The Indianapolis times. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1922-1965, 1935-08-21
.Wander1uSt
Teaches Real
Lessons
Young Folk Who Travel
Hobo Trails May
Be Benefited.
BY DOROTHY DUNBAR BROMLEY
Times Special Writer


Times Special Writer
r DON'T doubt there are a good
il many high school and college
girls who'd like to join a Coney
Island side show and do vanish
ing act with mirrors. When the
shouting was over they might go
home with mamma just as readily
as Miss Anne Sibley of Chicago has.
But the experience would give them
topics for months to come.
There's a monotony to campus
life and a conventionality to home
life that make rooming with tat
tooed girl an experience not to be
missed. To most of us a circus or
anything ike it is as strange as life
on Mars and as alluring to the ad-
venturouS.
Another young woman from Chi
cago-there seems to be something
about the Windy City-topped off
her course in an Eastern finishing
school with a practical course IN
wild animal training. She comes
from a family that is socially prom
inent, as the newspapers say, but
she's put in a year toying with the
Barnum e. Bailey elephants and
tanning their ferocious beasts. Now
she's giving up her job to tame a
husband.
DepIOrers, Not Explorers
Such goings-on among the young
will set off the what-are-we COM
ing-to-now school of deplorers. Per-
sonally, I'm for the explorers. l
like to see them doing their stuff in
the sky and breaking into animal
cages and side shows and other pur-
lieus where their grandmothers
would not have gone on pain OF
death.
Their grandmothers, poor dearS.
and many of their mothers, weren't
educated either in book learning or
in life learning, and there we're vast
areas of human experience which
were as much of blank to them
as the North Pole.
1 never could see why girls as well
as boys shouldn't have itching feet.
Parents, it seems to me. would be
wise to encourage a girls lively
curiosity about the world and the
persons who go up and down in it.
Everything that she sees and hears
and experiences-if she has been
given standards and values-will
arm her to meet life without having
an attack of the vapors.
1 remember reading some few
years ago a piece by Ida Wylie in
which she told of the bringing up
her English father had given her.
At the age of IL she was pedaling
over the English countryside by her
self, sleeping at inns, and when she
was II she travelled Second-class to
Norway, making friends as she went
with the sailors but never being an
noyed by them.
Men Get the Breaks
Young girls who are wise and self
reliant, with money in their pockets,
can be trusted to travel by them
selves. But they take chances if
they go hoboing alone, certain ele-
ment of men being what they are.
The freedom to kick up their
heels anywhere at any time is some
thing I've always envied men, just
as I've envied them their numerous
pockets, without wanting my clothes
to look like theirs.
I shouldn't mind, for instance.
switching roles with the young man
from Syracuse University who
stepped down from a box car in
Oakland, Cal. the other day after
4O00-mile trek across the country.
He had notebook chock full OF
data on depression itinerants, and
he explained to the puzzled train
inspectors that he was gathering
material for a thesis.
There's something about explor-
ing the unknown, whether it's for
eign city or strange scenes in your
own country, that quickens your
pulse and makes living fully as ex-
citing as when you are in the
thrOeS of love.
A lust for the open road isn't q
bad kind of lust for young persons
to have. So it's to be hoped that
the youth hostels which have been
opened in. New England will be the
first link in a chain of hostels
through all our great national and
State parks.