Hope: Entertainer of the Century

by Richard Zoglin

  The oldest boys, Ivor and Jim, now had to help out, going to work at a dairy. Jim would bring home extra milk for the family and pick up day-old bread and cakes from a bakery where he made deliveries. His mother scrimped to make ends meet. At one dinner, Jim noticed that all she had on her plate was a small portion of potatoes. He asked why she was eating so little. “Mom’s not hungry,” she replied. Later, when he went into the kitchen to help clean up, he found her eating the leftovers from all the plates. There had been only enough for the boys.

  Harry, meanwhile, was a sorry figure, trying to keep busy as he convalesced: repairing the boys’ shoes, cutting their hair, and tending to a small flock of caged canaries given to him by a neighbor. Much of the time he just wandered aimlessly around the house and garden. “When he would be in the house, he felt he was underfoot,” recalled Jim. “It was pitiful to watch him.” Even when he was well enough to look for work again, he had little luck. So once again the family picked up and moved, this time to Bristol, the large port city up the coast.

  They lived for a time in a house on Church Road, then downsized to a smaller place on Whitehall Road, across the street from a woman who sold sweets through her window. But Harry again found little work, and Ivor and Jim picked up the slack with a variety of dreary and sometimes dangerous factory jobs. Meanwhile, Harry began thinking about a much more drastic move: to America.

  Two of his brothers had already emigrated there and were living in Cleveland, Ohio. Frank, who had a successful plumbing business, had made the move in the 1880s; Fred, a steamfitter, had come more recently. When Harry wrote proposing that he join them, they both tried to dissuade him, warning him that jobs were scarce—you couldn’t even find work digging ditches. Avis too pleaded with Harry not to attempt the move. But Harry—impressed by literature that promised gold mines, wide-open spaces, and unlimited opportunity in America—made up his mind to go. He told Avis and the boys that he would send for them once he found work.

  The family scraped together enough money for his fare and saw him off at the Bristol station, where he took the train to Southampton and, on April 10, 1907, boarded the USS Philadelphia for New York City. He arrived at Ellis Island a week later and made his way by train to Cleveland, to join his brothers and try to start a new life in America.

  • • •

  Not yet four years old, Leslie was surely unaware of the seriousness of his family’s financial plight. Still, it must have imprinted itself on him profoundly. Psychologists know that stable attachments in the first two years of a child’s life are crucial. Leslie lived those formative years in a household that was constantly on the move, with a father who was frequently absent or drunk, and a mother with five other sons and constant money worries that demanded her attention. Without an environment that provided him with the safety and security he needed, Leslie must early on have learned to protect himself by avoiding close attachments that could so easily be upended. He would retain that protective shell for the rest of his life.

  He also learned to fight for what he wanted. Significantly, his one memory from his English childhood was of a neighborhood scuffle, when he got conked on the head by a rock thrown by some young toughs in St. George’s Park, near their house in Bristol. “I was defending my dogs from a gang of Bristol kids,” he recalled in his memoir Have Tux, Will Travel. “I’ve been leery of dog acts ever since.” His brothers’ early memories of Leslie also mostly involve mishaps and misadventures. His oldest brother, Ivor, once plucked Leslie from under a pier in Herne Bay, on the Kent seacoast, after the boy fell in the water and nearly drowned. Another time, Ivor and his uncle packed Leslie into the family’s pony cart for a ride to a local food joint. When they came out, the cart and the pony were gone. They walked home—only to find that the police had been sent on a frantic search because the pony had trotted home alone, with the cart turned upside down and empty.

  In the bustling, itinerant household, Leslie found that performing was a way to get attention. Jim recalled that Leslie would hang out with his older brothers on a busy street corner, drop his trousers, and burst into tears, telling a sob story to get passersby to cheer him up with a few coins. Once they did, he’d start the act all over again for the next group of pedestrians. He would do imitations of fat people for his great-aunt Polly, who gave him cookies as a reward. He liked to dress up in his mother’s old clothes, shoes, and hats, delighting in the praise from neighbors: “Whose lovely little girl are you?” Ivor claimed that his precocious younger brother could recite an entire Irish poem, “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna,” at the age of four.

  Without Harry, Avis was terribly lonely. For weeks after he left for America, Jim recalled, she did the housework almost in a trance. To save money, she moved the family to an even smaller and more dismal house on Cloud’s Hill Avenue, right next to St. George’s Park. She got sick, was diagnosed with abscessed teeth, and had to have all of them extracted. Jack came down with rheumatic fever and almost died.

  Avis waited anxiously for Harry’s letters from America. When the postman had one, he would wave it at her from down the street, and Avis would run out to grab it before he even got to the house. Harry wrote newsy, romanticized accounts of the new country. The buildings in New York were so high, he said, they had to be lowered to let the moon pass by. All the women dressed like actresses and painted their faces like Indians on the warpath. Cleveland was on a lake as big as the Atlantic Ocean. “The very air in America is invigorating,” Harry wrote. “Why, Avis, I’ve been here only a month, but I feel like a different man already!” He would write special messages to the boys, telling them to take care of their mother: “Remember sons, since I can’t be there, I’m depending on you. You know, the Queen has an army of soldiers to protect her. It’s up to you guardsmen to guard our queen!”

  Harry was having little luck finding work in America, but Avis made up her mind to bring over the family anyway. “We started planning and figuring, even though Dad said things were bad over there,” Jim recalled. “Mom decided it would be cheaper to maintain one home anyway. And we’d never starved yet.” The family began saving up money for the trip. Avis stopped buying the kids any new clothes or shoes. During an especially frigid winter, she scrimped on coal, and most of the children caught colds. Finally she sold off their furniture—including their cherished grandfather clock, the only thing Harry had asked his parents for when he and Avis got married.

  In March 1908, Avis and her six boys—all dressed in double layers of shirts and underwear so they would have to pack less—trekked to the Bristol station to catch the train for Southampton. They left in a rainstorm, casting an extra pall on their departure. When they got to Southampton, Avis discovered they had inadvertently packed their boat tickets in one of the bags that had been sent ahead; she had to corral a steward to find their trunk in the pile of luggage waiting to be loaded, so they could rifle through it and find the tickets.

  Finally, on March 21, 1908, the Hope clan boarded the USS Philadelphia, the same ship that had taken Harry to America nearly a year earlier. Back in Bristol, when the two eldest Hope boys didn’t answer the roll call at school for a few days, the teacher asked where they were. A student’s reply was entered in the logbook: “Gone to Canada.”

  The family had two cabins in steerage—though, because Avis hated to be apart from any of the children, they often squeezed together into one. The trip was rough, with the heat and the clanging from the engine room making it especially noisy and uncomfortable. Once they left their cabin unattended and returned to find it had been ransacked by an intruder. Luckily, a watch was the only thing missing.

  “Everybody on the ship was in sympathy with this tiny lady traveling with her brood of six sons, three of them larger than she—and as a result the boys fared exceptionally well,” recalled Jim Hope. “None of them were backward when encouraged to sing, usually to the accompaniment of someone’s concertina, mouth organ, or Jew’s harp, for the amusement of the passengers, who w
ould in return often reward us generously.”

  Leslie, as usual, was the most troublesome of the brood. When all the kids on board were lined up for their smallpox vaccinations, the four-year-old bolted free and led the ship’s crew on a mad chase around the deck before they found him hiding behind a ventilator and forced him to face the needle. Later his mom tried to calm him down with a bath, but he raised such a fuss that his bandage was dislodged and some of the vaccine inadvertently rubbed off on Avis’s thumb, leaving a vaccination scar there for the rest of her life.

  The ship docked at Ellis Island on March 30, after an eighteen-hour delay in New York Harbor because of fog. Leslie is the fifth of six Hopes listed on the ship’s manifest (his age incorrectly recorded as two years old); their destination is given as Cleveland, to join “husband and father, William H. Hope,” at 2227 East 105th Street—where Uncle Fred and his wife, Alice, were living. The manifest notes that their train fare to Cleveland was already paid for, and that they carried $50 in cash.

  The immigrant train to Cleveland was slow, forced to give up the right of way to every freight train in its path. With no food on board, the family had to wolf down meals during the brief stops at stations along the way. With little clean water on the train, mothers would use the station stops to wash their children’s clothes, then hang them out to dry on baggage racks or out the window once the train got going. A pair of Leslie’s pants got snagged by a passing post and were ripped away, and Avis had to search through their luggage to find him another pair, to stop his crying.

  After a two-day trip, they arrived at Cleveland’s Erie Depot on the evening of April 1. Harry and his older brother Frank were there to meet them, and Avis cried with joy as she embraced her husband. “I’ll swear she looked as though she had shed twenty years,” said Jim. The motley crew of three adults and six children then straggled with their luggage, much of it held together with string or wire and breaking at the seams, to the public square downtown, where they caught a Cedar Avenue streetcar and rode all the way out to Uncle Fred and Aunt Alice’s house, on East 105th Street. Though it was the middle of the night, a feast was waiting for them at the dinner table, their first meal on solid ground in more than ten days.

  • • •

  Cleveland was not a bad place for an immigrant family to start life in the United States in 1908. In the waning months of Theodore Roosevelt’s vigorous presidency, and despite the lingering effects of the panic of 1907, the American economy was thriving. And Cleveland—then the sixth-largest city in the United States, with a population of 560,663 in the 1910 census—was home to many of the industries that were making it hum. Until Detroit overtook it a few years later, Cleveland was the nation’s No. 1 manufacturer of automobiles. It was among the leaders in iron and steel production, shipbuilding, and the manufacture of machine tools. Thirty-two banks were founded in Cleveland between 1900 and 1903 alone. The city was enjoying a construction boom, with new downtown office buildings, bridges, colleges, churches, and fine homes in the well-to-do residential neighborhoods along Euclid Avenue to the east of downtown. True, automobile exhaust was starting to befoul the streets, and development was encroaching on the greenery that had earned Cleveland its nickname the Forest City, but the metropolis was enjoying an economic heyday.

  The booming city drew plenty of immigrants. At the turn of the century, fully one-third of Cleveland’s population was foreign-born; another 40 percent had foreign-born parents. Most of them came from Western Europe—at least half from either Great Britain or Germany, followed in order by those from Sweden, Russia, Austria, and Italy. The Hopes, like many of these newcomers, settled in a neighborhood on the eastern fringe of the city known as Doan’s Corners. The bustling area (named for Nathaniel Doan, from whose farm the area had been carved up, before being annexed by the city of Cleveland in 1872) was becoming known as Cleveland’s “second downtown,” and its vibrant center was the corner of Euclid Avenue and 105th Street, dominated by the four-story Cleveland Trust building. Just to the east were the adjoining campuses of Western Reserve University and the Case School of Applied Science (decades later to merge into Case Western Reserve). To the west, along Euclid, was so-called Millionaire’s Row, a stretch of mansions where Cleveland’s richest industrialists and business leaders lived, among them Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, mining magnate Samuel Mather, and Charles F. Brush, inventor of the arc light.

  A working-class neighborhood bounded by opulence and higher education, Doan’s Corners was home to small tradesmen, steelworkers, salesmen, clerks—along with the cooks, chauffeurs, and other household workers who helped tend the mansions on Millionaire’s Row. Like so many other urban residential neighborhoods at the time, it was shedding its quaint nineteenth-century trappings and being transformed by the technology of a new century. A hand-drawn map of the area around 1900, annotated by a longtime resident, gives a good snapshot of the neighborhood that likely greeted the Hopes when they arrived in 1908:

  Euclid and Cedar had Brush arc lights. Other streets were faintly illuminated by artificial gas lamps on posts: lighted in evening and turned off in early morning by the lamp lighters. Homes of the rich had electric lights, those of the well-to-do artificial gas, while the poor burned coal oil lamps. . . . Coal was king, but furnaces were few. Hard coal base burners warmed the living rooms, while the cook stoves in the kitchens helped out with their smoky soft coal fires. In the summer much cooking was done on gasoline stoves. Ice boxes were had by some. A telephone was a luxury, and if you owned a bathtub you were rich. . . . Electric cars—four wheelers—ran on Euclid and on Cedar; cable cars on Hough. Those had stone block pavement. Doan was a sandy road, while many of the others were yellow clay with coal-ash crosswalks for wet weather.

  When they arrived in Cleveland, the Hope family had to temporarily split up. Ivor and Jim stayed with Uncle Frank and Aunt Louisa, who lived above Frank’s plumbing and pipe-fitting business. Avis, Harry, and the rest of the boys moved in with Uncle Fred and Aunt Alice. It’s unclear how long that arrangement lasted. According to Jim Hope’s memoir, the family moved into their own home within a few weeks. But the August 1909 Cleveland City Directory still lists the family as living at 2227 East 105th Street—Fred and Alice’s place. At some point, however, Avis rented a three-bedroom house from a Welsh doctor named Staniforth for $18.50 a month, and the family was together again, in their first home in America.

  After buying furniture and stocking up on groceries, their money was nearly depleted, and they didn’t have enough to pay for the second month’s rent. Harry was no help: most days he came home with nothing in his pockets and liquor on his breath—much to the chagrin of Avis, who’d harbored some hope that his drinking problems had been left behind in England. Jim appealed to Uncle Frank for money, but he refused, saying the family shouldn’t have come to America unless Harry could support them.

  The Land of Opportunity, it turned out, had not provided much opportunity for Harry Hope. Jobs for a stonecutter were nearly as hard to find in America as they were in England. Architects who had previously designed buildings with limestone were switching to terra-cotta, and there were ten men for every stonecutting job. The frigid Ohio winters were another problem, limiting the number of days when stonecutting could be done. Even at the relatively good wage of $12 a day, Harry could not generate enough steady income to do much more than cover his bar bill. As in England, the job of keeping the family solvent was left largely to Avis and the boys.

  Bob Hope, at least in his public recollections, had warm memories of his father. A jovial English gentleman, whose figure varied from “medium stout to happy stout,” the man known in the neighborhood as ’Arry ’Ope was “not only an artist with the stone-cutting tools, he was a happy man,” Hope wrote in his memoir Have Tux, Will Travel. “He loved to live it up. He was popular, and a great entertainer.” He wasn’t much for disciplining the kids, but would occasionally “take off his belt and salt us good.” Yet he was having a hard time in Ame
rica: “I remember Dad saying, ‘The United States is a fine place for women and dogs. It’s a poor place for horses and men.’ He had trouble adjusting himself to this country. I don’t think he ever did.”

  His drinking was not constant, and never in front of the family. When he was working and sober, the older boys liked to stop by his jobs and just talk to him. “For when he was sober he was so magnetic, he’d cause you to want to linger as long as possible,” wrote Jim. “Maybe we’d ask his opinion on some current topic. He’d explain it in such a way that you’d feel proud to discuss it with the next person you’d meet, who would in turn credit you with being well-informed.” He was a strong union man, popular among his fellow workers. “I have seen Harry in a great group of angry stonecutters debating and arguing in the most violent fashion,” recalled one fellow worker, “and after listening for a while to their remarks he would rise to the floor and with all the true marks of a born orator would calm them down and show them the proper and logical approach to their problem.”

  His stonecutting skills were also admired. He worked on some major construction projects in Cleveland, including the Church of the Covenant, a Gothic Revival Presbyterian church at 112th and Euclid, and the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge, spanning the Cuyahoga River (and later renamed the Hope Memorial Bridge in his honor). Yet as a businessman he was fairly hapless. Once Harry and a fellow stonecutter formed a partnership and bid on a contract for the stonework on a high school. They won the job, but seriously underestimated the costs and wound up losing money.

  Avis, as always, was the family rock, the diminutive, de facto head of the household, and her resourceful, can-do spirit, more than his father’s old-country ways, imprinted itself most strongly on young Leslie Hope. Generous, self-effacing, unfailingly upbeat, she put up with Harry’s misbehavior and took on the responsibility of managing the household finances. She was a painstaking shopper, carefully comparing prices at the city market and buying in bulk—butter, beans, several sacks of onions in the fall to last through the winter. She altered the boys’ clothes so they could be passed down the line to each successive kid. (A seventh, George, was born in 1909, the only Hope son to be born in America.) She kept the house bright with music, singing and accompanying herself on a secondhand piano she had saved enough to buy. She took the boys to services at a nearby Presbyterian church (after trying out an Episcopalian church that she found too uppity) and frowned on cardplaying, cigarettes, and public dancing. Unable to afford doctors except in dire emergencies, she treated every childhood malady, from measles to whooping cough, with a hot bath and a homemade brew. She kept their home immaculate, regularly scrubbing the floors, beating the rugs, and scouring the cooking stove. She always had fresh-baked pies and cakes ready for visitors, tradesmen, and the children’s friends, who would frequently stop by.