later be his chosen career.

In August 1941, Champion's wandering days ended when he heard General Charles de Gaulle's call to arms and joined the Free French Forces. He signed up in New York and sailed for Europe, where he was assigned to the famed 2^nd French Armored Division, serving first as gunner and later as tank commander. On August 25, 1944, in the liberation of Paris, his tank (dubbed "Mort-Homme," for the name of a WW1 battle) was set ablaze as he stormed the German headquarters. Oblivious of his wounds, Champion fought to extinguish the fire and drive the tank to safety. He had a second tank blown up under him before coming back to the U.S. as a decorated war hero. In 1994, the French government bestowed the 'Légion d'Honneur' on Champion.

On his return in 1946, Champion went back to school and earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. After a ten-year academic career, he joined a Rand Corporation think-tank, doing research for the US Air Force. He later worked as a strategic planner for several corporations, including Johns-Manville in Denver. Retiring in 1990, he went back to teaching, as a part-time professor of Anthropology at two Denver universities.

The memories of a lonely runaway in 1937 have never faded. On a day more than half a century later, Champion walks down a country road outside Denver, the train tracks just a stone's throw away. The aging boxcar philosopher retraces his steps on a rite of passage from youth to maturity.

If I had to do it over and choose between going on the road or going to college after high school, there's no question I would do exactly as I did. My experience on the road gave me self-confidence. I overcame a profound shyness and saw that I could shift for myself. I could survive and be respected by people. Without that experience I don't know what kind of person I would've become because I was so beaten down psychologically and emotionally as a child.

As Champion watches a long freight come into view and roll across the Colorado landscape, his memories move him to tears.

The sight of that train, the smell and sound of it makes me cry. It reminds me of the freedom of the road. It is such a sharp contrast to the life I lead now, which is completely organized every moment and hour of the day. On the road, I would have been on that train. I would have gone wherever it lead me, its whistle a siren song that reaches deep down and pulls you along.

Watching that train pass, I sense that I am saying goodbye to an innermost longing for that old freedom I knew. It makes no sense. It's no way to live, certainly not now.