Joe Sanderson was an Illinois kid who wanted storybook adventure. Héctor Tobar’s ‘Last Great Road Bum’ finally writes his book.
Near the end of his review of the 2007 movie “Into the Wild,” the true story of a young man who escapes a predictable future to try his luck in the Alaskan bush, Roger Ebert mentioned a childhood friend. He was reminded of Joe Sanderson, who grew up a few doors away, in their quiet Urbana neighborhood. When they were young, Sanderson left to wander. He returned at times to see his parents, but mostly, he became a road bum, with no clear direction. Ebert wrote: “From a nice little house surrounded by evergreens at the other end of Washington Street, he left to look for something he needed to find.”
Like countless dreamers before him, Sanderson wanted to write the Great American Novel. His mother worked in a bank, his father was an ecologist at University of Illinois. Joe was a Boy Scout who supported Nixon, learned to shoot a rifle in the woods of central Illinois, earned his pilot’s license, painted flag poles for work and studied theology at Hanover College in Indiana. He could see the rest of his life from a million yards, and what he wanted was a continuous adventure, to gather material for a book.
So that’s what he did.
Sanderson lived his life romantically and impulsively, every stop only temporary. For most of the 1960s and 1970s, he traveled the world, to Jamaica and Japan, to India and the Congo; he talked his way into Vietnam (during the war) and visited the DMZ along North Korea. He hitched, sat in the back of trucks, hopped freighters across oceans and rode trains across continents. When he was shot to death in 1982 at 39, he was in El Salvador, fighting with students and peasants against the country’s U.S.-backed military.
