Heart of a hobo beats inside 90 year-old Honor Man

By Jane Greiner
Sun staff writer
Almost as soon as I met Clive Haswell, 90, of Honor, he quoted a little poem. I had asked him about his hobo days and he said it brought this to mind:
The skunks they have in Wyoming
Smell just as bad as ours.
The odor sneaks into the cabin
And lingers there for hours.

That was just a glimmer of the gold mine of poetry and experience he began to reveal as we talked.
“I’ve been making poetry since I can remember,” he says.
The longtime area resident grew up on Aral Road. He attended the one-room Platt school from “Chart School” (our kindergarten) through elementary. That school, now the Platt Grange Hall, still stands at the corner of Esch and Indian Hill Road. He graduated from Honor High School in 1930 at the age of 17. In the early days on the farm, the family read Zane Grey aloud. “Ma would read a chapter after supper.” At school he read every book he could get his hands on.
According to Clive, though he lived on Aral road, there never was a town of Aral. “The town was Otter Creek.” Aral was just the name used for the post office.
Nowadays he lives on Fowler Road in a one hundred year-old house with pebble columns on the front. His youngest son Dan lives next door, his Dan Haswell Excavator truck parked outside.
We started talking about Clive’s poetry. It seems that just as long as he’s been making poetry, he’s been dreaming of the open road.
Here are a few lines from “the first poem I ever wrote down and kept,” written at age 16 called “The Lone Trail.”
For I’ve the urge to wander
Beneath the clear blue sky,…
So I’m packing what is needed,
My rifle, pistol, knife,
And I’m off, I care not whither
To a wild and simple life.”
Though he has been thinking in rhyme since he was very young, he only started writing down and gathering his poetry in 1984 at the urging of a lady friend. Since then he has written over 4,000 poems and essays. He has put together numerous small, self-published books of poetry and one three-volume memoir. And he keeps on writing.
Much of his poetry concerns the wild years he spent as a young man before he settled down and raised a family. He calls himself the Frustrated Rover because he wishes now that he could go back to those times on the open road.
From PROGRESS
The other day, upon the road,
I crossed an old railroad bed.
The tracks had just been taken up,
That old railroad was dead.
I traveled on that railroad,
Riding in an empty box –
But I realize that railroads
Are about as dated as the ox.
But I get a lonesome feeling
And my mouth feels dry as dust,
Whenever I cross a railroad
And see rails all red with rust.
Way back there in the thirties –
I close my eyes and dream.
I hear wheels click on rail joints
And whistles fed live steam.
I seem to hear those steamers
On the trains I used to ride.
I hear the bark of the exhaust
As we climb toward the divide.
Clive remembers everything about those times. It all started when he took a different name and “crossed over to the other side of the lake.” In those days if you knew someone on the car ferry out of Frankfort, you could ride over with the cars for five cents.
It was the 1930s, the decade of The Great Depression. Clive was a young man, just out of high school. He tried for, but was turned down by, the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps). He was lucky to get a little job near Frankfort and began playing poker in the evenings.
He discovered that he was “a natural” at it. Penny ante poker is one thing, Clive told me, but “when there’s money on the table, I only play for blood!” Those were slim times, and poker was about the only way he could put some money in his pocket.
He hung around playing poker up and down this side of the lake. However winning too many pots made him unpopular and his competitors stopped telling him where the games were being held.
So he crossed the lake and began playing for a living. He could have “made a good stake too,” he said, except it seemed that every time he got a little money together he “went hoboing.”
The hobo experience took him on many rails, ships and trucks all over the country and beyond. He avoided the big cities, saying “Chicago is the only place I ever got lonely.” Here he recalls some of the trains he rode.
I’ve Rode
I never rode the Cannonball
But I rode some Wabash freights.
I rode the Burlington Northern
And Michigan’s Nickel Plate.
I rode Great Northern boxcars
And the old C B and Q
I stole rides on the Soo Line
And on the Santa Fe, too.
I’ve rode the Chicago Northwestern
And I’ve rode the old South Shore,
I’ve ridden a lot of short lines
That aren’t there any more.
I never rode the cushions much,
My rides were mostly freights.
I’ve heard those old steam whistles
In almost every state.
I’ve rode Maine Central sidedoors
That were a long ways from home.
I hitched rides on the Michigan Central
Back when I used to roam.
The Pere Marquette, the G R and I,
The Rock Island, the Katy too.
I’ve ridden the Milwaukee line
But my roving days are through.
Clive gambled and hoboed for a couple of years. The hobo life was rough. Sometimes they went hungry. They were often cold. Sometimes people died.
But there was a hobo code of sorts. When they gathered in the hobo jungle in the evening, they made hobo stew with each man contributing whatever food he had managed to scrounge that day. It all went into the same pot and then was divided up among them when it was ready to eat.
Clive told the story of how he accidentally killed a man over a pot of hobo stew.
From The Sixth
That day the pickings had been scarce.
The stew was meager.
And when we took if from the fire, twas plain
That each ones’ portion would be small.
There in the jungle was a big man,
Who we all knew was not a hobo.
He’d not contributed nor spoke a word before,
And he was bigger far than any one of us.
Now he stepped close and said, “I’ll need it all,”
And reached to take the stew.
…
I swung a fist against his jaw.
He fell.
Another Bo quick grabbed the kettle
And salvaged some, though part was lost.
The bully had not moved.
Now someone checked, and gasped in fear,
“He’s dead!”
The hobos scattered like a flock of quail.
I ate, then caught a west bound freight.
I’ve no regrets
But sometimes wonder,
If I broke then
The Sixth Commandment.
But that had been an accident and the man was stealing food from hungry men. What really made Clive stop and look at where he was headed was later on when he almost shot a man over a game of poker.
As Clive told it, a group of men was playing and quite a bit of money was on the table. But Clive had a bad feeling about one of the men in the game, and Clive knew he was carrying a gun. Clive had a gun too and prepared himself to use it.
Clive said “a professional poker player generally looks at his cards and then bunches ‘em up. He either holds them close to his chest or lays them down on the table.”
The game got tense as the pot grew bigger. The other guy was losing and getting angry.
Clive began playing using only his left hand to keep his right hand free, palm down on the table, in plain view. He figured the other fellow would see Clive was keeping his gun hand ready.
As the tension mounted, he thought to himself “I would have enough time to get two shots off, and at that range, I could shoot the man’s hand, and if I missed that, I wouldn’t miss his head.”
The climax came when Clive was dealt a “spade Royal” (a royal flush in spades). Though he had drawn to complete a Royal Flush before, this was the first and only Royal Flush he has ever been dealt right off the bat. The pot was over $400.00. Clive raised. Everyone else folded except the one man; He called. Clive turned over his cards showing that he had won the pot.
The guy was so mad he jumped up and knocked over his chair. But thankfully he did not go for his gun. Clive was left with the winnings and the haunting knowledge that he had been ready to shoot a man over $400.00. The close call made him stop and take a look at his life. He resolved to give up poker playing and go home.
The fact that his sweetheart was waiting for him at home in Honor may have helped him make his decision.
He “crossed back over the lake” (Lake Michigan), took back his real name, and returned to this area.
He had been away about three years. When he walked back into the house, “Ma said, ‘Well, where have you been?’” Clive said he never told her. His Dad, who had done some wandering of his own in his younger days, only smiled knowingly.
His girl Harriet Green was still waiting for him. But even though he had come back home off the road, there still wasn’t any work. And a man didn’t get married without having a job.
He spent a year in the CCC (this time they took him) including five weeks fighting forest fires up on Isle Royal. That job lasted through the summer of 1937.
This time when he came home he encountered some amazingly good luck, and got a temporary job at Crystal Downs Golf Club near Crystal Lake. That “one month turned into 46 years.”
Clive and Harriet were married on December 27, 1937. Their first home was a 9 x 18 foot room above his sister’s in a shop on the old family place. When he got home from the wedding, Clive said, he had only $1.50 in his pocket. But they had groceries on the shelf and he had a job. It was a start.
Together they made a good life and raised three sons.
He lost his wife after 26 years in 1963 when she was only 48. The youngest of their three sons was still at home.
It was 20 years before Clive dared love again. And then he had a series of disappointments. He has concluded that he is unlucky in love. He is still single and he still likes the ladies, but I think he is resigned to being single the rest of his life. It seems to fit with his self-image as a loner and a wanderer.
In his poetry he says it would be hard to marry a wanderer, and even though his feet don’t carry him as far now or as easily as they once did, in his heart he is still a hobo.
The Yukon
I read Bob Service’, “Spell Of The Yukon,”
The call was more than I could stand.
I just had to pack up my equipment
And go look at that wonderful land.
I did not go looking for gold,
Nor to skate on the frozen Yukon,
Though I did file on a couple of claims
And even dug gold out of one.
I found a magnificent country,
Where it takes a big man to survive,
And the one who can’t face up to Nature,
Will soon head back to the outside.
I only remained for one winter
A Rover gets itchy in spring,
But as time creeps along I keep yearning
To go back to the Yukon again.
I know that it isn’t the same,
Not since the Highway is there,
But there’s surely a few hidden hollows
That a Loner could find, if he dare.
I know that I never will get there,
But the yearning will not go away,
And I wake from a dream, in the darkness,
And wonder why I didn’t stay?
These days Clive stays busy cutting wood for the stove, taking care of his horse Dusty, growing, canning and freezing food from his large vegetable garden, baking his award winning Cocoa-Zucchini Bread, going to Nancy’s Restaurant each Tuesday morning to get together with all the seniors there for music and visiting, attending church on Sunday, going to the monthly Senior Jamboree at Wellston to dance, handwriting book after book of poetry and essays, and typing them all up on the computer (which he taught himself to use).
His bad knees, and a broken arm a couple of winters ago have slowed him down. He walks out to “Drake’s Corner” and back as often as he can and occasionally gets over to walk along the beach of Lake Michigan. He doesn’t drive after dark or in the winter much anymore because he wants to keep his driving privileges as long as possible.
Recently the family held a 90th birthday party for Clive. About 20 friends and relatives attended. The party was held out back in a pleasant spot under some trees and a little picnic awning between Clive’s and Dan’s house. In the background is the horse barn where Dan’s horse Dusty lives. Clive has never ridden Dusty (he hasn’t ridden in 50 years), but there is a symbolic attachment between the old Rover and the unbroken mustang.
Through it all, he never stops writing. He doesn’t sit down to write a poem; they just come to him and seem to force themselves out. It’s his job to write them down.
His poetry is influenced by Rudyard Kipling and by Robert Service, an extremely popular American poet who wrote about The West and the Gold Rush Years.
Clive writes about many subjects including Nancy’s restaurant in Honor, the years as a hobo, his love for Michigan, the women he knew and loved, growing up, his insatiable need to learn, his urge to make poetry, growing old, farming, getting into and staying out of trouble, freight trains, trucks and playing cards.
Recently he explored new territory with a children’s book of fantasy poetry called Wonderland. It seems a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Green Eggs and Ham.
From SASCUMBLAT
The Sascumblat is yellow,
Except where he is green,
Of course there are some purple spots,
While places in between
Are colored sort of orange —
From Gimblewich
Across the hills of Wonderland
A clumsy hero blundered.
He stubbed his toe on every rock
And trembled when it thundered.
He is a prolific writer. He has 49 handwritten “books” of his writings on the shelf at home. From these he has self-published about a dozen volumes of his poetry plus a number of what he calls “Nancy Books,” collections for and about the seniors who gather weekly at Nancy’s restaurant. Clive types, prints and assembles the books himself. He has a couple books of collected essays and in one book includes poems and essay by other family members he has gathered, He has a three-volume memoir with another volume in the works. Plus he has the Wonderland book of children’s poetry.
Clive Haswell has lived a long and full life. It is wonderful that he is willing and able to share so much of it with us through his poetry. Read one or two poems about the lonesome road, and suddenly you are hooked. His poems about coming to terms with old age and death pull at your heart-strings. You will wonder at all the things this man has seen, and done and thought. And then you will want to read more. Let’s hope he keeps on writing them.
Autographed copies of Clive’s books are available at the Cottage Book Shop in Glen Arbor. Some are also available from the Benzie Area Historical Society in Benzonia and from Beulaland, a gift shop next to the Cherry Bowl in Honor. Or call Clive at 231 325-6464 to arrange to stop by for a copy. He’d be happy to greet you and would undoubtedly quote you a poem.