IOWA: Bad Days for the Bo

Britt, Iowa, hung its bunting out again last week; the hoboes were coming to town. They cannonballed from east & west, bedded down in the town park, the jungle under the railroad water tank, in freight cars. Scholarly Roger Payne, 72, and plump Polly Pep were exceptions. Payne slept in the school doorway; Polly, the only woman delegate to the bindle stiffs' first postwar convention, picked a haystack.

In a business sense, there was little doing at the high powwow. The hoboes were glad to be back in Britt (pop.: 2,000), where they had met off & on since 1900. The...