Hoboes and White Laundry

In my preschool years of the late fifties, my family lived in a large stucco house beside the National Guard Armory in Marion, Kentucky. The street in front of our house passed the armory and came to a dead end at the foot of a railroad loading ramp.
The ramp looked to have been used years earlier when Marion was shipping spar by rail. I remember how the roadway sparkled with blue and purple. I picked up many a flashy piece believing that I had surely found a priceless jewel. I would drop them into my pocket with whatever other collectables I might be carrying, only to be lost somewhere in the laundry. I suppose that such foolishness was typical of that age, for if Mama ever found any of my lost treasures, she never let on.
A Train whistle from a mile away would bring my older brother Jerry, and I running to watch the train from the ramp. There were two sets of tracks then with at least one sidetrack under the ramp. Jerry would sometimes creep down to the sidetrack and lay a stick or a penny on the sidetrack rail. I was always relieved to see the train coming on one of the other rails for I was sure Jerry would derail the train. But the engineers never saw our sabotage and always waved as did the brakemen in the caboose, and that was a delight for this five-year-old.
Mama would always warn us to “watch for hoboes” who might be camped under or near the ramp. To me, a hobo was a cigar smoking, coal dust covered troll who would demand payment from two brothers caught standing on his ramp.
I never saw a hobo but I saw a lot of tired old men in bib overalls sometimes carrying lunch buckets. I saw sad looking men walking the ties with their coat thrown over their shoulder, not waving or even looking up. I remember older boys with fishing poles hiking to some hidden pond. They would all melt into the distant rail mirage as Mama called us home.
Like the last echoes of the steam age, a few coal-fired locomotives would pass, hissing and roaring like Mama’s pressure cooker gone mad. The noise made it seem like they were going faster than the newer trains.
With a large wicker basket and an apron pouch full of clothespins, Mama would fill the clothesline with white sheets and cloth diapers. I remember playing under billowing sheets trying to keep in the shade with my ‘57 Mercury peddle car, as the black smoke from a locomotive drifted overhead.
“I don’t know why I bother”, Mama would say, “Between the trains and you kids, I might as well not wash clothes at all.” Relatively clean diesel engines were a Godsend, but for Mama there would always be kids. Only six years later Mama passed away leaving six children, the youngest being only four months old.
These days have long gone and life is less of a wonder now, but on some days when the wind is right and a whistle sounds in the distance, I can still reach into the pockets of my memories and pull out a glittering piece of spar that Mama saved for me.