What Could be Better? Museum Awarded Grants for Hobo Symposium
Alex Hanson
"What Could Be Better? Hobo Festival Gets Grants", Valley News, 1 January, 2009, c-1.
Welcome to the New Year. Can it get any better than 2008? Or, more to the point, can it get any worse? The answer to both questions is “yes,” of course. At least one Upper Valley visual art institution is looking ahead to both the best and the worst of times.
With the sort of extraordinary prescience we've come to expect from the Main Street Museum, its chief curator, presiding officer, supreme leader and most humble enabler, David Fairbanks Ford, writes to say that the White River Junction museum has received a $2,000 grant from the Vermont Humanities Council for a planned Tramp and Hobo Symposium this spring.
“Combined with another equally generous grant (of $2,000) from the Byrne Foundation, these grants now make our dream of a Tramp and Hobo Symposium a reality,” Ford wrote.
The symposium is planned for May and will include slide lectures, a “Hobo Film Festival,” live music, publications, oral history and the museum's ongoing efforts to catalog and exhibit its growing collection of “hobo-iana” (my word, not Ford's, though he’s welcome to it).
Could a symposium on “hobos, wanderers, traveling musicians, lone-wolf visionaries and anyone else who rides around in empty freight cars” be more timely? Who knows how many of us might fit into one of those categories once May rolls around.
“We've been planning this for two years and what perfect (gosh darn) timing,” Ford said in a brief phone interview yesterday. Only he didn't say “gosh darn.” Ford said he noticed a steep increase in the number of hobos passing through White River Junction last year, most of them young people riding the rails.
The Hobo Film Festival is already a living entity that's making its own low-budget tour of the country. For a preview, check out www.myspace.com/hobofilmfest.
The $4,000 in grant money will allow the Main Street Museum to purchase projection and sound equipment to screen films, Ford said. Despite the economy, the museum is doing well, with both visitation and donation on the rise. “People are doing cheaper things and staying home,” Ford said.
