… I’ve been layin’ in a hard rock jail, I thought you knowd I’ve been laid out ninety days Way down the road. The darned old judge, he said to me, It’s ninety days for vagrancy, And I’ve been doin’ some hard travelin’, Lord. —Woody Guthrie20 Ed Paulsen From 1926 on, when he was fourteen, he, himself, knocked around and about the states—“I rode the freights” across the land. “I always went back to my home in South Dakota. My sister and her husband had a little farm. It was a retreat. I played semi-pro baseball up there at one time. You know who I faced? Satchell Paige. He was pitching for Bismarck. I worked punching cattle, $10 a month. I was never satisfied to stay there. I was always taking a pop at L.A. or San Francisco. “Everybody talks of the Crash of ’29. In small towns out West, we didn’t know there was a Crash. What did the stock market mean to us? Not a dang thing. If you were in Cut Bank, Montana, who owned stock? The farmer was a ping-pong ball in a very tough game.
