If I failed to receive the customary presents of childhood, I received almost by accident certain others that provided wondrous compensation. One bleak Christmas a gentle-hearted woman who barely knew me summoned me to her home to give me the only present she could afford, a slim cardboard box with a flap lid containing a sheaf of used carbon paper. She showed me how to use this magical stuff, and I spent all that Christmas enraptured with the idea that a person could write a sentence and have it duplicated endlessly. That seemed so amazing that I am still delighted when I open one of those slim boxes with flap tops and see the glistening black carbon with which I can do so much good or so much damage.
At a surprisingly early age I received another present whose value was incalculable. Two delightful, soft-spoken sisters, the Misses Price, opened a small library in our town, and it is a matter of record that the two children who first applied for cards were Margaret Mead and me. We used to meet occasionally as we came in to take out our next armful of books, and I remember the elder Miss Price saying one day: ‘Goodness, Margaret and James, I believe you’ve read all the children’s books we have. If you wish, you can start on the other shelves,’ and in that way both Margaret and I were reading advanced adult books before we were eleven. No bicycle, but all the great books of the world! What an uneven exchange, what a benefaction to a boy with no money!
The second unexpected gift came somewhat indirectly. A slick salesman in Detroit, where my aunt Laura taught school, conned her into buying a complete bound set of Balzac’s novels in translation. I suppose she had been assured that reading them would make her a cultured woman and possibly enhance her chances for a promotion in the Detroit school system. If that was the pitch, it worked, because she rather quickly became principal of a school. But to me the important part of the story was that she boxed up the forty-odd handsome volumes and shipped them to our house, so that before I was twelve I had read Le Père Goriot, La Cousine Bette and all the novels involving Rastignac, whose journey from the provinces to Paris set me to imagining an American Rastignac, me, hiking off to New York. No skates or bicycle but the complete La Comédie Humaine! The Muse Thalia herself must have arranged that exchange.
Since my mother worked so unceasingly, it was natural that I would want to help, and at the age of nine I took my first odd job. Those were the days when chestnut trees flourished in America before the remorseless blight killed them all, and as children we knew where in the woods all those beautiful trees were. They were tall and branchy and laden with those prickly golden burrs inside which lay the kernels of sweet, nutty goodness. We used clubs to knock them out of the trees. I gathered them to peddle through the neighborhood, and these chestnuts were so rich and mealy when boiled that I had no trouble selling them. Almost every household to which I went was so eager to buy that during the season I made a substantial and steady amount of money.
My first regular job came at what must have been age eleven. I rose at six each summer morning, walked the two miles out to the Burpee Seed Farm west of town and labored—and I do mean labored—from seven in the morning till five in the afternoon, six days a week, for seven and a half cents an hour in the hot sun cultivating phlox, a miserable flower of varied colors whose seeds were apparently sought after by amateur gardeners. I have sown phlox, thinned phlox, hoed phlox, gathered phlox and heavens knows what else, and if my birthday were tomorrow and someone were to give me a bouquet of the horrid flowers, I would punch him in the nose. Ten hours a day times the meager pay made seventy-five cents a day times six days a week yielded the very real sum of $4.50 a week, and since we worked at our phlox some fourteen weeks, it can be seen that I earned a real salary—$63.00—all of which I gave to my mother, who was generous in giving back small sums for things I needed.
At a very early age I was apprenticed to a plumber who kept his gloomy shop in the cellar of Barrett’s Hardware. I worked there for real wages all one summer, and it began to look as if I might quit school and become a plumber, because I showed aptitude for the work. I was especially good at using a long-handled wrench to bend water pipe to the needed angle, but the thing I remember most about the job was that our noon break for a paper-bag lunch ended when the one-o’clock trolley car to Philadelphia came down the hill past our workshop, and I can still rattle off the schedule of that trolley which ran at thirty-six-minute intervals starting before dawn and ending at one in the morning: 1:00, 1:36, 2:12, 2:48, 3:24, 4:00. It seemed quite wonderful to me that after five trolleys had passed, the sequence of minutes repeated, and any one of the numbers remains a very real thing to me. It was the 8:12 and could be nothing else.
My apprenticeship to the plumber ended dramatically. When Uncle Arthur came home for one of his regular visits and learned that I might quit school in favor of plumbing, he put his massive foot down and insisted that I quit the job instantly: ‘James, you were not intended to be a plumber.’ That was all he said, but he said it repeatedly, the last time with tears in his eyes. In later years when plumbers were doing exceptionally well and as an underpaid teacher I wasn’t, I often wished that he had left things alone.
I have only the warmest memories of being a paper carrier. From the seventh grade through the twelfth, I rose at four, had a quick breakfast and hurried down to the newspaper stand run by Kenneth Rufe to which he brought in his small truck the Philadelphia morning papers that had been delivered to the Reading railroad station at the southern end of town. The five of us boys would sort the papers into the proper piles, jam them into the canvas shoulder bags he provided, and go through the sleeping town to place them on the front doorsteps so they would be available to the citizens at breakfast. Since at one time or another I served each of the five routes, I came to know the occupants of every house in town—yes, every family name in every house—and I can still remember the residents of certain entire streets that I had served the longest. My paper routes gave me an insight into the complexity of life in a small town that not many boys acquired: I knew who had committed suicide; who had eloped; whose business was in trouble; where the mortgage was about to be foreclosed; and where the attractive girls lived, but that last was inconsequential because I considered all girls attractive.
In those years Philadelphia had six outstanding newspapers, five in the morning and the great Philadelphia Bulletin in the evening. I lived with those papers, and still remember the keen joy I found in the musical criticism of Samuel Laciar in the Ledger; in fact, I rather fancied myself as a typical reader of the Ledger, which was favored by bankers and judges, and would have been appalled had anyone predicted that when I grew up I would prefer the Record, that radical rag whose editors seemed always to be in trouble.
On Saturdays, I worked for Nick Power, the charismatic manager of our local Strand Theater, delivering handbills advertising forthcoming motion picture attractions, and I remember with warmest affection lounging in the upstairs office when work was done and reading the lurid promotional material that arrived two weeks before the films themselves came up on the train. It was then that I gained my first insights into the motion picture industry in which I would in later years participate substantially, and I judged it then and forever after from the exhibitor’s point of view. I sympathized with one distraught theater owner who’d had bad luck with a chain of historical dramas that no one really wished to see. In despair he wrote to his central distributor: ‘Don’t send me no more of them pitchers where the hero writes with a feather.’
I did not get paid for distributing the handbills; instead I was allowed to see movies free, and it was from that beginning that I acquired my passionate devotion to them. My knowledge of movies at times has been almost encyclopedic, but what I remember most fondly were the improbable Saturday afternoon serials. I discovered that the secret of a good serial was to present in the first of the fifteen episodes a hero so gallant, a heroine so vulnerable and a villain so dastardly that the children would keep coming back through the next fourteen episodes to see how the good characters sur
vived and I recall most vividly one opening episode that demonstrated the formula for drama.
The director, wanting us to understand that the black-suited villain was really a villain, showed him performing three vicious acts: he kicked his dog, he struck his mother, and looking for a piece of paper on which to write a ransom note, he tore a page out of the Bible. Oftentimes the writer, also, cannot anticipate which of his signals is going to be picked up by the reader, and while three such deplorable acts may seem excessive, sometimes a little repetition is justified to assist those who are a bit slow to catch on.
The other day I recalled with extraordinary clarity a sermon that I must have heard when I was nine or ten, because I was old enough to understand and savor every word in the text on which the sermon was based. On a wintry day I was the only child who accompanied my mother to the Presbyterian church—which we attended because Doyleston at that time had no meeting that we could go to as Quakers—when the Reverend Steckel was giving either a pre- or post-Christmas homily. He began in an unusual way, not by reading the text from the Bible but with a short preamble: ‘We’ve had a tragic death in our Congregation, a young boy cut down in the morning of his life, and I do not want this grievous incident to pass unnoticed or to have its meaning lost as we resume our holidays. I am therefore taking my text from the very end of the Christmas story as told by Saint Luke, Chapter 2, Verse 19,’ and with a consoling voice I can still hear, he read: ‘But Mary kept these things, and pondered them in her heart.’
He then proceeded to say how the birth of Jesus had been of the greatest significance to Joseph, and the shepherds, and the three kings from the Orient, and especially to King Herod, who was so afraid of what the child might signify that he would order him slain, but Jesus was of special concern to Mary, who said nothing but who listened to all the rumors about what might happen to her child and kept them to herself. Steckel said that the women of Doylestown were like Mary. They wondered constantly about what might happen to their sons, but kept their secrets and their fears and their hopes to themselves: ‘Like Mary, they pondered these things in their hearts.’
He said a good deal more that sad morning, and I cannot now recall how he developed his main points, but his message seemed to have been composed for me alone. It was a revelation of the relationship between mothers and sons and a challenge to me personally to make something of myself in order to put my mother’s fears at ease. It was probably the most meaningful sermon I would ever hear.
My next job was one that put to the test the resolutions I made at the conclusion of Reverend Steckel’s sermon. It was an experience straight out of Charles Dickens. In our town there was a lawyer who represented the trolley-car company whose one o’clock special had summoned me back to work in the plumbing shop. Someone had told him that I was a good worker and the son of a worthy widow, so he asked me if I would like to have a job at the company’s famous entertainment park, Willow Grove. In those years, throughout the nation, many traction companies, as they were called, purchased large acreages some distance from the center of their city and built amusement parks featuring wild rides, carousels and hot-dog stands. The main purpose, obviously, was to lure city dwellers to spend the fare out to the park and back, but Willow Grove was special in that it provided not only cheap rides and food but also four free concerts a day in a fine bandstand by a lake. To the podium came the great names of American popular music at the time: the suave Victor Herbert, the bumptious Giuseppe Creatore and the imperial John Philip Sousa, plus classical musicians of high merit like Wassili Leps, who appeared between the popular heroes to play Beethoven, Johann Strauss and Lehár.
Elsewhere I have told of my adventures in this scintillating arena and of my youthful friendship with Herbert, Sousa and the musicians from the Philadelphia Orchestra who played there to pick up summer income. My concern now is with finances. My introduction to the underworld structure of this great amusement park, thought by many to be the finest and best run in America, was an eye-opening experience for a boy of fourteen, which is what I was when I reported for work as a cashier for one of the rides.
The system was simple. Park management paid mature men who specialized in the work fifteen dollars a week to serve as cashiers on amusements that took in thousands of dollars a day with the implicit understanding that these men would be permitted to steal as much as possible from the unsuspecting public. If a woman put down a two-dollar bill, then in heavy circulation, the cashier quickly handed her change for one and rushed her along before she realized what had happened. A skilled cashier at a busy ride could pick up forty or fifty dollars a day in what was known as ‘honest stealing’—that is, from the public—and a good deal more in ‘dishonest stealing’ from the company. The really fine cashiers, those upon whom the park depended, stole only from the public. What the other more unscrupulous cashiers did was appalling. They resold tickets supplied them furtively by the men who collected them; they finagled the receipts from the turnstiles; they charged double and treble what they were supposed to and pocketed the difference; and in ways that only the most ingenious thieves could invent, they stole from everybody. For those rewarding and criminal opportunities, mature men would ride miles each day for an official salary of $2.14 and go home at night with as much as a hundred dollars.
I was afraid to steal from the company, but by the end of my first summer I was one of the more adept shortchange artists, so skillful that I felt confident of taking something from one person in four who bought tickets from me. But during my second year, when I was fifteen, I had a midnight experience that led to making me more cautious in my business dealings. As I was leaving the park a man loomed out of the shadows—one of the ticket takers at the ride I was then serving. He had in his hand a wad of the numbered tickets I had sold that day and he had collected, and his proposition was simple: ‘You substitute one of these from time to time tomorrow, and the numbers won’t show on the amount you have to account for. At the end of the day you’ll have a nice surplus, and we’ll split, fifty-fifty.’ The tickets he slipped me represented sales of close to fifty dollars, and if the plan worked, we’d each get twenty-five. The next day the plan did work, and that midnight we split the take.
But about this time the park, in order to keep what it recognized as considerable theft under control, arrested one of the men who stole the most blatantly, and the resulting publicity scared the other cashiers. When I asked why this had not been done before, one of the old-timers explained: ‘No park can tolerate bad publicity. If they had a lot of such arrests and it got into the paper, people might stop coming and they’d lose a lot more than they lose to us. We have a free ride if we don’t get greedy. Max got greedy and they had to stop him.’
There were no more substitutions of used tickets at midnight, and when my supplier asked why, I said I was scared, and I was so young that he did not try to change my mind. Then an amazing thing happened whose import I did not understand at the time: one morning I was asked to go to the office where we got our tickets and our bag of money for change, and a gray-haired man asked me if I would like to be a relief cashier: ‘You wouldn’t have any specific booth, you’d serve wherever a man was absent that day and take over any of the spots when the regular cashier needed time off for supper.’ When I said that this sounded great, he added: ‘And we’d want you to let us know about any suspicious situations, where men are selling tickets twice or fiddling with the turnstiles.’ In this bizarre manner I became a kind of private detective.
Why had I been offered the job? From time to time the head office painstakingly checked the proper serial number of the ticket that opened that day’s sale for a given ride or stand, then riffled through the tickets presumably sold during the day to see if any old ones were being substituted. They had spotted the fact that I had for some days been selling old tickets—not so many as to be a serious offense—and that I had definitely stopped after the arrest of the other cashier. I was, indeed, precisely the kind of young man they want
ed, one who had been through the mill, knew the tricks and had, of his own volition, turned honest.
The famous old war-horses among the cashiers, the ones given the big rides where the flow of money could be tremendous, ate from paper bags and did not leave their booths for supper because they did not want to risk anyone’s fouling their system, so I never got to see their operation. But one day one of the very biggest rides had no cashier; he was in the hospital with an ulcer of some kind, and I was given his booth. Just before noon break when I counted up the money I had and compared it with the number on the turnstile counter telling me how much I should have, I found myself with an overage of more than a hundred dollars, which meant that something was terribly wrong, so I followed the strategy of the old-timers and did not leave my booth for my evening meal, and by ten o’clock that night, at the height of the busy period, I had accumulated a small fortune.
Then I figured what had happened. A turnstile consists of a vertical pole to which are attached at the top six metal arms so spaced in a circle; that only one customer at a time, having paid his fare, can squeeze through. Invisible to the customer and at the bottom of the revolving pole, is a small wheel containing six projections or cogs. As the arm above rotates, indicating that the customer has paid his fifteen cents, one of the moving cogs activates a counting device that registers that payment. At the close of day the cashier notes the number on the counting device, subtracts from it the number at the start of day, multiplies the difference by fifteen cents and that’s what he gives the company. Anything over belongs to him, but anything under he must pay out of his own pocket. His task is to see that there is always an overage.
The World Is My Home: A Memoir Page 59
