Children of the City

by David Nasaw

  He had to advertise, shout, gesticulate. Americans were aggressive, brash, forever on the make. If he, Max Ravage, wanted to succeed, he had to do as they did. “Move along, elbow your way through the crowds in front of the stores. Seek out the women with kids; shove your tray into their faces. Don’t be timid. America likes the nervy ones. This is the land where modesty starves. And yell, never stop yelling. Advertising sells the goods. Here is a formula to begin on: ‘Candy, ladies! Finest in America. Only a nickel, a half-a-dime, five cents!’ Go on, now; try it.”

  “Reluctantly and with some misgiving,” Ravage followed the advice. He was astonished to find that it worked. The more he shouted, the more he lied, the more he shoved and pushed, the cruder his salesmanship, the more chocolates he sold. “Incredible as it seemed, these people actually paid five cents for every piece that cost me less than two-thirds of one cent.”8

  Ravage, a recent émigré from Rumania, had been thrown into street trading at the advanced age of sixteen. He had had to learn from the lace peddler what the street traders who had grown up in the city took for granted. America was the land of the huckster, and the early twentieth century the era of “salesmanship,” defined by the Detroit Free Press as the art of selling a dress shirt to the customer who came into the store looking for a celluloid collar.9

  The children of the city grew up listening to the peddlers cry their wares in the street. They were watching when the pots-and-pans merchant paraded his utensils across the kitchen table; they listened to the insurance man and the undertaker as they sold their goods and services; they stood by as their mothers haggled with the vegetable man and their fathers bargained with the tailor over the price of a new suit—with an extra pair of pants thrown in. The huckster and his sales pitch were as much a part of their culture as baseball and movie stars. They grew up with the newspaper advertisements and the movie posters and billboards and the barkers’ spiel at the amusement park. They learned how to sell and, just as important, that it was the salesman’s job to pitch and the customer’s to resist. All was fair in the marketplace. Whether buyer or seller, you had to look out for yourself. No one else was going to watch out for you.

  The children who earned their money as street traders peddled whatever they could buy cheaply, fit into their pockets or the canvas bag slung over their shoulders, and sell for a profit. Bessie Turner Kriesberg, a Russian émigré whose oral history translated from the Yiddish is found in the YIVO archives, was astounded on her arrival in Chicago by the number of boys on the streets—and the variety of items they sold. “She enjoyed watching the young boys acting as businessmen. They were shouting out the merchandise they had for sale. One was selling newspapers, one chewing gum, one peanuts, one theater tickets, and the youngest carried on his shoulder a small wooden box with tools to clean shoes for people.”10

  Many children sold more than one item at a time. The newsies in particular were always adopting “side lines” to hawk with their papers. Hy Kraft, the future Broadway playwright, who claimed to have held more jobs as a child “than there are categories in the Yellow Pages of the phone book,” sold newspapers with his brother Willie “at the corner of 116th Street and Lenox Avenue, in front of the pool parlor next to the subway kiosk, defying the onrush of bicycles and streetcars. We almost got ourselves killed, but we never got rich. So we took on a side line—Spearmint gum. We had the same deal as we had on the newspapers—two for a penny and sold them for a penny a slice, when we sold them. Packages were two for a nickel; we sold them at a nickel a pack. A 100 percent profit.”11

  Twenty-third Street and Fourth Avenue, New York City. A Lewis Hine photograph of two peddlers waiting outside a subway station. The older boy carries the display box that the gum came in, advertising “Wrigley’s Spearmint: The flavor lasts.” (Lewis Hine Collection, LC)

  George Burns claims in his autobiography that he sold so many different items he “became sort of a one-man conglomerate. And that was before I became a man, or before I knew what conglomerate meant.… One of my many big business ventures lasted exactly two hours and twenty minutes. I thought there was money to be made by selling vanilla crackers. I’d go into a grocery store and buy a bunch of vanilla crackers at ten for a penny. Then on the street I’d sell them eight for a penny.… The problem here was by the time I sold eight crackers I’d eaten two crackers. It didn’t take me long to realize that this was the wrong business for a kid who was hooked on vanilla crackers.”12

  Al Jolson and his brother Harry sold newspapers in Washington, D.C. In the summer, they went into the watermelon business. “We could buy watermelons at the wharves at a wholesale price, three for a nickel. Sometimes we could get four for a nickel. We had a patched and battered wagon, for which we had traded. We would load it with melons, and haul them to a promising section of town for resale. Here our voices … became part of our stock-in-trade. We made up a little song which Al and I [Harry] would sing in tones that carried far:

  Wa----------a-termelons

  Red to da rind

  Five cents a piece

  And you eat ’em all da time.”13

  As the Jolsons and the other young hustlers quickly discovered, their youth was their greatest selling point. There was something irresistible about innocent-looking children trying so hard to earn money. The incongruity between their size and their salesmanship attracted customers. In their own neighborhoods, the children were helped out by working-class and immigrant adults who had children of their own. Downtown, they were patronized by prosperous Americans who found the little hustlers too cute to pass by.

  Boston, October 1909. Selling suspenders in the street. (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC)

  All the street traders had to perform for their customers. One needed a bit of bravado and an immunity from embarrassment to survive on the streets. Children with a surfeit of each—and a bit of talent—went a step further. The streets of the city were filled with young hustlers who clowned, pantomimed, sang, and danced, some for the sheer sport of it, others for the change they hoped to collect from bystanders. The Jewish neighborhoods in particular were, as Irving Howe has written, the training grounds for future generations of comics, dancers, and singers. “There are the famous or once-famous names: Al Jolson, George Jessel, Eddie Cantor, Sophie Tucker, Fanny Brice, Ben Blue, Jack Benny, George Burns, George Sidney, Milton Berle, Ted Lewis, Bennie Fields, and others. And there are the hundreds who played the small towns, the ratty theaters, the Orpheum circuit, the Catskills, the smelly houses in Brooklyn and the Bronx.”14

  The children of the streets observed from the outside the great panorama of urban life, taking it all in, and then, if they had the talent, representing it in comic or melodramatic form from the stage (and later on the screen, over the radio, on television). They learned to mimic the dialects, the dialogues, the patter of peddlers, policemen, and “the hoity-toity Irish teacher who recited Browning in high school.”15 They began by entertaining each other. Only later would they begin charging for it.

  At the age of six, Eddie Cantor began keeping “late hours … with a band of boys two and three times [his] age who spent their nights in a revelry of song. For the East Side at night is not only menaced by the caterwauling of cats, but by gangs of youngsters who sit on the stoops and the corner stands, singing all the popular songs with all their might at an age when their voices are changing.”16 The Jolson brothers, George Burns, and Fanny Brice began their careers in similar fashion, singing or clowning on street corners and in backyards and alleyways with their friends. When they discovered that adults were willing to throw pennies their way, they quickly abandoned their amateur status. Fanny Brice roamed with her gang through backyards until they found “a likely-looking tenement” to perform for. The children sang all the popular songs of the day and, when they were lucky, were rewarded with a “brief, scattered shower of pennies.”17 When the Jolson brothers and their gang in Washington, D.C., “found that grown people would stop to listen” and even throw coins at the
m, they moved away from the street corners they had been gathering on to well-situated sidewalks where they were sure to meet adults with change in their pockets. “Our favorite stage was the sidewalk in front of the Hotel Raleigh. In those days, congressmen, high government officials, and even Supreme Court Justices would sit on chairs on the sidewalks during spring and summer evenings, just as people did in small towns. They not only appreciated our singing, but they became an unusual source of income for us. We sang all the popular songs, such as: Sweet Marie, The Sidewalks of New York, Who Threw the Overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder, Daisy Bell, and Say Au Revoir But Not Goodbye. We soon learned that statesmen and jurists preferred the songs that carried them into the romantic past, the songs of Stephen Foster, and Listen to the Mocking Bird, Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming, and When You and I Were Young, Maggie. Songs such as these brought a shower of nickels, dimes, and even quarters.”18

  Indianapolis, August 1908. “American District Telegraph messengers: the night shift.” (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC)

  For children whose songs or clowning met with applause, laughter, and pennies, there was no turning back. George Burns and the three friends who mixed syrup with him in Rosenzweig’s basement began work as the Peewee Quartet after school one afternoon “at the corner of Columbia and Houston.” “We stood there and sang from three-thirty to six, and made exactly four cents.” The boys did not give up. They continued to sing—in saloons until they were thrown out, on the Staten Island ferry until “Mortzy” got seasick, and in backyards where they were greeted by rotten fruit and occasional pennies.19

  Though future show business characters tell the best stories about performing on the streets, they were by no means the only children who tried to make some money this way. Of the four friends who made up the Peewee Quartet, only George Burns went into show business. Two others went into the taxi business; the third became an insurance broker. Similarly, the dozens of children who sang in groups with Eddie Cantor on the Lower East Side, Fanny Brice in Brooklyn, and the Jolson brothers in Washington, D.C., had neither the talent nor the inclination to go into show business.20

  Children with imagination put it all to use, coming up with special ways to make money. Because they were their own bosses, they could conjure up and follow their own leads. If they failed, they could start all over again tomorrow. Fanny Brice made twenty cents an afternoon by charging the kids in the neighborhood a penny a piece to attend her variety show in the shed behind her Brooklyn tenement.21 Children with a less theatrical bent were every bit as enterprising and inventive. In the Berlinger family (Milton would later change the family name to Berle), it was the older boy, Jack, who came up with the big ideas while little brother Milton was off plugging songs in his Buster Brown haircut and kiddie tuxedo. The Berlingers lived “about ten blocks from the Hunt’s Point railroad stop [where they had discovered] an open spring that flowed down the railroad embankment. It was July, and hot as hell, and Jack and a kid named McDermott, who was the janitor’s son in [their] building, found two big jugs, like the kind they use in water coolers today.… Jack and McDermott went around the building asking if anyone wanted fresh cold spring water. A lady said she’d take the two jugs and pay them a nickel, which seemed like pretty good money.

  “I was allowed to tag along when they went to fill the order. The empty jugs were heavy enough going to Hunt’s Point. They were murder coming back filled. And then, because it was Saturday and McDermott was a Catholic, we had to stop by the church while he went in to confession.”

  When the boys got back to their tenement, they hoisted the jug into their customer’s apartment and then waited to collect their nickel. “We waited and waited for the nickel to come down. Finally McDermott rang her bell again. ‘What?’ the lady shouted down.

  “ ‘Where’s our nickel, lady?’

  “ ‘A nickel you want? The police you could get! You call that hot stuff spring water? You filled it from the tap.’

  “Jack shouted up, ‘We went all the way to the Hunt’s Point spring. It’s hot outside, lady.’

  “ ‘Get away from there, you liars, or I swear, I’ll call the police. I’m counting to five!’

  “We ran.”

  This was, of course, neither the first nor the last of Jack Berlinger’s “big ideas.” Like other city kids (most of them without younger brothers to tell their stories in show business autobiographies), Jack had different hustles for different kinds of weather. When it rained, he took his umbrella to the IRT subway station near the Berlinger’s home. “Jack would get there when the people were coming home from work. Jack would run after anybody without an umbrella. ‘Take you home, mister? Take you home, lady? Only a nickel.’ … It was a small-time Hertz operation. When I [Milton] got a little older, I tried it once. I got pneumonia.”22

  With one eye on their potential customers and another on the bottom line, the children stood ready to take advantage of whatever came their way. Because they were on their own, they could change locations and goods at will, add to or subtract from their wares, and adjust their practices to the demands of the marketplace. When, in the early months of World War I, fifty thousand soldiers moved into Camp Greene, the children who lived in Charlotte, North Carolina, hitched rides or walked the two miles to the camp to hustle food, candy, and soft drinks after school. According to a National Child Labor Committee study published in 1918, 35 percent of the students in Charlotte’s “white schools [were] selling at camp.”23

  The children had few scruples when it came to making money from adults. Adults were old enough and experienced enough to watch out for themselves. If they got taken by a bunch of children, it was their own fault. The children were too busy trying to earn some money to watch out for their customers. Some of the children’s schemes were slightly deceptive, others were clearly fraudulent. Two of the “little twelve year old merchants” who did business with the Camp Greene soldiers boosted their profits by buying leftover pies, warming them up, and selling them as fresh.24

  The street traders knew that their adult customers, even the soldiers, had more money than they had. The children who worked in the downtown business and entertainment districts had seen firsthand the wealth of the city. They read the newspaper and Sunday supplement stories about the idle rich and their yachts, ocean liners, Twentieth Century expresses, million-dollar hotels, charity balls, and Newport “fête champêtre,” and watched them as they ate in their restaurants, shopped in their department stores, and rode in their fancy cars through the city streets. There was more than enough wealth to go around. The children wanted their share. And they were willing to work days and stay up nights figuring out some way to get it.

  In the Marx household on Manhattan’s Upper East Side (then an immigrant and working-class neighborhood), Leonard taught his little brother Adolph how to make money on the streets. “You don’t earn mazuma,” he explained, “you hustle it.”

  In later years, long after Adolph had become Harpo and Leonard Chico, the little brother recounted one of their most imaginative hustles, “The Great Cuckoo Clock Bonanza of 1902.” Chico had found cuckooless cuckoo clocks on sale at “a novelty shop on 86th Street” near the boys’ home. “These cuckoo clocks had no working cuckoos (the birds were painted on) but they had the genuine Black Forest look, they kept time, and they were on sale for only twenty cents apiece … Chico bought a clock. We got fifty cents for it in a hockshop down at Third and 63rd. Thirty cents profit. We went back and bought two clocks, pawned them for four bits apiece. [Business was now so good that the boys branched out. Chico continued to cover the hockshops, Harpo was detailed to] work on people up in the neighborhood. Early the next morning, I took a clock and gathered up my courage and went to the office of the ice works on Third Avenue. The manager there was a friendly guy, who winked whenever the loader chipped off wedges of ice for us kids. He seemed like an ideal customer.

  Rochester, 1912. (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC)

  “ ‘Cuckoo clock for sale,’
I said to the manager, trying to sound self-assured, like Chico. ‘Good bargain. Guaranteed.’ … The ice works manager wanted to know how long the clock was guaranteed to run on a winding. Whereupon I heard myself saying, as I began to sweat, ‘Eight hours.’

  “ ‘All right,’ he said, ‘Wind ’er up. If she’s still running eight hours from now I’ll buy her.’

  “I pulled the chain that wound the clock. I stood in a corner of the office, out of the way, holding the clock, waiting and praying. It was a torturous battle of nerves. Every time the manager turned his back, I gave the chain the little pull to keep the clock wound tight. Along about lunch time, he suspected what I was doing, and caught me with my hand on the chain with a swift, unexpected look. He took the clock and hung it on the wall, without a word.

  “At two-thirty, the clock ran down and died.… Those were the most grueling six hours I had ever spent and my net profit was, in round figures, zero.”25

  Most of Chico’s prospects ended that way. So did most of the other children’s. There was some hidden flaw in every “big idea.” But that didn’t stop the children from thinking up new ones.

  The street traders were a creative bunch and a restless one, never satisfied with what they had, always on the lookout for better jobs, hustles, selling locations, and merchandise. They were exhilarated by what their money could buy but at the same time driven by the need to make more. There was so much wealth in the city, it was not unreasonable to want more than you had—and expect that you might get it.

  The children were barely adolescents, but they had learned on the streets to put their faith in the American dream, Horatio Alger style. The way to riches was through what Alger called “luck and pluck,” being in the right place at the right time. The boys were avid Alger fans because he told them what they wanted to hear.26 No poor but deserving boy ever stayed that way in his magical urban landscapes. Each got the opportunity he deserved.