My Ears Are Bent

by Joseph Mitchell

  “Can you imagine? I am an anarchist now; and what is Mussolini, who was so radical? A traitor to the cause. He remembers that incident, and if I go anywhere near Italy I don’t live long.”

  When Tresca first came to New York he worked as editor of Il Proletario. Then he went to Pittsburgh, founded an anti-Catholic newspaper, La Plebe [The Mob]. Every Italian revolutionist is an anti-Catholic.

  “Well,” he said, “the churches there pulled together and started a paper to counteract mine. That is no good, so they start libel suits against me. No good either. So they send an emissary to kill me, pay him $500 in advance for job. He comes with an open razor. See this scar?”

  Tresca has a broad scar which extends from a corner of his mouth to his right ear. It is very decorative.

  “But I grabbed the razor. So he doesn’t kill me, just slits my throat. Since they can’t kill me they get the postal authorities against me. A good stunt. It succeeds. But I start another paper.”

  Then he left Pittsburgh, aided in the defense of Ettor and Giovannitti in Lawrence, Massachusetts, assisted in the silk-mill strikes in New Jersey and the hotel strike in New York in 1912. He led the Mesabi Range iron-ore strikes in northern Minnesota in 1916, was arrested for the murder of a deputy sheriff but never tried. During the war period, under cover, and with great difficulty, he started Il Martello. During 1917 only twenty-seven issues of the newspaper were banned.

  In 1925 he was sentenced to a year in the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta for publishing a two-line advertisement on birth control. President Calvin Coolidge cut the sentence to four months. In the Atlanta prison Tresca enjoyed himself. He collected evidence on an interprison dope ring, brought it out between the soles of his shoes. The Department of Justice begged him for the evidence, but he laughed and said, “I am only interested in tearing down your government.” On his way home he stopped in Washington and followed a group of college students into the White House.

  “They were on a hand-shaking expedition,” he said. “So I stood in line and shook the president’s hand. I wanted to say, ‘Mr. Coolidge, I am the man you pardoned from the penitentiary. Thank you ever so much.’ But I didn’t say it. I was afraid a guard would rush up when he heard my name and yell, ‘For God’s sake, Mr. President, be careful. He may have a bomb in his hip pocket.’”

  A few years after he left prison, the bomb period of Tresca’s career came to a close. In a few weeks he will start publishing Il Martello again and his life will once again become turbulent.

  3. ASCAP INVESTIGATOR

  In this agitated metropolis nightlife joints sprout like jimsonweeds after a spring rain.

  A former coffeepot counterman with delusions of grandeur withdraws his savings and leases a vacant store, a cellar or a second-floor hall. Carpenters erect a secondhand bar with defective beer pipes and hammer some grooved boards together for a dance floor. A few cases of what are known as choice wines and liquors are toted in, and checked gingham cloths are laid on two dozen unsteady tables. The proprietor’s wife buys some pots and pans and two bottles of pickled cherries and turns the kitchen over to “the chef,” an unshaven ex-plumber. Miss Lucy de Lulu, an apprentice fan dancer, is hired at $12.50 a week, and an orchestra—piano, violin, saxophone and drums—is engaged. Neon signs begin to flicker and El Clippo is born.

  Before the handle on the cash register is greasy an investigator from ASCAP, or the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, hears about the establishment known as El Clippo. The moment a night spot using music sprouts up he is supposed to get on the job. He drives by at night and sees the neon signs, or he sees an advertisement.

  El Clippo may be far up in the Bronx, under El tracks on Third Avenue, or in the heart of Harlem, but before many nights go by the investigator is scribbling notes on little cards. It’s his job to convince the outraged proprietor that he has to get a license from ASCAP before the orchestra can legally play such artistic numbers as “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie” or “These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You).”

  “It is a thorny job,” said Russell W. Rome, a former Wesleyan University football player and one of the most resourceful of ASCAP’s investigators. The majority of the backers for cabarets and dance halls in the New York district are real tough characters. Not all are cutthroats, of course, but you won’t find many who go to Sunday school. Some were in the liquor racket during prohibition, and some were gangsters or gamblers.

  “When you drop in to tell them ASCAP represents the songwriters and publishers who own the copyrights on most of the songs they play, and that they will have to get a license from us before they can play them legally, they usually say, ‘It’s a racket. Get out of here, you bum, you sneak, you dope.’

  “Making them see the light is a long, hard job. Take a joint of the El Clippo type. We have a theoretical minimum of $210 a year, entitling a proprietor to play all our songs, but in a place like that the rate committee would probably decide from $60 to $90 a year would be just, depending on the capacity of the joint, the number of hours the orchestra plays and things like that. Some of the big swanky places pay over $2,000 a year. We license hotels with orchestras, theaters, dance halls, cafés and restaurants, radio stations, any place with an orchestra.

  “When a place opens up we send a form letter telling them what ASCAP is and asking them to apply for a license. They throw this in the wastebasket 99 times out of 100. We wait a week and send him another notice, which also goes into the wastebasket. Then an investigator goes around. Most of those people use their bars for offices, and you stand at the bar and explain the matter. He says he didn’t get the letters.

  “He says he bought the sheet music, paid good money for it, and do we mean to tell him he can’t make use of what he bought? We take some sheet music and show him where it says ‘All rights reserved, including public performance for profit.’ This does not mean a thing to him. If he is the boss he will make out he is the bartender and say, ‘I got to see the boss.’ Or he says he will see his lawyer or the district leader. They always have to see somebody. Then he says, ‘Get out!’”

  The next step is a registered letter. When it is disregarded the investigator goes to work in earnest.

  “He goes up to the bar in this place and orders a beer,” said Mr. Rome, “or he takes a girl along as camouflage and sits down and has a sandwich. We always drink beer or coffee. I wonder how many cups of coffee I have downed in the service of ASCAP. Sometimes I have hit as many as ten night spots a night. You have to do most of your work after midnight.

  “All the investigator does is sit still and listen to the music. He writes down each title as the band plays it, and most of them are bound to be songs by our members. The band plays ‘Is It True What They Say About Dixie?’ That’s our song. It plays ‘All My Life.’ That’s ours.

  “He writes them all down. He also writes out a description of the place so he can answer questions if he is put on the witness stand in case we finally have to bring suit. After a while he sends the waiter to the boss with his card. The boss has forgotten the matter, of course, and you have to tell him the whole damned thing again. Still he doesn’t get it. He says, ‘It’s a racket.’ You explain some more and he says, ‘Get out.’ Then you take your report back to the office. You have caught him in an infringement of copyright and you can bring suit.”

  Mr. Rome said a few more letters are dispatched. Finally the proprietor is notified that he has infringed the Copyright Law of 1909, that ASCAP has placed the matter in the hands of its attorney, that a suit will be filed in a United States District Court if he does not apply for a license.

  “Now comes the headache,” said Mr. Rome. “In New York City it is hard to tell who really owns a cabaret or similar place. The man they tell you owns it may turn out to be the porter. You have to get the name of the proprietor so the United States Marshal can give the subpoena to the right man. The best place to get the name is from the liquor license. We could get it through th
e State Liquor Authority, but it takes time. So we usually get it off the license, which is supposed to be displayed in the joint.

  “Usually they hang it up where the ceiling meets the wall, where you can’t possibly see it, or behind the stove in the kitchen. You have to use your wits. This is one way to get the name off the license. I go in and get in an argument with the bartender over beers. We begin to argue about eyesight. I say, ‘I bet you a beer I can read the name on that license up there on the wall.’ He bets, and I say any name that pops in my mind. He laughs and yells with triumph and says that isn’t the name at all. I make him get the license down to prove it, and then I copy off the name.

  “Another way is this: Frederick C. Erdman, the manager of the New York District, has a pair of sports binoculars in his desk. I take these glasses to a bar and say to the bartender, ‘Look what I got at an auction for fifty cents.’ He looks at them and focuses them here and there about the joint. Then he gets tired and I focus them here and there, finally concentrating on the license. You can usually read them that way.”

  “When we get the name the Marshal goes around to serve the subpoena, and an investigator goes along to point out the boss. I remember one night at a tough little joint full of sailors, Filipinos and their girls in the Brooklyn Navy Yard district. The boss has already told me, ‘Buddy, if you ever put your face in here again I’ll smack it through the wall.’ I believed the gentleman would do it, so I let the Marshal talk.

  “He handed him the paper. The boss tore it up and knocked the Marshal flat on his back. I picked up the pieces and handed them to the boss and ran for the door. I usually keep between the proprietor and the door. This is a good policy. The Marshal got cops, and finally the boss got nicer and decided to apply for a license. He even bought a round of drinks.”

  After a subpoena is served most proprietors see their lawyers and finally realize that they must apply and pay for a license. It takes them a long time to understand that music is not free. If he takes it to court the probable damages he will have to pay is $250 for each infringement, and each time a song is played constitutes a separate infringement. Few cases end in court. Before a contentious proprietor is permitted to take out a license he has to pay the Marshal’s charge and other court costs.

  There are nine investigators in the New York Office. All understand the sixes and sevens of popular music, and most are college graduates. ASCAP maintains offices in key cities throughout the country, and investigators work out of them. If a beer hall with music opened in Ashpole, North Carolina, or if a hotel engages an orchestra in Claremont, Texas, ASCAP investigators will be around before the bar is thoroughly seasoned with alcohol.

  “We are selling an intangible,” said Mr. Rome, “and it is hard to make people realize it isn’t a racket and that songwriters are entitled to receive real money for songs. They are buying something they can’t eat, something they can’t hold in their hands, and they consider it a strange bill of goods.”

  4. SALTWATER FARMERS

  I

  Into a section of blue, shallow water in Great South Bay, marked off by four poles, Captain Jacobus Kwaak steered his old copper-sheathed Willie K., flagship of the Bluepoint oyster fleet. When he reached the middle of the bed the Captain slowed down, and two oystermen in hip boots ran forward and dropped the starboard dredge. The heavy dredge bumped over the bottom, stripping bushels of fat, five-year-old oysters from their resting places.

  In a few minutes the dredge was pulled up and its sloshing load dumped on the deck. With the oysters the dredge always brings up an allowance of trash, and this time it brought up a number of baby crabs, several handfuls of sea lettuce, an ugly toadfish, a scattering of sea snails, a starfish and three bunches of dirty sponge. The old Captain yelled for one of his men to take the wheel. Then, grunting, he climbed to the deck and bent over the heap of dripping oysters. He threw a handful of trash overboard, dug into the pile and selected an oyster, a big one.

  He drew a rusty old knife and opened the oyster. It lay in its left shell, clean and fat. With the blade of the knife he tapped the narrow end of the oyster, the fat end which holds the stomach, the digestive sacs and the heart. The fat bulged under the strokes of the blade. Through with his inspection, Captain Kwaak lifted the shell into the air and expertly dropped the oyster into his mouth.

  “This will be a good oyster year,” he said. “The whole crop is good. We had enough rough weather to roil up the water on the bottom of the beds, stirring up the microscopic vegetable matter the oysters feed on. They are fat, salty-tasting and thrifty. Their parasites, the starfish and the drill-snail, haven’t been loose in the beds. The oysters are as good as I ever tasted and I’ve been eating at least a dozen a day for sixty-five years.”

  The oyster syndicate for which the Captain works, the Bluepoints Company, Inc., a subsidiary of General Foods Corporation, will dredge up and ship this season approximately 100,000 barrels of oysters in shells and around 300,000 gallons of shucked oysters in cans. It and its subsidiaries, oyster farms in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Long Island, have approximately 5,000,000 bushels of oysters of varying ages lying on the bottoms of Great South and other shallow bays.

  There will be a bumper crop this year. In the Long Island area alone the yield this year for all oyster companies, syndicated and independents, will total more than 1,500,000 bushels. This week the business will get under way in earnest after four warm spawning months, and along the Atlantic seaboard, on the finest oyster farms in the world, around 25,000 men are back at work, hauling oysters out of the beds, shoveling them into barrels, culling them into many sizes and qualities, throwing them into conditioning basins, shucking them for long shipments.

  The tap of the hammers wielded by the graders can be heard in hundreds of sheds in Long Island, and in immaculate but smelly barns, rows of shuckers, largely hearty men of Dutch descent or Negroes from the beds of Virginia and Maryland, are shucking thousands of oysters every day. They will work feverishly until next May.

  Most of the oysters you will eat this winter were planted at least five years ago. The similarities between oyster-growing and truck-farming are close. Like tomatoes, oysters are first planted in seed beds, then weeded out and transplanted. In fact, in the three to five years it takes to mature seed oysters to a size fit for marketing, they may be transplanted three or four times. An immobile oyster may be born off Rhode Island, transplanted to beds in Connecticut and spend the last two years of its life in Long Island.

  “All this transplantation and the fight oystermen have to carry on against parasites are what make oysters cost so much more than they should,” said Joseph B. Glancy, an official of the Bluepoints Company, who has done research in oyster-farming up and down the Atlantic coast for ten years.

  “An enormous amount of capital is tied up in the business. For example, the company I work for owns, through riparian laws, a total of 14,000 acres of bay bottom, and of this only about 3,000 acres are suitable for oyster beds. If the bottom is too muddy, it is no good for oysters because they get lost in it and suffocate, and a loose, shifting, sandy bottom is no good because your oysters may be swept by a storm over into beds owned by another company.

  “All our beds are staked out and mapped, of course. We have thirty boats varying in capacity from 500 to 4,500 bushels of oysters, and the captains know the beds. Captain Kwaak knows the bottom of Great South Bay as well as a farmer knows his fields. He watches over them all the time, and when the season opens he goes from bed to bed, dredging up a few bushels here and a few more there, sampling them to see if they are ready for marketing, watching out for starfish and drills.

  “You saw dredgers on the Willie K. haul up a few bushels out of bed No. 21 a while ago and the Captain found them all right. When he goes back to the plant he will say the oysters there are ready to go and his boat and the other boats will start bringing them in by the hundreds of bushels. All the oysters out there in Great South Bay may be called Blue-points if they have been le
ft there at least three months. According to a New York State law an oyster must spend that time in the bay before it may legally be called a Bluepoint.”

  Captain Kwaak’s sturdy boats leave the marketing beds (beds in which oysters feed from six months to two years before they are brought in) and make fast to a wharf beside the Bluepoint Company’s sheds at West Sayville, Long Island. The oysters are hoisted from the boat to a loft and then dropped into a row of bins. Standing at these bins are men in boots with burlap sacks wrapped around their legs who tap each oyster with a hammer to see that it is sound. Then, they grade them, throwing them into one of a half-circle of barrels.

  There are many grades. The Bluepoint is a small, round oyster which will run 1,300 to a barrel. There is a type called the half-shell size, which runs 1,000 to the barrel. Mediums are oysters suitable for frying and too large to eat on the half-shell, which run 750 to the barrel and may be sold as Cape Cods. The Rockaway or Lynnhaven is the granddaddy. Only 500 may be crammed into the iced barrels.

  Mr. Glancy said the oystermen kept a close watch on their beds, but that they were bothered often by poachers.

  “There are millions of dollars worth of oysters lying out there on the bottom of the bay,” he said, “and stealing is inevitable. On foggy nights the thieves run out there and play havoc. Sometimes they have a little motorboat and take the oysters with tongs, and sometimes they have dredges on their boats.

  “There is no way to eradicate them. About the only man who was able to keep them off his beds was Stanley Lowndes, the millionaire oysterman, who weighed 400 pounds. He’s dead now.

  “He was having a lot of trouble with stealing in the fattening grounds on Staten Island, which used to be perfect for oysters. One day he went out to his beds and caught a boat red-handed. The thieves were loading them on as if they owned the place. Mr. Lowndes was very angry.