When Joseph Szalanski’s father hopped on a train passing through East Vandergrift on July 31, 1932, he intended to do more than ride the rails.

Like many young men during the Great Depression, the 22-year old was out of work. A Polish immigrant, he was determined to see every state in the nation.

He may also have planned to write a book. He tracked his experiences as a hobo — which, in less than five months, covered nearly 14,000 miles and took him to all 48 states — in his journals.

“He recorded every day what he did,” Szalanski said. “I think he kept them to write something later.”

But Szalanski’s father didn’t. He got a job at U.S. Steel’s Irvin Works plant in West Mifflin, and was killed in an industrial accident in 1940, only two months after his son was born.

Seven decades later, Szalanski turned his father’s journals into a book.

“Boarding the Westbound: Journey of a Depression-Era Hobo” was published last year by Word Association Publishers in Tarentum.

It chronicles Joseph F. Szalanski’s journey, hobo life, the immigrant experience and local history.

The book is rich with pictures from archives and Szalanski’s family albums, and includes a glossary of hobo lingo and excerpts from the journals.

Like the book’s subject, “Boarding the Westbound” has gotten around. The Route 66 Museum in Barstow, Calif., and the Hobo Museum in Britt, Iowa, carry the book, as do the Pennsylvania Railroad Museum in Altoona and the Rivers of Steel Museum in Pittsburgh. Locally, it’s available at the Pittsburgh Mills Borders and at Reads, Ink Bookshop in Vandergrift.

Reads, Ink owner Tina Mendocino said her store has sold out of the book several times.

Readers “seem to be interested in it for a variety of reasons,” she said, “the local history, and hobo culture, and also because it’s very well written.”

Szalanski said he didn’t set out with the intention of getting closer to his father, but in the end he did.

“I ended up liking what I saw,” he said. “His attitude was good and he was good to people.”

While Szalanski grew up surrounded by stories from the Italian side of the family — his maternal grandmother and great-uncle — his father’s story was never far away.

His mother, Louise DeMichele Szalanski, kept his dad’s journals all her life. When she died in 2002, Szalanski turned to them for inspiration.

“It didn’t take long once I got started,” he said, flipping through one of the two small, well-worn journals.

Szalanski’s father sent one journal home in the mail. He was carrying the other with him when he got off the train in East Vandergrift on December 8, 1932, and walked a block home, his hobo days done. His destiny, perhaps, unfulfilled.

Until his son inherited his journals.

“I wanted to finish what he couldn’t,” Szalanski said.

Joseph Szalanski

Hometown: Vandergrift

Age: 71

Family: Aunts, uncles, cousins.

Favorite thing about the Valley: “These are my roots and these are the people I have a history with — these are all my best friends and my family.”

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