Remembering Sissy Hankshaw of hitchhiking fame in the National Hitchhiking Month of July

One of the premiere hitchhikers of the world, Sissy Hankshaw was immortalized in a gut-busting book called “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” by author Tom Robbins.

As Robbins tells the story, Sissy wasn’t a normal girl from the start. She had what he called “sugar-sack” thumbs. Supposedly they stood out like huge monstrosities and glowed in the dark, giving off an eerie glow much like the kind from a t-shirt under a strobe light in a disco joint.

Her mother decided early on that something had to be done with Sissy and took her to a fortuneteller who told her she must never marry or have offspring.

Sissy soon hitchhiked for the first time. All she had to do was stick out one of those magic thumbs and the cars would stop for her, brakes screeching and squalling as they did. Everyone drove her at breakneck speed toward her destination.

Mostly men would pick her up. Most would try to molest her. But it never happened. Sissy stayed a virgin until she was 29 years old and married a degenerate but educated man. He took her off the road, sent her to see a psychiatrist who somehow made her think her thumbs were ugly enough that she had one of them surgically removed and generally caused the demise of a fresh, wholesome girl.

But before that happened, Sissy would zip back and forth around the country in times only airplanes could beat. Some of the experiences Robbins reports this girl having are enough to make your hair stand on end. No ordinary girl could make it through ordeals like Sissy faced on the road and keep herself together.

Usually, Sissy never had a destination when she took off on her cross-country runs. No, the important thing with her was how swiftly she could go from coast to coast or from somewhere to somewhere else. It was speed and endurance that counted.

To some people it might not make any sense. But it did to Sissy. She had been blessed with two unique thumbs that enabled her to be the best hitchhiker in the world. Just as Picasso, Einstein, Shakespeare and all the other great geniuses of the ages used their talents and abilities they had been given, so Sissy used her God-given abilities to be the world’s best hitchhiker.

Of course, it didn’t pay well.

I went on my own hitchhiking trip across the country in the late 1970s.

Besides her extraordinary thumbs, Sissy had also been blessed with a beautiful body. Her tall model’s figure was in demand by a cosmetic company man in New York who had her model his line—always without her thumbs showing. Her hands not being shown became a topic of cocktail party conversations when intelligent discussion was often difficult to sustain.

When she was in need of some work and when he was in need of her modeling services, she’d check into some pre-arranged little town at the General Delivery window for his message for her to come to work.

One job called for her to travel to the Dakotas to entice the Great Whooping cranes to stop at the “Rubber Rose Ranch,” an all-girl ranch sponsored by the cosmetic giant that Sissy worked for, where she was going to be filmed with the cranes for the commercial.

As you can see, Sissy got around quite a bit and was into a lot of things. But it gets worse. When the cranes disappeared, the government came into the picture and a large whooping crane hunt ensued.

With Sissy married about that time and the action out west, she hitchhiked back and forth between the Dakotas and New York, spending an increasing amount of time at the Rubber Rose Ranch where she finally met the Clockwork Man who lived above the hills.

Students and young people from miles around thought the old man was a guru of some kind who had the answer to life’s riddles. They came to see him from time to time. He never allowed them to come near him and made obscene gestures and waved things at them as they approached.

Sissy got acquainted with him and found out he was a much different man than he was thought to be. When she hitchhiked back to New York again, she underwent analysis and told her psychiatrist about the man. The psychiatrist knew Sissy wasn’t crazy and believed the man might have the answers to life, quit his post at the hospital and went in search of the guru.

Marriage wasn’t working out too well for Sissy, and she headed for her old home in the South. In Richmond, Va., she found someone to amputate her other sugar-sack thumb. It made her unhappy, and her hitchhiking life seemed to be over.

You’ll have to read the book for the rest of the story and for all the little details. But Sissy Hankshaw with the sugar-sack thumbs ranks right up there with all the other geniuses of the world and I wanted to recognize her in the National Hitchhiking Month of July.