I WAS LOOKING FOR A STREET: A Memoir

by Charles Willeford

The author recounts his childhood as an orphan in Los Angeles, and his experiences as a hobo during the Depression

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Memoir, Biography Memoir

143 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1988

About the author

Charles Willeford was a remarkably fine, talented and prolific writer who wrote everything from poetry to crime fiction to literary criticism throughout the course of his impressively long and diverse career. His crime novels are distinguished by a mean'n'lean sense of narrative economy and an admirable dearth of sentimentality. He was born as Charles Ray Willeford III on January 2, 1919 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Willeford's parents both died of tuberculosis when he was a little boy and he subsequently lived either with his grandmother or at boarding schools. Charles became a hobo in his early teens. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps at age sixteen and was stationed in the Philippines. Willeford served as a tank commander with the 10th Armored Division in Europe during World War II. He won several medals for his military service: the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts, and the Luxembourg Croix de Guerre. Charles retired from the army as a Master Sergeant. Willeford's first novel "High Priest of California" was published in 1953. This solid debut was followed by such equally excellent novels as "Pick-Up" (this book won a Beacon Fiction Award), "Wild Wives," "The Woman Chaser," "Cockfighter" (this particular book won the Mark Twain Award), and "The Burnt Orange Heresy." Charles achieved his greatest commercial and critical success with four outstanding novels about hapless Florida homicide detective Hoke Moseley: "Miami Blues," "New Hope for the Dead," "Sideswipe," and "The Way We Die Now." Outside of his novels, he also wrote the short story anthology "The Machine in Ward Eleven," the poetry collections "The Outcast Poets" and "Proletarian Laughter," and the nonfiction book "Something About A Soldier." Willeford attended both Palm Beach Junior College and the University of Miami. He taught a course in humanities at the University of Miami and was an associate professor who taught classes in both philosophy and English at Miami Dade Junior College. Charles was married three times and was an associate editor for "Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine." Three of Willeford's novels have been adapted into movies: Monte Hellman delivered a bleakly fascinating character study with "Cockfighter" (Charles wrote the script and has a sizable supporting role as the referee of a cockfighting tournament which climaxes the picture), George Armitage hit one out of the ballpark with the wonderfully quirky "Miami Blues," and Robinson Devor scored a bull's eye with the offbeat "The Woman Chaser." Charles popped up in a small part as a bartender in the fun redneck car chase romp "Thunder and Lightning." Charles Willeford died of a heart attack at age 69 on March 27, 1988.

Reviews

[Gretchen Rubin]

A short memoir of a writer who, as a fourteen-year-old, left home during the Depression to ride the rails.

[Ron Hefner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a treasure. The great Willeford tells the story of his youth, being a depression-era hobo and riding the rails at the age of 11, with his typical dispassionate style. Yet, it's not dispassionate. Willeford can tug at your heart strings without being sentimental. This is the characteristic that makes all of his books so amazing.

Someone should do a formalistic study of Willeford's prose. It's no mean feat to tell a story simply, using exactly the right words without lapsing into long-winded exposition. Like Steinbeck, Willeford can tell a tragic story without embellishment, and the emotional impact is tremendous.

I have given this book to people who never read any of Willeford's novels, and they immediately wanted to get into his fiction.

[Mark Nichols · Rating 5 out of 5]

Among the best and biggest-hearted autobiographies you'll read.

[Nick LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Willeford was a genius writer, his prose a crystal dart. Self-effacing, endearing, extremely funny, and never ever overwrought. This is a weird book, certainly not an autobiography, more a selective memoir. I wanted to stay in his head and kick around for another few hundred pages. His knack for characterization and economy of description is really something to admire. Also, it kind of makes the whole beat generation look like a bunch of navel gazing lame-os. Which, hey, maybe they were.

My only critique is that there isn’t enough here, and the structure is a little tossed off. It’s a little too long to be one thing and far too short to be another. With a little more polishing this thing could have been a diamond. Maybe he needed the paycheck quickly? Can’t begrudge a man for that!

If you know Willeford, read this. If you don’t, I can say with confidence that if this book connects with you, you will love his fiction.

Read on archive.org and the paperback with Lucy Sante’s (mostly pointless) preface.

[Andy Weston · Rating 5 out of 5]

Charles Willeford is one of my favourite writers. He wrote crime novels that weren’t really crime novels, they were something a bit different, containing his own distinctively crotchety, sometimes raunchy, and usually satirical dark humour. His characters didn’t fit either, the best ones were oddballs and described in a way that was very much his own. They were character driven rather than plot driven novels, and it was easy to see that he didn’t give a dam about what other people, notably critics, thought.

I have put off reading this memoir for years. I felt that it couldn’t come close to his fiction..but I was wrong.

Though the first short part of the book deals with his childhood, how he was orphaned and then, at 8 years old, spent two years at the McKinley Industrial School for Boys, living for his weekend visits with hat-saleswoman and grandmother, Mattie, it is his adolescence which is the most gripping and memorable part of the book; his life as a hobo in Depression era America.

It’s intentionally small scale and understated, and more a series of anecdotes than a saga, but there is the necessary detail of the key experiences that played a large part in forming him as an adult, and the great writer he was. By the age of 14 he had lived through as many tragedies and experiences as most do in a lifetime.

Many if the trademarks of Willeford’s writing are evident; the ability to get across a scene, a mood, in just a sentence, or a line of dialogue, with absolute precision and brevity, and his deadpan delivery.

Here’s a couple of clips..

When I first hit the road, a bum in Colton, California, had told me that a man should always have a destination of some kind in his mind, even though he had no real plan and knew in his heart that he was going nowhere. There were literally thousands of new bums riding the freight trains in 1933, and very few of them had actual destina-tions. When they were asked where they were going, the standard answer was that they were looking for work. This answer, the professional bum told me, was much too indefinite for anyone in authority because authorities everywhere knew that there was no work anywhere. Not only, he said, did a man need a final destination, he had to add that he already had a job waiting for him when he got there. And somehow, he concluded, it was best for a man to actually believe that he did have a destination, and to head for it. He, he said, was going to New York, and he knew that he would make it, too, because he had been there before. When he got there, he planned to leave immediately, of course, and go to New Orleans, because he hated New York. But at least, having a destination in mind kept a man from thinking he was merely on an aimless journey to nowhere. What he said made a lot of jsense to me.

and..

There is a definite distinction, and an important one, to be made between a bum (tramp) and a hobo (transient worker). A bum, or tramp, is a professional; he is on the road by choice, and he is uninterested in employment of any kind. A hobo is a man who uses freight trains as a free means to get from one job to another, especially during harvest seasons. The hobo frequents the jungles and uses the trains just as bums do, and he is not above begging when he is broke, but he is on the road primarily in search of employment. In the American economy, bums and hobos are a constant.
But in the 1930s there was another in-between category, a man who was homeless and who would much rather have been settled somewhere, anywhere, with a permanent job of some kind. He was on the road because he had nowhere else to go, and he hated his condition.

[Craig Pittman · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW. This brutally honest memoir by pulp fiction master Charles Willeford is a mesmerizing read with prose as crystal clear as a fountain.

The story he tells about his early life is compelling too -- all about how a pampered boy from well-to-do circumstances in California wound up as a teenager naked, shivering, hungover, unemployed and wandering in the desert on the wrong side of the U.S.-Mexico border.

I wrote a profile of Willeford for CrimeReads because I so enjoyed his South Florida-set mysteries featuring aging cop Hoke Moseley, and his widow liked it so much she sent me a British publication of this book. I am so glad she did, because it's such a great read.

Willeford conjures up both the bygone world of his idyllic childhood in LA, as well as the depths of the Depression, when it was not uncommon for boys of 13 and 14 to ride the rails and beg for handouts rather than be a burden to their impoverished relatives. His depictions of the bread lines and vagrant camps, and the other poor folks he found there, are a palpable thing, so well described I swear I could feel the grit and grime and taste the day-old bread.

Because the book was written in the 1980s, there are some dated racial terms used. But he also depicts real-life Black and Hispanic people he met while on the road and shows how their struggles were different because of prejudice against their minority status.

The book is a short one -- 142 pages -- and left me wanting more. I know Willeford wound up in the military, fought at the Battle of the Bulge, became a writer and professor, eventually finding success late in life. But now I kind of want to hear him telling the story.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Willeford, who died in 1988 was an American treasure. Best known as the author of the character Detective Hoke Moseley of “Miami Blues” fame, growing up in a relatively well-off family in the 1920’s due to the early death of his parents during his childhood and the onset of the Depression, Willeford hit the road from LA at the age of 14 and rode the rails like a lot of other young men of the era. “I Was Looking For A Street” tells the story of these early years in unstinting detail. If you’re familiar with any of his other work you’re familiar with the plain, candid just-the-facts style that serves him very well in this memoir that is surprisingly free of any sense of self-pity. On the contrary you get the sense of a young man who is delighted to be emancipated from the shackles of the working life and happy, though very poor and never sure where the next meal is coming from. CW is the kind of guy one would like to sit down in a steamy Miami bar and have a few beers with, but he got away too soon for that.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

4*

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

strange little book.

i've read most of his other published works, and this one is built on 2 colliding conceits (i won't ruin this for you), but the digression about the hat illustrates a kind of image of self that is entirely believable if you have a sense of the world as unforgiving and conniving.

very happy this was republished.
hopefully a few more people will read him.

[Craig Childs · Rating 4 out of 5]

"One man alone without responsibilities has got a fighting chance in this world."

"A straight city can always stay straight as long as it has a sin city nearby. Columbus, GA has Phenix City, AL. Pittsburg has Steubenville, OH, and Los Angeles then had San Bernardino. Today of course San Bernardino has Los Angeles."

This slim 1988 autobiography focuses on Charles Willeford's childhood. He was raised by his grandmother in Los Angeles after both his parents passed. When the Great Depression struck in 1930, she became unable to care for him, so at the age of 13 he left to ride the rails all over the American Southwest. He survived by panhandling and occasionally picking up odd jobs.

The book is an engaging snapshot of hobo life in the 1930's, full of teenage antics. My favorite anecdote is the episode in which Willeford walks to Juarez, loses his virginity in a room above a Mexican cantina, gets robbed, and has to swim back across the Rio Grande naked and drunk in the dead of night to get back to Arizona without getting arrested.

The best reason to read this book is because of Willeford's trademark deadpan, off-kilter perspective. He may be literature's most good-hearted psychopath. Here is a man who brags about never saying goodbye. He relates without any hint of embarrassment how he once dumped his fiancée because she beat him in three straight tennis matches. He simply walked off the court and never spoke to her again, figuring correctly she would eventually figure out the wedding was off.

No matter the subject--no matter how intimate or distasteful or mundane--he speaks with the same frankness and enthusiasm. There is a chapter-long discourse on men's hats. He instructs readers how to roll a cigarette with one hand. He expounds on the importance of washing your foreskin at least once a day. All these topics are just as impactful in his mind as the time he carried a boy's severed foot to a railroad bull while the teenager lay bleeding on the tracks.

It is no longer a mystery to me how Willeford developed such memorably quirky characters in his crime fiction. I think they all seemed perfectly normal to him.

I listened to the audiobook read by Dan McGowan. The book is highly recommended, but the sing-song quality of McGowan's reading voice grated on my nerves.

[Brett Shields · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting read for me. I enjoyed the experience of reading it, sort of. The story swept me along well enough and I was never really bored by it, but at the same time when I got to the end of it I felt completely indifferent about what I'd read. Had I got anything out of it? Had I enjoyed it? Would I remember it in a months time? I honestly don't know, but I suspect the fact that I'm asking the question is an answer in its own right.

[Gia Ruiz · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're into John Fante, and old timey Los Angeles, this book is a must read. The memoir of Charles Willeford is rich with unique slices of 1920s-1930s Los Angeles life. Once he hits the road, the details get crazy and amazing. He's a sparse writer, and yet his writing is so rich. Some of his word and ideas are misguided in an early 20th century kind of way, but I've read worse.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good book but a lot of typos in the new edition...they should've hired a copy editor...or at least proof read the thing.

[Vytas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Willeford and the Great Depression hobos might be the original beatniks, if only because they got on the road out of necessity and survival, not for some superficial reason.

And it shows how a great trouble or even a tragedy for a nation might be a wonderful, marvelous opportunity for a 13 year old kid.

The kid leaves home and learns how to survive. The kid gets himself a sense of humor. And the kid finally gets his friend a cowboy hat, and now his friend on a quest for a cowboy hat can go home properly – as a cowboy.

Indeed, after the overture, the opera seemed brief. But the book packs a lot of punch at its short length. Writing of the highest caliber that delivers all kinds of goods. It moved me a lot.

[John Reid · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second section of this story, which focuses on the author's experience 'riding the freight trains' during the Depression in Texas, Arizona and New (and Old) Mexico, makes it worth a read all on its own. There's a sense of the intermingling of freedom, love and patriotism combined with sadness, fear and loneliness. It's all moving, sad, and utterly real, and as such to me feels like a more alive rendition of the era and location that any Cormac McCarthy epic. I'd recommend it highly for that section alone.

[Julia Hannafin · Rating 4 out of 5]

strange and wild and young - a true result of its times. i liked reading about young charles and these hyper-specific moments of his childhood. sticking with me is the paragraph in which he, drunk on mescal, starts to look forward to the fantasy version of his life he tells other people - an aunt and a job waiting in chicago. when reality hits, it's cold and depressing, for he's slipped into the story of himself. i liked having access to both stories.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Willeford is one of my favorite writers of crime fiction, but this is something a bit different— a hardscrabble memoir of his Depression-era adolescence, where he saw the country via freight train, slumming around begging for work. It’s wonderful, full of vivid recollections, sex, travel, violence, and more. It’s all remembered with fondness, but Willeford never romanticizes. And true to form, he frames the whole adventure as a quixotic quest for a cowboy hat.

[Ezekiel Tyrus · Rating 4 out of 5]

A different generation and era when a 13 yr old goes runs away from home and becomes a hobo running the rails. Descriptions of a kid too young to drive legally going around getting drunk, having sex with whores is hard to digest but I believe true for the era and time. Descriptions of EL Paso, Mexico, LA are fascinating and the writing is entertaining, conversational and I read it in one or two settings. A solid 4 stars.

[wally · Rating 4 out of 5]

#14 from willeford for me. i'm a fan. i enjoy his stories. this from 1988, the year he died...although i could be mistaken on that so don't quote me on it.

he has this note on a white page: for euphonious reasons, most of the names, but not all of them, have been changed in this book.
--c.w.

before that, there's a b/w drawing...i assume of willeford...looks to be of him late in life.

a dedication: for robert d. loomis

a quote from donald justice:
after the overture,
the opera seemed brief.

then there's something titled "perforce"...15 lines...thought i saw/read that this is from another...though there's nothing to indicate that on the page, so maybe it's something, poetry, from willeford?

there's a part one: overture

begins:
i don't think we were rich, or anything close to that, but we were well-to-do. we lived in a big two-story house in topanga canyon, which was still open country then, and everyone in the family was working except me.

which, really, starts out a contradiction to the description, something about an orphan boy, tramping around, whatever. that must be coming...although at the page-41 mark where i'm at now...that has yet to happen.

update, monday morning, 9:18 a.m. e.s.t.
plow hasn't gone by this morning...about 6" of fresh snow and the banks on either side of the driveway are over 6' in height...where to put it?

yeah, and so i'm on the part now, part two, "opera" where the boy is on the road...fourteen he said at one point, although him and another have been lying and saying they're seventeen.

he's been picking up pointers from other bums. tells of places where hard men w/clubs line the railroad tracks as they don't want any more of that kind in their town. america. variations on this theme have happened...t'would appear that he will be unable to return to los angeles.

there's this great line--he made it to yuma and has set up in an old prison, got a campfire going, made a bed out of soft sand and straw, managed to buy a loaf of bread, made some sandwiches, and "tried to think for the first time in my life."

thinking, when you first try it, is very difficult.

man, if you don't love that line...

update, finished, 28 jan 13, monday afternoon, 2:27 p.m. e.s.t.
yeah and so w/the 2nd part it gets interesting...he makes a distinction between tramps/bums and hobos/transient workers. mentions a down-pointing arrow chalked on houses where you aren't going to get anything...although nothing was said of a house marked where one could get something. seen that before in a few stories, most recently in Love and War in California: A Novel.

too...writes about one character had two dishonorable discharges on the wall, one from the marines, one from the army, the one from the marines yellow...and i'd seen that before, too, in jones's story, From Here to Eternity...i think it was that one, although it his Some Came Running is the other possibility. i know i mentioned it in my "review".

too...there's an event that another told him, about being a theatre, balcony, knocking off a piece while the movie is going, the lights coming on when the film breaks, all turning to look back, seeing him in action...so this other had to leave town, join the army. there's one of his stories...i know i just read it...but i haven't been able to locate exactly...

i do, i'll swing back. thing is, it could be one of leonard's stories...has me interested now, see if i can find it.

some sad tales of woe here...a dozen or more bums freezing to death overnight in some town...texas or new mexico...the town finding them the next day, instituting a policy of rounding them up when the storms blow, getting them shelter etc

another, this other road-kid didn't quite make catching the train, etc

good read all in all

there's a thing called "coda" at the end...a kind of long poem to his old man, who'd died w/the tb shortly after willeford was born--there's something about not having a superego in that diddy...and in one story, a character tells another he has no superego etc maybe that was the one w/the movie scene? i'll check my notes.

onward and upward

Burnt Orange Heresy is the story where one male character says he has no superego since he had no father...and in Honey Gal...also published as The Black Mass of Brother Springer, there is an incident like he describes here, a young man/boy in the balcony w/a black girl

[Brian Beatty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really what I'd hoped it would be. Willeford's good, but not good enough.

[Jacoby · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great title, good story, poor writer-

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Milton

[Matthew]

Fantastic ordered 3 more of his books.

[Jade Aslain]

He was 13 when he left home in the Depression and rode the rails. Somebody else here said he was 11, another said he was 14. But I paid attention.

[Darla Ebert · Rating 3 out of 5]

A compelling memoir, just wish it had been longer with more detail. I saw way more potential there than the author recognized and brought out

[Danny · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love books set in the LA of the 1920s and 1930s. I love hobo tales. Charles Willeford’s I Was Looking For a Street falls right into that wheelhouse. That said, I liked I Was Looking for A Street well enough, but I didn’t love it. It’s a memoir of Willeford’s childhood years. Orphaned by parents who succumbed to TB, Willeford was raised by his grandmother. Because times were tight, he spent much time at a school for boys when she couldn’t afford to keep him. His reminiscence of weekend visits with his grandmother are particularly sweet and touching. Though he was close to his grandma, the Depression took a toll on the family and Willeford, at the ripe old age of 14, lit out to the rail yards to tramp across the Southwest to make his own way.

Street contains a hint of Edward Bunker’s Little Boy Blue. There’s a hint of Jack Black’s You Can’t Win. Willeford’s writing is spare. He doesn’t dress up the prose. But, alas, there’s something light and surface level to the tale. The book, which clocks in at 150 pages, feels like an anecdote rather than a fully realized memoir. There are potent incidents, yet they don’t build in a wholly satisfying fashion. I Was Looking For A Street is an easy read and an enjoyable read, but it left me wanting more.

[Igor · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pretty alright and breezy read. This autobiography turned out to be mostly a recount of Charles Willeford's childhood up until he hits 14 years of age. The one thing I really hoped for was a vivid discription of Los Angeles and where else he traveled in a distinct moment in time, but what we end up with is mostly just a sliver of that, I think. It's too bad, but considering how short the read is and how many events it covers, I suppose it's inevitable that some of the depth had to be sacrificed in favor of the breadth. And the story it self probably didn't diverse to be longer than it was anyway. I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's no Miami Blues, but possibly worth a look if you're interested in another depression era America portrait.

(p.s. Maybe Chares' is just a rare case, but people sure did seem to drop like flies back then.)

[Stevie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Willeford was one of my dad's favorite authors, and I can totally see why. Nice spare prose, with just a bit of the grotesque creeping in around the edges from time to time. Reminded me a bit of Cormac McCarthy without the visceral violence...even hit on some similar bits of US landscape given the fact that Willeford spends the entirety of his memoir trekking back and forth between LA and the Texas Panhandle. In any event, reading the memoir made me feel pretty lucky to have spent my teenage years in the 1980s instead of 1930s riding boxcars....not that there were very many female bums, but still.

[Adam Bregman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The only nonfiction I've read from Willeford, I Was Looking for a Street, is his memoir of growing up during the depression and riding the rails, mostly on his own, trying to survive as a kid. In literature, it's well-treaded territory, but Willeford's real life wanderings aren't dissimilar to a novel of that period. In this case, his journal-like writing is riveting. This is one of two 2010 paperback reissues (the other is Cockfighter) of Willeford's work from PictureBox and Family and they're an excellent place to get to know Willeford, one of the great American writers, who transcended pulp writing, in particular with these two works.

[Douglas Castagna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great autobiography, or rather, an autobiography of a piece of the author's life. It does not cover his writing years, nor does it go into his years in the service, but it is nevertheless a very well written and interesting life. Orphaned young, and deciding not to be a burden to his grandmother, he leaves home at the age of 13 and rides the rails. Some great anecdotes and stories lie within the pages.