Bill Bailey

by The Kid from Hoboken- An Autobiography (epub)

  So, my mother had remarried, we were told, and from now on we were to take orders from, and be disciplined by, Harry. It was fairly obvious that someone was bound to come along and fill the void in my mother's lonesome life. Even with a dozen kids around her she could still be lonely. My mom had met Harry years before at a St. Paddy's Day picnic. At that time he was carefree and charming. After he returned from the war, he sought my mother out and found her, separated from my father, vulnerable to his charm.

  It wasn't long before the honeymoon was over. That came through to me via a slap across the face that sent me reeling across the room. I looked into the eyes of what appeared to me at the moment to be a madman. I glanced past him to my mother for some sort of protection or comfort. But all she said was, "You deserved it."

  The discipline was tightening up. I did not like it one bit, nor did I like the stepfather. Two weeks after he took over the reins, he sent me out to sell newspapers. I would buy the Jersey Observer for two cents per paper and sell it for three cents. If I sold ten papers in a day, that was ten cents profit; ten cents could buy a lot. So I hustled around with papers under my arm, rain or shine, and competed with the other barefoot kids who ran around the street.

  My biggest day in the newspaper game was during the Dempsey-Carpentier fight in Boyle's 30 acres, in Jersey. I met the newspaper man and his horse and buggy at the Lackawanna Railroad Ferry Depot. I gave him twenty cents in advance for ten papers. Instead of the ten papers, he handed me a bundle of 100.

  "Here, these are for you. I'll be around later to pick up any papers you don't sell, and the money."

  I panicked. "Why so many papers?" I protested.

  "Never mind," he soothed me. "You'll sell them all today. Just shout as loud as you can when the people come off the ferry boats, `Read all about it! All the facts about the big fight!'"

  I did as he ordered. I shouted my "read all about it" as each ferry boat brought in hundreds of people who would disembark and catch other transportation to the fight. The Observer carried a picture of the Manassas Mauler, Jack Dempsey, on its front page in a posed shot facing the French challenger, Georges Carpentier.

  Within two hours I had sold out the hundred copies. I didn't realize how much money I really had, since many people handed me a nickel or a dime and said, "Keep the change."

  The newspaper man came around, left some more papers and took some of the money. I went home with two papers I hadn't been able to peddle. As I emptied my pockets onto the kitchen table, there were smiles and pats on the back and words like, "He's a great boy."

  Old stepfather kept his eyes open for little jobs for me. One day, the potato man came past our house. He had a horse and cart loaded down with a mountain of potatoes. A big sign on the wagon read "TWENTY-FIVE POUNDS FOR TWENTY-FIVE CENTS." The peddler was fat; he didn't look like someone who looked forward to climbing long flights of stairs all day. Harry had a little chat with him. Then he called me out to accompany the potato man and assist him in his work. "And be sure to do everything the man tells you or you'll catch it when you get home," was his parting shot.

  All that day, the horse and cart moved slowly through the poor neighborhoods of the city, the potato man shouting out his bargain. People stuck their heads out the windows to holler down their orders. He loaded the bags, handed them to me and told me what to collect. It seemed like most of those who bought potatoes lived on the top floors. Sometimes I had to climb the stairs again to take back change.

  At one place where we stopped, a good-looking woman put her head out the door and beckoned to the peddler. He came back to me and said, "Kid, stay near the wagon, see? I'll be back in a few minutes."

  When he finally reappeared, he was buttoning the fly of his pants. "Here, take these potatoes to that woman. Don't collect nothing. She already paid me."

  At six that evening, we finished, with 25 pounds of potatoes left. He let me off the cart at my house and handed me 25 cents and the potatoes. Again I was the hero, but I was so exhausted I could not stay awake to eat. I curled up under a few old coats and blankets and fell asleep.

  If our mother had expected things to improve economically around the house by giving us a stepfather, she was soon to be sadly disappointed. Old Harry rarely held down a job longer than the first or second paycheck. He was full of excuses. The war, he said, had taken the best out of him. He was suffering from ulcers brought on by his service in France, he said. This also meant that if there was fresh butter or milk around the house, it would go to him. While we spread lard and salt on our bread, he drowned his toast in butter. While he drank fresh milk, we poured a spoonful of condensed milk over a bowl of snow and pretended it was ice cream. Harry received a small disability check from the government because of his war injuries. But that check was spent days before it ever arrived. Harry also loved the taste of the foamy suds, and he was no stranger to the thrills of wiping out a bottle of Irish whiskey.

  Again my mother had to be the provider, taking in washing, scouting around for cleaning jobs. There was one fail-proof way we recognized the pressure building up in her. Ordinarily, if I was doing something she did not like, she would say, in a comforting voice, "Stop it." If I ignored the warning, she would come charging at me with Harry's razor strop in her hand and whack me across the fanny. But when she was under pressure, there was no comforting warning. Instead, she would lay it on before I knew what was happening.

  One day I turned quickly to see her charging toward me. I put out my arm in self defense. She stopped short, and in that moment, I made a gesture of swinging at her.

  "Don't you dare hit your mother. You hear me?" she shouted. I said nothing, but felt happy that the charge resulted only in a verbal blast instead of the strop. She continued with her tirade. "In Ireland, you can always tell the bad people who struck their mothers. When they died, their hands stuck up out of the grave."

  For many months afterward, I would carry the picture in my mind of graveyards in Ireland with hands exposed above the ground. I didn't want my hand sticking out from the grave; from that day on, I never struck back.

  Sister Kate had been dating a young Polish guy called Chick. He worked on and around the vast fleet of barges which were towed up and down the Hudson and East Rivers, laden with cargo. He lived a few blocks down the street with his mother and two younger brothers. When he came to the house to court Kate, he always stopped at the bakery and bought a bag of sugar buns. I liked him. The romance had gone on for six months. There was mention of marriage, but my mother thought that Kate should wait at least another year.

  One night, the winds blew and the rain came down heavy. The barges tied together alongside the docks banged and stretched their mooring lines. It looked as if some of them might be set adrift. Chick was called from the house to go down and make sure they were secured. Crossing from one barge to the next with a lantern in his hand, he slipped and fell between the two. He was crushed, then drowned. It was a night he was to have taken Kate to an uptown movie.

  For three days and nights, Chick's body was laid out in an open coffin in the front room of his house, while friends of the family came at all hours to kneel before the casket and pray. His mother was constantly in tears. On the third day, the horse-drawn hearse came to the house and took him to the burial grounds, removing the black ribbon that had been pinned on the front door to let everyone know there had been a loss in the family.

  The sudden tragedy of Chick's death was a shock to sister Kate. In the next six months, she came close to joining a Catholic order to become a nun. Instead, she married two years later, raised a family of five, and died of a heart attack in San Francisco at the age of sixty-two.

  Chapter V: Hoboken Drama and Petty Larceny

  One day I came home to find the house full of excitement. There were several wooden barrels in the center of the kitchen. What few dishes we had were being wrapped in newspaper and placed in the barrels. We were moving.

  It wrung my heart to say goodbye to all my friends--P
auline, Peter, Helen--all the kids I had grown up with. The refrain of my farewells, repeated again and again, was that I would return some day.

  Hoboken, my new residence, was one mile square. Our house was adjacent to the industrial area, not far from the railroad tracks. My mother sent me to public school instead of enrolling me in Catholic school. She did not want to start the hassles all over again about not having money for books or regulation clothing. In public school one needed not to worry about such details. Books were free, and the only clothing requirement was that it be clean.

  Public School Number Five took in a large section of Hoboken. It was only a couple of blocks from where I lived. I adapted easily to the new classroom routine. The time I had spent at St. Peter's parochial school had made it that much easier. Here, discipline was more relaxed; I didn't witness anyone being brutalized with a ritual morning stropping across the palms for little infractions of dogmatic rules. There I found the greatest teacher who ever lived, Alice A. O'Rafferty. She was a small, frail woman with pince-nez, impeccably dressed. She was in her fifties. She could see through me as no one else could. Within five minutes, she knew when I was about to commit some sort of mayhem in class. Once, while she was facing the blackboard, chalking up the next day's lessons, I began performing a little mimicry, waving my hands in all directions. Without turning around or pausing in her writing she said, "Will the person who is making a fool of himself please stop." From that moment, I figured she had some spiritual power working for her; she did not turn her head once, yet she knew I was the one performing. For years afterward, the incident remained a mystery. I finally decided that, somehow, she got my reflection bouncing off her glasses when she tilted her head a certain way.

  She lived in a better section of Hoboken, the area that faced the river. At night she could look out the window and see the towering lights of New York City, including the Woolworth Building, the world's tallest. In front and in back of her residence she had gardens full of lovely flowers. Alice A. O'Rafferty immediately noticed that I lacked three good meals a day, as well as warm clothing. It did not take her long to discover that I came from a family with a good many problems.

  At least three times a week, a young Jewish boy whose father owned a furniture store on the main street would bring her an apple. She would thank him warmly and leave the apple on her desk all day. I would stare at it, cursing the "teacher's pet" for boot licking. When it came time to dismiss the class, Miss O'Rafferty would always have someone stay behind to clean the blackboard erasers. Usually that was me. When I had finished my chore she would say, "Put this apple in your pocket and eat it when you get home." Finally I realized that whenever I saw the apple on her desk, I should stay behind after class.

  On Easter Sunday she had me come to her house to receive an Easter basket loaded with eggs and chocolate bunnies and jelly beans. When Christmas came around, she again invited me to her house. When I arrived, she had me try on an overcoat. It was a beautiful, long, black wool coat, several sizes too big for me. I was so grateful to receive it that I cried with jubilation. I felt warm all over.

  Our school maintained its own traffic control police. I was assigned a street corner to patrol. My job was to stop all traffic, letting the kids cross safely. A badge was strapped to my upper arm. After the area was cleared of kids, all the badges were tuned in to the assistant chief, who put them in the janitor's workshop until the next day. Within three months, I took over the assistant chief's job. The collection of badges fell to me. The janitor was a heavy smoker who left partial packs of cigarettes all through his workshop. Every time I walked in with the badges I saw a pack here and there, but never any janitor. It was the perfect setup.

  Just a few months after moving to Hoboken, I teamed up with the local group of kids always responsible for petty mischief. Naturally, we were all striving to grow up quickly--to be rid of childish chores and to shed those knicker pants and long stockings. Smoking was one of the evil steps to growing up and reaching manhood. "Look at me!" you felt like shouting to the whole darn world, "Look! I'm smoking! I'm a grownup! Don't lay any more kid stuff on me, I'm a man!" We would sit around in groups of five or six, carefully watching the one guy who knew how to inhale as he slowly drew in the smoke and let it out through his nose. Man! That was something: to make smoke come out of your nose like a dragon! That was living!

  After days and days of trying, I finally made the grade and found myself going around in a dizzy twirl. We would buy small packs of "Sweet Caporals" or "Mecca," which came in half-size packs for a nickel. But nickels were hard to come by, and the discovery that the janitor left cigarettes lying around was the perfect solution. At first, I only took a cigarette or two out of his pack, leaving the package where it was. But as time went on and the demand for cigarettes grew stronger, I began taking the entire pack.

  These easy pickings and a life of crime came to a fast end one afternoon when the janitor hid in a closet. Peeking out, he watched me play "Raffles." He jumped out of his hiding place and dragged me to the principal's office. The principal looked up when we entered. "Aha, you finally caught him!"

  I stood there like a sheep ready for shearing. Had this been the parochial school, I would have been drawn and quartered. Here, however, the discipline was different. My own teacher was still in the building. She was summoned. Now I was boiling with indignation at being caught--I would have to face Miss O'Rafferty. She came in, looked at me and said, "Wait outside." After a few minutes, she came out and walked me away from the door. "Why didn't you come to me and ask for money for cigarettes instead of stealing them? If you must smoke--and I think it's asinine that you do--I would rather give you the money than see you steal it and end up this way. What am I going to do with you?" She looked at me with those eyes I was sure always peered right through me. I studied the floor.

  "Look me in the eye when I talk to you," she demanded.

  I raised my head sheepishly, but I couldn't keep my eyes focused on hers. "What do you think should happen to you for stealing?" she asked. I didn't utter a word. "Very well, then. I will find something for you to do that will keep you out of mischief."

  The next day she had a list of things for me to do. She named two books I had to read. Each morning I was to bring a written report on my reading. For at least a month, my play time with the "gang" was reduced to nearly zero. I didn't realize at the time that she was increasing the tempo of my education.

  Not long afterward, news that a play was shaping up spread through the school. I was assigned a part in "A Day at the Court of King Arthur." I was handed two typewritten pages; for the next three weeks I was to learn lines. The juicy role was that of King Arthur. He was played by the richest kid in the school, Sol Fineman, whose father was a well-established doctor. King Arthur sat in a big royal chair, elevated two feet off the floor. This way he could look down on his subjects. All he did in the play was shout to his court flunky, "Who dares enter the court of King Arthur?" The flunky would then announce the name of the caller. The king would answer, "Let him enter," and the flunky would bang his staff on the floor and shout, "Enter, sir, and pay your respects to the King." The King was dressed in royal garb, and he was always on stage.

  My big problem with my lines was a difficulty in pronouncing "Hoboken." I kept saying "Hobucken," It infuriated the teacher. As a cure, she worked out a formula: no matter where I was, if she approached me, I was to repeat the word, "Hoboken."

  "Just remember the word `hobo'," she said.

  I mumbled, talked to myself, and kept repeating, "hobo, hobo, hobo." I finally got it: "Hoboken."

  In the play, I represented the Red Cross. I stood in the wings waiting for my cue. I carried a big white flag with a red cross in its center. The pole to which the flag was attached was nine feet long and heavy. I was to walk up to a designated spot, stopping about ten feet from the king.

  When the flunky announced, "Come, sir, and pay your respects to the King," I came charging out much too fast. Instead of st
opping within ten feet of the king, I charged ahead, holding the flag pole almost straight up and stopping six feet away. I started to recite, "Five years ago, the President of the United States called upon the children of our country to organize for services during the great World War. Among the hundreds of thousands of children to answer the call were the children of Public School Number Five of Hobo Ken." There were other lines about the number of bundles of clothing and toys that we gathered and something about how our gifts brought hope and enlightenment to the children who were victims of the war in Europe. I was terrified that I might fumble my lines in front of so many people in the auditorium, so I blurted them out quickly. I felt so good when I reached the last line, so proud that I had "done it," that I failed to pay attention to the position of the flagpole.

  Instead of stepping back several feet and then turning to exit the way it had been rehearsed, I turned quickly to get off the stage as fast as I could. Though I have no memory of doing so, I lowered the flagpole. It clunked Sol Fineman, alias King Arthur, right on the head, knocking loose his crown. He tried to maintain his composure. But now I turned, and as the pole swung around, it belted him on the side of the face. A series of "oohs" and "aahs" came from the audience. The king was dethroned and sprawled on the floor.

  By a stroke of good fortune, I was the last of the king's subjects to appear before him. The curtain came down, and someone picked up the king and his crown and gave him a handkerchief to wipe away his tears. Someone else called me a dummy. And still someone else called for first aid for the scratch on the king's head. Fortunately, it was the last day of school before summer vacation. Everybody would have many weeks to forget the incident.