Hard Times

by Studs Terkel

  No one was vaguely interested. They were waiting for the table singers. These were the folk who went around with a little push-around piano and sang sad songs while customers cried in their beer. It was weeks before anybody discovered I wasn’t wearing anything. It was economically sound, because I didn’t have any money to buy anything.

  It’s now the spring of ’33. I’d met Charlie Weber, who was County Commissioner for forty years. Charlie had the beer concession at The Streets of Paris. 74

  Meanwhile, they had the Beaux Arts Ball at the Congress Hotel. There were bread lines, and people were starving. Yet, women in Chicago had the bad taste to have themselves photographed in gowns they were going to wear at the Ball. One was made of thousand-dollar bills. People went to Paris to get these gowns that cost thousands of dollars, wearing jewels, while people are starving in the streets, and people are marching in Washington and being shot at. It was such bad taste.

  A friend was doing press work for me. We were socially conscious. She said, “Why don’t you have your picture taken in the costume you’re going to wear at the Beaux Arts Ball?” I didn’t have a costume. She said, “How about Lady Godiva?” She sent out a blurb to all the papers.

  We had to hire a horse. So I had a picture taken as Lady Godiva. It was like saying: How dare you have a dress of thousand-dollar bills when people are hungry? The girl sponsoring the ball was a little upset because of all the publicity my pictures got. So I went to the Congress, and they wouldn’t let the horse in because he didn’t have rubbers on his shoes. They put me and the horse on a table, and all the guys carried us in: Lady Godiva’s riding into the ballroom floor on a white table top. The Hearst papers came out the next day with the whole double column, front page. All righty.

  Now I’m harassing Charlie Weber for that job at the World’s Fair, and he’s not coming up with it. Because The Streets of Paris was sponsored by the high and mighty of this town, the social set. It was all French entertainment. Mr. Weber just didn’t swing it big enough to get a job for me there. He suggested I crash the preview, the night before it opens. Mrs. Hearst was giving one of her famous Milk Fund dinners: “You’ll get your foot in the door… .”

  I hired the horse again, but the gates of the Fair were closed. No wheeled vehicle could come in until the next day when Mrs. Roosevelt would be there and the ribbon, cut. I took the horse out of the truck: “O.K., no wheeled vehicle, it’s a horse.” But no animals were allowed. O.K. Back into the trailer, we go up to the Wrigley docks. The Streets of Paris had a yacht landing there. The clientele is so posh, huh.

  So I paid $8 for the tickets to the boat. He said, “Who’s going with you?” I said, “Just a friend.” So I brought the horse on the boat, and the man demurred. I said, “What do you care if it’s a horse or a human?” At the yacht landing of The Streets of Paris, there was a little Frenchman who spoke no English. He figured that a broad that arrives in a boat with a horse is supposed to be there. So he opened the gate. The master of ceremonies, poor soul, figured: God, here’s a woman with a horse and nobody told me about it.

  Up to this time, the party’d been pretty dull. They had two bands. It kind of takes people’s appetite away at a hundred dollars a plate. The fanfare sounded and the MC announced: Now, Lady Godiva will take her famous ride. Music played. Every photographer in the business, especially the Hearst ones, were there. Flashlights went off and the music played, and everybody was happy. They said: do it again. So I did it again. I had to get back to the show at the club.75

  The next day I went down to The Streets of Paris to importune somebody for a job. I couldn’t get in. There was a riot. All the people were waiting to tell them when Sally Rand was going to appear. You see, the Fair had opened. To hell with the cutting of the ribbon. Every newspaper in America came up that morning with Lady Godiva opening the Fair. The place was jammed. When does she go on? Nobody knew. (Laughs.)

  A poor soul was walking the floor: “Nobody’s gonna come in unless Sally Rand’s gonna be here.” I said, “I’m Sally Rand.” Whaaat? They hired me at $90 a week. I had to go home immediately and get the fans. They had no piano, just a xylophone. That’s how we got started.

  They planned this Fair to bring business to Chicago, into the Loop. But you could have fired a cannon down State Street and hit nobody, because everybody was out at the Fair sleeping in their Fords. No business in the Loop. They figured they’d better get a Fair attraction down there. It wasn’t easy to bring the Streets of Flags or the Hall of Science. I was the most mobile. So they hired me in the Chicago Theater.

  There was a big scandal on in City Hall. A reporter got a hold of this tax business that Mayor Kelly was stealing. Taking property for taxes and hadn’t even sent out tax notices. It hit the front pages. So City Hall had to do something to attract attention away from their own nefarious business. They got an old jim-dandy slogan: Clean Up The Loop for Fair Visitors.

  Their first net brought in a little prostitute who wasn’t paying the right madam. And a guy selling rubber goods in a back alley. Everybody else was protected. They paid. Well, you’re not gonna get a headline that way. You gotta get a hold of somebody big.

  So on my opening night, this enormous policewoman, a giantess, came crashing through the scrim curtain. I thought she was a sex maniac. She came screaming…. Here I am locked in my dressing room with a tiny little reporter trying to get a story. The police sirens are going, and the whole detective squad is out there. It’s the biggest thing since sliced bread. Finally, John Balaban76 had to get his firm of lawyers to get me to come out of my dressing room. Why … I’m arrested!

  By this time, it’s all on the radio, and the lines are beginning to queue up. I went down to the police station, signed the necessary papers, came back, did my show. I was arrested again. Four times that day. Finally, a little policewoman said, “Honey, don’t worry about it. It wouldn’t make any difference if you were wrapped up in the back drop. They’d still arrest you.” I was trying to conform to whatever the hell they wanted, but nobody would say.

  That was the point. They had to get headlines to distract away from the tax thing. That was the whole bag. The lines queued up for eleven solid weeks, four deep. I was doing seven shows a day at the Chicago Theater and seven shows a day at The Streets of Paris. I got my first $1,000 a week that week, and the first thing I bought with it was a tractor for my stepfather.

  In June, ‘33, $1,000 a week was a lot of money. I did the Fair again in’34. On the eleventh of November, 1934, mass hysteria took over. They completely demolished the Century of Progress. They tore down flags, they tore down street lights, they tore down the walls. It started out being souvenir hunters, but it became mass vandalism. Anybody who witnessed it had this terribly frightening feeling….

  When we say “our society,” it has a smug kind of ring to it. We seem to be a people who can’t get out of our childhood. We don’t believe what we see, what we hear….

  The rich still eat rich and wear mink coats, while people in Chicago literally freeze to death in the streets.77 When I first went to India and saw dead in the streets, I couldn’t eat. When I think of the garbage that goes into our garbage can, and here are people dying in the streets. And it’s happening in our country, too. And I’m wearing a mink coat. Yeah.

  I truly believe we shall have another Depression. I think people will just go out and take what they need. I don’t think there will be any more people queueing up on bread lines waiting to be fed by charity, God damn it. I’m not condoning this, but we’ve let it happen. Take the television. It isn’t food they’re hungry for now, it’s a different kind of food. Not only the Negroes. All the poor.

  The middle class look upon the deprived smugly: the poor we’ll have with us always. Oh yeah?

  Tony Soma

  New York restaurateur. In his early days as a young immigrant from Italy, he suffered. privation. As a waiter in a Cincinnati hotel, during the nomination of William Howard Taft, 1908, “I got a black eye from a tall
red American. He said I had no business being in America because I was a wop.” Later, in New York, he became Enrico Caruso’s waiter … “he was a bad tipper.”

  In the late Twenties and early Thirties, he was known as “Broadway Tony.” His speak-easy was a favorite watering place for members of literary and theater circles.

  THE DEPRESSION meant the glorification of “Tony’s.” I had three leases, three blocks east of Sixth Avenue. I sold them for $104,000. In ‘29. So for me, ’29 was the biggest year I had in my American life. Glorification, money-wise and in friends, too. I had the greatest friends and from both continents, Europe and Hollywood.

  Didn’t some of them go broke?

  They didn’t went broke—they went crazy. They were still rich. Americans never broke. It’s a question of figures. Oh yes, I had stock. Paper went into paper. City Bank stock when I bought it, $518. Went down to $35. The same stock, the same people. It was the figures that changed. To me, money was paper. My ego is meant all the moneys in the world. I am an egotist.

  I am a capitalist myself, but I think money rules too many human beings. No, I am not enlightened, I’m just a capitalist. After all, this is a capitalist country, and I am entitled to live like a capitalist. But I know the propertied classes, the conservative element kept the Depression going. Roosevelt changed the country back into the United States today. We are still adventurous today. I would give credit not to F.D.R., but to Mrs. Roosevelt. She was the genius of that family. He was a vain man.

  I thought I was going to be well protected, but I had at that time a lawyer—he did not understand the procedures of business. It was on the night of Repeal, the vestibule of Seventy-Seven78 was piled up with cases of liquor, which we were not supposed to have. The name Seventy-Seven brand. A retailer was not supposed to have a wholesaler’s license. Only one license. So I had a retail license, that was enough. But the Seventy-Seven Corporation could be many things. I always thought what I did was responsible. I should have had for myself a corporation. Today that’s why they are millionaires. Double standard of laws being made for the protection of money and not for the protection of human beings. Still today.

  My business was better than ever in the Depression. Never changed my mode of life. I’m a very humble man. Many, many of my customers were in the paper. They were my friends: Wolfe, Fitzgerald, any of the big names. I never suffered economically because I never looked at economics. To have credit in an individual like Robert Benchley and to have credit in a bank—Benchley was better than a bank.

  I give you an instance. I met him at Seventy-Seven to settle certain matters. In those days, they were the place you had to meet certain people that was of value to my business. We had a little contract, it was in four figures. He gave to me, he says, “Tony, if I die today, you can collect.” Just a piece of paper. That’s the type of customer. It was a kind of mutual sympathy.

  Were you ever raided?

  Raided? No, never. A visitor was here. They wanted to know what business we had to be open with liquor. Well, I don’t do anything here, I’m drinking here. It was not by the authorities considered bad, unless you had bad liquor, unless you had dope, unless you had prostitution. My place was a place where you could go and sit down and have liquor with a bottle on the table. I never measured it. They were my guests and they had their friends. Absolutely, there was no crime.

  I never suffered. Life is not to suffer. The Depression is still here for some peoples. Depression is a disease, a mental disease. There’s bread lines today, but they’re getting money. Paid by people that works.

  In the old days, the poor were more ignorant. They didn’t have television. They had to work sixteen hours a day, and they didn’t have time. The Plaza Hotel, where I used to work sixteen hours a day, my pay used to be a dollar a day. The Knickerbocker, I was frisked when I walked out, whether I had something in my pocket. They found out once I had a box of candy, so they fired me.

  Today the poor are not guilty, just sick, mentally sick. Poverty is always a sign of laziness.

  During those days, did you ever notice homeless men?

  No. I always lived between Forty-third Street and Fifty-ninth Street. I never bumped into slums.

  Ever see apple sellers?

  I was busy. I worked.

  POSTSCRIPT : Immediately following the conversation, he, a devoted follower of the Yoga philosophy, stood on his head and sang “La donna è mobile.”

  Alec Wilder

  Composer. Among the more than five hundred songs he has written are, “It’s So Peaceful in the Country,” “While We’re Young,” “I’ll be Around,” “Trouble Is A Man,” “The Winter of My Discontent,” “Goodbye, John.” Among his instrumental compositions, woodwind octets, concerti, and concert band music. He has lived at the Algonquin Hotel, New York, off and on, since pre-Depression days.

  I KNEW something was terribly wrong because I heard bellboys, everybody, talking about the stock market. At the Algonquin they were grabbing as much as they could—horse betting, anything—and running to put this money on margin. It sounded nutty to me. About six weeks before the Crash, I persuaded my mother in Rochester to let me talk to our family adviser. I wanted to sell stock which had been left to me by my father, who was president of a Rochester bank. Maybe that’s why I became a musician. I certainly didn’t want to be a banker. Anything but a banker.

  I talked to this charming man and told him I wanted to unload this stock. Just because I had this feeling of disaster. He got very sentimental: “Oh, your father wouldn’t have liked you to do that.” He was so persuasive, I said O.K. I could have sold it for $160,000. Six weeks later, the Crash. Four years later, I sold it for $4,000. John Balcom was his name, I’d never seen a face as red as his. It turned out he’d been an alcoholic. So all this advice came to me through the fumes of gin. He’d finally killed himself. Oh, gentle John Balcom! Solid citizen and everything. He cost me about $155,000. I could have done nicely with that. The sage old gentleman. So I did know something was wrong.

  I wasn’t mad at him, strangely enough. But 1 wanted nothing to do with money. The blow had fallen, and it was over. I was very skeptical and never invested. I became tired of people telling me: “Oh, there’s a marvelous thing happening—and if you should have any extra money …” I’d say, “Don’t talk to me about the market.” I would have nothing to do with it.

  I didn’t even take money to a bank. I kept it all in my pocket. I didn’t have a bank account for years. The money was drifting in. Taxes weren’t as bad in those days, so you didn’t have to keep track of what you spent. So I just kept the money in my pockets. It was crazy. To walk around with three or four thousand dollars and not be able to pay any bills by check. Just crazy.

  I carried thousand-dollar bonds around in my pocket, and whenever I would run out of money, I’d cash one. Again, I was reinforced by money. It was a counteractive against any feeling of Depression.

  I met a very beautiful girl just outside a speak-easy, on the sidewalk. She was reading the funny paper about midnight. It was all very romantic. She wanted to appear in a play a friend of hers had written. So I sold my New York Central stock for $12,000. I don’t think the play cost more than ten or twelve thousand dollars to produce. Had I waited five years, I could have gotten—oh, $100,000. Of course, the play was a perfect mess. That was about ‘30 or ’31. So I did know a little bit about the Depression. (Laughs.)

  I loved speak-easies. If you knew the right ones, you never worried about being poisoned by bad whiskey. I’d kept hearing about a friend of a friend who had been blinded by bad gin. I guess I was lucky. The speaks were so romantic. A pretty girl in a speak-easy was the most beautiful girl in the world. As soon as you walked in the door, you were a special person, you belonged to a special society. When I’d bring a person in, it was like dispensing largesse. I was a big man. You had to know somebody who knew somebody. It had that marvelous movie-like quality, unreality. And the food was great. Although some pretty dreadful things did
occur in them. I saw a man at the door pay off a gentleman in thousand-dollar bills to keep from being raided.

  I recall the exact day Prohibition ended. I went into a restaurant that started serving booze. It was such a strange feeling, ’cause I started drinking in speaks. I didn’t know about open drinking, to go in off the street and order a drink without having an arm on your shoulder. I’d gotten used to the idea of being disreputable. A friend of mine took me to some dump up in Rochester and gave me my first glass of beer. I don’t think I’d have drunk it if it had been legal.

  A very rich family up in Connecticut, before taking off for Europe, said to their children: No liquor in this house. So, under the rhododendron bush, the gin; under the hawthorne bush, the bourbon. It was all scattered just outside the house. No liquor in the house. All the drinking had to be done on the porch.

  Roosevelt came in, and that was a cheery moment. Everybody seemed to know it. Even politically uninformed kids. I’m so sick of hearing how devious he was politically. So was Abraham Lincoln, for heaven’s sake. To be a politician in a country like this, you’ve got to be devious.

  His miraculous quality seemed to hit everybody. His fireside chats. It was very odd to me. Although his wit and speeches were beautiful, I never could understand how the public could pick up on his voice. It wasn’t the kind of voice you hear on the street. But it grabbed them. They all mocked him, and the comedians kept doing imitations of “My friends.” Yet the moment he said it—bang!—you were home. It was really a very extraordinary experience.

  My mind doesn’t move in political ways, ’cause I’m fixed on music. Away from the seamy side. Maybe it’s cowardice. That could have been part of it. I wouldn’t go up to a Hooverville and look at those shacks. I didn’t want to know too much about it, because it depressed me too much and I couldn’t write any music. That’s no excuse, but….