Judge takes pity on five railroad tramps

Nov. 4, 1907: “Five of the most superlatively hungry men in the State of California” appeared in court “charged with the crime of sleeping in a boxcar,” The Times reported.

“The men were so hungry that they gazed with envy at a little boy who happened to be in the courtroom at the time chewing sugared crackers,” the paper said.

“Their story,” The Times went on, “would have caused a bronze dog to weep bronze tears out of sympathy. They had tramped it from Bakersfield to Los Angeles and during that time got along with three loaves of bread, two cans of beans and a large slice of thornless cactus.”

Or at least they thought it was free of thorns.

The judge sentenced them to a night in jail and asked the jailer to feed them well before sending them out to search for work.

Then “the cactus spines were taken from the roof of one of the sufferer’s mouths by one of the police surgeons.”