by Bill Bailey
The main toughie in the neighborhood was a kid named Carson, whom we called Kit. He was small in comparison to the rest of the "mob," but he was skinny and fearless. He was as crooked as a barrel of snakes. He had knew where every small merchant in the neighborhood kept his money overnight. The only obstacle that had face him so far was how to break into a place without tripping the alarm. On such small details, however, he was working assiduously. Kit was much admired by all of us. He knew how to smoke a cigarette, blowing smoke out of his nose and mouth at the same time. He taught us all a lot of tricks.
There were a few saloons in the area that catered to petty thieves. Carson knew them all. One time when things were tough--meaning that there was little to steal and peddle--Carson made a deal with one of the saloon keepers to buy all the electric light bulbs he could steal. The streetcars and buses that made up the transportation system of Hoboken each carried a 100-watt bulb in a cage-like structure in the rear. Just as the streetcar or bus was about to take off from its corner stop, one of the "mob" would climb onto the rear bumper. Holding on with one hand, he would use the other to flip open the cage and unscrew the bulb. Then he would hop off at the next stop. Within three days the Hoboken transportation company was without lights. That brought about an innovation: the two-prong bulb that could not be attached to the system in houses. We were out of business.
In the meantime, the saloon keeper bought bulbs from us at two for a nickel. For a while, there was competition in the "mob" as to who could hop aboard the most streetcars and buses in one day. It was considered only natural that our leader, Kit Carson, won all the honors. We blew our loot on cigarettes, pizzas and charlotte russes. Carson, with his ever-keen eye, picked a grocery store in our immediate neighborhood for his next caper. He knew that the Italian owner never walked home with the store receipts on a Saturday night. So, one Saturday, he climbed up on a roof across the street from the store. From this vantage point he could look down into the large window of the Italian's place. He watched as the owner went about his routine of emptying the cash register, counting the money, separating the ones from the twos, fives and tens, stuffing it into a small cloth sack, and finally locking it in a small steel container. Carson watched, his heart beating faster, as the owner went to the oatmeal shelf, removed a few cartons, placed the cash box on the shelf, then neatly replaced the oatmeal cartons. Out went the lights. He locked the door and went home.
Skinny, tough, small, wiry Carson was clever enough not to call upon the 12 or 13 kids who made up the "mob" to join him in the burglary. He picked only two who suited his purpose. Come Monday, there was much activity in the neighborhood. Cops and detectives ran in and out of the grocery store. From time to time, the owner would come out and stand in front of the door, slapping his head with his open palms and shouting something in Italian. I imagined he, a poor, humble Italian who had been robbed, was appealing to the neighborhood to please bring back his money, whoever had stolen it. To us kids, it was obvious who stole it.
Carson and the two others were not around to witness the antics of the police and owner. No sir, Carson and his cohorts were busy at Rockaway Beach and its amusement park, spending some $200 which just the previous day had rested comfortably behind some boxes of oatmeal. Around the middle of the week, after four days of swimming, eating hot dogs, drinking countless bottles of soda, smoking countless cigarettes and taking in all the amusements the park offered, the trio came home, tanned, refreshed, well-fed--and broke. Since the cops knew Carson as the neighborhood petty crook, they picked him up when he arrived home. He lived up to his tough reputation: after several hours of grilling, he said nothing. The cops let him go.
How did he enter the store, since it was wired against burglary? The rest of the mob asked him that a number of times. The secret lay in the transom over the store's front door. The door itself had been wired against unlawful entry, but the transom wasn't. Since it was the middle of July and a heat wave scorched the city, the grocer invariably left the transom shutter wide open when he locked up. Carson had turned this opportunity to his advantage.
Carson's cutting out most of the mob from the goodies didn't sit well with us. We realized that he could not be relied on to cut us in on any future lucrative projects. We would have to cut it on our own. Of all the ways of making penny-ante dough, the junk-shop route was the most appealing. If you weren't inclined toward robbing stores or grabbing somebody's purse, you could locate and collect any old junk and haul it to the junk shop. Copper paid most, with brass and then lead following in price. Old rags paid very little; you needed a whale of a load to get ten or fifteen cents. An empty house in the middle of the block became our target. One of my cohorts and I managed to sneak into this house through an open rear window. It had three stories. All of its pipes were exposed, as they were in most of the old homes in those days. All the pipes were lead. We knew enough to go to the basement, search out the valve and shut the water off. The rest was easy. We went to the top floor and yanked off the pipes under the sink. We rolled up some 25 pounds of lead and wrapped it in a sack. We fixed the door so we could re-enter when we returned. Then we headed for the junk shop with our loot. It weighed out at 27 pounds. At five cents per pound, it came to $1.35. That night we sat on the doorstep, eating a pizza and licking a charlotte russe, happy in the knowledge of the location of more lead pipe, which meant more pizza and charlotte russes.
There are all sorts of laws, some good and some bad. The law of averages was one we were not familiar with. On the fifth day, we had worked ourselves down to the first floor. We used a hacksaw which cut easily through the pipe. We even brought our own burlap bags to hold the lead. Soon it became clear that the more lead we took to the shop, the more the owner cheated us. According to him, the price of lead could go down in a single night by as much as a penny. If we didn't like it, we could always haul our stuff to the other junk shop ten blocks away. Exhausted as we were, ten blocks did not appeal to us. Sometimes we made two trips a day with our lead. We were making it in the junk business. The other kids were jealous, watching us smoke "tailor-made" cigarettes and eat pizzas every night. We kept the source of our wealth to ourselves.
It happened quickly. Two detectives nailed us as we took a few steps outside the house, each of us with a bag of lead over our shoulders. The steel-barred doors clanged shut behind us. Caged! We were in a cell with two bunks chained to the wall, two lumpy straw mattresses, a couple of moth-eaten thin gray blankets and two tin cups. The walls were full of scratches and penciled initials, with a word or two for the wise: "Don't cop a plea with Judge Sullivan," Advised one. "Make your peace with God," counseled another. We were lucky. Our families came and took us home after a few hours. I had my ears boxed that night and my mother chased me from room to room as she laid the poker across my butt.
Five days later, my mother appeared with me before a judge in his private chambers. The red-faced, pudgy man sat behind a desk. To his right sat the probation officer. My mother faced him nervously. He shuffled a few papers, then looked at me. "You don't seem to have any productive outlet," suggested the judge.
My mother jumped in quickly. "But he's really a good boy, sir. It's just some bad company he got into lately."
"It's always bad company," countered the judge. "Every mother or father that comes before me insists on blaming their son's habits on the company he keeps, never on him."
"But he has never been in trouble before, sir. And besides, I gave him a good licking when I got him home. That will teach him," ventured my mother.
"I think he needs more than a good licking," replied the judge as he turned toward the probation officer. "Let's try two weeks at the Farm for Wayward Boys." It was all over. My mother started weeping. I pouted. The probation officer took me by the hand and led me outside into another office.
"He goes to the Farm," he informed the man at the desk.
"Sit there and don't move," ordered the man. An hour later, a small bus took me to the Farm.
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nbsp; The Farm was located on the fringes of Jersey City. It was comprised of a few buildings, a large number of work sheds, and plenty of rich black soil. There were a hundred kids there, all from the working class. I remember no fat ones; they were all skinny, bony guys like myself, who entered the place hungry. This was the first time I had been forcibly separated from the family. I did not like it. Only the fear of being humiliated by the other kids kept me from bursting into tears. Every kid at the Farm was in the same boat.
During the day, we were sent out to work in the fields, to hoe row after row of carrots, cabbages and onions; to pull weeds; or to fertilize the rows with manure. At meal times, we crowded together in a small building, the mess hall, to eat. The food was plain but fresh, and there was plenty of it. A wire fence seven feet high separated us from the outside world. What kept kids from trying to escape was the fear of a severe beating, an ice cold shower, and more time at the Farm.
The day I entered the place, a nurse checked me over and gave me a few tests. Three days later I was summoned to her office, and within minutes I was en route to a hospital at a place called Snake Hill. I had diphtheria. After ten days in the hospital, I returned to the Farm to serve the rest of my two weeks.
Back on the streets, I quickly picked up my old habits. I was back to smoking, back to making plans to turn knowledge into money. I found a few hours of work in one of Hoboken's three bowling alleys, setting pins a couple of nights a week. The competition was tough, and even two bits for three hours of backbreaking work was considered good.
Another boy and I went on a scouting expedition, looking for something to turn into cash. We wound up around the big car barns that housed and serviced Hoboken and Jersey City street cars and buses. All sorts of fire ladders led to the roof of the one-story structure. We climbed one, expecting to get a view rather than to find anything of value. We scanned the city in all directions, locating our school, the city hall, the church. Nothing we noticed on the roof could be negotiated into cash, and we prepared to leave and scout other territory. My partner caught his pants on a piece of thin metal sticking out slightly from the roof parapet a foot below the top of the roof. As I bent down to untangle his cuff, I discovered that the pitch-covered metal was copper. A bonanza! A complete city block of copper! It was used as a waterproofing sealant strip that ran around the top of the roof. All we had to do was work the copper sheeting loose from the side of the wall, pull and tear. The sheeting would peel off in ten-foot strips. We would roll it up, step on it to flatten the roll, pop it into a burlap bag, and haul it off to the junk dealer.
Once a day, we appeared on the scene with our potato sacks. We checked the area to make sure no one was around, then we climbed the roof and started our operation, the "big rip-off." Each day's work netted us at least three dollars apiece. That was big money for the short amount of labor involved. And if the junk man had been honest with his weights and prices, we would have been paid triple that. As it was, we were happy for small favors. For ten days we tore up that roof, peeling off copper strips as if we were peeling bananas. The junk man gloated over our success.
On the eleventh day it rained, and we laid off work to enjoy the fruits of our labor. The next day, when the sun came out, we too were out with our sacks, ready for work. As we started to leave with our sacks loaded, a small army of conductors and repairmen fell upon us. The roof had sprung a thousand leaks. The machine shop was soaked with rain water. Someone had gone to the roof to check, found all the weather proofing torn up or missing, and then set the trap. The game was up. A week later, it was back to the same judge, then back to the same Farm. This time the sentence was doubled. If you returned to the Farm for a second time, they made it rough for you. No more simple work like picking potato bugs off leaves or pulling weeds. "Shake hands with the pick and shovel," they told me. I spent that month digging ditches, with very few breaks. That did it--no more jails, I told myself. No more banditry.
Three days on the outside, bored and broke and listening to the heated arguments between my mother and stepfather started me off again. A few blocks from the neighborhood stood an expensive hotel and drinking place. Only the very rich and sporty frequented it. A few other kids and I started hanging around it, looking for an opportunity. One night we spotted a swanky car pulling up. The driver got out and entered the bar. The car was full of rich-looking suitcases. The door was unlocked. We opened the door and pulled out the first suitcase we saw. We headed down the street to a dark alley. The suitcase was loaded with the most expensive shirts we had ever seen. Someone peering out of an upper-story window had seen us commit the act. The police received a fair description. We hid the suitcase under a warehouse loading platform. Every evening for three days straight, we made a trip to the suitcase to change shirts. For three days we were the ritziest kids in Hoboken, while the cops continued their search for us. A detective picked two of us up after he noticed us wearing silk shirts under overalls with sneakers. We insisted that the shirts belonged to our fathers, but the detective was suspicious. We were held until some member of the family appeared to take us home.
My mom came to get me. The first thing she said when she saw me was, "Just wait until I get you home. You'll get the licking of your life." The detective smiled at this. In the next breath she said, "And where did you get that shirt? You never had it on when you left the house."
The detective turned and stared at me. That was it. The detective got the suitcase and the rest of the shirts and I got nabbed for rap number three. This was serious. Now I was really flouting the law. This meant being sent to a strict reform school where there would be harsh treatment and few privileges. I did not get a beating when I got home. Instead, my mother was rather morose about the whole deal. She felt that she had unintentionally put the finger on me. She was worried. After all, the other two brothers had been sent to the strictest reform school in New Jersey, and she didn't want to see the same thing happen to me.
As luck would have it, the juvenile judge went off on a two-week vacation, leaving a backlog of cases. There were just three more weeks of summer vacation.
Chapter VI: Hell's Kitchen
About ten days later, my mother found the answer to some of her problems. We packed up and moved to New York City, right into the middle of notorious Hell's Kitchen, on West 38th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues. The Hoboken police were so pleased to get rid of me, they never pursued the matter. I was glad to be out of there.
Adjusting to a new neighborhood always takes a while. You stand around and watch the action in the streets for a while. Pretty soon you get to know who the toughest character is, who the good guys and bad guys are. The local kids start their scrutiny of you the minute you haul the first piece of furniture into the house. The block we lived in was made up mostly of Irish, with a scattering of Greeks. A block away, Poles dominated; in the block on the other side of us it was Italians.
On Saturdays, between West 38th and West 42nd Streets on both sides of 9th Avenue, pushcart vendors took over. From six in the morning to almost midnight, almost anything edible was for sale. The competition was keen, yet there were never any arguments among vendors. I soon learned that, by carefully crawling under certain pushcarts from the rear, I could steal a fair number of shopping bags. Legitimately, these sold for five cents apiece; I sold them for four. Sometimes I could even lift some fruits and vegetables. Generally, from these little crawling expeditions around the pushcarts I was able to supply the household with enough potatoes and onions and other vegetables to last until the following Saturday. Sometimes I or another kid would get caught and receive a good kick in the ass. We couldn't show our faces to any of the vendors on the block for a long time without having the word passed that the petty crooks were on the loose.
I managed to make a few legitimate dimes on the side. At nine or ten at night, the pushcart owners closed shop. Usually too tired to haul their carts back to the stables, they called on the kids to help. For ten cents, we would dash like madmen t
o the stable, then run back to pick up another cart. If we were lucky we might come out with fifty cents. That was enough money to take us through the week. We never spent the money on movies, because we could always sneak into them through unlatched back doors or through toilet windows.
Up to now, the stepfather's contribution to the family had been negligible. His hitch in the army during World War I had been the best thing he'd ever done from the vantage point of the idleness he had enjoyed ever since. He developed the attitude that the time he spent fighting to make the world safe for democracy qualified him to be taken care of for the rest of his life. The world owed him a living and he was going to make it pay dearly. The rest of the world may have loved "Harry Longlegs" for winning the war in Europe, but no one in my family was impressed. Manual labor was alien to him. Whenever some government bureaucrat insisted he put as much zeal into finding suitable employment as he did demanding an increase in his disability check, he would cough and complain about how he was left disabled by the "German gas attack." He was one of the most articulate letter writers I can remember. He knew enough about the law and how congressmen and bureaucrats operated to get some traction with his letters when other means failed. All government-run hospitals were open to him. Whenever the booze got to him and he needed a few weeks' rest and good food, he'd complain about his condition and get admitted to any number of hospitals. During the severe winter months he would find his way into a hospital in the warm regions, where he would loaf and eat nourishing food while the family lived on potato and onion stew and stuffed their shoes with newspaper to keep out the chill. He spent more time inside convalescent homes than he did outside of them. For those on-and-off moments when he was around, it was clear that as a husband he was a failure. As a provider, he was a disaster. He provided nothing but confusion and broken promises. He managed to lift the lion's share right off the top of what little did trickle into the house. My mother had long since given up on him. It was becoming routine to enter the house and hear her denouncing him and his forbears as drunks and lazy freeloaders.
