Footloose, But Not Fancy-Free

Running away, in American folklore, has always been considered more romantic than reprehensible. Each year, an estimated 100,000 middleaged, muddle-income American men flee the seemingly unbearable pressures of their jobs and families to seek a different life far from home. But for many of them, the heady wine of freedom soon goes flat. What then? After a few weeks, according to the Tracers Company of America, a New York firm that specializes in finding missing people, these runaways begin to act quite predictably. By sending up naive signal flags, they consciously or subconsciously ask to be found.

The fugitive mails a birthday card to his child, for example. It bears no address, but does have a postmark. Or he calls a friend from a pay phone to ask about the family; his approximate distance from home can be determined when the operator says, for instance, "Deposit $1.65 please." Those geographical leads are often enough for Tracers, says Vice President Edward Goldfader, because the runaways seldom alter the familiar pattern of their lives when they take up residence in a new city. They do not change their names, often because they fear their inability to respond naturally if someone calls out to them; they usually end up with jobs similar to the ones they left. Often they can be found merely by checking the records of the firms that clear new applications for company group insurance and pension plans.

Frequently, the fugitives are even more obvious: knowing that their credit-card bills will be mailed to their offices or homes, they start hinting their whereabouts by charging things, even insignificant items such as the 500 breakfast that one fugitive bought with his credit card. For a minimum fee of $500, Tracers turns over the new addresses of some 800 such runaway husbands to their wives each year--and finds that with only a little prodding, 90% of the husbands come home.

These men are not the low-income deserters who seek a "poor man's divorce," says Sociologist Lenore Weitzman, a graduate student at Columbia University who is currently completing a study of missing people. Nor are they the determined "social suicides" --most of them also middle-class family men--who succeed in obliterating enough of their past to start fresh and evade detection. Instead, she says, they are like the people who attempt suicide but do not really want to die. Possessed by the feeling that they are trapped, they flee in an inchoate attempt to call attention to their problem. Running, at least for these men, "is a cry for help."

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