On weekends I'd walk down the hill to a place called Navy Field, where there were four old football fields with old stands. The navy ships docked in the harbor, and the sailors had games, maybe four games going at once. I'd go down alone and sit alone in the stands and watch. Once I was walking under the stands to get out of the wind, and I looked up and saw the people. And the women, when they stood up, you could see under their dresses. That really excited me, so I started doing that, walking around under the stands on purpose to look up the women's dresses.
I built up my own play world. I loved sports, and I'd play I was a boxer or a football player. I even invented a baseball game I could play alone with dice, but boxing was the one I really got carried away with. At that time Joe Louis was coming up as a heavyweight. I would go out in the garage and pretend I was a fighter. I had a little box I sat on. I'd hear an imaginary bell and get up in this old garage and fight, and it was actually as if I was in the ring. Sometimes I'd get hit and fall down and be stunned, and I'd hear the referee counting, and I'd get up at the last minute, and just when everybody thought I was beaten I'd catch my opponent with a left hook. And then I'd have him against the ropes. I'd knock him out, and everybody would scream and throw money into the ring and holler for me, and I'd hold my hands together and wave to the crowd.
I played by myself for a long time and then, much as I hated to be with other kids, because I felt I wasn't like them, they wouldn't like me, I wanted to play sports so bad I overcame that and started playing in empty lots, and I was extremely good at sports. I was good in school, too. My drafting teacher in junior high said I really had a talent, and my father dreamed that one day he'd send me to Cal Tech here or Carnegie Tech back east so I could do something in mathematics or engineering.
My mother's side of the family was very musical. Her aunt and uncle-I think their last name was Bartolomuccio, shortened to Bartold-had five children. They all played musical instruments. The youngest boy was Gabriel Bartold, and as a child he played on the radio, a full-sized trumpet. He'd put it on a table and stand up to it and blow it.
The Bartolds lived in San Gabriel in a big house. In the back they had a lath-house, an eating place with a big round table. I remember going there several times and all the activity in the kitchen with the aunts and I don't know who-all making pasta; they made the most fantastic food imaginable. The men drank their homemade wine and ate and ate and ate, and the children were very attentive to the adults. I was very young, and the only thing I really remember is the daughter who was an opera singer. I remember hearing her sing and how pretty she was. She looked like a little angel, and she sang so beautifully with the operatic soprano voice.
I loved music, and when I passed a music store and saw the horns glittering in the window I'd want to go inside and touch them. It seemed unbelievable to me that anybody could actually play them. Finally I told my dad I just had to have a musical instrument. I wanted to play trumpet like my cousin Gabriel. My dad agreed to get somebody to come out and see what was happening with me. He found this man somewhere, Leroy Parry, who taught saxophone and clarinet, and brought him out to the house. In playing football I had chipped my teeth. Mr. Parry looked at my mouth and said I would never be able to play trumpet well because my teeth weren't strong. He said, "Why don't you play clarinet? You'd be excellent on clarinet. Give it a try." I still wanted to play trumpet, but I figured I'd better take advantage of what I had, so I started lessons on clarinet when I was nine years old.
Mr. Parry didn't play very well, but he was a nice guy, short and plump with a cherubic face, warm, happy-go-lucky. He had sparkling little eyes. You could never imagine him doing anything wrong or nasty or unpleasant. He invited me to his house for dinner a couple of times and I met his wife. She liked me, and they had no children of their own, so she would send me candy that she made. Mr. Parry was like another father to me, and I used to love talking to him. That's what our lessons were. None of them had anything to do with technicalities or the learning of music. It was just talking, having somebody to talk to. And I never had to practice. Just before Mr. Parry came I'd get my clarinet out and run through the lesson from the previous week. He'd think I'd been practicing the whole time. When I did play I played songs. I played what I felt. I didn't want to read anything or play exercises.
My father lived nearby. He was working as a longshoreman, and he lived with a woman named Nellie as man and wife. He never married her. He'd visit us and pay the bills. When it was time for school he'd give my grandmother money to get me a few clothes. He drank all the time, too. He used to get mean sometimes; he'd get loud and talk on and on and recite "The Face on the Barroom Floor" and all kinds of weird things.
After I started playing the clarinet my father would come and take me down to San Pedro to the bars. I've been there lately and the place is all cleaned up, but at that time, down by the waterfront, the whole area was nothing but bars, and there were fishermen, Slavonians, Italians, Germans-almost every nationality known was in those bars. A few had entertainment, a beat strip show, but most of them were just places guys went to hang out and talk. They weren't the kind of bars women would go in or that hustlers were at. They were men's bars, where they'd drink and talk about fishing and the waterfront and driving winches and their problems with management, to talk about the union. They were real tough guys; they were all my dad's friends. He would take me to several different bars, sit me up on the bar, and make me take out my clarinet and play little songs like "Nola" and "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" and "I Can't Give You Anything but Love," "The Music Goes Round and Round," "Auld Lang Syne." The guys would ask for other songs, and I'd play them, and they'd listen. My father would stand right by me and stare at them and nod his head-like they'd better like it or he'd smack 'em in the mouth! And he was a big guy, and he'd be drunk. I got the feeling that they did like it because I was his boy. They liked boys. I was his boy: "That's Art's boy. He plays nice music." "Yeah, nice boy. Play that thing, boy!" They'd pat me on the back. They'd grab my arm and shake my hand-almost hurt my hand they were so rough: "You just keep it up, boy. You don't want to be like us." I was like their child. All their children. "You keep that up and you won't have to do like we do." And they would have fingers missing, and some guys would have an arm gone. Things would drop on them and they'd lose legs, feet, fingers. I could get away from that and be respectable and not have to get dirty and get hurt and work myself to death. And so they'd drop a dollar bill in my hand or fifty cents or a silver dollar. I'd end up with fifteen, twenty dollars just from these guys, and my dad never took the money from me. He said, "That's yours. You earned that." I always felt scared before I played, but after I did it I was proud and my dad was proud of me.
My grandmother was always talking about Dick, her son, the favorite. According to my dad Dick never helped my grandmother at all, never brought her anything, never gave her any money, but she thought he was just great and went on and on about how good he was and how bad my dad was. My dad supported her. One day my dad came over and there was talk about paying some kind of insurance for her. He felt that Richard should pay part of it. My dad was drinking, and he decided to go over and see Dick-"Dicky Boy" he called him. He just hated him.
Dick was a plain-looking man. He had dull-colored, hazel eyes; he was a dull person, nondescript and withdrawn. But he always felt that he was right. He always considered himself a good person. Maybe he was. My dad had got him a job as a longshoreman and had done nothing but good for him, but he said Dick had never shown any appreciation.
We went over there, me and my dad. We went inside. He started talking to them. Dick's wife's name was Irma, and she was just like him, thin, with no beauty, dull, lightish hair, faded eyes. Everything was faded about both of them. My dad tried to reason with them, tried to find out if they would pay anything. Irma said, "No! She's taking care of your brat: you pay it!" They got into a terrible argument. When they started hollering I got scared; I ran out to the car; but they were getti
ng so crazy I felt something terrible was going to happen so I ran back, grabbed my dad, and tried to pull him out of the house. I got him to the car but he was too insane to drive. I opened the door and pushed him into the passenger side. He had just started teaching me how to drive. Dick ran out of the house with a big hammer, and when my dad saw him coming he tried to get out of the car to get at him, but I started the car up, praying I could get it going, trying to hold on to my dad at the same time. He's screaming out the window at them, and Irma's just screaming on the lawn, and here comes Dick with this hammer. By a miracle I was able to start the car. As Dick saw it moving he threw, and I pulled out just as the hammer hit the window in the back. It hit right where my dad's head would have been and shattered the glass. We got away. I looked over at him and saw that he was cut, there was blood on his face, and he was still raging about what he was going to do to Dick. Then he stopped. I guess he realized what had happened-that I was driving the car and had possibly saved his life or stopped him from killing. He might have killed both of them.
I drove back to my grandmother's house, and she wasn't there. I took him inside. I led him into the house and made him go into the bathroom and sat him down on the toilet and got a washrag. During the ride he had looked at me while I was driving, and I felt that he was seeing me for the first time. And I felt really good that I had done something that was right. I wiped the blood off his face. He wasn't cut bad, and he looked at me, and that was the first time I ever felt I had reached him at all. I felt good about myself and I felt that he loved me.
Right after that my grandmother came home and broke the spell. He looked at her and realized how she was. I realized how she was. He started raving at her about her Dicky Boy, and I remember cussing her out myself, telling her that her Dicky Boy wouldn't pay a penny, that he'd tried to kill my dad, that I would kill him, that she was an unfeeling, rotten, ungrateful bitch. She flipped out at both of us. She didn't care anything at all about him being cut: "How dare you go over there and bother Richard and his wife?" She kept at him and at him, ranking him and goading him, and finally he grabbed her and started to strangle her. Probably all his life he'd wanted to kill her. She certainly deserved to be killed by him, and I had the feeling of wishing that he would kill her, thinking it would maybe free me. She wouldn't be there and something else would have to be done with me. Maybe he would have to take me to live with Nellie, who was warm and nice and feminine and smelled pretty. And so, for this moment, I was hoping he'd kill her, but all of a sudden I realized what would happen to him, so I grabbed him, and finally he let her go, and she ran screaming out into the street.
(Sarah Schechter Bartold)* My husband was born in Italy. I think he said he had four sisters, but maybe there were three. Two were living when I went there many years ago. I couldn't say a word. They brought a chair outside. They didn't invite me in. They were country people, very suspicious.
My husband went to study for the priesthood when he was a young man, but he didn't like the things he saw going on there. He came to this country, and he was a waiter. He also worked in the coal mines. When I met him he was an insurance man. We met back east. I worked daytimes, and then I went with him to all his prospects at night. But I actually never got, out of fifty-eight years with him, more than he told me. And what difference does it make?
I don't remember anything about Ida [Mildred Bartold, Art's mother]. She was seven or eight when she came to us. She was pretty, but she was a terrible little troublemaker right from the beginning. She was a liar, a little liar. But I really don't
* See Cast of Characters on page x, for identification of speakers.
remember why she was sent to live with us. Maybe they felt that she would do better in America. As far as I knew she was one of my husband's sisters' children. She was a little liar, and that's the whole story. A child who fibs can do an awful lot of damage, especially when you have little children of your own. She lied about all sorts of things, about the other children-"This one did that." And they were younger than she was, so I thought it best not to have her around. But why stir up the past and cause her son to have hard feelings about her? She was his mother. Was he her only child? Did he inherit anything when she died? She had nothing to leave? I remember her mostly as a terrible fibber.
(Thelma Winters Noble Pepper) Arthur Senior, "Daddy," was born in Galena, Kansas, and then I think they went to this Missouri mining town. Grandma's [Art's grandmother's] first husband worked in the lead mines. And it was a real sad thing there because her husband, I think his name was Sam Pepper, was a periodic drunkard. Every weekend when he got paid, he'd go to the saloon to cash his check, and then usually there was nothing left. So this one time, they were visiting Sam's sister's family, and this sister's husband and Sam, they both got drunk, and the sister called the police, who took 'em both to jail, and I think they must of give 'em a thirty-day sentence. And while he was in jail, the place where Grandma lived-they evicted her. She had four or five children at that time (one had just died), and there wasn't no place for her to go, so they sent her to the poor farm, she and the children. And she was expecting then. She was carrying her twins. They told her, "You know that you can't keep your children here. They'll have to be put up for adoption." She said no way was she going to let her children be put up for adoption, so she went back to where they had been living. She knew an old man that had a rundown, old chicken house. She asked him if she could move in there, and he told her that if she thought she could make that livable, she could have it, and she did. When Sam come out of jail he didn't look for her. He just stayed away. He just decided to beat it. So that ended that, and that was two months before her twins was born. This all gives you an idea of why Grandma was like she was.
The twins was only three weeks old when she went to work. She and her sister-in-law took in washing together. And the boys-the sister had a boy about Daddy's age-they'd deliver and pick up. I guess this was in 1895. Daddy would have been about nine years old.
When the twins was fifteen months old they got-at that time they called it membranous croup, but now we know that it was diphtheria. So one of 'em died, and they took him away to be buried, and then the second one got so sick it couldn't breathe, so she'd walk it, day and night. Fifteen days apart they died. And this last one, Grandma was so wore out with taking care of them for so long, the neighbors induced her to lay down and take a nap. She washed the dead baby and dressed him and put him on a pillow on her sewing machine. While she was asleep, the authorities came in and took the baby, didn't even wake her up. And that affected her tremendously. When she was here with me and Daddy, dying, she lived that again. One day I heard her crying and I went in there. She was crying just fit to break her heart, and she said, "Oh, why didn't they wake me? Why did they take him away without waking me?" She didn't even get to attend the funeral of that second baby.
After that I think she run a kind of boardinghouse for miners. At that time women couldn't get jobs like they can now. Joe Noble was one of the boarders. Then when Joe started a butcher shop, she helped him in the butcher shop. They decided to get married, and that's when Joe come out here to California. They were married in 1913.
Daddy didn't live with them. When he was growing up he spent most of his time on his uncle's ranch back in the middle west somewhere. Daddy never went to school beyond the fifth grade. Then he went to work. I think he was seventeen when he joined the merchant marine. I don't know when it was that he lost his eye. Every once in a while he got tired of being at sea, and he'd take a stateside job. He was working on a bean huller, and he got a bean hull in his eye. That put it out. You couldn't tell it on him. He was the handsomest man I ever saw. I knew him for years before I knew that eye was no good.
Well, Daddy's stepfather just tolerated him. They didn't have no open quarrels that I know of. When Daddy'd come to port, San Pedro, he'd go to see them, but he never stayed overnight. His home port was San Francisco, so he'd come down here to see his mother and say hello and go
odbye. He loved his mother very devotedly, but she didn't care too much for him because she hated anybody that drank to excess and Daddy always drank to excess. Dick was her favorite. He didn't drink at all, and when her other children died, he was the baby. But, anyhow, Dick was a very affectionate, loving person, see, and Daddy wasn't. Daddy was kinda standoffish, like her. Well, Daddy thought when he supported her and took care of her, that showed his love. He didn't do a lot of talkin.' That was the way it was. And I know when she died-Oh, my-he'd sit in that chair there and cry like a baby. He says, "Why couldn't she tell me she loved me? Just once. Why couldn't she tell me she loved me?" All three of 'em: there was Grandma, and Daddy, and Junior; they didn't communicate with each other.
I was married to Shorty-that was Daddy's stepbrother-in 1920; Johnny was born in October of 1921; and it was March of the following year that I first saw Daddy. He'd just come by for a few minutes, said hello to Grandma, and was gone. And the next time he came in port, my second baby, Buddy, was about six months old, so that was two and a half years later. He come up to see Grandma again, but this time he brought Millie [Mildred Bartold, Art's mother] with him. That would be 1924, when they got married. Well, Millie fell in love with my Buddy. He was one of those pink and white babies, all soft and cuddly, you know. She wanted a baby. She didn't figure on junior [Art] being sickly and hard to take care of.
Millie said she was born back east in New Jersey or New York, and her uncle and his wife, the Bartolds, brought her to California when she was just a little girl. Her real name was Ida. She didn't know her last name. She'd got a lot of sisters and brothers somewhere. Well, they made a regular little doll of her. Her slightest wish-they got it for her, until they had kids of their own. Then her name was mud. Her aunt wasn't very good to her after she had children of her own. She'd accuse Millie of doing something, and if she said she didn't do it, she wasn't allowed nothing to eat until she admitted she did it. Millie said she went three days one time without anything to eat because she knew she hadn't done what she was accused of, but she finally told her aunt she did just to get out from under. Then she ran away from home. She ran away a lot of times, and that's why, I think, the Bartolds finally put her in a convent school. But she ran away from there, too. For a while she was put in a foster home; she was very happy there. But then she met this woman, Mildred Bayard. Millie must have been about fourteen then. This woman wanted Millie to go with her to one of the Harvey Houses out in the desert-I think it was Barstow-as a waitress. I don't know what kind of experience she had out there, but she run away from there, too, and she went down to [San] 'Pedro to be a waitress.
Straight Life Page 3