About 150 vagrants gathered in Britt, Iowa, last weekend to commemorate the special hobos of America’s past. The small Iowa town hosts this event annually, offering carnival rides and traditional hobo meals for the 20,000 tourists to enjoy. However, this year showed a huge decrease in attendance at the Hobo Convention, due in part to the country’s current burgeoning economy.

      Patches McPheeny, a disgruntled hobo, lamented, “There didn’t use to be enough work to go around. Those were the days. Now everybody’s gots jobs and  lives in houses. The trains is lonely now, too.”

	Above: Patches in the "good ole' days" when everybody, not just hobos, looked like this.

      Patches then turned a bottle of Strawberry Hill upside down and vomited on himself.

     Tattied Sammy, his weathered face painted to look like a sad clown also commented, “Little kids used to come up to this festival and give me little treats and hugs. Then after the festival was over, they’d cry when they see me sleeping on the streets.  Now even the kids who come to the festival cry. Maybe it’s because I try to stab ‘em.”

     The friendly Iowa community initially welcomed Patches and the Hobo Convention with open arms, however, once they caught a whiff of the delegates’ horrible stench, they quickly closed their arms and walked away.