RICH HILL. Mo. - To sit in August "Hoot" Gibson’s kitchen and hear him rattle off his story about clubbing skunks for bounty, you’d swear he was a country boy several generations deep.

Think again.

This wisecracking 79-vear-old man with a flat-top haircut, who stands barely 5 feet tall in his high-top Converse All-Stars, was born in Brooklyn. N.Y.

From ago 3 to 9. he lived in an orphanage in the crowded borough of America's largest city. Then he was loaded on an "orphan train" and brought to the Midwest. That ride in December 1923 took him from being a 9-year-old Brooklyn kid nicknamed Hoot to a Kansas farm boy named Lamar.

The farm couple who claimed him off a church stage in McPherson, Kan.. gave him their dead son’s name.

Hoot quickly decided he needed to get back to Brooklyn. He swore the first chance he got he would ditch that farm and race back to his friends and the orphanage that had been the only home he could ever remember.

217 Sterling Place

Remembering the address was a 9-year-old boy's trail of bread crumbs leading home. That was in 1923, He's never forgotten about 217 Sterling Place.

But Gibson never made it back to Brooklyn. His ride on the orphan train that cold December more than 70 years ago turned out to be not so much a displacement as a correction. In a way, it brought him home.

"I think that train put me where I was supposed to be all along," Gibson said.

Young Hoot figured out that milking cows and feeding chickens wasn't all that bad. He grew to like the hills, woods, and streams. He learned to hunt and he built his own boats for fishing in the river.

Later, he went off to war and when the fighting was over, he brought the bride he'd met at a USO dance back to the Midwest instead of to Brooklyn.

Sometimes, though, he remembers. Every now and then a smell or sound will take him back to his boyhood days in 1920s Brooklyn.

Sleeping in a room with 24 other boys. Streets filled with thousands of people all in a rush. Immigrant peddlers with their pushcarts. Early car horns. The clang of the subway and the clamor from the nearby Brooklyn Naval Yard. Public School No. 9, across the street from the orphanage.

"When I wanted to go back, I was just a boy and couldn't get there," Gibson said. "Later, when I could go, I guess I didn't want to anymore. I figured I was better off where I was." "But for a long time, I wondered what happened to all the other boys."

"It's been so long though now, that, if I would ever find myself in New York first thing I'd do is look for the quickest way out."

Train heads ‘out West'

Gibson remembers the little girl who sang "California, Here I come" on the train all the way from New York. She didn't know the train was going to Kansas. All she knew was that they were going "Out West" and to her that meant California.

It was December 1923. The Children’s Aid Society was running another orphan train to the Midwest. The organization had started the trains in 1854 to take New York's homeless children to the Midwest where they might have a better chance at a good life.

Charles Loring Brace, a young clergyman. started the trains after finding that thousands of children were roaming the streets begging and stealing, and sleeping in doorways and alleys.

The book Searching for home says that most were the children of immigrant parents, who had died, and the others were simply lost or abandoned.

Handbills were posted in towns along the orphan train's route, which ran mainly through the farm country of Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska. Anyone who wanted a child, who had "been thrown friendless upon the world", went to meet the train..

Sometimes children were given to takers right along the railroad tracks during a brief stop in a small town.

When young Hoot Gibson was loaded aboard in 1923, more than 100,000 children had been taken out West on the orphan trains. By then, the children came from orphanages rather than the streets.

The strategy of the Children’s Aid Society was based on the belief that "there is always room for one more at a farmer’s table" and "that a child's ability to do chores should be worth an upbringing."

So sometimes with nothing more than a suit and a name tag each, thousands of children were boarded onto trains and taken West to the farms and small towns. The trains were funded by public donations, and the railroad allowed discount rates.

Each family who volunteered to take children agreed to feed and clothe them and make sure they attended school.

Sometimes the children were adopted; others, such as Gibson, were not.

The orphan trains ended in 1929 after more than 150,000 New York children were shipped West.

Gibson doesn't know what happened to his parents. He just knows that when he was 3 years old, he and his sister, Anne, were taken to the orphanage. Maybe there was another sister, too. He doesn't know for sure.

When his orphan train rolled into McPherson, Kan., the wind was blowing raw and the ground was snow white. "This isn't California'" protested the little girl who had been singing.

The children were taken to a church and ushered onto a stage. A farm couple from Fontana, Kan., claimed Hoot. Their son, Lamar, had been killed a few years earlier in World War I. They gave him their dead son's name and immediately put him to work on their farm.

Hoot was glad a year later when he was sent to live with another farm family west of Rich Hill, Mo. They gave him another new name. For the next eight years he was Lester Summers.

 He walked to a one-room school and rode to town in a buggy. After high school graduation, he jumped freight trains. He remembers droughts and dust storms of the Great Depression.

"I was 21 before I saw a $20 bill," he said.

At the start of World War II, an inch too short for the Navy, he tried to enlist in the Army. Lester Summers was not his real name, he was told. Then he remembered. He was August A. Gibson.

He fought In the South Pacific and lost most of his hearing in a bombing attack.

After the war, Gibson and his bride - they had done their courting on a streetcar in Atlanta --after meeting at a USO dance --settled in Rich Hill and Gibson became a rural route mail carrier.

Now retired, he's an afternoon regular in the coffee shop. When he drives through Rich Hill, a town of 1,400 or so about an hour’s drive south of Kansas City, he waves to friends from the window of his old 1968 Ford pickup.

He and Maelynn will celebrate 50 years of marriage this year. "We might never have met if he didn’t ride the orphan train," Maelynn said the other day on the couple’s front porch. "I think it was a good ride for both of us."

Gibson's sister, Anne didn’t make the trip on the orphan train. He found her years later, but then eventually lost touch again and now he thinks she's dead.

"Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I'd stayed in New York," Gibson said "it’s almost scary because I think I’ve had a pretty good life."

Now, with springtime here, his fishing fever is up. "But I'm going to let it warm up some more," the old country boy said. "I like it warm when I fish so I can go barefooted."