Does anyone hitchhike anymore?

April 13, 2026

Dell Franklin behind the bar in the 90s

By DELL FRANKLIN

Editor’s Note: The following series, “Life in Radically Gentrifying Cayucos by the Sea,” to be posted biweekly includes the notes, thoughts, and opinions of an original American voice: author Dell Franklin. 

Franklin’s memoir, “The ballplayer’s Son” and “Life on The Mississippi, 1969” are currently on Amazon.

I wonder if a young person in today’s America, in such a volatile climate that exists, would set off from the west coast and head east by thumb with but a few bucks in his shoe and try and explore the country, seek jobs along the way, and live by his wits and instincts while at the mercy of the road.

I did this in early February of 1969, headed for New Orleans and Mardi Gras. I had no idea what would happen from day to day, hour to hour, knew only that I’d had the urge to hitchhike around America since I was a teenager.

At the time, I was wallowing in a vortex of failure and needed not only to escape my situation, but myself. I was demoralized and depressed. But, after my first ride, I felt released of all that had plagued me and experienced what I now call an “exhilarating recklessness.” A sense of ultimate freedom.

So, after 57 years, I finally settled down and, in writing a book about it, relived my time on the road as a hitchhiker and felt the experience so deeply and keenly that I was literally transported back to 1969. A time when our big city ghettos were being burned down and we were fighting a losing battle in Vietnam and young people and veterans were marching and protesting in the streets against the war.

I was warned so many times by so many people not to try and hitchhike, that it was dangerous, that I could be murdered, and especially in the deep South, where three civil rights workers had met their deaths by members of the KKK in Mississippi in 1964.

I slept in a ten-dollar-a-week dive in New Orleans and in a barn. I learned that America was small towns and funky two-pump gas stations, barmaids in honky-tonks and truck stops with dusty diners employing weary graveyard shift waitresses.

I met hookers, truckers, salesmen, runaways, a Vietnam deserter, returning combat vets from Vietnam so mentally fractured they ended up crying in my arms. I ate in a chicken shacks with the best friend chicken in the South, was employed as a bartender in a Jewish resort in New York’s Borscht Belt.

I road with a Catholic priest who did not want to talk me out of being an atheist, faced rednecks who berated me as a “hippie faggot” and threatened me with bodily harm and worse while alone on the road in the middle-of-nowhere. I was stopped by good cops and bad cops and in one riotously great week during Mardi Gras, I found the right bar and the right crowd and almost the right woman.

And then, broke in New Orleans, I found employment as storekeeper on the last riverboat at that time to carry passengers up and down the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, the Delta Queen.

But what I really discovered about America while on the road for so many months was the generosity and humanity of our people. Amid the ugliness of our politics and the wreckage of our cities and the hostility pervading the air, there was beauty everywhere.

For every dangerous situation, there were ten amazingly heart-warming ones. I had arguments with an angry pro-war hulk of a retired army drill sergeant who ended up pulling into a small town bar in Indiana and buying rounds of booze, making sure I was fed, and letting me know he “had my back.”

Why? Because we both played football. Why? Because on the road, as a hitchhiker, you learn how to talk to people and find the good in them.

On the Delta Queen, I was verbally accosted with great anger and passion by fellow Black male employees from different generations who resented not Dell Franklin, but his whiteness that allowed him to thumb across America and find the best job on the ship so easily when in reality most of these people worked at the lowliest jobs in America (deckhands, porters) and had to be thankful to have them. I ended up writing a book about this experience.

On the road, by thumb, you have to stop to see it. You have to stay to know it and feel it. I did, and wrote a book about it: “Hitchhiking, A Destiny.”

How could I remember all this, so long ago?

Well, how could I forget a man named Big Charley who drove me out of danger in Northern Michigan and allowed me to stay overnight at his suburban Detroit home after buying me lunch and dinner.

Big Charley, who had four kids and was 37 when WWII broke out, was told he was too old to fight in the Army, Marines, and Navy, so he joined the Seabees and spent two years in the South Pacific hacking through jungles and building airports while his wife worked in a munitions factory that once produced automobiles and had previously employed Charlie on the assembly line.

“My kids, they fended for themselves,” he explained. “We all wanted to contribute. Part of the deal.”

When he dropped me off at the border across from Canada the next morning, Charlie, a widower, told me, “Son, this country’s been good to me, and there’s still some good people left in it, and I’m one of them.”

That’s why I wrote this book; because I wonder these days if a young fool could thumb across America and meet somebody like Big Charley, and so many others who saved my ass, and expressed the true soul of America.