Boy, look at that poor family. 27 years later, and you'd swear they were looking at a door they expected Adam to walk through any second.
When I took the bus to Calgary last week I was struggling to find a word for the people I always meet at the Greyhound station—undernourished working people with stringy hair and poor dentition who have lived in many places and find themselves doing different jobs that require steel-toed boots every couple of years (which invariably emerges quite early on in conversation). Reading the Adam Walsh wire story was like having a finger jabbed into my chest. That's right, isn't it?—they're the "drifters" you always read about in crime stories!
Reporters use the word like it was some obscure occupational classification—as if "drifter" were a specific, indisputable role in life that you could decide to occupy when you were 18. And, of course, it's never used except in stories about murderers, but there must be lots of drifters who have never killed anyone. Here's a headline you will never see: "HEROIC DRIFTER SAVES FIVE FROM FLAMING BUS".
Comments (8)
More passerby heroics.
Posted by Crid [cridcridatgmail] | December 16, 2008 8:50 PM
Posted on December 16, 2008 20:50
While I agree that you'll be hard pressed to read of the heroics of a drifter on the front page, Heinlein did include the attempts of a hobo to rescue a young lady (along with her husband) from a train. He died in the attempt, and Heinlein used this event to highlight true selflessness.
I can't find it online (where I first came across it), which means it could be falsely attributed to him, or he could have made it up.
That's all I've got.
Posted by Half Canadian | December 17, 2008 2:56 PM
Posted on December 17, 2008 14:56
This guy confessed repeatedly to killing Adam Walsh - the police dismissed it because he claimed to have killed just about everybody, and there is and was zero evidence to connect him to the crime.
What changed?
Posted by nitus | December 17, 2008 11:11 PM
Posted on December 17, 2008 23:11
The cops were pretty clear that nothing had changed, they had just reviewed the file and found that Toole was the last man standing. They had a bloodstained carpet from Toole's car at one point but it went missing before the advent of affordable DNA testing.
Posted by Colby Cosh | December 17, 2008 11:35 PM
Posted on December 17, 2008 23:35
And especially they had the testimony of his niece from his deathbed.
"Psst, niece - btw, I killed Adam Walsh."
Case closed!
Posted by nitus | December 18, 2008 2:31 AM
Posted on December 18, 2008 02:31
The Littlest Hobo = heroic drifter
Posted by phil | December 18, 2008 6:41 AM
Posted on December 18, 2008 06:41
HalfCanadian:
The Heinlein anecdote comes from (IIRC) a speech to the graduating class of the US Naval Academy, probably in the late 'eighties or so. In any event, you didn't imagine it (or if you did, we are suffering from the same delusion). As I recall, the couple were caught on the tracks with a train bearing down on them.
Posted by dcardno | December 18, 2008 9:48 AM
Posted on December 18, 2008 09:48
Thanks dcardno. Found it:
http://physicsgeek.mu.nu/archives/034542.php
Posted by Half Canadian | December 18, 2008 11:03 AM
Posted on December 18, 2008 11:03