Harold Segal left Roxbury for Palestine in 1939 and ended up in Los Angeles.
He was 20 at the time, a restless young man who decided to help his fellow Jews under threat from Arabs.
So early one spring morning, Segal left $5 for his mother, the amount he gave her each week out of his $15 salary, and crept out of the house. He left with a small bag of clothes and the remaining $10.
He hitched a ride to Manhattan only to find that the seaman's papers he needed to reach Palestine would take a month to process. So he changed gears and aimed West.
Segal tells me this at the Callahan Senior Center in Framingham, where he volunteers at the front desk every Wednesday from noon to 4. He's 89 now. His body has been ravaged by a cascade of illnesses, but he's a prince of a man who writes like a dream and remembers things he has no right to remember.
Anyway, Segal hitchhiked to Pittsburgh, where he looked for a cell for the night in the city jail - always a good fit on a shoestring budget. An officer sent him to a suburban jail without rats. He slept in a locked cell and had breakfast there the next morning.
He went on to Chicago, where he stayed with relatives, and then lit out again. The goal was the Pacific, but he had no idea how to get there. It became increasingly hard to get rides in Missouri and Kansas - the traffic just wasn't there amid the seas of wheat. It was in Russell, Kansas, that a restaurant owner who gave him a meal in exchange for work told him his best bet was to ride freights. And that's what he did.
Segal, by the way, had a successful career in radio in these parts: He sold ads, managed a bunch of stations, bought and sold a couple, and was in the first crop elected last year to the Massachusetts Broadcasters Hall of Fame.
Back in Russell, a train dispatcher, of all people, taught him the rules of the rails: Look first for empty cars. If there aren't any, climb the ladder and hold on. There are catwalks on the roofs, but they can be dangerous.
Segal came back that evening and caught a freight. No empties, so he grabbed a ladder and held on for dear life, one foot resting near a coupler. He eventually made it up to the roof, where he remained for ages. He remembers freezing through the Rockies - he only had a light sweater with him - and he emerged from a long tunnel black from the cinders that blew back into his face.
Segal, you should know, enlisted in the Army right after Pearl Harbor and ended up an officer in a truck battalion that took him from North Africa to Sicily, Montecassino, and up around Genoa. He removes a frayed photo from his wallet of him and some GI pals in the Tuscan city of Pistoia.
Back in 1939, he wanted to visit an uncle in Salt Lake City, so he jumped a freight headed that way via Cheyenne, Wyo. Cheyenne was an eye-opener. He walked into a hotel that turned out to be a brothel. He worked in a Greek restaurant for a meal and 50 cents for a room and eventually hopped a train for Salt Lake.
Segal and his wife, Miriam, 87, have been married 61 years, by the way. "It's been a great, great marriage," he tells me.
In 1998, his son got him a computer. "I had just learned to run the toaster," says Segal, who went on to write a marvelous 60-page account of his trip.
Segal stayed with an uncle in Salt Lake, a huge brakeman appropriately known as "Tiny," who barked at his nephew never to ride the rails again. Segal did, but first unloaded luggage for tips at a bus terminal and washed windows at a Japanese restaurant for food. And he swam in the briny Great Salt Lake.
Outside Ogden, he discovered a "hobo jungle" in the woods. A dozen men were there, mirrors hanging from branches, a few cooking fires smoking. "They could tell you what time a freight was leaving Minneapolis for New Orleans, " he recalls.
Segal made it to Los Angeles, where he swam in the Pacific, and then turned around. Hitching home, he fell asleep on someone's lawn in Barstow and was rousted the next morning by the local sheriff, who gave him a cell for the night.
He reached Las Vegas, where the police chief, who hailed from Springfield, Mass., told him to get a room at the nearby Hoover Dam, where there was space in the bowels of the behemoth. He arrived and took an elevator down to the depths, where he was given a room, in his words, of "stygian darkness." He couldn't stand it and rode the elevator up to daylight. The next morning, he woke on the sidewalk along the dam, surrounded by tourists.
It was during this trip that Segal fell in love with the United States of America.
"People were so kind in those days of the Depression," he says. "I was picked up by Okies returning home from California. It was a large family, but they made room for me and gave me some sandwiches. They didn't have 50 cents to their name."
He hitched the rest of the way home. His parents wanted to come get him in Providence, but he said no - he wanted to come in on his own steam.
So he arrived in West Roxbury, three months after he left. He took a streetcar to Roxbury and walked to his front door. And that's what happened to Harold Segal in the summer of 1939.
Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com
