Campus Legend Keith Jensen Created Own Hobo Memory
Riding the rails and living as a hobo are common euphemisms on the South Dakota State University campus every October.
But for one of SDSU’s biggest boosters and a former director of the SDSU Alumni Association, those weren’t buzzwords associated with the state’s largest one-day celebration. They were a ticket to survival.
Keith Jensen, a 1956 graduate of South Dakota State College and the director of his alma mater’s alumni association from 1971 to1982, is now age 92. However, he still vividly remembers his experience as a non-fare-paying railroad passenger as a 19-year-old in 1953.
Jensen, a member of the 1988 class of SDSU Distinguished Alumni, definitely was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
His dad was a South Dakota farmer who struggled during The Great Depression. He left the farm and joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, where he tended dairy cattle for the Mescalero Apache Tribe in New Mexico.
“I was born in a tent hospital on the reservation” on June 6, 1934, Jensen said. He was told his older sisters lifted up the flap of the tent to get a peek at their new baby brother.
His dad, James, was later diagnosed with cancer. While he was able to get to Mayo Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, via private plane, James died there when Jensen was 3 years old. His mother had four children. She sent the older two back to South Dakota to live with relatives. Keith and a sister went to a foster home in California for a year.
His mother remarried in the early 1940s to a serviceman who was headed to fight in northern Africa during World War II. After the war, just a few days before Jensen turned 12, his mother put him on a train for Lake Preston, where his older brother, Huber, ran a gas station. (Part of the service station is the cottage that now is in McCrory Gardens.)
Jensen worked for his brother and then got a job at the Lake Preston Times, where he ran the back shop, doing everything but running the linotype machine.
That experience fueled his interest in entering the printing and journalism program at South Dakota State.
‘Now, there’s a job for me’
Early in his freshman year, Jensen saw a flyer at the Pugsley Student Union that advertised work in Oregon in the summer. The firm was hiring college students to pull weeds in the summer because the weeds provided habitat for insects that were destroying pine trees. The work appealed to Jensen, and he wrote the company and was accepted.
He didn’t give any thought about how he would get out there. As spring rolled around, he thought, “I’ll just hitchhike,” which was then considered especially through stretches where vehicles were few and far between.
That’s when he decided to become a hobo.
While that also was fairly common, it was discouraged by the railroad. Jensen thought more about the quicker trip than the potential consequences. He hitchhiked from Lake Preston to the Aberdeen depot and asked when the next train was departing. “10 p.m.,” he was told.
‘All aboard’
Soon the Great Northern Railway steam locomotive rolled in. Jensen could see he wouldn’t be the only one riding the rails without a ticket. Jensen also spotted a couple of Army dump trucks on a flatbed. The cabs were locked, but he was happy to have his own room in the bed of the dump truck.
It was a two-day journey to Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho, where the company was headquartered.
“It was a great experience. I never felt in danger.” He noted that most of the hobos on the train had been in the South and were returning to the North. Jensen said he associated some with fellow hobos when the train made frequent stops to take on water. The veteran hobos knew what house or church they could go to for a meal.
Jensen never opted for that version of bum-a-meal, having bought “a sack of groceries” (bread and bologna) along the way.
He was better equipped than most hobos. On the first night, he had cash for a steak dinner. There was a blanket in his suitcase, and he wore an Army Air Corps fleece-lined flight jacket. That came in handy on the second day when reaching the Idaho-Montana border, where it was so cold “I about froze to death.”
He said he was impressed by the kindness of fellow hobos, noting that one veteran railrider, probably about 60 years old, offered him a cookie.
‘And then to get back home’
Pulling weeds, sleeping in a tent and being awakened by a 6 a.m. whistle wasn’t quite as good of a job as Jensen had envisioned. He lasted two months, worked one 12-hour shift at a nearby pea canning factory and then found work worth sticking around for.
Nicholson Manufacturing Co. was selling a recently invented tree debarker for use at sawmills. It was Jensen’s job to help install them. He became the right-hand man to the boss, and his wage went from 50 cents an hour to $5 an hour. (Minimum wage for those involved in interstate commerce was then 75 cents an hour.)
That was his summer job for the rest of his college years. “I made good money. Paid for my college completely,” Jensen said.
The trip back to Brookings that first year was a circuitous adventure. He hitchhiked going south from Oregon to San Diego and then caught a ride with a radio disc jockey, who had two days to make it back to Fort Worth, Texas, to do his show. They traded time behind the wheel, spent six hours in a motel and arrived in Fort Worth, so Jensen could see his mom, who traveled north from San Antonio.
73 years later, the story fully told
From Fort Worth, he took a bus to Brookings, bringing to an end his “what I did this summer” story.
However, it wasn’t a story he penned in The Collegian or shared with anyone but a few friends. He said his recent sharing was the first time he had told the full story to anyone except his wife. While riding the rails was fairly common, it was trespassing “and I didn’t know what trouble I would be in,” Jensen said.
As the statute of limitations passed, Jensen would share snippets of his story with his children and grandchildren during the Hobo Day Parade.
When the bands, floats and hobo-attired students pass the Coughlin Campanile at this year’s Hobo Day Parade, you can expect Jensen to think back a few times to 1953.
Written by Dave Graves, University Marketing & Communications