For a poor kid unable to afford fancy sleep-away summer camps and without many friends, reading helped Stanley cope with his family difficulties, “It was my escape from the dreariness and sadness of my home life.”23 More importantly, reading enabled the boy to hone his sense of adventure and creativity. “Used to scribble my own comics, as far back as I can remember,” Lee said. “Used to draw horizon line and add stick-figure people, telling myself little stories all the while.”24
Celia pushed the boy to excel at school. As a result, “I was always something of an outsider,” Stanley said. “My mother wanted me to finish school as soon as possible so I could get a job and help support the family.”25 Hoping to please Celia, Stanley worked hard enough to skip grades and advanced quickly, despite the teasing from older kids and getting picked on. He developed a precocious intellect, but his youth and brightness did not help him socially. He found it difficult to establish friendships with older classmates who had gone to school together for years.
Like many bright students, the boy found a mentor in a young Jewish teacher named Leon B. Ginsberg. Each day, Ginsberg started class by telling the students a baseball story featuring the imaginary slugger Swat Mulligan, always “funny and exciting,” according to the boy. Mulligan’s heroics created an atmosphere that made learning fun. For a classroom in Lee’s elementary school days, this was a rarity. For Stanley Lieber, however, the life lesson drawn from Ginsberg’s daily tale was clear: “Whenever I want to communicate to others, I always try to do it in a lighter-hearted way and make it as entertaining as possible.”26
Telling amusing stories that created a vivid scene and a great deal of excitement also appealed to Stanley’s other passion—watching movies. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the boy thought about a bigger-than-life future, his idea of heaven was embodied in film icon Errol Flynn. The actor burst onto the scene in 1935’s Captain Blood, which showcased his good looks, flamboyant charm, and athletic grace. Flynn became the top action film star and drew in young viewers like Lieber with detailed and finely choreographed fight scenes and swordplay, as in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Flynn’s first color film. For a boy creating his own comic stories and devouring books and magazines, the movies demonstrated how the marriage of visual elements and dialogue drove the action. “There on the screen were worlds that dazzled my mind, worlds of magic and wonder, worlds which I longed to inhabit, if only in imagination,” he remembered.27
Lee went to the movies at Loew’s 175th Street Theatre, one of New York’s “Wonder Theatres” built between 1925 and 1930. Originally built for vaudeville, the increasing popularity of motion pictures led to Loew’s being transformed for films. An enormous seven-story-high Robert Morton Wonder organ entertained viewers in the ornate setting. Not just interested in action adventures, Lee also loved the early comedic films of the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy. Within a three-block radius of 181st Street, the youngster could pick from five movie theaters. On Saturdays, they showed serials. Lee eagerly anticipated Tarzan and his other favorite, The Jungle Mystery, the adventures of a man-ape. After the films ended, he met up with his cousin Morty Feldman on Seventy-Second Street, where the boys ate pancakes and talked about the movies.28
Stanley grew into a self-described “voracious reader.” In later years, he often cited Shakespeare as his most important influence, because of the commitment to drama and comedy, which shaped the young Lee’s ideas about creativity and storytelling. Lee enjoyed Shakespeare’s “rhythm of words,” explaining, “I’ve always been in love with the way words sound.”29 The boy’s desire to read had no real boundaries. He took a book or magazine with him everywhere, even the breakfast table, using a little wooden contraption his mother found for him that held the pages open while it propped up the book.
Although he loved reading and film and dabbled with drawing, young Stanley had no illusions about working in comic books. Comic books during Stanley’s boyhood years were primarily reprints from newspaper strips and looked more like books or magazines. In the 1920s, black and white strips were popular, particularly the slapstick humor of Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff, which were reprinted as oversized comic books. He read them, like other children his age, but they did not capture his imagination the way film and novels did. “Creating comic books was never part of my childhood dream,” he explained. “I never thought of that at all.”30 He did, however, read Famous Funnies, widely considered the first modern American comic book, which Dell published in 1934 and distributed through Woolworth’s department stores. He specifically remembered enjoying Hairbreadth Harry, a strip created by C. W. Kahles that featured the hero in various melodramatic adventures to keep his rival Rudolph Ruddigore Rassendale from the heroine Belinda Blinks.31
As debilitating as the stock market crash was on the nation’s economy, the truly crushing blow came from the way it demoralized the American people. The shocking speed of the collapse shook the public’s faith in the national economic system. Millions of workers lost their jobs as businesses desperately cut their operations to the bare essentials. Construction in New York City, for example, came to a near halt as 64 percent of workers were laid off soon after the stock market collapsed.
Desperation reigned, and its epicenter was New York City. By October 1933, it counted some 1.25 million people on relief. Even more telling is that another million were eligible for relief, but did not accept it. Some 6,000 New Yorkers attempted to make ends meet by selling apples on the streets. But by the end of 1931, most street vendors were gone. Grocery store sales dropped by 50 percent. Many urban dwellers scoured garbage cans and dumps looking for food. Studies estimated that 65 percent of the African American children in Harlem were plagued by malnutrition during the era.
Tens of thousands of people in New York City were forced to live on the streets or in shantytowns located along the banks of the East River and the Hudson River. These clusters of makeshift abodes were dubbed “Hoovervilles”—a backhanded tribute to President Herbert Hoover. The city’s largest camp was in Central Park. Ironically, the Central Park shantytown became a tourist attraction and featured daily performances by an unemployed tightrope walker and other outof-work artists.
Unemployment in 1929 was about 3 percent, but by 1932 the figure had reached 24 percent. Millions more involuntarily worked in part-time roles. Two years after the crash, some two hundred thousand New Yorkers faced eviction for failure to pay rent. Many who were not evicted sold off their valuables so they could raise the money. Others—like the Liebers—trekked from apartment to apartment. If their furniture had been purchased on credit, many owners left it behind when they could no longer make payments.
For the Lieber family, the crash had lasting and prolonged consequences, yet somehow they managed to keep a roof over their heads and the rocky marriage afloat. On the surface the obvious impact was that Jacob’s career virtually disappeared in a complicated game of supply and demand. The number of dress cutters shrank as manufacturing companies struggled to stay solvent. The years after the stock market tanked, Jacob searched for work, but to no avail.
The arguments about money took a toll on the Lieber marriage and created animosity that Stanley could avoid to some degree as he got older. Unfortunately, his little brother, Lawrence (Larry), born nine years after his older brother, suffered more directly and spent his formative years under the stress and strain of a troubled marriage and little hope for better days ahead.
Jacob’s unemployment meant that Stanley had to find work as soon as possible; any little bit of extra income might help the family avoid destitution. Consequently, as he reached his mid-teen years, the boy (along with millions of other teenagers) either worked or constantly searched for jobs. Celia’s mix of fawning support and pushing him to work through school quickly paid off. The enterprising teen, smart and already a budding storyteller and wordsmith, found a variety of odd jobs, including as an usher at a movie theater, an office boy at a factory that manufactured jeans, and even wri
ting obituaries of living celebrities that would be filed whenever they passed away. Balancing high school and part-time jobs became a constant way of life.
Lieber went to DeWitt Clinton High School, a twenty-one-acre campus at 100 West Mosholu Parkway South and East 205th Street in the Bronx. Described as the “castle on the parkway,” the all-boys school stood as one of the largest high schools in the world, enrolling ten to twelve thousand students from across the city and comprising a diverse ethnic population, heavily tilted toward immigrants and the children of immigrants.
In a high school like Clinton, which seemed more like a factory than a school, making a name among the throngs would be difficult, if not impossible. Yet, Lieber’s high school years were filled with school clubs and other opportunities that demonstrated his budding showmanship traits. The boy who had whiled away time reading and being alone grew into a handsome, tall young man, though rail thin. He joined the public-speaking club and the law society, where he dreamed of becoming a famous courtroom attorney.
Earning the nickname “Gabby” for his charm and ability to chat up a storm, Lieber predicted big things for himself in the future, a notion echoed by his peers. High school friend Bob Wendlinger remembers thinking that his classmate was headed toward greatness. “You always knew that he was going to be successful,” Wendlinger says. “It was a given.”32
Lieber experimented with a variety of personas as a student, like many good-looking and popular students do while in high school. He gravitated toward publicity and held a position on the business staff of the Clinton literary magazine, the Magpie. Despite his own budding writing talents and years of intense reading, he confined himself to “publicity director” for the magazine. Part of the Lieber youthful lore is that before a meeting in the tower, the high-ceilinged part of the school where the Magpie staff went to work, he found a ladder left there by a worker on his lunch break. Jumping at the chance to show off and leave his mark, the youngster scurried up the ladder and wrote, “Stan Lee is God” on the ceiling. Perhaps unwilling to risk getting in trouble with the maintenance worker or other high school administrators for defacing the building by using his real name—or just playing around with a stage name—this was his first recorded use of the moniker that would later travel the globe.33
The Magpie publicity job wasn’t a throwaway position in a high school club for the teen. While he dreamed of a variety of careers—including actor—advertising seemed like his true calling. The years of reading magazines created an aura of fascination about advertisements for him. Several of the jobs he held during high school centered on words or selling, including writing publicity materials for a Jewish hospital in Denver, the obituary job, and selling New York Times subscriptions to his classmates. Even as a teen, the boy realized that he had a dramatic flair and could be a persuasive public speaker, a skill he had been honing since his mother asked him to read aloud to her as a boy. In high school, he also adopted a magician’s persona—calling himself the great “Thimbilini”—and performed sleight-of-hand tricks with small thimbles that drew crowds of curious classmates to his miniroutines. From an early age, Stanley craved attention and a spotlight.
As a fifteen-year-old, Lieber had entered a high school essay competition sponsored by the New York Herald Tribune, called “The Biggest News of the Week Contest.” The paper, owned by Ogden Reid and his wife Helen, although conservative, pursued local issues in a stylized fashion, emphasizing realism and the city’s changing atmosphere. Lieber claims to have won the prize for three straight weeks, goading the newspaper to write the boy and ask him to let someone else win. According to Stanley, the paper suggested he look into writing professionally, which the boy claims, “probably changed my life.”34
However, the story is apocryphal. The likelier story is that the young Lieber won a seventh-place prize of $2.50 and two honorable mention awards—hardly the rags-to-riches tale that he would identify as the moment he wanted to become a writer. “After all,” as one assessment puts it, “Lee is a storyteller, and his account of the Herald Tribune essay contest certainly made for a good story, even if it’s untrue.”35 While the story veers from the truth, the prize money made an impression on a poor Jewish kid. A year later, in 1939, the teen worked a total of twelve weeks, pulling in $150 via part-time jobs and whatever work he could muster.36
Leaving the hallowed halls of the monolithic all-boys DeWitt Clinton High School in early summer 1939, Stanley Lieber entered the job market feeling anxious and under more than a little duress. His high school years coincided with some of the worst years of the Great Depression. Graduating did not mean launching a career but just finding a job. His family needed the money.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to wrench the United States out of its financial turmoil, only to see gross national product fall 4.5 percent in 1938 and unemployment hit 19 percent. The economic downturn triggered by FDR’s misfires did not make the transition easy for Lieber, a young man attempting to make the move from high school student to actually earning a living.
Ironically, Hitler’s invasion of Poland several months after Lieber’s graduation would spark the nation into war planning and production, thereby reviving the economy. For several years prior to the attacks on Pearl Harbor, the United States shipped products to allies around the globe and simultaneously prepped for its seemingly inevitable entry into the global fight. The economic rebound, however, did not kick in soon enough to aid Lieber.
Duty-bound to help support his family, college would not be an option. As a boy and then teenager, he may have daydreamed about becoming an actor or enjoying a career as a courtroom attorney, but his immediate future meant getting work. He needed a permanent position, not another in a series of humiliating and somewhat menial part-time jobs like the ones he had during high school. The Lieber family suffered during the financial crisis, so Stanley’s graduation and subsequent salary might offer his family some financial stability, which it lacked for most of his young life.
For so many families of the 1920s and 1930s, the economic collapse and daily struggle to claw back to normality defined American life. Growing up in New York City during the Great Depression had profound consequences for young Stanley Lieber. He could cling to vague memories of his short life prior to the Wall Street crash, but his worldview would be shaped by his father’s inability to find consistent work. The resulting turmoil that unemployment rained down on the Lieber family shook the boy to his core and would remain central to how he approached his own work life.
Lieber’s most fundamental thinking was “a feeling that the most important thing for a man is to have work to do, to be busy, to be needed.”37 This notion shaped Lieber as an adult—the desire not only to work, but to feel needed. “Even when I made a good living, my dad didn’t think of me as a success,” he remembered. “He was pretty wrapped up in himself most of the time. Some of that rubbed off on me. I was always looking at people who were doing better than I was and wishing I could do what they were doing. . . . Part of me always felt I hadn’t quite made it yet.”38
What Lieber would call the “specter of poverty” cast a dark cloud over his parents’ marriage, essentially sapping the joy and love they once shared.39 The fear of unemployment pushed the youngster to value work and earning a living above all else. Lieber had this shared experience with other contemporaries, including fellow comic book veterans, many of whom were first-generation immigrants and Jewish. They knew each other’s neighborhoods, and they had similar experiences navigating life in Depression-era America and New York City, including serving as eyewitnesses to the despair of bread lines or watching people around them get booted out of apartments or jobs.
The tumultuous life at near-poverty and his parents’ constant battling had lasting effects, despite Celia’s frequent doting on him and reiterating how successful he would someday become. One writer describes the consequences these competing factors had on the boy, producing a young man “agonizingly sensitive, desperate for ap
proval and easily influenced by others.” Highly intelligent, the youngster yearned for something larger than life that would fulfill his mother’s predictions about his future fame and wealth.40
CHAPTER 2
TEENAGE EDITOR
Rising up to his feet and towering over a messy desktop with drawings strewn haphazardly about and correspondence littering every square inch, Timely Comics head writer and editorial director Joe Simon reached out his hand to welcome his new young assistant.
Still a little dizzy from how fast he had transformed from applicant to full-time employee, Stanley Lieber vigorously pumped the older man’s hand. He beamed with gratitude. Lieber’s mind raced as he tried to put it all in perspective.
A steady paycheck . . . $8 a week!
For a kid just out of high school whose family always had money troubles, the meager sum, if nothing else, meant that he might help the family regain its footing. More importantly, however, a full-time job gave the teenager security and a shot at a career in writing and publishing. Words appealed to the boy. Constantly reading as a kid to escape the reality of his father’s unemployment and their shabby surroundings in cramped, cheap apartments, he dreamed of one day writing the Great American Novel.
Long before he would get to write anything, though, Lieber would work away the days as an office boy for Simon and the other full-time Timely Comics employee, artist and writer Jack Kirby. Some days the gofer job included refilling the artist’s inkwells. Other days he would run out for sandwiches while the famous duo concocted new superhero stories.
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