Wow! Meet The Hobo Named “Apple Bob” Who They Named Bobbing For Apples After
Leominster, Massachusetts is best known as the birthplace of Johnny Appleseed, but old Johnny had nothing on Apple Bob, the city’s most beloved hobo. When a group of neighborhood children who had gone to catch pollywogs found Bob’s drowned body floating in the bog on the 4th of July, 1991, a city mourned and new tradition started.
There was talk of erecting a statue in his honor, or perhaps renaming the local high school Apple Bob High. Thinking of all the apples which had drifted out into the marsh water from the pockets of Bob’s big dirty coat, librarian Karen Bingham remembered a game that her mother would make her and her sisters play when they misbehaved as children. “My mom would put a bunch of apples in a bucket of water and make us catch them with our mouths. It frightened and upset me when I was little, but as a mother myself now, I see that it actually was kind of fun. You could say the same about Bob himself.”
Leominster City Council members loved the game, and in September of 1991, gave it an official name: Bobbing For Apples. Today, the game is an American tradition.
“Bob was a rascal, but truly one of a kind” recalls Karen, a fifteen-year employee of the library where Bob would go use the computers to look at pornography on Saturdays. “I’d always catch him. I think that was part of of the thrill to him, being chased out of the library with a broom. After he’d fled to the woods from which he emerged, I’d go back to the computer, and there was always a shiny apple waiting for me. It was his way of saying thank you. That’s just who Bob was.”
First appearing on a downtown bench in 1961, Bob fast became a fixture of the small New England city. “I tried to find out where he was from, what his last name was, but he’d always just tip his crumpled stovepipe hat and say he was only passing through” recalls says Jack Reardon, owner of La Bagel Cafe on Main St. “Then he’d flip open a switchblade, pull an apple from his coat, and peel it as he stared you right in the eyes. You don’t see hobos like that anymore.”
Reardon soon introduced an apple-flavored bagel at his store to celebrate Bob, but it tasted very bad and nobody bought it so he stopped making them. “I remember how happy he was when he found out that my name was Jack. We had this little thing we’d do as I passed by him on the way to my shop- I’d say ‘what’s on the menu today, Bob?’ and he’d reply ‘Apples, Jack!’, cackling with that jack-o’lantern grin of his. I think it made him laugh because applejack was his favorite drink. He made his own applejack out of apple juice and Listerine.”
A sadness passes over Jack’s face. “The only thing Bob loved more than eating apples and drinking mouthwash was swimming in that damn bog.”
Jack Reardon is still making bagels. “Bobbing For Apples is a tribute not only to Bob and his deep love of apples, but to the children who found his water-logged corpse that day. They’re the real heroes.” Reardon hands me a bagel. “See if you can guess the flavor.”
I take a bite. It’s Listerine.
