I’m 18 years old and a senior at Joel Barlow High School. I absolutely love your magazine! I couldn’t help but smile when I read “Flipping the Meat Train” in your February/March 2001 issue. I have always been fascinated with the hoboes of American history who hopped freight trains. This article was especially informative be cause it was written by someone who actually experienced this “terrible freedom.”

I would give it all back—e-mail, computers, cell phones, television, VCRs and DVD players, CDs, and cassette tapes—just to see America as it once was: a country of pride and freedom where SAT scores didn’t matter. If I could experience, just once, the thrill of riding in an open “side-door Pullman,” like the boys in the picture, I’d be the happiest girl in America. Forget the movie stars of today. Dale Wasserman and all the boxcarriding hoboes of yesterday are my idols. Thanks for such an amazing story.