Box-Car Bertha

SISTER OF THE ROAD--As told to Dr. Ben L. Reitman--Macaulay ($2.50).

Nobody knows how many hoboes there are in the U. S. Nobody knows how many of them are women. Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins says there are 6,800. "BoxCar Bertha," whose ghost-written autobiography appeared last week, doubles the estimate. Whether or not Bertha is always strictly accurate in her figures or her facts, her narrative is cauliflower-ear-marked by the brutal truth, wears no wig. Beside Sister of the Road, such recent revelations as Mark Benney's Angels in Undress and John Worby's The Other Half, pale into comparative respectability. Bertha's birthright was a mess. Her mother, a handsome blonde who advocated and practiced free love on her father's Kansas farm, had four children, each by a different man, took to the road when Bertha was an infant. Bertha's "first playhouse was a box car." Her progressive education began early: her teachers were labor agitators, I. W. W.'s, prostitutes. From their talk Bertha picked up her three S's: sex, strikes, socialism. Included in her haphazard schooling were two years during the War in an Arkansas cooperative colony run by radicals and conscientious objectors, where she read William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Zola. When her mother came back from an anti-War tour with a young Irish poet in tow, they all went to Seattle, where Bertha's mother entered the University of Washington. There Bertha, now 16 and 160 lb., "like a truck horse," had her first lover. She took to the road, fell in love with an anarchist in San Francisco, followed him to New Orleans. By the time she had made her first swing around the country she knew all the ropes. In Chicago, which she calls the woman hobo centre, she worked a while for a celebrated abortionist; later traveled for some months with a gang of shoplifters.

Bertha knows all about dope and the dope traffic, but says she never became an addict herself, though she tried marijuana once. To appease her insatiable curiosity she became a prostitute, found the job unexciting. "I just felt completely wornout, as though I'd finished an unusually hard day's work." The earnings varied from $50 to $200 a week, but pimps and madams took all but a Woolworth-store residue. Arrested after two months' work, 30 men a day, Bertha found herself pregnant, with two venereal diseases. While waiting for her confinement she worked in a hospital laboratory, eventually gave birth to a robust baby girl.

In Chicago she watched an old grifter friend hanged for a payroll murder, got jobs in transient bureaus which never lasted longer than the time it took to check up on her past record. When Bertha struck up acquaintance with a statistician working on a Federal transient survey and he offered her a job, she took it; her wanderlust was nearly sated. She decided to settle down in Manhattan, raise her own child. She was 30, and she had seen the world.

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