Sister of the Road: the Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha

“I am thirty years old as I write this, and have been a hobo for fifteen years . . .” says Boxcar Bertha, daughter of Mother Thompson.

Bertha was interested in people. She records conversations from boxcars, around the campfire, Greenwich Village in New York, hotels and soup kitchens in Chicago, union meetings in Florida and back to Chicago whorehouses. She meets and talks, argues, steals and sleeps with tramps, yeggs, pimps, bohemians, drunks, wobblies and other radicals and provides us with a window to the wildly under-appreciated dropout culture that gets left out of history books.