Frankly, my concern is less will they embarrass me than might I, by dressing like a hobo embarrass them.
Perhaps you can come …" In an instant, I'd gone from wandering hobo to homecoming friend, thanks to the latest online travel innovations.
This idyllic picture has helped to give birth to a new type of American hobo: young, often well-educated but not poor, not in need of work, unlikely to carry a hoe, and only a phone call away from anxious, supportive parents.
But his own resilience, and skills in finding blind spots and ruses, came from life as a hobo, riding freight trains during the great depression, dodging the "bulls" (railroad police) and scrounging food.
His body is buried in the hobo cemetery in Britt; his humble possessions are displayed in its museum, which celebrates wanderers.
The great ranches of the west were a reliable source of seasonal work, either herding cattle or, less glamorously, doing farm work: hobo is probably a corruption of "hoe boy".
Being a hobo, self-sufficient, despising welfare, is thus acceptably American, and probably more than that.When Mr Stevens was elected king of the hobos at the hobos' convention in Iowa in 1988 he became nationally famous.
His homely wisdom dispensed on television programmes formed the subject of numerous newspaper articles extolling the merits of the hobo philosophy.
Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukCHILD LABOURER, deckhand, gold prospector, hobo, and then forever a writer.
Those who travel by road today tell of being hit with objects thrown from cars, including bottles filled with urine.The hobo convention was a riot of straggly hair, hobo poetry and free Mulligan stew.
He washed dishes, picked cotton and potatoes, and worked in a lumber mill.Another hobo, a young woman with blond dreadlocks and bare feet, says she is on her way to Oregon to work on the marijuana harvest.
