by Guy Stern
My other afternoon outings, the quintessence of American leisure time activities, didn’t interest Idamae. An energetic, attractive brunette with decided individualistic opinions—she was interested in theater, appeared in several high school productions, and wasn’t enamored with baseball at all. But another neighborhood friend, Kurt Salomon, like me a recent arrival from Germany, had jointly with me foresworn our intense, even fanatical, attachment to German soccer in favor of baseball. We shared the incredibly useful intelligence that high school students could get so-called Knothole Passes, which entitled the bearer to free admission to the left field bleachers of Sportsman Park, home of both the Saint Louis Browns and the Cardinals. There I became acquainted with the intricacies of the squeeze play, batting averages, and a more robust American language than the parlance absorbed in my English classes. I remember one diminutive student from another high school whose booming voice belied his small stature. He greeted each opposing left fielder, when he took up his position, with the choice sobriquet of “moldy rectum,” this being a somewhat attenuated version of the actual quote. I also came to admire the powerful hitting of Joe “Ducky-Wucky” Medwick, of Johnny “The Big Cat” Mize, the fielding artistry of Terry Moore, and the spectacular pitching of the Browns’ Buck “Bobo” Newsom. In fact once, while hitchhiking to Sportsman Park from Soldan, I was picked up by the Browns’ all-star pitcher himself. He detected my accent, asked me quite a few personal questions and I gloried for years in my close, if only very brief, proximity to diamond greatness.
But another hitchhike acquaintance ended in an impasse that fills me even today with guilt and outrage. All this while I had vainly tried to find Jewish people in Saint Louis wealthy enough to provide credible affidavits for my family left behind in Germany. One afternoon, on my way to work at the Jefferson Hotel downtown, a man picked me up in a car that implied affluence. I steered our conversation first to myself, then to the plight of my family. “What’s involved in getting them over here?” he asked. “Someone with some means has to guarantee that they won’t become a public charge,” I told him, or words to that effect. “Well,” he answered, “I could do that.” I nearly hugged him even while he was speeding down Delmar Boulevard. But then he continued: “I’m not sure the government will accept my pledge.” He offered no further explanation. “Are you willing to try it?” I asked. “Sure, absolutely, after all, life’s a gamble!”
All the next week I hustled for an appointment with the lawyer whom the Jewish Committee had designated to do pro bono work for us refugees. The three of us met on a Friday afternoon in the fall of 1938. Mr. R., the lawyer, turned out to be a stickler for the niceties of the law and all but oblivious to the less-than-nice plight of Germany’s Jews. He started fussing with papers and forms, asked my new acquaintance the usual routine questions, but came to an abrupt halt when my family’s potential benefactor stated his occupation. “Gambler?” A pause. Then: “We needn’t bother. The signer of an affidavit must be a stable citizen with an assured income.” The terse verdict was uttered with supercilious superiority. I remonstrated, in less sophisticated terms, of course, that we could perhaps substitute a euphemism. A withering look: “Circumvent the law?” My newfound friend walked out of the lawyer’s office, out of my life, and with him the last concrete chance of rescuing my family. I have never forgotten nor forgiven that afternoon in lawyer R.’s office. I am convinced that Malcolm C. Burke, even had he detected a subterfuge, would have validated my family’s immigration papers. Until this day, beginning with that afternoon, I have retained a loathing for pettifogging, pigmy-sized, letter-of-the law officials, and a secret if selective admiration for America’s free and generous spirits who, like that gambler or Azdak, the poor folk’s judge in Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, “broke the laws like bread to feed the people.”
In 1939, during my senior year in high school, I became the feature editor of Scrippage and earned the nickname of “Scoop.” Said appellation attached to me because I had obtained some interviews rarely found in high school newspapers. Within months I had interviewed the band leader Benny Goodman, which also contributed to my Americanization. He and his band were appearing at the Fox Theater in midtown Saint Louis. After watching the rousing performance—I had grown to be a jazz aficionado—I eluded a watchman to get backstage. I immediately ran into Jerry Jerome, a member of the band and, with a bird in hand, developed my strategy. Had I asked Jerry directly and unadornedly to lead me to the leader of the band, he might well have shown me the door. So I said, “I would like to interview you and later Mr. Goodman for my high school newspaper.” “Sure, kid, go ahead!” And then he took me to the reigning idol of the jazz scene. “Bright kid here, wants to interview you,” Jerry said. Benny Goodman spent half an hour with me. Even today I remember the lead sentence of my front page feature: “Here he is, the King of Swing, whose clarinet and band delight jitterbugs across the land.” Of the interview itself I remember one item of repartee. I told Mr. Goodman that I had become a jazz aficionado upon coming to America from Germany, where jazz had been outlawed by Hitler. He responded, “Well that is just one additional folly of that madman!” For about a month I was a high school celebrity and my fellow students nearly forgot that I was a strange transplant in their midst.
Their brief admiration increased even more with my second interview with a prominent personality. I had devoured two news stories in the St. Louis Star-Times, the newspaper favored by my aunt and uncle. Two of my German cultural heroes were appearing in my new hometown, if under different auspices. The Nobel Prize–winning author Thomas Mann, whose novel The Buddenbrooks I had read at my home in Hildesheim and long past my bedtime, was scheduled to speak at the Saint Louis YMHA/YWHA located within two blocks of Soldan. Richard Tauber, the celebrated Viennese tenor—whose records of opera and operetta arias had frequently resonated through our apartment—had also found asylum in the United States and was appearing at Kiel Auditorium downtown.
Of course my allowance of fifty cents was laughably inadequate if measured against the price of admission to either event. Inspiration struck feature editor Stern. I went to Mrs. Rasmussen, the advisor of our school paper who wrote a well-crafted letter, requesting a free admission to the Thomas Mann lecture for the feature editor of Scrippage, Soldan’s incomparable school newspaper.
I arrived at the Y in good time. But already a record crowd was beleaguering the stairway leading to the auditorium. I immediately noticed that all arrivals were closely checked by a Cerberus in the form of a ticket-taker. Several prospective attendees were unceremoniously shunted to the nearest exit. My chances appeared no better.
I decided on a stratagem. I handed him my trumped-up credentials and while he was reading, I vanished into a group of validated arrivals and triumphantly took a seat in the auditorium. Thomas Mann, reading from a manuscript, but ever so hampered by a curious pronunciation of the English language, held forth on “The Coming Victory of Democracy,” a topic fully covered by the dailies. My moment of journalistic distinction came after the lecture and the question-and-answer period. He was assisted in the epilogue by his daughter, Erika, who translated the questions into German and her father’s answers into English.
As the crowd filtered out, Thomas Mann was led to a horseshoe-like semicircle of seats, near the exit of the auditorium. For whatever reason, Erika was temporarily not at his side. An eager group of reporters led by an obtrusive correspondent of Time magazine, started the grilling. The Time representative couched his beginning question in the willful style of his magazine, to the bafflement of the famed author, who despairingly and vainly looked for his interpreter. When another journalist was similarly ignored by the eminent guest, I saw my opportunity. I threw in a question in German. As if he had been tossed a lifeline, he clung to several of my questions. My “colleagues” were fuming. In protest, I assumed, they capped their fountain pens. Then I spotted Erika Mann, hiding a wicked smile behind her hands, undoubtedly amused by the spectacle of th
ese supercilious reporters scooped by a precocious high school student. Having composed herself, she joined Daddy and my fun was over.
In its issue of March 24, 1939, the school newspaper carried my report on the main event and my interview, together with a column by the “associate editor-in-chief,” announcing to the world that “a Scrippage reporter scooped a Time magazine interviewer” and so forth.
For years I tried to retrieve that column and my report. My high school never responded and I thought it unlikely that the volumes of Scrippage could have survived anywhere else. But a colleague of mine, Professor Paula Hanssen at Webster University, Saint Louis, was more persistent and more skilled. Soldan’s news organ had been neatly shelved, all volumes of it, at the Missouri Historical Library.
I reread my report with a note of triumph, still reverberating into my advanced age. My first question to Thomas Mann concerned the past and was linked to something he had said during his lecture. “Mr. Mann, how is the socialization of which you spoke to come about, since you are aware that such attempts had failed in Weimar Germany?” His answer, given in German, was a prediction that the lower classes and particularly the “Negro” population, still resenting the hardships of the Great Depression, would become politically active and achieve those goals. A second question that I raised about education received an equally optimistic, if hitherto unfulfilled prediction. He felt that America was on the cusp of having universal college education. If I look at today’s tuition, Thomas Mann’s vision has moved backward rather than forward. It was an auspicious (and all but final) beginning of my journalistic career.
I graduated from Soldan in June, 1939. My efforts to gain a scholarship for college succeeded, but ultimately led to naught. Westminster College in Fulton, Mississippi was ready to cover my tuition but could contribute nothing for my room and board and in fact told me that getting a job there, for example as a busboy, would be next to impossible. I had to find a different route to make the transition from high school to college.
So I did what my students of today are doing quite regularly. I decided to work for one year to have the funds for college. I carefully hoarded my busboy tips and salary. Finally when I was financially ready—well, more or less—I had a stroke of good luck.
I applied for a busboy job at a hotel within half-a-block of one of the universities located in Saint Louis. I went for an interview with hope and trepidation. The interviewer for the position was Lukas Lanza, the head waiter of the Piccadilly Room of the Melbourne Hotel. I sold myself as a busboy of nearly superhuman capacities. I also interspersed an appeal to his apparent good nature. I mentioned that I was ready to continue my education at a university and that Saint Louis University would undoubtedly accept me because of my good high school grades and what I needed now was a job to pay my tuition. His kindness showed: “OK Gunther, we’ll try you out.” My luck held. I proved to be proficient at my job as a busboy and Saint Louis University sent out a letter of acceptance in short order. With the help of a counselor I selected my program and found that the faculty was both outstanding and absolutely undeviating in their rigor. My prize example is our encounter with our logic teacher on a wintry day. Father Steven J. Reeve, who took delight in signing himself S. J. Reeve, S. J., had an uncanny ability to provoke his students into thinking. As a debate coach he would take on the affirmative team and deftly obliterate it, then turn around in mid-debate and dispose of the negative team with equal ease.
On a chilly February day we were scheduled to take our final exam. The central heating system had given up the ghost and we were sitting in our overcoats, hats and gloves awaiting the arrival of Father Reeve. He came into the classroom clutching thirty or so blue books. Immediately one of the students, Nancy Bakewell, a prominent campus leader, rose from her seat. “Father Reeve there is no heat in this building. You will have to postpone the final.” He looked at her with an iciness that matched the room’s temperature. “Miss Bakewell, you didn’t come to Saint Louis University to get out of the inclement weather, did you now?” It is the first and only time that I, together with my fellow students, wrote the answers to an exam with my gloves securely in place. I might add that there’s no way that Father Reeve could have prevailed in today’s atmosphere even at a rigorously run university.
There was my history professor, Father Bannon who taught European history from an American perspective. For example neither in Germany nor in my high school classes had I learned about the history of Ireland and the emigration of Irish citizens to America during the so-called Irish Potato Famine of 1845–1852. His graphic description and empathy kept us spellbound. But his empathy didn’t stop with his (presumable) forefathers or with his present-day fellow Catholics. Before I left the university at the end of the semester for the US Army, I went to him to say good-bye. He kept me at his desk until the room had emptied, took me aside and gave me his priestly blessings well-knowing that I was Jewish. I heard that several months later he joined the Army as a chaplain. His kindness overwhelmed me.
And there was Father McNamee, the head librarian. He had set up a large desk at the entrance of the main reading room. One day Professor Sullivan, our English teacher, had given us a fairly complex assignment. I had the temerity to walk right up to Father McNamee’s desk and to ask him where I might find relevant material on the subject. He got up and urged me to follow him. Belying his seventy years plus, he climbed at top speed up a spiral staircase, then turned to a shelf and said: “You will probably find several books on the subject right here.” I did, of course, and I found something else, a university administrator whose first priority was students.
As those intensely lived years progressed I learned to see America as it was, its wonders and its warts. But one additional person had simultaneously entered my life who showed me my adoptive land not only as it was, but as it should be. Aunt Rae (short for Rebecca) Benson was no relative at all; she was the sister of Ethel, my aunt by marriage. While both sisters had been born in or near Saint Louis, Rae had broken the mold of Ethel’s homebody existence and humdrum lifestyle. Ethel had married an assimilated but still observant Jew, Rae an Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Ethel took no trips except into the close vicinity of the West Side and hence had little to report beyond neighborhood gossip; Rae, the wife of a railroad linesman supervisor, had gotten annual railroad courtesy tickets and showed pictures of fabled San Francisco, its stately hotels and Fisherman’s Wharf with Joe DiMaggio’s restaurant, a landmark of particular interest to me, since the Yankees always stayed at “my” Chase Hotel. Aunt Ethel played auction bridge; Aunt Rae went to lectures.
She took me along. When I first came to their house to play with her son Frankie, a few years younger than I, she sensed my unformulated hunger for a closer and deeper look at America’s culture. She had joined the Ethical Culture Society. At least once a month I joined her at her invitation for a lecture by prominent speakers at the society’s auditorium. It was there I heard Martha Gellhorn’s impassioned plea for America’s involvement in the face of Hitler’s quest for global conquest. A magnetic personality, striking both by her eloquent, fiery delivery, and her commanding beauty, she told of her experiences during the Spanish Civil War with her fellow correspondent and brief marital partner Ernest Hemingway, and of the brutalities she witnessed during the German entrance into Prague. Aunt Rae and I walked up to her after the lecture and I asked her a few questions. Some fifty years later, during an interview I conducted with her for my article on Hemingway and the exiles during the Spanish Civil War, I reminded her of our first encounter. She indeed remembered her lecture in her hometown of Saint Louis; but of course not the precocious youngster and his insistent questions.
Aunt Rae made me see the darker sides of American life and she offered correctives for them. She recommended that I read some of the muckrakers. I read Upton Sinclair’s The Brass Check, an exposé of America’s press and particularly its beholdenness to its advertisers. I was shocked at first by the boldness with which she discuss
ed the book’s title; Sinclair had taken it from the entry tokens bought upon entering a house of prostitution. So Aunt Rae also freed me, en passant, of a lingering prudishness. But she also pointed out how reportage can be twisted according to the wishes of large advertisers, an observation that even today has lost little of its relevance.
After Joe Louis’s blitz victory over Max Schmeling in their second encounter she ridiculed the myths of racial superiority and ethnic stereotypes. She pointed out America’s discriminatory practices; in later years she took an active part in the integration of Saint Louis’s public swimming pools, effected only after some brutal beatings of some pioneering black youngsters. She looked at some of my high school textbooks and found them wanting. In David L. Murray’s textbook she found his reference to the slaves as “samboes” incredibly offensive. She gave me an added perspective on my country of asylum. I began to see it more clearly without loving it less.
