by Osa Johnson
The only carousel in the park was silent and motionless. The owner, a small, bald-headed man with a large stomach, alternately berated the sweating mechanic for his failure to start the merry-go-round and implored the derisive crowd to be patient.
Martin, on the edge of the jeering circle and knowing something of the Latin temperament by now, saw that the grease-smudged operator had lost his head and would completely wreck the machinery unless something were done about it. Without so much as a s’il vous plaît, he elbowed his way through the crowd, past the proprietor, and gently but firmly pushed the mechanic aside. A little adjustment of the mechanism, and the gaudily caparisoned wooden steeds sprang into action, the calliope took up its lusty tooting, and the crowds cheered. Gay pennants fluttered from the red-and-white-striped awning, the proprietor’s plump wife took her place on a high stool and sold tickets for the next ride, and the proprietor, beaming, shook hands with himself and kissed Martin on both cheeks.
For two months Martin remained as engineer of the Luna Park carousel, but more and more he thought of home, of his mother and father and Tom, and of the money in his pocket, which was just about enough, with careful figuring, to take him back to Independence. At length, shaking hands with the proprietor and his wife, both of whom wept, he patted the wooden horses and caught the boat train for Le Havre.
Chapter 6
Independence awoke one morning to find that a proud duty lay before her: the welcoming home of a distinguished son. A hurried town meeting was called to determine the extent of the welcome, and while a few of those present said that Martin Johnson couldn’t be any different from what he’d always been and why all the fuss, the general opinion was that Martin Johnson unquestionably had become a person of note. Wasn’t he the first citizen of Independence to circumnavigate the globe? Hadn’t he been where no other white man had been? Why, three times the town had mourned when the Snark was given up for lost, and three times it had rejoiced when the little craft and all aboard were reported safe. And the Independence Star had thought him important enough to print, right on the front page, excerpts from his letters to his family!
Some of Martin’s former teachers said—and the principal himself, embarrassed, agreed—that a man who had been accepted for two years, more or less, as the close companion of that bright literary light, Jack London, must have qualities of intellect that, mysteriously, had remained undiscovered by Independence. Further, the principal gave it as his opinion that a general holiday should be declared to celebrate Martin’s return. This was put to a vote and carried unanimously.
John Johnson found the whole thing a little terrifying as, on the eventful morning, he was on his way to his jewelry store and saw the flags and bunting usually reserved for the Fourth of July and Election Day blossoming along the main street in honor of his son.
Came train time, and Mr. and Mrs. Johnson and Freda were unable to get anywhere near the incoming express, since practically the whole of Independence was there ahead of them. The town’s band had polished up its brass and perfected its liveliest numbers and, as the train came to a stop, blared forth with “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
Martin, standing on the platform, complacent only in the possession of some decent luggage, good shoes, and a suit that was not frayed, wondered what was up. Must be a celebrity about to get on the train, he thought. Maybe the governor. He craned his neck to see, and the crowd caught sight of him. A roar went up, and he was astonished to find the whole town of Independence rushing at him, and scores of hands reaching up for him and his baggage.
He stood frozen, his knuckles white as he clutched the iron rail of the train platform. The faces of Jess Utz, Opal White, Hannah Scott, Charlie Kerr, and the rest were turned up to him in a blur of excitement. The whole thing was as fantastic as a jungle-fever dream. Then his eyes searched the howling crowd for his family and, finding them, he grinned for the first time and sent a half-wave, half-salute in their direction.
The crowd, led by the band, marched en masse from the station to the Johnson home, and there on the lawn the band gave an impromptu concert. Notable for volume rather than harmony, it defied speech and deafened the ears of the Johnsons, and by nightfall their faces ached with smiles.
To walk a block in any direction, Martin found, meant being stopped and made the target of endless questions. The presidents of various clubs in the surrounding counties called in person and invited him to talk before their organizations. He refused all of them. There was one invitation which he found great satisfaction in refusing, and that was from the principal of the high school: the very principal, a little grayer and a little wiser, perhaps, who some eight years before had expelled him. The invitation became almost a plea.
“It is your duty, Martin,” the worthy principal said almost humbly. “You are a hero to the young people of this town—to all of us, I might say, you have seen places of great interest geographically which they will never see, and in the interests of education, Martin, I ask you to reconsider.”
“In the interest of education?”
“Precisely. Also as a model of forthrightness, of enterprise, of perseverance.”
“Well, hardly all that.”
“Yes. Of sticking to a job, my boy, no matter how hard, and seeing it through. And last but not least, as an example of loyalty: your loyalty to Mr. London.”
“Well, why wouldn’t I be? What’s that got to do with—”
“Character, my boy, it shows character. Through fair weather and foul, you—”
“Well, it’s very nice of you, I’m sure, but I never made a speech in my life…. I—”
The day of the ordeal arrived. The principal led Martin behind the heavy velvet drapes of the high school auditorium. A long, narrow table bearing a pitcher of water and a glass was flanked by two chairs. Martin sat in one, the principal in the other.
The drapes parted. The auditorium was packed. Martin’s eyes darted over the sea of faces, found his mother, father, and Freda, and fastened there.
The principal now arose and went to the center front of the stage, and presently Martin heard himself extolled in a flow of rhetoric and oratory that had him clutching his knees and looking toward the exit. Before escape was possible, however, the principal had finished and was waiting, smilingly, for him to stand on his feet and talk. Martin got up and moved forward automatically, to be met by a blast of applause, which, stopping abruptly, became a blast of waiting silence.
“A trip like I took,” he said very loudly and remembering that his talk was supposed to be educational, “sure does learn you a lot.”
It didn’t take the shout of derisive laughter to tell him of his error. Teach was on his tongue—Jack London had put it there in their many months together—but habit and old associations now replaced it with learn.
What he said or did after that he never knew; his voice went on and on and on. Then, after a while, he felt the principal’s hand on his arm, and there was a pained smile on his face and a rasp in his voice as he said whatever was necessary to bring to a close the unhappy and embarrassing occasion.
* * *
—
Martin next set about sorting the hundreds of photographs he had taken, cataloguing his curios, and organizing himself in general. How he was going to turn this wealth of material to account was a problem, until late one evening he went into Charlie Kerr’s drugstore. Charlie was about to lock up.
“How are you, Martin?” inquired the genial druggist. “You came just in time. I’d have been closed in another minute. What can I do for you?”
“Give me another bottle of that paste. The large size,” Martin said.
“It’s none of my business, but what the heck do you do with all that paste—eat it?” asked Charlie, setting the bottle on the counter.
“I’m just fixing up some scrapbooks and putting labels on those pictures and curios and stuff,” Martin explai
ned.
Charlie Kerr wrinkled his forehead and leaned on the show-case.
“What are you going to do with all that stuff, Martin?”
“That’s what I’ve been wondering.” Martin put down a quarter and pocketed the paste.
“One of the boys was saying that you’ve got some moving pictures you took. That right?”
Martin nodded, and told about substituting for the sick cameramen down in Penduffryn, and how he had stopped in Paris on the way home and bought a print of the two-and-a-half reels from the Pathé Frères Company.
Charlie Kerr’s eyes widened, and he snapped his fingers as an idea hit him.
“Why don’t you make a show out of it? You know—run the moving pictures, have some lantern slides made from those other pictures you took, and give lectures. I’ll bet people would come from all over the county.”
“I thought of that,” said Martin, “but it would take a lot of money. You’d have to fix up a theater, buy a projection machine, get the slides made…”
“Yeah, I suppose it would.” Charlie moved about, slowly turning off the lights.
“Well, so long,” Martin said, going toward the door.
“Wait a minute, and I’ll walk over with you,” said Charlie. He closed the front door and gave it a hearty shake to test the spring lock before he spoke again. “Would you, if I put up the money?”
“Would I what?” asked Martin, puzzled.
“Open up a show.”
“You know I couldn’t give a lecture. Look what happened at the high school,” protested Martin.
“Sure you could. All you’d have to do would be write it down, then learn it by heart. You’d be in the dark and no one would see you. They’d just hear you talk about the picture on the screen.”
“It would take too much money.” Martin shook his head. “Maybe more than you’ve got.”
“I’ll sell the drugstore.”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t let you do that. Anyway, how do you know people would come?”
“I’ll take a chance.”
And take a chance he did. Charlie Kerr sold his business and rented another store several blocks down the main street. The front of the new store was rebuilt to represent the bow of the Snark, and inside, the deck plan of the yacht was outlined in lights on the ceiling. Martin selected a large number of his best pictures, took them to Kansas City, and had vividly colored slides made of them. He spent hours of agony writing and rewriting his lecture and committing it to memory. Seats installed, the big screen hung, the projection machine set up with Dick Hamilton as operator, and the Snark Theater was ready for the opening. If the Snark opening were held today, there would be great searchlights sweeping the sky to attract attention. Radio stations would carry a description of the event into every home. But all the ballyhoo then available in Independence was a phonograph set up in the lobby of the theater grinding out Hawaiian melodies, audible for not more than a block. Still, it was sufficient to fill the little theater to capacity.
When Martin stepped in front of the screen on November 3, 1909, he was greeted with thunderous applause. He grinned sheepishly. His face turned a deep red. The applause died down and the audience waited expectantly. Martin opened and closed his mouth but made no sound. Several people in the back rows shouted “Louder,” whereupon he bolted from the stage. Charlie Kerr then did the only thing left to him: the lights dimmed, and the first slide was thrown on the screen abruptly and without benefit of Martin’s carefully rehearsed opening speech.
Everything possible went wrong that opening night. Just before the show started, Dick dropped the box of slides, breaking only a few, fortunately, but mixing them up hopelessly. Added to this, he found he could not hear the click of the tin locust which was the signal to change the slides. As a consequence, the pictures on the screen and Martin’s lecture seldom met at any point.
After the show, Martin confronted Charlie Kerr.
“I told you I couldn’t lecture,” he groaned.
“Now, don’t you worry about it,” soothed Charlie. “You’ll be fine tomorrow night—you’ll see.”
“Tomorrow night?” shouted Martin. “Why, I wouldn’t go through that again for a million dollars! You’ll have to call everything off, I tell you. I can’t do it. I get so weak in the knees, I—it’s all I can do to stand up!”
Undaunted, Charlie had a carpenter, a plumber, and a tinner on the stage of the Snark Theater early the next morning. The carpenter built a high desk, the plumber made a railing about two feet square out of water pipe, and the tinner cut sheets of tin a little larger than a letterhead. When the job was finished, Charlie rang Martin to come right over.
Martin, apparently, had spent a sleepless night.
“You’ve just got to let me out of this thing, Charlie,” he said desperately. “You can use my stuff and collect the money, but I just can’t get out there again and talk.”
Charlie grinned and said nothing; he let his handiwork in the middle of the stage talk for him. There, pasted neatly on the sheets of tin where they could neither blow away nor crumple, were the typed pages of the lecture. The copy of the lecture, Charlie pointed out, would lie on the breast-high table inside the pipe railing. Then, with pride, he explained the function of the railing itself.
“All you got to do is hold onto that iron pipe,” he chortled, “and your knees can’t give way!”
* * *
—
From this point on, the little enterprise prospered, and soon Charlie and Martin had equipped another store as a motion-picture theater and called it Snark No. 2. Here they ran current films, offered popular illustrated ballads, and found themselves launched in the amusement business. Requests for Martin’s lecture began coming in from neighboring towns, and Charlie, who at that time dreamed of a chain of theaters, saw Martin as a sort of advance agent and encouraged him to accept. The whole thing was handled in businesslike fashion. Advance notices were sent out, and a careful itinerary was planned. Included in this itinerary was Chanute.
Advertisement broadside used by Martin Johnson on the vaudeville tour.
Osa and Martin on their honeymoon in “the Valley of the Moon,” with Jack and Charmian London.
Broadside advertising the Johnsons’ first feature film, Martin Johnson’s Cannibals of the South Seas.
Charlie Chaplin gave them moustaches to take to the cannibals—and one reel of “pie-throwing” comedy. The cannibals liked both.
“Hawaiian” costume designed by modest Kansan for his wife.
At the time of Osa’s marriage, the Gibson girl dress was the mode.
Martin and Osa in the New Hebrides, now Vanuatu, 1917.
Osa found it difficult to understand and communicate with the women of this totally different culture.
Campfire of the headhunters.
Tenggara natives coming to bid Osa goodbye as she starts down the Kinabatangan River.
Up the Tuscon River, tributary of the Kinabatangan, in search of the proboscis monkey.
Orangutan family in the Borneo jungle.
Mother honey bear playing with her youngsters at a waterhole in the Borneo jungle.
Chapter 7
On a bright Saturday in November 1909—I was just sixteen—I was one of a giggling group of high school girls that climbed the stairs to the Roof Garden Theater for the afternoon show. We were there not because some man from Independence was giving a talk on his “Trip Through the South Seas with Jack London” and something about cannibals in the same region, but because our friend Gail Perigo was singing there.
Gail had been my bosom friend for four years. We had gone to school together, never had secrets from each other, often dressed alike, and were determined, when we grew up, to have our weddings fall on the same day. Not only could Gail s
ing but she could dance wonderfully and roller-skate too, and she had taught me all these things. Recently she had quit school to sing with colored slides at the Roof Garden, and most Saturday afternoons saw me there with a group of the girls from school. We were all motion-picture fans, of course, and sighed and wept with all the persecuted little picture heroines of the day, but our chief delight was applauding Gail.
As Gail bowed gracefully from the stage on this particular day, the manager of the theater came forward and introduced “that intrepid young traveler from Independence, Mr. Martin Johnson.”
A tall, thin young man walked out on the stage, blinked at the lights, ran his finger around his collar, and began to talk. Every now and then he clicked something in his hand, and slides were thrown on the screen showing a boat with some people on it. This went on for quite a while, and I began to think about ice cream. Then the lecturer said something about cannibals, and on came a reel of film showing people of such horribleness I couldn’t look at them.
I sent a whisper along the line that I had had enough, and we left in a body, seven of us.
Gail and I sang in the choir at church, and, as was my custom, I called for her one Sunday morning. Since I had seen her the day before, she told me blithely, she had accepted an offer from Mr. Martin Johnson to go to Independence and sing in his Snark Theater No. 2. And did I remember Dick Hamilton? They’d been sweethearts their first year in high school. Well, he was the operator in Mr. Johnson’s theater, and wasn’t it all too thrilling?