Stuff You Should Know - Hitchhiking: Two thumbs out!

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

Today we go down the road a bit, thumbs out, to explore the rich history of hitchhiking. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Thumbs out? Yep, with our thumbs out and our chest puffed and our, I don't know, standing on our tippy toes. That all makes this stuff you should know, by the way. Yeah, can we shout out that great book that a lot of this is culled from? The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? No.

What great book then? Jack Reed wrote a book called Roadside Americans. Colon. Colon. The rise and fall of hitchhiking in a changing nation. And I bought an ebook. 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 have been written over the decades and like, there are some really interesting, helpful, authoritative writings on hitchhiking out there. So I'm sure if that guy had the, 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, uh, 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, you may hold a sign that says, you know, uh, Akron or bust, but the traditional, and we'll talk about the thumb in a minute, but the traditional way is to hold the old thumb out and someone eases off and says,

where you heading buddy? You say I'm heading to Akron, you going that way? And he says, no, but hop in. And then you get killed. It's pretty much par for the course, yeah. Yeah, it's hitching a ride, it's grabbing a ride, I figure everyone knew that, but you never know. Yeah, there was one flaw in your story, yeah. Yeah, it's hitching a ride. It's grabbing a ride. I 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, ouch. If you wanted to ride out of Akron, I'm sure it'd be very easy to catch one. Ouch. So then your sign would just say anywhere. Anywhere but here. Oh man, poor 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, everybody shut up. It all dates back to the old west and hitchhiking was a technique, a 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. I don't know. I mean, I'm happy for you to explain this part.

Oh, well I was going to make a- Because I don't buy this one either. I was going to make a horse walking sound while you explain it, but okay. So basically, um, 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 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. It is. All right, you want to move on to the one I think it is? Go ahead, because I'm not so sure about this either. Okay, I think it was a 1966 Sports Illustrated long form article on hitchhiking that was written by Janet Graham, veteran seasoned 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 jerks, 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 whole walk. But in between, it's punctuated by short periods in a car that kind of gets you further along. The hitch part. So you're hitch hiking. Another great story. Well, okay, Mr. Smartypants., 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 1923, even though obviously people were hitchhiking before 1923. But the whole thumb thing, in 1927 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 parentheses, quotes, which indicates that the writer did not believe that the reader would know what they were talking about. Yeah, probably so. 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 1920s, when it kind of first got going, 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 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, they 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 in a lot of states. Totally. But it makes sense that hitchhiking really started around the 20s 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 to 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 being more about like the legalities of being the driver. There was also talk of like the original warnings being more about like 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 will 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 begging you for money and living on the street. Yeah. And smoking marijuana cigarettes and becoming a pot fiend. Yeah, jazz cigarettes. Right. So, that was, like you said, the original version was just kind of adventurous and novel and usually kind of young, white, middle class typically in the 20s.

In the 30s, 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 are 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, who were viewed by the public at large as 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, 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, dress 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 100% right with that. Yeah. So, that era, the 1930s, like you said, society, you know, didn't look down upon it so much. There was even a poll in 1938 by the Institute of Public Opinion that said 43% 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 2010s and it was down to 9%. No, they never liked it over there though. No, but it was still fairly popular, even though publicly people claimed it to dislike it as a whole. Like bo, I think it was pretty popular. I mean, I think it was pretty popular. I mean, I think it was pretty popular. I mean, I think it was pretty popular. I mean, I think it was pretty popular. I mean, I think it was pretty popular. I mean, I think it was pretty popular.

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I mean, I think it was pretty popular. I mean, I think it was pretty popular. I mean, I think it was pretty popular. I mean, I think it was pretty popular. I mean, I think it was pretty popular. 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 20 years, hitchhiking went from a fun, thrilling, relatively safe thing for college kids to do, to a necessity for people who are 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.

CRAIG LABOREEK, JR. Away from Akron. If you were 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 there. 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 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 awake and 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 the 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 II, if you were a hitchhiking army person. That's what they call them, 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 going to build shelters like this is in the 19 sort of early 1940s and A couple of examples in California where they would build, you know And I get the feeling is 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 to Europe in particular I guess by the 1930s, 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 II, where it was kind of introduced widely during World War II. 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, You Should Know"] No. and Mika! Hi, I'm Mika and this is our brand new podcast, Blippi and Mika's Road Trip! The Blippi Mobile will take us to amazing places! Click, click, put your seatbelts on, get ready for a ride, we're gonna have some fun!

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or wherever you get your podcasts. of the world's first and greatest travel writer Eugene Fodor as he jet sets around the globe. Tongue Unbroken Season 2. This podcast explores complex concepts of identity, resilience, erasure, and genocide. Table for Two Season 2. Think of the show as a deconstructed Oscar party in podcast form. Each episode takes place over the romance of a meal and feels like you're seated next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, now we're in the 1950s 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. Oh, yeah? But it was sort of here and there, depending on what town you were in or what state you

were in. But the first kind of national push came thanks to J. 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 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 in disguise. And, you know, it had like an all-American family basically stopping to pick up what looks like

a clean-cut hitchhiker. Death in disguise, is he a happy vacationer or an escaping criminal? Yeah, a pleasant companion or a sex maniac. That's what else it said. Thank you, J. Edgar Hoover. Yeah, J. Edgar 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 1957 FBI bulletin that included a letter that he personally wrote about how terrible hitchhiking was and we needed to stamp it out. He 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-50s, 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 1950s dealing with hitchhikers, though, and that, of course, is gonna help sway the public opinion.

And, of course, is something that Hoover's gonna jump on and sort of highlight as one of the big dangers. The crime rate in, like, the United States was, you you know at one of the all-time lows in American history and hitchhiking 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 something so vile happened a handful of times, a statistical anomaly, essentially, but was well publicized and so horrific, like murders of entire families. There was a guy named Billy Cock-Eyed 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 it- Rucker Howard. Yes, I watched that spread. And it- Rutger Hauer. 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-80s. And I feel like it really captured the spirit of like the average hitchhiking interaction. Yeah. Where you eat fingers as french fries. Yeah, it was nuts, but yeah I liked it. I thought it was very long, overly long, but I still liked it.

Yeah, probably so. It was a good movie. That's so funny, I don't remember why I watched it other than, it might, I doubt if it was on a plane. But 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 only fly one airline. So there were like those, I think that Billy Cock-I-Cook killing spree came in 1951 just in time for people to start freaking out. As we'll see, movies are made about these kind of things the FBI is beating the drum against this kind of stuff and so it gets kind of a bad a bad rap and that's a a trajectory that it's followed over the decades

Every decade or so there'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's like a blip on the radar. Yeah, sure. But it scared everybody enough that parents were like, you do not hitchhike. I would never, ever hitchhike because my mom scared me so thoroughly as a kid that it's just not gonna happen. I'm just not gonna do it. Sorry. Oh, sorry.

Oh, interesting. So the danger that was drilled into you is more hitchhiking than picking up a hitchhiker? Either one, no, either one for sure. Oh, okay. For sure, like yes, I was in grave danger, almost 100% 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, uh, I got lost one time camping, uh, 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're like this guy needs a 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 wouldn't now, just cause, you know, I don't need to and I'm older and I have a family, but in the not too distant past,

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 like give you a ride is 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've killed some of them. Yeah.

There were, I mean, um, overseas that happened too. There were some famous, um, 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, I'm not gonna hitchhike. Yeah, totally.

See Thomas Howell, I mean, he put the fear of God in me. Yeah, he did a good job. No, he was pretty good. So moving forward to the 60s, this is when it got like really popular again, of course, because of the hippie movement. Mm-hmm. 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 its counterculture, its 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 60s. Yeah, it 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 seeing 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 and 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 if you could make it over to Europe, you were set for a vacation of a lifetime. Yeah. Into the 1970s, it remained pretty popular, at least early on. There was a poll in 1973, and this is just a sort of a little rinky-dink poll from a high

school, but it was 272 junior and I guess junior high and high school students said that more than 25% 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, well, I think they're more nuts walking around than in cars.

Pretty smart. I guess, he's probably right. Probably. I mean, that's your take on it, right? That's why you wouldn't pick up a hitchhiker. That's why you would hitchhike, because there's more nuts walking than in cars. Yeah. I think that jibes.

Another teenager in one of those polls was asked why do you hitchhike? And they're like, to get to where you're going, of course. Yeah. In the 60s and 70s 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. 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. No, of course not. 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 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 you, you just didn't get to do it. Yeah, same here. Yeah. So that's what kids were doing though, in the 60s and 70s.

They were just hitchhiking. It was just kind of a 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 in more trusted small-town America

Then like the main streets of Toledo 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 Keitel So hitchhiking like I said was was doing pretty well into the 70s, but it started, that's when the decline that we're at today basically kind of started, was in the early to mid 70s. You know, reputationally it started to go down. By the end of the 80s, it was, there was one journalist who said basically it's all but dead, and that jibes with just my memory my memory I said jive three times a day for now That 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 someone I was a kid But just less and less over the years and a lot of that had to do with car ownership Yeah, the 40s about half of Americans owned a car in 1941. Less than 20 years later that was at 80% and then into the 70s and 80s 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 16 year old to drive because that's the one that that mom aged out over whatever so in our family it was the the VW Beetle that my mom drove, you know from 1968 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 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 a 68 Beetle. Yeah so that just found that fascinating it wasn't just that people were scared out of hitchhiking even kids in that those early 70s polls 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 hitchhiked 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, um, hitchhiking is the, the, um, spread of interstate travel in the U S and in Europe. Um, there's plenty of laws these days that basically prevent people from hitchhiking on the

highway in particular. Um, but even in places where it's not prohibited, just the practicality of getting somebody going 80 miles an hour to slow down and pull over and it not be a mile and a half ahead point that you have to trot to that far to get in the car. It's 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 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. They have, so they have those and people would just go from gas station the gas station and then the entrance ramp right back onto the highway. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, I think so. They have, 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 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're always sort of, depending on where you could before the interstates. Yeah. And I mean, there 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 around if you were a person of color. You had, a lot of times, you would have an easier time if you were 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 loosey 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 1966 Sports Illustrated article by Janet Graham She basically talks about that how you like you 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 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 Illustrated 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 definitely worth looking up. It's a great article. But no sport. Not really. I guess it could be a sport. 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 there 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 were like,

oh, well, if that person can't even afford a car, like, 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 gonna look down upon them. And that means that hitchhiking itself,

by association, came to get a bad name, which 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 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 there was a big sort of I Don't know about a sea change, but at least a very public view that like You're you're lazy if you're hitchhiking

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 derelict. And 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 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 a transactional society kind of developed where everything had a price. Nothing was free and anything that was free is communist, right? That's what communists are into. 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 ethos of I have a car, you don't, I'm gonna help you out, converted into my car is mine, so TS for you, loser, is kind of what that changeover happened. All right, that's a good place for a break so angry people can compose emails. And we'll be right back and we'll talk about some notable famous hitchhikers over the years. No! Stop! You! Should! Stop, you should!

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Okay, Chuck, so we're back. We have gotten a lot of angry emails in the interim, but that's okay. They're flowing 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 ride 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 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 a Reader's Digest, like that was just a whole thread of thinking. There was a Reader's Digest article from 1973 that said that, in the case of a girl who hitchhikes, the odds against her reaching her 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 1977 and they they Solicited And they solicited 356 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 68-year-old grown man in the, like, 2013 from his home in Baltimore to his other home in San Francisco and wrote a book about it called Car Sick, John Waters Hitch Hikes Across America. And this one is 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 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 wanna cover.

I've never heard of Hitchbot. Is that a famous person? You have. We talked about Hitchbot, and I think I want to cover. I've 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 2015, there was a robot. It was very basic in design.

It was a social experiment more than anything. They wanted to see how people responded to a robot. And they sent this kludgy, junky, cartoonish-looking robot all the way across Germany, all the way across 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 it to 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 is 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 tweeted the whole time about how good everything was. Yeah. Let me see. What do we got here? I don't wanna talk about Dave Matthews, do we? No.

He hitchhiked on time to a concert. I guess we can say that at least. You know what we should cover on a short stuff is the Dave Matthews poop bridge incident. I don't know about that one. No. Well, we'll talk about it on a short stuff. It's when his tour bus dumped the contents of their

Oh, I did hear that. thing like off a bridge onto people. Or it was on a boat or something that was below the bridge. My God. They got in trouble for it. Well 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 Zandt movie. Sissy, the main character, was born with an 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 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 C. Thomas Howell and Rooker Howard. Yeah that that Billy cockeyed cook murder spree got turned into a Movie two years after called the hitchhiker It's supposedly pretty good And yeah, so throughout from from the 50s onward So throughout, from the 50s 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 MacGuffins in a lot of films, as just kind of a funny, like, little side thing, like Pee Wee Herman getting picked

up by Large Marge in Pee Wee's Big Adventure. What a scene. Big Bird in 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 nuts. That sounds really familiar. I might have seen that actually. It came out in 2010 I think. Yeah, the McGuffin thing is big though. I feel like most times if hitchhiking isn't a plot that turns out to be really bad or something, that you're supposed to think it is at least. Right. Like very few times I feel like it's just a scene where someone hitchhikes and it's no big deal. Unless it's like a period thing, you know, from the 60s or whatever.

Yes. Um, a good example of that is, um, Dumb and Dumber, where, um, Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels pick up the guy who's trying to assassinate them. And he ends up dying, um, because of the hot sauce burger, they trick him into eating. Yeah. That's a good one. That's 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 a very cute scene. Oh yeah? Yeah, he's basically being a man, teaching her how like 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 II, 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. Mm-hmm.

But people still did it, and apparently still today, if you're around Glastonbury, you're probably going to get hit up for a ride at festival time. Oh, sure. 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 Burning Man? I bet that's half hitchhiking.

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 hitchhiking in that after the Berlin Wall fell, the oil from the Soviets really dried up and that I can't remember what the period was called, like the special period or

something like that, where basically the 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 2014, 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 in American dollars or I think 11 cents if it's trans-provincial. But really, really interesting.

And I saw on the HitchWiki 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 50s or 60s, where they essentially nationalized it by, I think they passed some regulations saying you basically have to stop

if you see a hitchhiker. You, private citizen, have to pick up hitchhikers. Yeah. But 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, handed 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 sounded like an interesting experiment. There's two lotteries then. There's the lottery of if you have a serial killer that you've picked up, and then there's the second lottery. I did forget one thing about Cuba that I thought was interesting.

They call it ir con la botella, which means going with a bottle. That's what they call it Ir con la botella, which means going with a bottle. That's what they call it there because apparently they think when you stick your thumb up like that, it's resembling you holding something and taking a drink. Awesome. Yeah. And then speaking of today also, like you said, there's a lot of sites that 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 it's less environmentally impactful and not drive yourself, but to hitch instead combined with that transactional nature of our society and now we have ride share apps. It's essentially the same thing except you're paying somebody to come get you

rather than standing out there relying on someone else's goodwill. Well, there are also hitchhiking apps that are essentially ride share apps that you don't pay for. And I think it's just a way of connecting the hitchhiker culture to potentially a 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 wanna ride in the carpool but are driving to work by themselves, there's these predetermined 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. Had an extra, it was, you know, classic herb. So I would strongly recommend people read up having to take her to the game and all. That's great. So I would strongly recommend people read that 1966 Sports Illustrated article by Janet Graham. It's called Rule of Thumb for the Open Road. And there's another one from the London Review of Books by Mike Jay 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 Chuck said 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 Brooke is great because this is from Brooke. Okay. You like how I did that? Hey guys, my name is great. Because this is from Brooke. Okay.

You like how I did that? Hey guys, my name is Brooke. I love listening to your show. Now in the latest episode, Peanuts Part 2, 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 1957 strip of peanuts.

Brooke, I don't like this email. I don't want to know this Minnesotans are especially obsessed with peanuts and Snoopy Minnesota has over 500 five-foot peanuts statues scattered across the state with more than 100 of them being in st 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 2008. 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 Linus statue in his yard. Cute.

Had no idea. Thanks so much for the show. I listened while I am trail skating 30 plus miles for marathon skate training. Wowie. Do you know that was a thing? No, I'm taking that to mean like rollerblading. I Guess or roller skates for whatever 30 something miles. I'll bet Brooke has extraordinarily strong thighs at this point I can't imagine, dude. Cabs 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 and side comments. I hope you have a great day. Thanks a lot, Brooke. That was a quintessential Minnesota nice sign off too, by the way. Thank you for that. Totally. Great email, and even though it contained information

I didn't really wanna hear, I still must have doffed my hat to you for that one Totally. Great email. And even though it contained information I didn't really want to hear, I still must doff my hat to you for that one. Doffed. If you want to be like Brooke and get in touch with us with some information we don't necessarily want to hear, we'd prefer you didn't do that. Otherwise, you can email us at stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, it's me Blippi and this is my best friend Mika. Hi, I'm Mika and this is our brand new podcast!

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