Apples

Hard times in "the thirties" fostered enduring legends. The most popular told of legions of unemployed men selling apples. 5 cents! There were pictures to back those stories up and Democrats would use them to discourage voters from pulling levers for Republicans for many years afterward. At least there were apples to sell in "the thirties." The next time around might be at hand, and the legions of unemployed will have to sell computer chips on street corners. All the apple orchards have been replaced by condominiums and shopping malls.

My father said a lot of rich men who were wiped out by the great depression jumped out of windows. Bodies were everywhere, he said. The depressed today don't bother climbing all those steps but just lie on the sidewalks of our cities and cause an equal inconvenience to passers by.

There's a big bridge near our old house that straddles Wissahickon Valley. It's made of stone and concrete and its arch is a couple of hundred feet over the valley, the stream and the road that winds along it. This viaduct, the Henry Avenue Bridge, carries six lanes of traffic high over the trees. We knew it, not by its street name, but as "The Suicide Bridge." Scorned lovers got equal billing with millionaires turned paupers. It's said they were considerate and chose their spots of impact on the rocks, in the shallow water or into the trees.

We (kids) didn't dwell much on the dramas of our times. Occasionally we would see hobos, men who were beyond selling apples but not of mind to jump from "The Suicide Bridge." They hung around the railroad and when we went to the train station with our parents we saw them moping at a respectable distance: sometimes alone, sometimes with companion bums. They didn't do much and that's why they were referred to as bums.

In our middle age, when we were twelve and became boy-scouts, their condition gained some respect from us because we got their recipe and on many camping trips we cooked up hobo-stew. They didn't have patrons or a lobby so others stole the idea and canned the ingredients (all the slop we mixed from cans) in one tin and called it Beef Stew or Dinty Moore. I'll bet that the hobos never got royalties.

There were contradictory schools of thought about hobos. Our parents had the more realistic — and colder attitude. They reasoned, for our safety, that vagrants were unsavory, perhaps because they were failed, perhaps for darker reasons and literature confirmed that. I knew that Tom Sawyer had a close call so I was on guard.

The police were on guard too and were constantly shooing away loiterers. Those poor guys were always on the move and because of that they were called "Tramps." The cops cleared them out so they went into the park. The park guards chased them so they went to the railroad tracks. The Railroad Dicks chased them. The Railroad Dicks had a reputation for beating-up trespassers and they not only beat up bums but kids, too. These guys insured us against becoming unipods. Many a kid lost a leg where Railroad Dicks didn't do their job.

In the real world the sad haven for bums and vagrants and hobos and tramps was skid-row. Every city of size had a skid-row and it was as mysterious as the elephants' graveyard.

All the misery of individual helplessness was romanticized in film. To counterbalance Tom Sawyer's heavy, Charlie Chaplin the tramp tugs at sympathy that dissolved at the door when theater-goers left him walking into sunsets. Rescue missions in skid-rows were the only places in the real world that offered bums a hello.

Halloween was a holyday for kids. Birthdays and Christmas might bring out the worst in unbridled greed but Halloween... well, it was a different approach to gift-getting. Apples and candy corn and cookies and peanuts and shiny pennies were reward enough for the night when kids ruled the hearts of grown-ups.

Ghosts and goblins and vampires and monsters, mostly considerably under five feet, prowled the neighborhoods carrying sacks that would be filled with booty. Some of it wouldn't be easily extorted. Kids had to perform. They might be interrogated. "Do I know you?" They might lie. Who, once they were inside, would take back what they had put in the bag of their little visitor?

Those traditional characters gave away to a corrupted celebration of Halloween. All Souls Day held little interest to kids and masked cowboys, fairy princesses and little hobos joined pumpkin heads and ghouls in parades to the doors of people they usually left alone.

Modern psychology might look for motives, for signs that indicate the future courses that people take. Little boys dress up on Halloween and if they wear their sisters' duds at eleven, might they send a signal that at twenty-two they might be queens? Hardly, unless they've done it in June or some Thursday evening in wintertime. If a kid dressed as a ghost or a zombie, it should be noted that he has a good chance of eventually becoming the former. Ghosts are secure role models for us all. If he appears as Monty of the Mounties his chances are dim unless he moves to Canada. Little Lone Rangers would never see a real horse except the one that pulled the milk wagon up the street in the morning. None of the kids were disguised as milk-men so enough already about analyzing the eleven year old in his sister's bobby socks, skirt and blouse and mom's wig.

Out there were the real heros. Wimps dressed like Peter Pan (in other neighborhoods). Unimaginative and lazy sorts threw sheets over their heads. Boo! Cheapies cross dressed: girls wore their brother's clothes, boys — their sisters. People with money went to Woolworth's to get costumes: witches and pirates. But any boy worth his salt put on his shabby best enriched with patches dangling from safety-pins and he topped his head with an old felt hat. Pop burned a cork and smeared a beard and <@145>stache on his little boy's face and voila, instant bum. The Halloween hobo tramped from house to house, not with a bag or a pillow sack. He carried a stick over his shoulder that had a big polka dotted <@145>kerchief in which his goodies would be thrown and knotted up.

Our role models were oblivious to us. They lived by the railroad, I guess, or at the dump, or in shacks by the quarry, or under bridges. We saw them from the windows of trains or cars. They were at the edge of the world. We were insulated from whatever they thought or said except in their romantic portrayals in comic strips or movies.

It would be exceedingly sad to see, no less imagine, one of these poor creatures standing under a tree watching impersonators knocking on doors to beg and getting an apple that they would be denied.