The Pushcart War

by Jean Merrill

  Whenever the prison guards came past Frank’s cell, they would call out, “How are you doing, Frank?” And Frank the Flower would report, “Got seventeen out of twenty last time. That’s one hundred and sixteen so far today.”

  Sometimes the guards even came into Frank’s cell and had a go at the dart board themselves. Frank the Flower was popular with the guards, who preferred crackpots to criminal types, and they called his cell The Shooting Gallery.

  After Mack was arrested, the guards took to calling the truck in the center of the target “The Mighty Mammoth.” There was much cheering from Frank’s cell every time someone hit The Mighty Mammoth, and medals, in the form of flowers, from Frank’s hatband, were given out for every bull’s-eye scored. Mack could tell from the number of daisies or bachelor buttons a guard had pinned to his uniform, how many Mighty Mammoths he had hit.

  When Mack heard Frank the Flower and the guards laughing and calling out their scores, he would throw his dinner plate into the corridor and demand to be given a quieter cell. At such times, one of the guards would go across the hall and tell Mack to lower his voice as he was disturbing the customers in The Shooting Gallery.

  At night when there were no guards around, Mack would call threateningly across the hall to Frank. “You just wait,” he’d say. “Just wait. This war is as good as over. And when it is—!”

  But he did not succeed in worrying Frank the Flower at all. Frank took the very fact of Mack’s still being in jail as a sign that things were going very well, indeed, for the pushcarts.

  After a week of Frank the Flower’s optimism, Mack’s own confidence cracked. A guard found him one morning crouched under his bunk, writing a desperate letter to The Three, begging them to surrender.

  “An old lady is supplying them with ammunition,” Mack wrote, “and thousands of officers are in training, and they will not stop until every Mighty Mammoth is extinct.”

  The guards confiscated the letter and gave it to the Police Commissioner. The Police Commissioner laughed and said, “Mail it to Moe Mammoth. Special delivery.”

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  The Turning Point: the War of Words

  Frank the Flower’s faith, unfortunately, could not be shared by any of the pushcart peddlers who knew the facts. Things had never looked worse for the peddlers. From the time the Mayor had threatened to revoke the pushcart licenses, most of them had given up hope. Even Maxie Hammerman, though he was now famous and on a magazine cover as “The Pushcart King of America” and “The Brains Behind the Pushcart Conspiracy,” was very glum.

  “A great kind of king to be when soon there will be no pushcarts,” Maxie said privately to his friends.

  “Who is giving up?” said General Anna. “So now we must fight the City Council.”

  “City Councils you can’t fight,” Maxie said somberly. “They meet in private. You don’t meet them on the streets.

  “Until now,” Maxie explained, “the pushcarts had a lawful right to be on the streets and we could fight for our rights. But if the City Council makes a law against pushcarts, then we have no rights to fight for. If we fight, we are against the law.”

  The whole city seemed to accept the fact that the Pushcart War was over. A newspaper ran a story called “The Death of the Pushcarts.”

  However, there was to be one more battle, and it was to be provoked by a picture, the photograph Marvin Seeley had taken months before, of Mack hitting Morris the Florist the first time. Everyone was curious at this point to know just how the war had begun, and this prompted Emily Wisser to show her husband, Buddy Wisser, Marvin’s Honorable Mention picture in her scrapbook.

  Buddy, as we know, blew up Marvin’s picture to get a clearer view of the situation, and as the facts he discovered by enlarging the picture had human interest, he decided to publish the picture on the front page of his newspaper.

  Buddy Wisser was as surprised as anyone else at what happened next. Buddy thought of himself as a hard-working editor putting together a few facts. He had no idea of the chain reaction that would be set off by the Seeley picture.

  For Marvin Seeley’s photo touched off the most heated, and certainly the oddest, battle of the war. This battle did not take place in the streets. It took place entirely in words, and it was to prove the turning point in the war.

  Overnight all the newspapers in the city began to get letters about the pushcarts. The following letters, for instance, all appeared in the June 18th edition of one of the city papers:

  Dear Mr. Editor:

  If there aren’t any pushcarts, where can you get peanuts in the park to feed the squirrels?

  Larry Gilbert, Age 8

  Dear Editor:

  I work in the garment business. I sew the sleeves in coats. I have been sewing in the sleeves for 35 years and I like my job, but I do not make so much money that I can eat my lunch in a restaurant. What I like to do is to buy a hot dog & sauerkraut, or else a hot sweet potato, from the pushcart of Harry the Hot Dog.

  Harry comes by my place of business every noon hour. From Harry the Hot Dog, you can buy for twenty cents a good lunch. For twenty-five cents, even a piece of fruit afterward. Several of my friends buy the same.

  Bessie Schwartz

  Dear Editor:

  My husband has a pushcart, and if they make the pushcarts get off the streets, I don’t know what I will do because the only peace I get is when he is pushing the cart. I love my husband, but a man should have some work to do.

  Mrs. Bertha Beneker

  Dear Editor:

  Every afternoon when we get out of school, we buy Good Humors from the Good Humor pushcart that stops by our school playground. If we cannot get a Good Humor after a hard day at school, we will be pretty mad.

  Sally Beck

  Harold Jayne

  Keith Amish

  Robert Williams

  Gene Smith

  Mary Wahle

  Vivien Vercrouse

  George Vogt

  Joe Maier

  Betty Rosenbauer

  Arlene Enderlin

  Bernie Schreiber

  Ballison Fulton

  Warren Heard

  Warren Neely

  Vera Burkhardt

  Eleanor Rojanski

  (The Second Grade of P.S. 42)

  Dear Editor:

  I would be grateful if you would print in your paper that I am 99 years old and cannot walk very far. A pushcart with bananas comes by my door every morning and stops outside my window if I wave my hand. I live almost entirely on bananas, and I do not know what I would do without this pushcart.

  Mrs. Clara Washington

  Dear Editor:

  I am in the plastic objects business, and all the plastic objects I get come packed in big cardboard cartons. After I unpack the merchandise, I have to get rid of the cartons, because I have no room in my shop for such big boxes.

  A truck will charge me $10 an hour to take the boxes away, because the truckers cannot be bothered for less. But there is a man with a pushcart who will take away these cartons at no cost to me, because he gets calls from people with merchandise to pack who need the cartons I do not need. If I have to pay a truck $10 an hour, I may as well go out of business.

  E. Siegel

  Dear Editor:

  Last week a truck smashed in the fender of a lovely little car I bought in Paris, France. The driver did it on purpose. I know just how the pushcart men feel, and I think we should do everything we can to help them.

  Nancy Raeburn

  Dear Editor:

  I am in the 2nd-hand and junk line, and I get almost all goods I sell in my shop from the pushcart men who go around the streets picking up things that people have thrown away, but which maybe someone else could use. I would like to ask you how I can stay in business if nobody picks up old toasters and chairs and all kinds of hardware. You’d be surprised what people are throwing out. I got from a pushcart last week an egg-beater practically as good as new. In addition, the pushcarts are cleaning up the
streets.

  Si Biski

  Dear Editor:

  I am an artistic person, and I want to say that I think the pushcarts with their striped umbrellas and big old-fashioned wheels are a very pretty sight. I have painted many pictures of pushcarts. All of the trucks are ugly.

  R. Solbert

  Dear Editor:

  Here is a fact I know will be of interest to all animal lovers. My cocker spaniel named Cookie, who has been with me for eleven years, grows very nervous whenever a big truck passes us on the street. But she loves pushcarts and will go right up to one and let the owner pet her. Now that there are so many trucks on the streets, I really dread taking Cookie for a walk.

  Arthur Winkle

  Dear Editor:

  A year ago I retired to the island of Rubanga. There are no trucks on Rubanga. We make our own peanut butter, and I am very happy.

  I am sorry to read that you are still having trouble in the city.

  Archie Love

  Dear Editor:

  I have never written a letter to a newspaper before, but the picture of that Mighty Mammoth hitting that pushcart has upset me so much that I cannot sleep at night. The whole thing does not seem right to me.

  Jean F. Merrill

  Dear Editor:

  Is New York being run for trucks or people? Pushcarts are pushed by people who sell goods to other people who buy from the pushcarts out of choice. Who needs 400 cartons of peanut butter?

  Committee for the Preservation of Pushcarts

  Dear Editor:

  Since crowded streets seem to be our trouble, wouldn’t it be more helpful to get rid of 300,000 trucks than 500 pushcarts?

  Committee for the Revocation of Truck Licenses

  Dear Editor:

  I just hate trucks.

  A Loyal Reader

  Dear Editor:

  I have followed with interest the concern your readers have been expressing over the plight of the pushcart peddlers in your city. It may interest your readers to know that in our city (Harmony, Illinois), we have passed a law which makes the sale, manufacture, or operation of a truck a criminal offense, punishable by a fine of $20,000 or 20 years in jail.

  Elmer P. Kusse

  Dear Editor:

  I have read about Maxie Hammerman, the Pushcart King, in your paper. I am wondering why there isn’t any Pushcart Queen. It is my ambition when I grow up to be the Pushcart Queen.

  Alice Myles, Age 10

  This was only the beginning. Each letter to an editor that was published seemed to inspire a hundred other people to write. Buddy Wisser said that he had never received so much mail in his entire life as an editor as suddenly came to him on the subject of pushcarts. Even though the editors could publish only a very small sampling of the letters they received, about one out of a thousand, the “Letters to the Editor” sections of the newspapers were within a week taking up so much space that several papers had to cut out their sports, news, and comic sections.

  The truck drivers did not know what to make of the hundreds of letters in the newspapers. It appeared from the letters that everyone who was not a truck driver was on the side of the pushcarts.

  Some of the truck drivers tried to laugh off the letters. “What are a few letters to the newspapers?” they asked each other. “Everyone knows only crackpots write to the papers.”

  Mayor Emmett P. Cudd, however, was not laughing. “Crackpots have a vote like everyone else,” he told his wife, Ethel P. Cudd. “And enough crackpots could vote a mayor into office. Or out,” he added.

  The Three were not laughing either. When Big Moe read Elmer P. Kusse’s letter about making the driving of a truck a criminal offense, Big Moe knew it was time to surrender.

  It was clear to Big Moe that the people of New York were already on the side of the pushcarts. If the Mayor’s threat to revoke the pushcart licenses was carried out, people would be even angrier with the trucks. The possibility of people voting the trucks off the street entirely, as Elmer P. Kusse suggested, was not a risk Big Moe was willing to take.

  Louie Livergreen wanted to proceed with the Master Plan. He said that once Operation Krushkar was rolling, people would be afraid to vote against the trucks. However, Big Moe’s faith in the Master Plan had not been the same since Maxie Hammerman had captured his bulletproof Italian car. And the word “extinct” in Mack’s special delivery letter had sent shivers down his spine.

  “How can the Master Plan be carried out,” asked Big Moe, “when we are in so much trouble with the pushcarts which you guaranteed would be a pushover?”

  The Tiger voted with Big Moe to come to terms with the pushcarts and on July 4th, Big Moe telephoned the Mayor, who was just about to call Big Moe.

  Big Moe told the Mayor that he was willing to meet with Maxie Hammerman and work out an agreement that would be acceptable to both sides. This was exactly what the Mayor had been about to suggest and was, of course, exactly what the Peace Army had been fighting for.

  “In other words,” said Maxie Hammerman, looking more surprised than he had ever looked in his life, “we have won the war.”

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  The Battle of Bleecker Street

  If any of the truck drivers thought Big Moe had given in too easily to the letters to the editors, The Battle of Bleecker Street convinced them otherwise. This was a freak battle in that it took place after Big Moe’s surrender, but before the Pushcart Peace Conference which spelled out the terms of the surrender.

  The day after Big Moe’s surrender, all the pushcarts were on the streets again. Wherever they appeared, people cheered wildly, especially down on Bleecker Street.

  On Bleecker Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, some dozen pushcarts lined up, end-to-end, along the north curb every day to form a kind of outdoor market. From the pushcarts on Bleecker Street, a housewife could buy anything she needed in the fresh fruit and vegetable line, without ever having to step inside a store.

  On the day after Big Moe’s surrender, the pushcarts that regularly did business on Bleecker Street were joined by many of their friends. For it seemed likely that the outdoor market would attract many people after all the newspaper stories about the Pushcart War.

  There must have been thirty pushcarts in Bleecker Street that morning, and there was still more business than the pushcarts could handle. Women crowded around the carts, exclaiming over the quality of the fruit and comparing bargains.

  Papa Peretz, who had come down to join the fun—although fruit and vegetables were not his line—had sold out a cart of pretzels by ten o’clock and was waltzing in the street with one of the customers. At about 10:05, while everyone was cheering the waltzers, half a dozen trucks came down the street.

  “Here they come!” shouted an excitable young woman. “Those dirty trucks!” And she picked a ripe cantaloupe out of a sack of cantaloupes she had just purchased and hurled it straight through the open window of one of the trucks.

  The driver she hit crashed into the truck ahead of him, and the trucks behind him slammed on their brakes. Then before the pushcart peddlers realized what was happening, their customers were all grabbing cantaloupes and tomatoes and peaches from the crates on the curb where the peddlers threw any spoiled vegetables and fruits they found in unpacking their produce each morning.

  “Have a peach,” a lady shouted, pitching a moldy peach at another truck.

  “Have a melon,” called another.

  “A nice soft pear!”

  “A rotten apple!”

  “A little salad,” said someone, tossing out a head of lettuce.

  “A nice fresh fish!” The owner of a fish store along the sidewalk could not resist making a contribution and flung a fat flounder into one of the cabs.

  “All the tomatoes you want!” said an old lady, generously emptying her whole shopping bag.

  The truck drivers leaped from their trucks and tried to run for cover, but they were surrounded. The ladies were pelting them from all sides. A truck driver dodged an
over-ripe mango, only to be conked by a cabbage.

  The air was filled with flying fruit and vegetables—peaches, pears, apples, pomegranates, cucumbers, cabbages, and cantaloupes. Mainly cantaloupes, as this fruit had just come into season.

  At 10:30, a siren sounded, and a police car screeched around the corner. Two policemen leaped from the car and seized a redheaded woman who was carefully aiming a cantaloupe.

  “Hey, lady,” said one of the officers, “the war’s over. Haven’t you heard?”

  “Certainly,” she said. “We’re just celebrating.”

  “Oh,” said the policeman, and looking around, he could see that everyone was laughing and in the best of spirits.

  “Well, in that case,” the officer said—and he took the cantaloupe from her hand and hurled it with deadly accuracy right into the back of a fleeing truck driver, knocking the fellow headlong into a cart of tomatoes.

  “You’re wonderful!” shouted the redheaded lady, clapping her hands and kissing the policeman. It was a wild morning.

  Fifty police cars had to be dispatched to the scene before any kind of order could be restored. And then it was really only the truck drivers’ finally escaping into a subway entrance that brought an end to the fighting.

  The police made no arrests. The situation was clearly a case of a city celebrating the end of a long and tiring war.

  It was an expensive celebration for the pushcart peddlers. In the excitement, the ladies—when they had used up the spoiled fruit and vegetables—had helped themselves to perfectly good produce from the pushcarts. Most of the ladies offered afterwards to pay the peddlers for what they had used, but many did not know which cart they had taken the fruit from. And the peddlers did not want to take their money anyway.