Stuff You Should KnowToday we go down the road a bit, thumbs out, to explore the rich history of hitchhiking.
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Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just making it our own way, grooving on down the road. E'sn on down, e'sn on down the road out yep, with our thumbs out and our chest puffed and are I don't know, standing on our tippy toes. That all makes this stuff? You should know, by the way.
Uh?
Yeah, can we shout out that great book that a lot of this is culled from.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Yeah?
What great?
Jack Reid wrote a book called Roadside America's colon the Rise and Fall of Hitchhiking in a Changing Nation. Uh, and about an e book. I actually read a lot of that thing.
Yeah, how is it?
It's really good.
I mean it seems like the book on hitchhiking in the United States.
That's really great because I ran across a lot of other stuff, not books, but articles that had been written over the decades. In like, there's some really interesting, helpful, authoritative writings on hitchhiking out there. So I'm sure that guy had the nerve to write an entire book about it. It was probably pretty good.
Yeah, it was good, and I guess we should say that hitchhiking is. This feels like one of those where we would just breeze right into it. Yeah, but we should say that hitchhiking is. When you stand on the side of a road. You may hold a sign that says you know, Akron or bust but the traditional and we'll talk about the thumb in a minute, but traditional ways to hold the old thumb out. Then someone eases off and says where your head, and buddy, you say I'm heading to Akron. You go on that way and he says no, but hop in and then you get killed.
It's pretty much a part for the course. Yeah.
Yeah, shitching a ride, it's grabbing a ride to figure. Everyone knew that, but you never know.
Yep, there was one flaw in your story, Chuck. No one's headed to Akron. Everybody's leaving Akron. Oh, if you wanted to ride out of Akron, I'm sure it would be very easy to catch.
One ouch, So then your sign would just say anywhere anywhere but here, oh man or Akron.
We should talk about the origin of the term hitchhiking too, because there's a lot of competing stories for where the term hitchhiking came from, and I think I found the real one.
Yeah, I'm not so sure about that, but go ahead.
Well, let's start with the first one. There was a nineteen seventy eight American Motorist magazine article that said, everybody's shut up. It all dates back to the Old West, and hitchhiking was a technique of method for two people to share one horse. And it went like such, Yeah, I haven't explained it yet. I just set you up to explain it.
No, No, I mean, I'm happy for you to explain this part.
Well, I was gonna make it make a horse walking sound while you explain it. But okay, So basically, you have two people with one horse. One person rides the horse, They take it to a predetermined spot and tie it up, and they start walking, and eventually the other person, who started walking from the same spot that the other person started riding from, comes upon the horse that's tied up. They get on the horse and they start riding to the next predetermined spot, probably passing the person walking on the way, and then the person walking catches up to the horse, and so on and so forth. And what's the beauty of it too, is the horse gets to rest in between rides as well. It sounds like a great, great idea, and I guess hitching the horse to a tree or something. That's where the term hitchhike came from. Not convinced by this one, but I think it's a great story.
Yeah, I'm not either. That sounds like some sort of demented relay race.
All right, you want to move on to the one I think it is.
I go ahead, because I'm not so sure about this either.
I think it was a nineteen sixty six Sports Illustrated long form article on hitchhiking that was written by Janet Graham, a veteran season hitchhiker, and she made an offhanded reference jokingly about how people look down on hitchhikers so much so that the definition of hitching is to move with jerks, making it sound like you're traveling along with other hitchhikers. But there's like a kernel of truth in there. The word hitch to hitch means to move along in short, sudden movements, kind of like how you scoot a chair up to a table, right, So you're moving by jerks, and jerks are short sudden movements, So that's hitching, And it makes sense if you look at the entire ride you're hiking. That's the that's the whole walk, but in between it's punctuated by short periods in a car that kind of get you further along the hitch part. So you're hitch hiking.
Another great story.
Well, okay, mister smarty pants, what's the word hitchhiking from?
I'm not really sure.
I just know that I go with the Oxford English Dictionary because I think they are superior researchers, and they have it dated back to the term at least in nineteen twenty three, even though obviously people were hitchhiking before nineteen twenty three.
Yeah, but.
The whole thumb thing in nineteen twenty seven at least, or at least that far back. They called hitchhikers thumb pointers, which I think is pretty fun.
But note that it's in parentheses or not parenthes quotes, which indicates that the writer did not believe that the proven reader would know what they were talking about.
Yeah. Probably so.
Yeah, but it's interesting, like the history of hitchhiking, because it's the people that hitchhiked and why they did it and how it was viewed has really kind of morphed a lot over the decades in the United States, and in the nineteen twenties when when it kind of first got going, it was it was not like hitchhiking today. It was a lot of like sometimes affluent young people, like college students who would be like, I want to go down to Palm Beach and I go to school in Syracuse, and so I can just put my thumb out and get a ride. And it was it was a pretty safe thing to do for a long time. Even though you know it was safe, though, there were people from the very beginning that were like, maybe you shouldn't do this, and early reasons, you know, were less like it's dangerous for you and more like, hey, if you pick someone up, you might get sued or something, or at least be responsible if you, like you get in a wreck with someone in your car that you don't know.
Yeah, And apparently trucking companies eventually by mid century had banned their drivers from picking up hitchhikers for that very reason, because they were on the hook totally. Yeah, but it makes sense that hitchhiking really started around the twenties because that's the very beginning of the time when people started to have cars. So the whole kind of idea behind it was like, Hey, I'm being adventurous and young, you have a car, give me a ride for a little bit. And there was like just the novelty of the whole thing of having a car and then also picking up just some random person. It kind of went well together because the whole thing was fairly new.
Yeah, for sure, the idea of like the original warnings be being more about like the the legalities of being the driver. There was also talk of like, hey, you know, if you start doing this next thing, you know it's that slippery slope thing you're going to be, it'll lead to a life of crime or something, or you know, it's sort of and you'll see that this is a big argument from certain people in this country ever since hitchhiking started, was like this is just one step away from like begging you for money and living on the street.
Yeah, and smoking marijuana cigarettes and becoming a pop fiend.
Yeah jazz cigarettes.
Right, So that was, like you said, the original version was this kind of adventurous and novel and usually kind of young, white middle class, typically in the twenties in the thirties, hitchhiking, which had already been established as a thing, became like a viable method of transportation for people who are down on their luck, and because so many people were down on their luck, hitchhiking actually kind of gained a measure of respectability during that period because there was this whole idea of people who were fortunate enough to own a car helping out the less fortunate, because we're all going through this together, right. The thing is is there were also plenty of people that were considered hobos and tramps who were viewed by the public at large is not really wanting to work. So if you were a hitchhiker and you were trying to move to the next town to look for work, you were generally considered like an upstanding person trying to do whatever they could to make an honest living. But you had to differentiate yourself, and oftentimes you would dress as clean cut, maybe wearing a suit and a hat, anything you could to basically stand out and say like, I'm not like these scumbags. I actually want a job.
You know that expression, dressed for the job you want, not for the job you have. Yes, I think that was like dress for the ride you want and not for the ride you have, which is zero rides exactly.
I think you're one hundred percent right with that.
Yeah.
So that era the nineteen thirties, like you said, society, you know, didn't look down upon it so much. There was even a pole in nineteen thirty eight by the Institute of Public Opinion that said forty three percent of Americans viewed hitchhiking favorably, and Mike, if you were to take that poll today, I can't imagine how low that number would be.
The latest I saw was a UK number and it was in the twenty tens and it was down to nine percent.
No, they never liked it over there though, No.
But it was still it's really popular, even though publicly people claimed it to dislike it as a whole, like bollocks to that, right, that's what they said.
So once you got to World War Two, another thing happened, which was American serviceman you know that would go on leave and you know, people in the army or whatever would sometimes hitchhike to where they wanted to go. And if you stopped and picked up a service person who was hitchhiking, then that means that you were doing your patriotic duty by giving you know, a fine young citizen a ride somewhere.
Yeah, so in like twenty years, hitchhiking went from a fun, thrilling, relatively safe thing for college kids to do to a necessity for people who were moving from town to town looking for work, to a patriotic duty to stop and pick up a serviceman hitchhiking on their way maybe back to base or out on leave away from.
Base, away from Akron.
If you were a fat like a right exactly, If you were a factory worker and a woman, you also were, people were expected to pick you up as well, to give you a lift to the factory. You were just supposed to like hold out your credentials for you know, whatever defense factory or whatever you worked in, just to make sure no one got the wrong idea.
Yeah, and you had to have on that Rosie the riveter bandana right tied in the front. That was your credential right now.
That definitely gave it away for sure. And then there was there's something else to mention about hitchhikers during this time, and it actually is, It's true. Throughout the entire time of people picking up hitchhikers. But it started at this time, which was it wasn't that the hitchhikers were just mooching. They actually provide and provided back then a service as well. Like a lot of times people would pick up a hitchhiker at night because they were getting sleepy and they needed somebody awaken alert to be like, hey, hey, wake up, don't fall asleep at the wheel. Other people just were looking for interesting conversation to distract them from a boring road trip. And then I saw a poem from very early days of hitchhiking where the guy references that he's essentially a counterweight to the driver in the car so that the car doesn't tip over, because that's how flimsy of the original cars were.
Interesting.
I thought so too. So it's not like anyone was viewing these people as just completely mooching. That came later on.
Yeah, and back to World War Two. If you were a hitchhiking army army person that's what they call him, sure, a soldier, you could It depends on where you are, but you could reasonably wait in a shelter. There were certain towns who would say, like, hitchhiking is such a thing that we're gonna build shelters like this was in the nineteen sort of early nineteen forties, and a couple of examples in California where they would build, you know, and I get the feeling it's sort of like a bus stop kind of thing where you could just sort of get out of the rain or wind while you thunder ride, which is pretty cool.
Yes, And hitchhiking. I guess it's spread overseas Europe in particular, I guess by the nineteen thirties, but it definitely wasn't widespread. It became widespread through American servicemen who did the same thing over in Europe that they did in America, and the practice started to catch on after World War Two, where it was kind of like a introduced widely during World War Two.
You think that's a good place for a break.
Sure, I wouldn't call it a cliffhanger, but do they all have to be?
I mean, we said the war was over, right exactly. I think everyone knows what happened next.
No cliffhanger, right, Okay, so we'll take a break then starting.
Now stop shut.
All right.
Now we're in the nineteen fifties and this was sort of the first real push. Well that's not true actually, because I read in the book there were sort of anti hitchhiking pushes from the very beginning, but it was sort of here and there, depending on what town you're in or what state you were in. But the first kind of national push came thanks to Jay Edgar Hoover, of course, who basically was one of the first guys to put out the idea that this could be really dangerous for you, like the next, you know, the next murderer that you hear about on the news could be the person that's getting in your car right now. And of course there were government I mean, I guess propaganda or at least warning posters that sort of indicated that. One of them said death and disguise, and you know, it had like an all American family basically stopping to pick up what looks like a clean cut hitchhiker death and disguise.
Is he a happy vacationer or an escaping krima.
Yeah, a pleasant companion or a sex maniac? That's what else it said, Thank.
You Jaugar Hoover.
Yeah, Jaegar Hoover considered hitchhiking a menace. I think that guy considered everything he didn't like a menace to America, right, But it's really revealing what the social attitudes were toward hitchhiking. In this nineteen fifty seven FBI bulletin that included a letter that he personally wrote about how terrible hitchhiking was and we needed to stamp it out. He was pointed out that what law enforcement was up against was changing the minds of the public. That against the idea that the courtesy of the road demands that a driver give a hitchhiker a lift if they're able to so. At that time, by the mid fifties, that's what people thought like if you saw some guy walking down the road or gal and they had their thumb out, you were basically obligated to stop.
Yeah, there were a couple of high profile murders in the nineteen fifties dealing with hitchhikers though, and that of course is going to.
Help ssuade the public opinion.
Yes, And of course is something that Hoover is going to jump on and sort of highlight, as you know, one of the big dangers the crime rate and like the United States was, you know, at one of the all time lows in American history and hitch hiking certainly didn't like ramp it up or anything. But it's not like it was a big like statistical analysis that was presented. It was just like, hey, this big murder happened, and you know, it's one of those alarmist things where if it can happen one time, then is it really worth the risk for you to pick up that hitchhiker.
Yeah, that became the premise in non Hitchhiking America. And it was just the same thing as like stranger danger. It was a moral panic, right, Like, yeah, for sure, something so vile happened a handful of times, statistical anomaly essentially, but was well publicized and so horrific, like murders of entire families. There was a guy named Billy Guy Cook who killed a family of five, including the three kids ages seven, five, and three, and the family dog because they just made the mistake of kindly picking him up while he was hitchhiking. Like, news like that spread And yes, I watched that for research last night.
Did you really?
Yeah?
I actually saw it a couple of years ago, and I think it holds up pretty good.
Yeah, It definitely had like a modernish feel to it. It didn't feel like stuck in the mid eighties, and I feel like it really captured the spirit of like the average hitchhiking interaction.
Yeah, where you ate fingers as French fries.
Yeah, it was nuts, but yeah, I liked it. I thought it was very long, overly long, but yeah, it was a good Yeah.
I know that's so funny.
I don't remember why I watched it, other than it might I doubt if it was on a plane. That feels like something I would do on a plane.
Yeah, I don't know. It's enough of a classic that I could see it being on like a hip airline. Was it Virgin? Were you flying Virgin that you saw it?
No? No, no, no, I don't. I only fly one airline.
So there were like those. I think that Billy Cockye Cook killing Spree came in nineteen fifty one, just in time for people to start freaking out. As we'll see, movies are made about these kind of things. The FBI's beating the drum against this kind of stuff, and so it gets kind of a bad rap, and that's a trajectory that it's followed over the decades. Every decade or so, they'll be like a handful of highly publicized, really horrific murders that took place because somebody hitchhiked. But if you look at it statistically, it just it's like a blip on the radar.
Yeah.
Sure, but it scared everybody enough that, like parents were like, you do not hitchhike. Like I would never ever hitchhike because my mom scared me so thoroughly as a kid that it's just not gonna I'm just not gonna do it. Sorry.
Oh, interesting, So the danger that was drilled into you is more hiking than picking up a hitchhiker either one.
No, either one for sure? Okay for sure? Like, yes, I was in grave danger, almost one hundred percent guaranteed to be murdered horribly if I did either one. That's basically what got drummed into my head.
I guess technically I did hitchhike one time, now that I think about it, I got lost one time camping with some friends. I like kind of went off to hike on my own, Like we had set up camp and we were fishing or something, and I went off to hike on my own, and I got lost and ended up miles and miles down the road and found a road, thankfully, and I got a ride.
I remember now, like I.
Don't know if I put my thumb out or if I just looked like, you know, maybe I had a fishing pole or something, and they were like, this guy needs hand, clearly. But I definitely remember, like I got a ride from a stranger and they took me back to the you know kind of the area where I could hike back to the camp.
Wow, and you weren't murdered.
No, And I would hitch.
I mean I would now just because you know, I don't need to and I'm older and I have a family. But then not too distant past, I would. I would have considered hitching a ride way more than picking up somebody. Really, yeah, because I like, what are the chances that someone that pulls over to give you a ride as a serial killer or something.
True. Okay, that's really smart, But.
But picking someone up Ooh, I don't know about that.
Okay, that is really smart, for sure. That's a great, great point. But there were some of those really high profile, publicized horrible murders. Serial killings typically did involve people being like they were hitchhikers and they were picked up by serial killers who were out looking for hitchhikers.
Well, I think what's his name picked up hitchhikers, right, Bundy.
If I'm not mistaken, Probably that would have been during a time where hitchhiking was a thing.
Still, yeah, I'm pretty sure that was something that happened, and I think he might have killed some of them.
Yeah, there were I mean overseas that happened too. There were some famous murders in Australia that Australian backpacker murders from like I think the late eighties even like, it just happens from time to time and it's so scary and you feel so badly for those people. Your mind just kind of goes to how horrible a way that would be to die that You're like.
Yeah, I'm not gonna hitchhike.
Yeah, totally see Thomas hal I mean he put the fear of God in me.
Yeah, Jo No, he was pretty good.
So moving forward to the sixties, this is when it got like really popular again. Of course because of the hippie movement. It became a big thing for hippies to do because not only could they get around and like you know, kind of travel the world doing so it was really like it just sort of fit the hippie ethos of trusting one another, and it's counterculture. It's anti like you know, owning a car and sort of anti consumerism, and it's a little bit rebellious, and it really just jibed with the whole hippie thing. So there was a lot of hitchhiking in the sixties.
Yeah, harkened back to that original kind of ethos of hitchhiking, which was you know, people just helping other people out and like you know, yeah, man being rewarded with some great conversation and maybe even making a friend and just shooing what happened. Yeah, totally worked with that. But it also provided very practically a way for people who were living the hippie life and didn't have money to go see the world. Like if you could make it to Europe, you could literally see Europe in Eurasia and Africa if you could make it down there just by hitchhiking on a couple of dollars a day. Because this is also a time when youth hostels had really kind of taken hold and spread, so you could if you could make it over to Europe, you were set for a vacation of a lifetime.
Yeah.
Into the nineteen seventies, it remained pretty popular, at least early on. There was a poll in nineteen seventy three, and this is just a sort of a little RinkyDink poll from a high school, but it was two hundred and seventy two junior and I guess junior high and high school students said that more than twenty five percent of them hitchhiked, either regularly or occasionally. So it was still going strong among the utes of America, and most in that same poll I said they were I don't think they were too worried about dangers. And one kid even said, I think there were more nuts walking around than in cars.
Pretty smart.
I guess he's probably right.
Probably, I mean, that's your that's your take on it, right, That's why you wouldn't pick up a hitchhiker. That's why you but you would hitchhike because there's more nuts walking than in cars.
Yeah, I think I think that jibes.
So another teenager in one of those polls said was asked like, why do you hitchhike? And they're like to get to where you're going, of course.
Yeah.
And in the sixties and seventies, in particular, hitchhiking among kids who weren't of driving age yet or couldn't afford a car. That was a thing, like you would hitchhike home from school rather than take the bus to ride your bike. You would hitchhike across town to go buy something from Eddie's trick shop, like a new magic illusion trick.
Sure, yeah, did you go there?
No, I guess I know that name from you telling me I don't remember the name of the one in Toledo, the magic shop that I used to go to. But it never even dawned on me, like I want to go buy some mad magazines, I'll just hitchhike over there. Like it's like our generation, like our age group was one of the last ones to be able to just like run around the neighborhood like wild animals and then come home in time for dinner. This was like that, plus like you would just get in a car with the stranger to go buy a comic book because it was too far to walk or you didn't feel like riding your bike. For us, it was or for me at least. It was like, if your parents wouldn't take you, you just didn't get to do it.
Yeah, shame here.
Yeah, so that's what kids were doing though in the sixties and seventies. They were just hitchhiking. It was just kind of thing that they did, and they weren't necessarily doing it to be rebellious or to be part of the counterculture. They were doing it because they didn't have a way to drive themselves.
Yeah.
I wonder if some of that was more prevalent and more trusted small town America than like the main streets of Dolino and Stone Mountain where we grew up. Yeah, yeah, what am I talking about? Like I was some urban you know, tough right.
Yeah, you used to play kick the can with Harvey Kitel.
So hitchhiking, like I said, was doing pretty well into the seventies, but it started that's when the decline that we're at today basically kind of started, was in the early to mid seventies. You know, reputationally, it started to go.
Down by the end of the eighties.
It was there was one journalist who said, basically it's all but dead and that jobs are just my memory.
I said, jibe three times a day. Four Now.
That reconciles with my own memories of and I'm sure yours of growing up of kind of seeing it, you know, be because I remember seeing it some when I was a kid, but just less and less over the years. And a lot of that had to do with car ownership. In the forties. About half of Americans owned a car in nineteen forty one. Less than twenty years later that was at eighty percent. And then into the seventies and eighties, you saw the deal like was in my family and a lot of other even you know, sort of regular middle class families where you ended up with an extra car for the sixteen year old to drive because that's the one that mom aged out of or whatever. So in our family, it was the VW Beetle that my mom drove, you know, from nineteen sixty eight to the I guess till my sister. I'm not sure if my sister drove it or not, but I ended up driving that Beetle because that was the extra car. And there were extra cars in American households kind of for the first time, and so all of a sudden, teenagers had wheels, usually some old car like eight beetle.
Yeah, So I just found that fascinating. It wasn't just that people were scared out of hitchhiking. Even kids in those early seventies Poles were aware of the dangers, but they weren't afraid of it enough to not hitchhike. It was, at least in part that whole group of people who hitchhike because they were trying to get from point A to point B didn't have to do that any longer because they had more and more expanded access to cars. Right, Because even if your parents didn't have a car, you might have a friend now that had a car and would come pick you up. Right, that's a big one.
There's always a friend that had the car.
Another thing that seems to have changed things for hitchhiking is the spread of interstate travel in the US and in Europe. There's plenty of laws these days that basically prevent people from hitchhiking on the Highway in particular, but even in places where it's not prohibited. Just the practicality of getting somebody going eighty miles an hour to slow down and pull over and not be a mile and a half ahead a point that you have to trot to that far to get in the car. It just it's not conducive to hitchhiking at all. So as interstate travel spread, hitchhiking just became a little bit harder, although people started just standing on entrance ramps or right apparently on the Autobahn. You know, if you go to Europe, they have like those gas stations that you just it's like an exit and then the gas station and then the entrance ramp right back onto the highway. You know what I'm talking about. Yeah, I think so, So they have those, and people would just go from gas station to gas station, like you could get a ride at a gas station and still do interstate travel. So there's ways around it, but it's still put a crimp in the whole idea. You could just pull over to the side of the road and pick somebody up pretty easily like you could before the interstates.
Yeah, and the I mean they were always sort of depending on where you are in the United States or anti hitchhiking laws. Maybe in some districts or regions or towns that weren't too keen on it. And this goes back to the very beginning, but it wasn't the kind of thing that was like super It may have been on the books, but it wasn't super enforced. Some more conservative towns may have enforced it more obviously, you know, kind of the elephant in the room is if you were demographically, like you said, it was a lot of sort of middle class white men earlier on, you had a much harder time getting right. If you were a person of color, you had a lot of times. You would have an easier time if you're a woman. But they were discouraged from doing it more for I guess, you know, the dangers that they thought a woman could face versus a man. But it was just sort of lucy goosey as far as you know, who a cop decided to hassle.
Interestingly about that sexism thing. I saw it also go in a different direction too that I think that nineteen sixty six Sports Illustrated article by Janet Graham, she basically talks about that how you like you want to dress enough to catch people's attention, but you don't want to like throw out a sign like hey, come pick me up, because you might attract the wrong kind of guy, or conversely, you might also just get passed by by some guy who doesn't trust you because of how you're dressed.
Yeah, that's interesting. Sports Illustrade used to do lots of weird articles like that.
Yeah, this is a really long article with great illustrations. Like Sports Illustrated lived up to its name. Had a lot of illustrations in this article, and it's it's definitely worth looking up. It's a great artis not really well, apparently they did have like, I don't know what you call them, but basically speed trials. A bunch of hitchhikers would all get picked up in the same town and try to make it to this pre arranged destination. See who got their fastest.
All right, that's a sport.
There's another thing that seems to have led to a decline in hitchhiking too, and that is that as fewer people actually needed to hitchhike, the people who were left over, who still needed to hitchhike because they couldn't, say, afford a car or something like that, were viewed less and less favorably or sympathetically.
Yeah.
That was the real change, I think is when it got to the point where they're like, oh, well, if that person can't even afford a car, and this is when you could buy a used car that ran for you know, a couple of grand or something. So it was like, if they can't afford that, then they're bad news, right.
So they're downtrodden, So I'm going to look down upon them. And that means that hitchhiking itself by association came to get a bad name, which further meant that anybody who hitchhiked couldn't had to be bad news. And so this feedback loop started and it was I think still to this day that hitchhiking has that image because of that change in perception.
Sadly, yeah, and of course because of the the Reagan years and the Thatcher years, that was a big sort of I don't know about a sea change, but at least a very public view that like you're lazy if you're hitch hiking, just like you're lazy if you're on food stamps, and if you're out of work and you can't afford a car, then that means you're sort of sort of derelict. And was it was sort of a conservative movement in two ways, Like politically conservative, it was looked down upon by them, but also just the word conservative in its true definition, just like risk averse, people became a little more conservative as as far as like what kind of risk they were willing to undertake by picking up a hitchhiker or I guess hitchhiking.
Yeah.
And then also during that time, transactional society kind of developed, where everything had a price, nothing was free, and anything that was free as communist, right, that's what communists are into. But there's this guy named Joe Moran who's a historian who wrote in the Guardian. He wrote about the gift relationship, the kinds of exchanges based on trust and goodwill that bring intangible benefits to everyone but are the hardest to retrieve when they're gone. Those kind of got stamped out in that transactional economy that Thatcher and Reagan brought. And I think it's just fascinating. You can blame basically everything on Thatcher and Reagan and probably be right the vast majority of the time. So I think the upshot of the whole thing, Chuck, is that the the ethos of I have a car, you don't, I'm gonna help you out converted into my car's mine, So ts for you loser is kind of what that that change over happened.
All right, that's a good place for a break.
So so angry people can compose emails and we'll be right back and we'll talk about some notable famous hitchhikers over the years.
Shut stop you shut.
Okay, chuck, So we're back. We'd have gotten a lot of angry emails in the interim, but that's okay.
They're in.
Let's talk a little bit about demographics, because you kind of hit on how it's easier in some cases for some people to catch a rye than it is for others. But the main demographic I could see when you look at just the differences in hitchhiking experiences, seem to be pretty much just divided between men and women. And I think one of the things that you see is that this whole sexist idea that if a woman hitchhikes and something happens to her, she was just basically asking for it. She put herself in unnecessary danger, which is a terrible way to look at a crime against an innocent person under any circumstances. But there was there's a reader's digest like that that was just a whole thread of thinking. There's a Reader's Digest article from nineteen seventy three that said that in the case of girl who hitchhikes, the odds against her reaching her destination unmolested are today literally no better than if she played Russian Roulette, which from what I've read, is totally made up. And that there was also two girls that conducted a science experiment in San Diego in nineteen seventy seven, and they solicited three hundred and fifty six rides, and they were either wearing a control costume of like pretty conservative clothing or a revealing costume, and they found that the revealing costume far and away attracted more rides, mostly from men.
All Right, we promised talk of notable hitchhikers, and you know, we could go on all day listing famous people who at one point or another hitchhiked. For me, John Waters is a pretty fun one because he hitchhiked and enjoyed it as a kid and then eventually wrote a book. He hitchhiked as a sixty eight year old grown man in the like twenty thirteen from his home in Baltimore to his other home in San Francisco and wrote a book about it called Carsick.
John Waters hitchhikes across America.
And this one's kind of fun because the whole first half of the book is just fiction. It's like fun stories he wrote about, like who could pick him up and what that could lead to, whether it was a serial killer or you know, something a little more fun. But the second half of the book I think is about like his real journey hitchhiking, and he made it all the way.
That's great. I mean, I'm glad John Waters survived because he's a national treasure.
Who else?
Hitchbot is the other one I want to cover.
I'd never heard of Hitchbot. Is that a famous person?
You have? We talked about hitchbot and I think Internet roundup or something like that. Oh really, Back in twenty fifteen, there was a robot. It was very like basic in design. It was a social experiment more than anything. They want to see how people responded to a robot. And they sent this kluegy junkie cartoonish looking robot all the way across Germany, all the way across to the Netherlands, all the way across Canada, and they finally said, okay, it's time for America. We're going to set this guy out on the road in Salem, Massachusetts and see if he can make it to San Francisco's destination. He made it to Boston, he made it to New York, he made Philadelphia, and he didn't get out of Philadelphia alive. He was dismembered and completely taken apart by some jerk vandal somewhere who was caught on video wearing a football shirt, like a football jersey. I can only imagine it was an Eagles jersey. And so this robot made it through three countries and didn't even get past Philadelphia in the United States, which, you know, kind of sad. I remember being sad about it at the time. But we definitely talked about Hitchbot. But he's a very famous hitchhiker as well. He had a real positive spirit. He like tweeted the whole time about however, everything.
Was, Yeah, let me see what do we got here?
I don't want to talk about Dave Matthews.
Do we no?
He hitchhiked one time to a concert. I guess we can say that at least, you know, we should cover on a short stuff.
Is that Dave Matthews poop Bridge incident? Do you hear?
No?
Well, we'll talk about it a short stuff.
It's when his tour bus dumped the contents of their Oh I did hear that thing like off a bridge on two people, or it was on a boat or something that.
Was bellowed the bridge. My god, they got in trouble for it.
Let's talk about movies instead, what about that?
Yeah, I mean, you know, in media in general, Like you know, there are some very famous, famous books and movies that were kind of centered around hitchhiking, whether it's obviously Jack Kerouac's On the Road is a big one, or Tom Robbins, even Cowgirls Get the Blues, the Gus Van's ant movie Sissy, the main character was born with a abnormally large thumb, so you know, she obviously had a talent as a hitchhiker. And that's kind of one of the subplots of the of the book and film.
Right, and yeah, hitchhiking It depends on the film, but it can be depicted as like a cautionary tale where you know, it just goes so off the rails bad that no one should ever hitchhike ever, like in Hitcher, like we were talking about with see Thomas Allen Rucker Howard. Yeah, that that Billy Cockye Cook murder Spree got turned into a movie two years after, called The Hitchhiker. It was supposedly pretty good and yeah, so throughout from from the fifties onward, hitchhikers could be depicted as murderous people or people picking up hitchhikers could be depicted as murderous. Right, but there was also like hitchhiking made appearances as mcguffins and a lot of films as just kind of a funny like little side thing like Pee Wee Herman getting picked up by Large Marge and PE's Big Adventure, What Big Bird and follow that Bird did a lot of hitchhiking in that movie. Yeah, have you ever seen I Saw the Devil?
I don't think so. That's Rob Zombie right.
No, it's a Korean film, a Korean serial killer film. I can't remember the guy's name who directed it, but it's really good. But there's this one scene in there where the main character, the antagonist I guess is a serial killer, but they follow him so much he's basically the main character. He hitchhikes gets picked up by a car that's being driven by a guy who had already picked up another hitchhiker. So now there's two guys including him in the car being driven by a third guy, and they all turn out to be serial killers, and they get in this fight driving down the road, a fight to the death. It's like a really interesting just kind of like a side scene that they could have easily edited out, but it's so good. It's it's nuts.
That sounds really familiar. I might have seen actually.
It came out in twenty ten. I think.
Yeah, the mcguffin thing is big.
Though, I feel like most times, if hitchhiking isn't a plot that's like turns out to be really bad or something that you're supposed to think it is, at least like very few times, I feel like it's just a scene where someone hitchhikes and is no big deal, unless it's like a period thing, you know, from the sixties or whatever.
Yes, a good example of that is Dumb and Dumber, where Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels pick up the guy who's trying to assassinate them and he ends up dying because of the hot sauce burger they trick him into eating. Yeah, that's a good one that was a good movie and then apparently I've never seen it, but like the definitive earliest hitchhiking scene is from It Happened One Night with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. It's very cute scene. Oh yeah, Yeah, he's basically being a man teaching her how it's all in the thumb. It's all in the thumb, that's how you hitchhike. And he's getting nowhere with it, and she like leans down and kind of sticks her leg out and adjusts her stocking, and a car just comes like to a screeching halt to pick them both up.
Yeah, and she's like, stick that thumb where the sun don't shine.
Exactly if you were in Europe.
We kind of mentioned kind of how it was going post World War Two, but throughout the years it's kind of ebbed and flowed in Europe. But it seems to be more popular and doable depending on what country you're in in Europe today, Like I think the Netherlands is still sort of very well known as a country where you can pretty safely hitchhike. I think Germany, at least for a while it was pretty popular. Always generally frowned upon in the UK, but.
People still didn't apparently still today, if you're around Glastonbury, you're probably going to get hit up. Oh ride at festival time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that kind of thing.
Of course, there's always somebody on the side of the road trying to go see some big music festival, probably Dave Matthews or I'm sure, what's a burning man. I bet that's half hitch hiking.
Yeah, for sure, I'm sure any of the big festivals there's probably a lot of people hitching there.
We have to mention Cuba because it is a pretty singularly unique country in terms of hitch hiking, in that after the Berlin Wall fell, the oil from the Soviets really dried up, and that I can't remember what the period it was called, like the Special period or something like that, where basically the national bus system and transportation public transport system kind of stopped, it slowed down, then eventually just went away, and then they nationalized it. In that if you are a government I think it was only until twenty fourteen, like you had to have a special government license to even have a private car, but if you are a government car, you are required supposedly to pick up hitchhikers, and from what I read, I read a few articles about it, like hitchhiking is public transportation in Cuba.
Now, wow, it's kind of set up.
They're called yellow points where you stop at a certain place if you're a government car, like if you're an agricultural truck or whatever carrying something, you know, from province to province, you're required to stop pick people up. They pay you if it's within province, like a penny an American dollars or I think eleven cents if it's trans provincial. But really really interesting, and it's all on the hitch wiki website. Of course, there's all kinds of great websites now where you can really kind of find out where it's good and not, because it's still a thing that like a culture that a lot of people embrace. But hitchwiki said that everybody hitchhikes in Cuba.
Yeah, it's just a way of life.
I was reading about Poland in the Cold War, I think the fifties or sixties, where they essentially nationalized it by I think they passed some regulations saying you basically have to stop if you see a hitchhiker, private citizen have to pick up hitchhikers. Now we're going to sweeten the pot. We're going to sell these books of vouchers that hitchhikers buy for very cheap, and then they give you a voucher for picking them up, and then you, the driver, hand it in and get a lottery ticket in exchange, so you could win big bucks. But apparently even still the Polish people were like, we don't like being told that we have to pick up strangers if we don't want to, and it kind of it was never popular and it went away, but it's sounded like an interesting experiment.
There's two lotteries, and there's the lottery of if you have a serial killer that you've picked up, right, and then there's a second lottery. I did forget one thing about Cuba, and I thought was interesting. They call it ear cone la botella, which means going with a bottle. That's what they call it there because apparently they think when you like stick your thumb up like that, it's resembling you like holding something and taking a drink.
Awesome. Yeah, And then speaking of today, also, like you said, there's a lot of sights that kind of trade info and best places to get picked up and where to avoid and all that stuff. That's a huge deal that people even out on the road are connected. And I saw that that actually you can make a really good case that that's morphed into a combination between that whole free spirit, freedom of the road, environmental thing, like it's less environmentally impactful than not drive yourself, but to hitch instead, combined with that transactional nature of our society. And now we have ride share apps essentially the same thing, except you're paying somebody to come get you rather than standing out there relying on someone else's good will.
Well, there are also hitchhiking apps that are essentially ride share apps that you don't pay for m h. And I think it's just a way of connecting the hitchhiker culture to like potentially ride supposedly.
Also one more thing in DC still to this day, from what I read, there's something called slugging, and every morning people who want to ride in the carpool but are driving to work by there's like these pre determined spots where people just line up and you just stop and somebody gets in your car and you take them into DC with you on your commute so you can ride in the carpool lane.
That's like when Larry David picked up a sex worker so he could get to the Dodger game quicker and he ended up having to take her to the game and all, oh, yeah, I had you know.
That's classic curb. Yeah.
So I would strongly recommend people read that nineteen sixty six Sports Illustrated article by Janet Graham. It's called rule of Thumb for the Open Road. And there's another one from the under review of books by Mike j called that Old Thumb. Both of them are just excellent. I guess chronicles on hitchhiking over the decades.
Yeah, and that book's great.
Okay, well, chucks it. That book's great and we don't have anything else to say about hitchhiking. So I think that means everybody, it's time for a listener mail.
I'm gonna call this that Brook is great because this is from Brook.
Okay, you like how did that?
Hey, guys, my name is Brook. I love listening to your show now.
In the latest episode, Peanuts Part two, you stated that the comic strip setting is unknown. We were wrong, my friend on behalf of Minnesota I had to mention that Hennepin County, Minnesota, was actually stated to be the setting in a nineteen fifty seven strip.
Okay, I don't like this email. I don't want to know this.
Minnesota's are especially obsessed with Peanuts and Snoopy. Minnesota is over five hundred five foot Peanuts statues scattered across the state, with more than one hundred of them being in Saint Paul. They also used to be a Peanuts theme park in the Mall of America called Camp Snoopy.
Sadly, Camp Snoopy.
Would later become Nickelodeon Park in two thousand and eight. Even still, statues of the Peanuts gang are scattered far and wide, including a Linus statue at the Minnesota State Fair. Even my uncle had a Linu statue in his yard. Had no idea. Thanks so much for the show. I listen while I am trail skating thirty plus miles for marathon skate training.
Wow, do you know that was the thing.
No, I'm taking that to mean like rollerblading.
I guess, or roller skates for whatever thirty something miles.
I'll bet Brooke has extraordinarily strong thighs at this point I can't imagine.
Dude, gabs and feet and big toes and little toes. I bet it's all very strong. You guys definitely helped me get through it. I love all the little jokes in side comments. I hope you have a great day.
Thanks a lot, Brook. That was a quintessential Minnesota. Nice sign off too, By the way, thank you. Totally great email, and even though I it contained information I didn't really want to hear, I still must off my hat to you for that oneft. If you want to be like Brook and get in touch with us with some information we don't necessarily want to hear, we prefer you didn't do that. Otherwise, you can email us at stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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