Al Capp

by Denis Kitchen

  It was at this point that Stanley, unaware of any problem, turned up to close out his shift. Rather than fill him in on what was going on, Alfred gave Stanley his take in quarters and hightailed it out of the station. When he was a safe distance away, Alfred turned back to see what was happening. Sam Moscow had driven into the gas station lot and jumped out of his car and was punching Stanley repeatedly. Stanley was big enough to take the punishment, and guilty enough not to turn Alfred in.

  As Alfred would remember it, Stanley didn’t return to school for a week. When he did, Alfred was nowhere to be found. Summer vacation was on the horizon, and Alfred simply began his vacation a little early.

  3 The Hills

  The gas station misadventure was still fresh in Alfred’s mind, and summer was just beginning, when a legitimate job opportunity popped up. Alfred’s Aunt Barbara, married to Tillie’s brother Louis, worked as the personnel director at St. Raphael’s Hospital in New Haven, and she called Tillie to say that the hospital was about to lose its third-shift switchboard operator. Barbara, a friend of the shift supervisor, had spoken glowingly about Alfred, praising his intelligence and reliability. Alfred, Barbara told her sister-in-law, should drop by and talk to the supervisor.

  Alfred couldn’t help but make a strong first impression: he told the supervisor that he was eighteen, a high school graduate, and about to enter Yale. He was hired on the spot.

  The job, Alfred would recall when retelling the story, didn’t require a great deal of vigilance or work. The hospital received only a handful of calls at that time of night, and when one did come in, all Alfred had to do was see that he made the proper connection on the switchboard. It was boring work, but it paid fifteen dollars a week.

  Alfred’s deception might have worked on the person hiring him, but he didn’t fool any of the young nurses dropping by to check out the hospital’s new hire. He certainly wasn’t a Yale candidate, and his poor grooming and dressing gave him away as just another teenage kid trying to pass himself off as older than he was. They’d see him once and never return.

  The head nurse was the sole exception, taking an unlikely interest in the boy. As Alfred would describe her, “she was quite old, thirty or better, and she looked exactly like President Woodrow Wilson, not only in face, but in figure, which was tall, erect, unbending.”

  Although not initially attracted to her, Alfred enjoyed her visits, which relieved some of the tedium of sitting around and doing nothing. He was also, since the loss of his leg, unaccustomed to sustained interest from the opposite sex. She grew bolder (and more attractive to Alfred) as the days went by, until one night the nurse appeared at Alfred’s station and soon they were making out and pawing at one another. Unfortunately, Alfred was finished before she could get his trousers open. Disappointed but unbowed, the nurse promised to return in an hour.

  When she did, she led him to a bathroom and asked him to pull down his pants and sit on the toilet. This made little sense to Alfred, and his confusion gave him away: this was his first time. Still undaunted, the head nurse lowered herself onto him.

  Capp’s account of his first sexual experience from here takes a wild turn—and not in an erotic way.

  “I don’t know how long it lasted [or] how long I passed out,” he admitted, in his autobiography, “but when I came to, it was daylight outside, the door was open, and a mob of people were boiling around the room.”

  Alfred learned that there had been an accident during the night, and he hadn’t been at the switchboard to take the emergency call. This, coupled with his transgression in the bathroom, was more than grounds for dismissal. He was given sixteen dollars and told to never return.

  For Alfred, this was okay. It was early summer and he had money in his pocket.

  Alfred knew better than to head straight home after being fired from his hospital job. He didn’t doubt that his aunt would be contacting his mother and providing her with the lurid details, such as she knew them, of his final night on the job. His mother would not take the news well. This wasn’t the worst she had heard in her lifetime of worries and disappointments, but it was pretty bad, and Alfred knew that she would cut loose on him as soon as she saw him. He didn’t need the tongue-lashing—not today, not in the immediate future. He needed to get away for a while.

  He decided to visit a friend named Gus Levy, whom he’d known since he was twelve, and while he walked to Gus’s parents’ house, he came up with a plan. He and Gus would hitchhike to Memphis, where Alfred’s Uncle George, an Orthodox rabbi, and Aunt Minnie lived. His sixteen dollars would finance the trip. He and Gus would visit with his aunt and uncle for several days before heading back home. At some point along the way, he’d send a postcard to his mother, just so she wouldn’t worry too much.

  Gus was a year older than Alfred and, according to Alfred, a first-rate hustler. It was Gus who introduced Alfred to cigarettes, and to the idea that sneaking into the movies was better than paying for a ticket. He was effective because he didn’t look or act the part of a scammer. He was well built, with broad shoulders and a slender waist, and he was good-looking, with a head of thick black hair. He was intelligent, and from the moment he and Alfred met, Gus filled Alfred with stories about how he was going to be the next great American novelist. Writing seemed like the best way to make a lot of money for very little work. Gus loved working outside the margins: if the deal was shady, he was all for it.

  “If it [was] simple, honest, [and] straight forward, he was bored by it and wouldn’t touch it,” Alfred wrote in his characterization of his friend. To Gus, “any shifty way was better than any other kind.”

  Gus, already a veteran hitchhiker, was on board as soon as he learned that Alfred was bankrolling the trip. They set off with nothing but the clothes on their backs and Alfred’s money. They had little difficulty finding rides—a couple of young people bumming their way across the country was common enough in the Roaring Twenties—but the going was much slower than Alfred had anticipated. There were no expressways or superhighways in those days, just two-lane roads or, worse yet, dirt roads that were barely wider than paths. It didn’t matter to the boys. They were in no rush. They were more than content to sit back and see America from the comforts of a car. They could fill their bellies with food they picked up in roadside diners and restaurants, and make their way south and west at a leisurely pace.

  They reached Washington, D.C., at the end of their second day on the road. They were riding with an elderly gentleman who asked them where they intended to spend the night. When they answered that they figured they’d be staying at a hotel, he informed them that hotels in the nation’s capital could be expensive. They would be better off, he suggested, if they stayed in a rooming house. He knew of a good one and took them there.

  The two slept in the next morning, and after cleaning up and dressing, they found the woman who ran the rooming house and asked where they might find a good restaurant nearby. They ate huge breakfasts, and when it came time to pay, Alfred learned that he and Gus had a big problem on their hands. They had blown through their money the first few days of their journey, and after paying for their meals, Alfred had thirty-five cents left from his original sixteen dollars.

  Gus felt that it might be best if they just returned to Connecticut, but Alfred strongly disagreed. He wasn’t yet ready to face his mother. He was determined to continue to Memphis. He’d find some way to make it.

  They agreed to split up and go their separate ways. They walked to a highway and, after shaking hands and wishing each other well, took places on opposite sides of the road. A car stopped for Alfred. Gus ran across the street. “What the hell,” he said, jumping in the car with Alfred.

  The following twenty days—the time Alfred claimed it took to reach Memphis—were tough but eye-opening. The traveling companions found ways to stay fed. Gus would sneak up to porches and filch the milkman’s deliveries. On other occasions, farmers or sympathetic drivers picking them up would set them up with a meal. They usua
lly slept under the stars, but every so often someone would offer them an overnight stay in a cabin or house.

  For Alfred, who had never strayed from the East Coast, the trip was an education. He’d heard all kinds of stories about how poorly people from the North were treated by southerners, but he found it to be quite the opposite. There was no way that he and Gus, with their New England accents, could have passed themselves off as anything but northerners, but they had no problems with the people picking them up or in the towns they visited. They were treated well regardless of where they went.

  The two eventually arrived in Memphis. Aside from the surprise of having two uninvited guests at her door, both in need of a place to stay, Alfred’s aunt was shocked to learn that he had taken such a long trip without any money. She demanded that both of her visitors contact their parents for the money needed for fare back to the East Coast.

  Gus informed her that he couldn’t write his folks; he was an orphan. His father had been a drunk and his mother had died when he was two. He was the youngest of eight kids. All had been brought up in different orphanages.

  Alfred listened, stunned by what he was hearing. He could tell a tall tale with the best of them, but Gus made him look like an amateur. In reality, Gus was the eldest of three brothers, and both of his parents were alive. They owned a candy store, and their two younger sons worked there. They wouldn’t let Gus hang around because he stole from them. He was laying it on thick, even by Alfred’s standards.

  This wasn’t the first time Alfred had seen Gus in action. Earlier on this trip, just outside of Nashville, a woman in a Cadillac had picked them up and driven them to her home, where she promised to put them up for the night. It was apparent to Alfred that she had her eye on Gus, even though neither of the travelers had bathed in two weeks. Her husband, the woman told Gus, left for work very early in the morning but, in a line intended for Alfred, they could feel free to sleep in as late as they pleased.

  Gus had other ideas. Early the following morning, before anyone was awake, he shook Alfred out of his sleep and told him they were leaving. He was carrying a big paper bag. They snuck out of the house and hit the road. After they had been picked up by a truck and were safely out of town, Gus opened the bag. He’d stolen the family’s silverware. “This must be worth a hundred dollars,” he told Alfred.

  There was no point in arguing the theft on moral grounds; Gus was beyond that. Alfred made a weak attempt at it before changing his approach. What did Gus think would happen when the two of them, grubby-looking teenage boys, walked into a pawn shop and tried to sell silverware embossed with the owners’ initials? There was little doubt about where the pawnbroker would be placing his next phone call. Gus could grasp this logic, and when they reached Nashville, they visited a place that polished silver, dropped off the silverware, and instructed the proprietor to call the owner when he was finished polishing.

  Now here he was, in Memphis, listening to Gus feed his aunt a cock-and-bull story about being an orphan. Gus had even managed to work up a few tears while he narrated his story.

  Later, when they were alone, Alfred chided Gus for lying to his aunt. There was no way he was writing his mother and asking for money, he told Gus. He’d be leaving before dawn the following morning. Gus could tag along if he wished, or he could stay with Alfred’s relatives, who’d bought his story and were probably willing to adopt him themselves at this point.

  In these panels drawn many years later, Al Capp told the condensed story of his first trip to the South in the 1920s, and its impact on the creation of “Li’l Abner.”

  The trip home, which took even longer than their journey to Memphis, proved to be invaluable to Alfred’s future. As before, they relied on the hospitality of the people they met along the way, and in Kentucky, in the hills country of the Cumberland Mountains, they slept on haystacks and were often helped along by people unlike any Alfred had seen or heard of before. These people were desperately poor, living in tarpaper shacks and eking out day-to-day existences the best they could, oblivious to big-city ways, backroom politics, or Wall Street finances. They had their own colloquial language, and their customs were far from anything Alfred knew. Alfred was amused by their innocence, which contrasted with the phoniness he loathed in modern, sophisticated society. They treated him and Gus very well, and Alfred would never forget them.

  “These people had a simple, appealing humanity that fascinated me,” he said.

  The traveling was beginning to wear him out. One of the motivating factors setting him on his journey in the first place had been a need to prove that he could do whatever a two-legged traveler could do, but he struggled on those days when the rides were few and the walking was long. One such day in southern Kentucky proved to be beneficial in the future.

  “It was a hot day,” he recalled, “and my thumb had no takers. So to break the monotony and postpone some weary hours of trudging I started to sketch.”

  He was in the midst of sketching a country landscape when a young boy approached him.

  “Whatcha doing?” the kid asked.

  “Embalming the landscape for posterity,” Alfred told him.

  The boy thought about it for a few moments. “That don’t make sense,” he finally said.

  Alfred glanced down at his drawing and had to agree. He asked the kid if he wanted to pose for him, promising him the picture. When he saw the sketch, the young hillbilly wanted no part of it. It didn’t look anything like him, he said. Alfred kept the sketch. He would refer to it later, when he was thinking of a subject for a comic strip. The sketch, a loosely drawn self-portrait dressed in hillbilly clothes, was similar to Li’l Abner.

  The trip home took nearly a month. Alfred ran into his mother, who was out with his sister, Madeline, for a walk, before he made it to his front door.

  “Hello, Mom,” he began.

  “Your brother Bence is at home,” she answered. “He’ll show you where the food is. We’ll be back in later.”

  She never uttered a word, then or in the future, about the time her son had been away. She had been worried to death about him, but she refused to address Alfred’s nearly two months away from home, or the pain and concern his absence had caused her.

  “It was just as well,” Alfred concluded, decades later. “I wouldn’t have understood.”

  His family had no idea what to make of the trip. Neither Otto nor Tillie seemed angry; that had been the reaction of the early days of Alfred’s absence, when they’d searched frantically for his whereabouts, only to come up empty. When they received his first postcard, they ceased worrying and resigned themselves to the latest example of Alfred’s individualism. When he returned, they were relieved and curious. What could a young man, walking about and hitchhiking around the country on one good leg, have possibly done?

  Alfred was full of stories, but, as always, they were heavily embellished. Otto Caplin didn’t know what to think of them, but he was skeptical of much of what he heard.

  “No one was able to get a coherent account of their trip,” he noted in his memoir. “At various times Alfred hinted at being lost in the mountainous regions of Tennessee and of being first regarded with suspicion, then fed and entertained by the hill people. He told about being picked up by questionable-looking men who ran them for miles in high-powered cars, and about disputes with local sheriffs. He claimed they always emerged triumphant from these adventures.”

  Alfred might have told tall tales, bald-faced lies, and embellished truths, but he never wavered, then or later, on his reason for hitchhiking as much as he did in his youth: he needed to prove to himself that he could do whatever a boy with two strong legs could do.

  There would be other hitchhiking episodes in the years ahead, but nothing rivaling the trip to Memphis. Alfred and his friend Don Munson hitchhiked regularly, often to New York City. Don, another aspiring writer, would explore the town while Al, as he was now calling himself, planted himself on a corner near Times Square and spent hours just watching
everything going on around him. He loved observing people, elegantly dressed and walking about with a sense of purpose, making their way to the many playhouses in the area. He’d revered the theater since he was a boy, especially after he’d seen a performance of Romeo and Juliet with an aunt. He’d even done a little writing of his own, first as a boy, when he staged little productions in the neighborhood, and later in high school, where he won a prize for a play he had written. But writing plays, he decided, was not for him. He treasured the classics too much to even consider trying to compete in the field.

  Cartooning seemed more reachable. He was supremely confident in his ability, believing that he was every bit as good as some comic strip artists he saw in the newspaper or illustrators featured in magazines. Al’s guidance counselor, though, didn’t know how to advise him. There were schools for serious artists and illustrators, but none that he knew of specialized in classes for people interested in creating comics. Al knew of correspondence schools, but they required prepayment, and that would have been out of the question, even if he had trust in their worth. A decade later, he would say, “Cartooning is something to do, not to study.”

  His formal education was slipping badly. He habitually skipped classes, and Otto Caplin spent more time than he cared to remember with the high school principal, who always seemed to be on the verge of expelling Al for his truancy. Father and son would quarrel over it, but Al knew that soon enough his father, now working again for the old paint company, would be on the road and away from his day-to-day life.

  He spent most of his time with Gus Levy, Don Munson, and several others sharing their disdain for the classroom. One day, Al, Don, and four others decided to steal a car and take it on a joyride. They made it as far as Norwalk, where they were stopped by the police and taken into custody. For Tillie, this was the ultimate humiliation—a rabbi’s daughter going to spring her son from jail. Otto tried to reassure her. What kind of actual trouble could he be in? After all, he couldn’t drive a car. Besides, they were all just kids and not professional car thieves. Fortunately for all, the car had not been damaged in any way, and its owner refused to press charges.