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True Weird Stuff

The Hobo King

True Weird Stuff

Now! Media

History, Science, Documentary, Society & Culture

4.9655 Ratings

🗓️ 18 July 2025

⏱️ 96 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Hobo King

 

In the decades before the Great Depression, it was common for folks known as hobos to wander from town to town searching for work, dangerously hopping on and off moving trains to reach their next destination. A man named Jeff Davis believed that hobos deserved a chance to care for themselves, and in 1913, he opened a hotel where hobos would provide for each other in exchange for lodging. This concept spread across the country, and Jeff Davis would become known as The Hobo King.

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:05.9

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0:14.6

And some lucky weirdos chosen at random are going to win a true weird stuff very high quality hoodie hoodie, fancy enough for wearing to a deposition, sturdy enough to wear for robbing a grave.

0:27.2

And I promise we won't spam you.

0:29.7

And after the episode, we hope you'll stick around because we've got more to the story.

0:35.0

A little bonus content, little conversation, some bloodthirsty stuff

0:39.1

right after the episode.

0:44.4

Do you ever feel like just a cog and machine getting up every day, trudging to your job,

0:57.7

working all day only to come home too tired for much more than a meal and some TV. Then the weekend comes. The chores and errands

1:05.3

piled up, and by Sunday night, the scaries arrive, the dread of another leap ahead just sinking in. Is this all

1:15.0

there is, you think? Work and sleep and never enough money to get ahead? No time for yourself ever?

1:24.2

How is this a life, you ask yourself? And then you blink and a decade has gone by.

1:31.0

Maybe this isn't the life you're supposed to live.

1:34.3

Maybe you were born to be a wanderer, someone who isn't built to be a cog, someone who's

1:39.9

spirit craves freedom and movement, someone who wasn't meant for mortgages and credit

1:46.5

scores and tyrannical homeowner associations. If only you'd been born a hundred or more years ago

1:53.9

when the whistle of a freight train was like a sirens call.

2:03.3

That whistle meant freedom.

2:05.3

It meant opportunity.

2:06.5

You could follow that whistle.

2:08.4

Heave yourself onto that train and leave the life you'd been born into behind.

2:13.9

Trading your fixed address for a rough kind of liberty, a nomads like what you say,

...

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