The World Is My Home: A Memoir

by James A. Michener

  The turnstile on my ride contained, when it left the factory, the regular six projecting cogs, but my absent cashier had filed one of them off, thus enabling him to keep one out of every six fares and clearing a 16 percent profit on each day’s take. How long this scam had been in operation I could not tell, but during that spell he must have made a fortune. On this day I stood to make well over a hundred and fifty dollars.

  At about eleven that night a breathless messenger from the hospital rushed up to my booth and whispered: ‘He’ll be back tomorrow. He says “Keep it all and tell nobody.” I kept half and told everybody, so that when he reported for work next morning he was quietly told that his services were no longer required.

  I worked at Willow Grove for many summers, even into my college years, serving the park well as a relatively honest cashier, and I left with insights into the workings of at least a part of our financial system: the agreed-upon ignoring of unsavory situations, the insidious preying upon the public, the efforts of good men to keep the operations reasonably clean, and the pressures upon the individuals ensnared by their own greed in the various traps. I did not leave the Park a hardened cynic; the lovely music I heard four times a day would not have allowed that, nor had I let my experiences there color my attitude toward either business or personal involvement.

  I had one other job as a young man before I entered serious adult employment, and from it I also learned a great deal. While a college student I gave a public political speech that pleased a listener so much that he came forward at the end of the evening and said: ‘Impressive. You have the kind of mind I’m looking for,’ and he offered me a job, which lasted four years and could have continued permanently had I not been drawn away to other interests.

  My employer was Frank Scheibley, exuberant owner of the highly regarded Strath Haven Inn in my college town of Swarthmore. He offered me a job that included being a nightwatchman of the lead hotel in his chain, and since it was a completely wooden and rambling affair, I was obliged to make an hourly round of all the hallways and crannies, carrying with me a time clock, which I punched with keys hanging from critical points to prove I had been there to check for fire. In the morning the clerk would verify my tape to ensure that I had been at each of the twenty or thirty spots at the proper times and certify my fidelity to the insurance company.

  My other duties included operating the switchboard through the night when I wasn’t on my rounds and attending to any emergencies. It was a peaceful job and I often dozed at the switchboard, but what fascinated me about it, in addition to the chance to study the human beings who staggered in late, was the business that Uncle Frank (as he insisted that I call him—he wanted to adopt me but I did not allow that) specialized in. He had made such a pronounced success of Strath Haven that he went around to other regional hotels and told their board owners: ‘Look, your place is a mess. In four or five years you’ll be out of business. Tell you what I’ll do, I’ll come in here with my team and turn this place completely around, save your investment and earn you a bundle.’ He wanted no fee, just 15 or 20 percent of the stock, and when the deal was struck he never failed to fulfill his promise. He was a wizard at rejuvenating run-down hotels and made himself a modest fortune.

  I helped in various of his adventures, working in this hotel or that, and I saw that he had half a hundred rules for running a good establishment, the most interesting to me being this: ‘When you are about to serve a meal, and the customers have ordered, whisk the menus away immediately so the women don’t change their minds.’ He was a fanatic about cleanliness, and he also trained his desk people to lean forward to greet guests as if impatient to help them. From Uncle Frank I learned that businesses can go extremely sour through mismanagement and even lose their entire investment, but that they can be resuscitated by some miracle worker who returns to basics. Uncle Frank was basic.

  So from the age of nine through twenty-two I was never without a paying job of some kind, and I worked interminable hours while at the same time pursuing a rigorous education in which I consistently got top marks, engaging in vigorous athletics in which I helped win championships, and keeping up a wide-ranging reading program. I was not an idle boy.

  My next confrontations with the inescapable problem of making a living came in rapid sequence, and I shall dispose of them briefly, but this will not mean that they were less consequential than my earlier experiences; they shocked me profoundly and crystallized my attitudes.

  In 1929 I graduated from college in that rosy June when the prosperity of the world, and especially the United States, seemed unlimited. But in October of that same year the fairy-tale castles collapsed and many of my classmates, from one of the finest colleges in the country, were unable to find jobs and remained desperately unemployed, some of them for years. I escaped the trauma because before the crash came I had landed a fine job teaching at The Hill, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, a private school for the sons of well-to-do parents where, as is so often the case with energetic beginning teachers, I learned far more than I taught. At the very depth of the depression, when jobs simply could not be had, I was given an opportunity to travel to Europe and astonished everyone by announcing that I was resigning to study abroad for a couple of years. Older teachers warned: ‘You’re making the biggest mistake of your life, quitting a good job in the midst of a depression. You may never find another,’ but I refused to listen, and on the munificent Swarthmore College scholarship of six hundred dollars plus my savings from The Hill I would spend two wonderful years doing graduate work at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and traveling to all parts of the Mediterranean and the Baltic on tramp steamers. This bold move, the surrender of a secure, well-paying job in order to roam, was both the beginning of my broader education and one of the wisest choices I ever made.

  I once spent six weeks in Italy subsisting on cheap pasta dishes, fresh peaches and milk, and the tramp steamers carried me to worlds I would never otherwise have known; my salary was one shilling for ten weeks and required me to do odd jobs about the ship. But since I was given free time at each port we touched I judged the pay to have been more than fair.

  When I returned to America I was offered a job at the excellent experimental Quaker-run George School near Philadelphia, for a salary of $1,200, and there I met three of the finest young teachers I would ever know—Rees Frescoln, Bill Vitarelli, Jack Talbot—each of whom received $500 a year and was glad to get it. I remember one especially cold morning in January when I was walking along a one-mile stretch of country road to my classes and thinking of the advertisement I had seen that morning. It showed a blissfully happy married couple in their fifties and was entitled: ‘How We Retired to Happiness on $2,500 a Year.’ I can recall every word I said to myself as I trudged along: Boy, wouldn’t it be great if a man could have $3,600 a year, guaranteed for the rest of his life—my goodness, he could do everything. The famous Polish transatlantic ship Batory was then carrying students to Europe for $50, and for many years my ideal of ultimate riches continued to be $3,600 a year.

  When my professors at Ohio State University, where I was doing graduate work, heard that I was leaving my secure job at George School for a teaching assignment at the fine experimental College of Education at Greeley, in eastern Colorado, they warned: ‘You’d be making the biggest mistake in your life. The sands of the desert are white with the bones of promising young men who moved west and perished trying to fight their way back east.’ For me the opposite proved true. Any young fellow of ability who worked in a state like Colorado enjoyed an enormous advantage, for when prestigious national committees were formed, participants from the East Coast were more or less automatically selected, the good men from the Mississippi Valley were quickly identified, as were the men from the Pacific Coast. That left a great gaping hole in the west, and someone would remember: ‘Hey, there’s a bright kid out in Greeley.’ You didn’t have to be good; you simply had to be there, and when the White House wanted to convene a small group to tal
k about problems in education I and four others enjoyed a long dinner with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. From Greeley I was also appointed to one significant national position after another and was invited back to Harvard as a visiting assistant professor. So much for white bones in the desert.

  But the part of my Colorado experience relevant to this chapter was a shattering one. As an administrator of the career procedures of would-be teachers, I became a minor official in the college’s branch of the National Youth Administration headed by a great-hearted professor of sociology, Hal Blue. Congress, in an admirable attempt to keep promising students in college and knowing that their skills would be needed in the years ahead, paid young people thirty-five dollars a month for some service so they could continue their studies, and it became my duty to help select the worthy students and see to it that they received their funds and spent them properly.

  It was a painful task, heartbreaking really, for to deny a student an NYA grant might mean the termination of his education, and I became known as a soft touch, for when some especially bright young woman or man failed to qualify for one reason or another, I gave her or him a temporary scholarship out of my own funds until the student could clear up discrepancies and qualify properly.

  But two of the students I was monitoring, one man and one woman who did not know each other, seemed to be doing so poorly in their studies that with Professor Blue’s approval I had to call them in with every intention of removing them from the list of grantees. However, when I had them before me and had outlined my proof of their inadequacies—missed classes, poor work turned in late and the like—the young woman began to cry convulsively, and when I had quietened her, she revealed that of the thirty-five dollars a month I had been giving her, she had been sending half to her family out in the drylands because they had absolutely nothing else to live on. She had been starving herself to feed them.

  When I turned to the young man, he placed before me proof that he had been sending to his parents twenty dollars of his allowance, and when I began to question other students I found that these two examples, while in no way typical, were not unique. To have gone through the Great American Depression in a dust-bowl state like Colorado was to have lived in hell.

  A few years ago, when I stopped by Greeley to watch a television show being made from Centennial, a group of adults who had been my students in those terrible years asked if they could come to see me, and in the group were the wonderful Kagoharas, the Japanese children who had conducted themselves so admirably in those difficult years, maintaining their courage, and their ebullient spirits. I remembered them with affection, the whole troop, and then one of the girls began to speak: ‘Mr. Michener, did you ever realize why we thought so highly of you in those days?’

  ‘You were good students. You made it easy to like you.’

  ‘But do you remember the time you drove us to Denver in your car? To see the museum? And you gave us each a dime?’

  ‘I remember the trip but not the dimes.’

  ‘In all the years we were with you, when you and Miss Selberg kept us going, each of us was given by our father five cents a semester to do with as we wished. We used to lie awake at night, wondering what to do with our nickels and we never spent them foolishly. And then in one swoop, you gave each of us a full dime. We have never forgotten and we came here today to thank you.’

  I think the reader can now deduce what my attitudes toward money would be when at age fifty, I began to earn substantial sums as a writer, whether I was fully entitled to them or not. But it may be helpful to recapitulate those points that seem significant.

  Money had been terribly important in my childhood and its absence meant real deprivation, but at a very early age I eliminated it as a dominant factor in my thinking and refused to allow it to tyrannize over me. From the age of eleven I had steady work in a wide variety of occupations in which I learned the day-to-day significance of money, but I held it in such contempt that twice I felt free to quit good jobs and go off exploring, and never did I allow financial considerations to dictate career choices, nor did I ever seek a job, promotion in the one I had, or a salary increase. My attitude toward money was bizarre and contradictory.

  But when I stopped looking at myself to study others, I saw a world in which money was of terrifying importance, its lack sometimes leading to disaster or suicide. It could also color personal relationships, as when acquaintances would ask, sometimes in print: ‘Why has he been so lucky and not I? Especially when I’m twice as talented?’ and for that unfair situation there can be no explanation.

  On the morning after the announcement of my Pulitzer Prize I was allowed a peep into one of the great secrets of publishing. My boss, Phil Knowlton, did not come to work that morning; perhaps the celebration, during which he told me about Alaska, had made him ill. In his absence it fell to me as his assistant to note and verify the Macmillan royalty statements that would soon be mailed to all our authors, a precaution intended to forestall either preposterous over- or under-payment, and this proved a sobering experience to a beginning writer.

  Running down the list I would come upon one famous name after another in British and American literature, for Macmillan had a noble group of writers, and see to my dismay that the yearly royalties were minuscule—John Masefield, $289.63—and others of equal repute at figures like $111.57 and $988.94.

  But then I stumbled upon a name I had never heard of—Michael O’Toole, $89,468.52—and I was so startled that I called Miss Habekorst, Mr. Knowlton’s longtime secretary, and she explained that O’Toole was one of the authors of our famous Beginning Chemistry, by Dorsett, O’Toole and Ginsburg, and when I checked the earnings of the other two men, I found that Dorsett, long dead, was still pulling down a hefty $20,000 for his estate and that young Isadore Ginsburg was getting $48,000. Upon asking around I learned this was a college text of splendid reputation written in the closing years of the last century by Brantley Dorsett, professor at Yale. When both he and his text began to run out of steam, Macmillan presented him with an ultimatum: ‘To keep your book alive you simply must bring in a younger author who teaches beginning chemistry in some big university,’ and they made a persuasive case. But when Mrs. Dorsett learned that the man nominated to update the sacred text was an Irishman named O’Toole who was professor in a minor school like Indiana University, she exploded at the indignity, whereupon a brutally tough Macmillan editor warned the Dorsetts: ‘Revise with O’Toole or your book goes out of print.’

  Of course, some years later, when Dr. and Mrs. O’Toole were informed by that same editor that his famous beginning chemistry, Dorsett and O’Toole, must now add the name Ginsburg or go out of print, they complained with Indiana pride: ‘But not someone from one of those big amorphous New York Jewish schools,’ and the editor repeated what he had told old Dorsett years before: ‘We go where the big freshman classes are. Dorsett’s dead and you no longer teach. It’ll have to be Ginsburg,’ and in this way the famous old book gained renewed life and continued its huge sales to freshman chemists, even though the original version was now well over fifty years old and its original author long dead.

  From checking those lists that day I learned that Charles Duckworth, who wrote a sensitive novel about a young lawyer in Louisville, was likely to earn $1,109.93, while both Lemnitzer and Riley, who had the hot new text for Beginning Psychology, would each earn well above $60,000. The number of writers whose names I knew who earned less than a thousand dollars that year was appalling, and my own book, which appeared for the first time on this list, earned so little that I am ashamed to report it. When I finished checking the list I was a rather shaken man, but I realized that it was salutary for me to know the gruesome facts.

  We have now reached the point where my professional career as a writer began—rather humbly, I must say. I had published a fairly good book, Tales of the South Pacific, but except for the Pulitzer Prize it had accomplished little beyond a couple of good reviews—few of the major journals noti
ced it—and it had certainly not brought me any financial returns worth mentioning. About this time the Authors League in New York launched a comprehensive study of what professional writers really earn, and the results were depressing, something like two thousand dollars a year on average, and the Macmillan list of royalties for serious writers confirmed the study.

  On the other hand, if the average book earned little, it could lead to a better reputation for the writer, promotion in his or her profession and, surprisingly often, to income from other sources that had not been anticipated. For example, after the moderately good reception of my novel I was approached by the leading speakers’ agent, a wonderful genius named Colston Leigh, who signed me to a long-term contract as one of his lecturers, and I proved, for reasons neither he nor I understood, to be fairly popular on his circuit. One day he gave me a fascinating insight on the lecture business: ‘Always remember the case of John Doe. It will teach you a lot. The real money to be made in this business is with the Jewish women’s clubs. They pay and they’re wonderful to work with, but to succeed with them you must have topics that will interest them. Now I’m sure you know Doe. Wrote one book that had modest success, Israel in Jeopardy. But as a lecturer he’s sensational. Darling of all the clubs and I help him make a damned good living. Had only two subjects. Most good speakers have four. His were “New Hope in Israel” and “Thunder Out of Africa.” Great successes both of them, but pretty soon, what with all his traveling, he had used them up. Clubs wanted something new so he offered “Thunder Out of Israel” and “New Hope in Africa.” Total bust. Now he’s back to the original names and he’s on top again.’