For six years, an elderly tramp toured the U.S., paying those who helped him with checks for sums of up to $900,000
On the evening of July 18, 1935, in an America still crushed in the coils of the Great Depression, an old man with a long white beard appeared on the front lawn of a farm off Route 1 in Metamora, Indiana.
It was late, nearly dusk, and when the farmer’s wife came out to ask what the man wanted, he begged her for a piece of bread. “He had a very kind face,” she wrote some days later,
and it has always been my custom to give to tramps if I have anything I can handy [sic] give. He was carrying a pack on his back so I told him to set it down on the lawn. I had a nice warm supper cooked so I served him on the lawn. He seemed to be very hungry. I gave him a second serving. When he finished he took from his pack two checks copied from brown paper, looked like they were cut from paper bags. He came forward and handed these to me with his plate.
According to this woman, “his face was so kind it is hard to believe he meant anything false.” But when she looked down at the paper checks, she saw that one had been written for $25,000, and the other for $1,000.
More than a year later, on October 23, 1936, the same old man wandered into a lunchroom on a highway outside Columbus, Texas. He told the waitress he had no money but asked her for a cup of coffee. Feeling sorry for him, she took him into the kitchen and fed him a bowl of stew and a jelly roll with his coffee. The old man ate his fill and, while the waitress was serving other customers, took another piece of paper from his pack, scribbled on it in indelible pencil, and slipped it beneath his coffee cup before taking up his pack and hurrying off into the night. The waitress returned to find that the slip of paper was a blank check for $27,000, written on the Irving National Bank of New York and signed “John S. Smith of Riga, Latvia, Europe.” On the back he had scribbled the words: “Fill your name in, send to bank.”
Tramps hoping to hitch a ride on the rails, c. 1907. Photo: Library of Congress.
Four days after that, John S. Smith was in Yuma, Arizona, where he left a check for $2,000 in exchange for a cup of coffee. Early in November, in Indianola, Mississippi, he handed another farmer’s wife two checks totaling $26,000. And in December, in Fort Worth, a young woman sitting in a parked car was approached by an elderly, bearded man who begged her for a nickel. She gave him a dime, prompting him to use her fender as a desk and write a check for $950. When the girl laughed and thanked him, he took the check back, tore it up, and wrote out another one for $26,000.”That’s for your sweet smile,” he said