The Sandburg Treasury

by Carl Sandburg

  So there was my vest-pocket library of biography and history. There were days I carried the eight books, four in the upper right-hand vest pocket and four in the upper left. I had books I didn’t have to take back to the Seventh Ward school or the Public Library. I was a book-owner.

  One Monday morning, a bright summer day, mother was doing a wash in the cellar. I came in to see a well-dressed man talking to her. She had quit washing and was listening to him. He was showing her a sample of a book. Here were the covers and here were sample pages—the real book was five times bigger. Mama’s face and eyes were shining. He was saying that education is important. And how do you get education? Through books, the right kind of books. Now you have this Cyclopedia of Important Facts of the World around and the children can’t help reading it. Knowledge—that is what counts when your children go out in the world—knowledge! “The more they learn the more they earn!”

  Mother was a little dazed by now. He was speaking her own mind as to education and knowledge. Papa would have been scowling and shaking his head. Mother was more than interested. She took the sample and turned pages. She looked down into my face. Would I like the book? I said yes in several ways. She signed her name and she had the required seventy-five cents ten days later when the man came with the book.

  About this Cyclopedia father grumbled—a waste of money, let the children get “eddication” in the schools. It was later he made a real fuss. This time I was there again when the book agent came, not the same man, but well dressed and polite, handy with his tongue, like the first one. His book was three times bigger than the Cyclopedia, bigger pages, two columns to the page, many pictures, A History of the World and Its Great Events, with special attention to the famous battles of all time. Mother was not quite so bright, not so sure, as the last time. But I was surer I would like this book. Mother signed again. This time it was a dollar and a half, more than a day’s pay of my father. But mother had the money when the book came two weeks later.

  I won’t go into the scene father made when he saw the book and heard the price. We were heading for the Knoxville poorhouse. If it ever happened again he didn’t know what he would do. It ended mother’s listening to book agents.

  Mother had visions and hopes. She could say with a lighted face, “We will hope for the best,” as I bent my head over A History of the World and Its Great Events. Father would stand over me saying, “Wat good iss dat book, Sholly?” And I had no answer. I didn’t like his saying such a thing, but I had some dim realization too that he had in mind mortgages on which payments must be made.

  When I finished the Seventh Ward school, I could feel I was growing up, halfway toward being a man. It was a change to walk a mile twice a day to the Grammar School downtown and home again. They came from all ends of town to the Grammar School, many new faces to see, many more boys and girls from the well-off families.

  The Grammar School stood a short block from the Public Square. Between stood the Old First Church, built more than forty years before by the First Settlers. Straight across the street from the Grammar School stood the two-story house of Henry R. Sanderson. He had a long white beard and a quiet face and had been mayor of Galesburg when Lincoln came to debate with Douglas in 1858. We heard he had taken Abraham Lincoln into his house as a guest and had helped with towels and warm water for Lincoln to take a bath.

  In the eighth grade I had Miss Frances (Fanny) Hague, truly a great teacher. She knew books and would have loved them whether she taught them or not. She had traveled Europe and could make cities and ruins there come alive for us. The high spot for me under her teaching was A Brief History of the United States; the title page didn’t tell who wrote it. It was for me the first book that tried to tell the story of our country from the time of the early Indians through Grant as President. It was stuffy and highfalutin in style, yet it made me see the American Story in new lights. Miss Hague knew history too and often gave color and good sense to passages in it.

  When I left Miss Hague’s room my mind kept going back to it. I wasn’t sure what education was but I was sure that I got a little under her teaching. From then on until several years later, what schooling I got was outside of schools, from reading books, newspapers, and magazines, from watching and listening to many kinds of people and what they were doing and saying.

  Five: Days of Play and Sport

  ON THE WOODEN sidewalks of Berrien Street we played one kind of mumble-peg and in the grass of the front yard or the grass between sidewalk and gutter ditch we played the more complicated and interesting kind with jump-the-fence, thread-the-needle, plow-forty-acres, and plow-eighty-acres. On the wooden sidewalks we spun tops, flipped jackstones, chalked tit-tat-toe. On the street we played baseball, two-old-cat, choose-up, knocking-up-flies. In shinny any kind of club would do for knocking a tin can or a block of wood toward a goal, though the fellow with a plow handle had the best of it. And duck-on-a-rock had its points—knocking a small rock off a large rock and then running to pick up your own rock to get back to taw without being tagged.

  After we had seen the commencement Field Day on the Knox or Lombard campus, we put on our own field day, barefoot in the summer dust of Berrien Street. Some boy usually had a two-dollar-and-a-half Waterbury watch and timed us as we ran fifty yards, one hundred yards, a few seconds slower than the college runners, and five or six seconds under the world’s record. We knew how near we came to the college records in the standing broad jump, the running broad jump, the hop-skip-and-a-step, the standing high jump and the running high jump. Whoever could throw a crowbar the farthest was counted put-and-shot “champeen.” We did everything the college athletes did except the pole vault. The mile run we did afternoons, breaking no records except some of our own, yet satisfying ourselves that there is such a thing as “second wind” and if you can get it you can finish your mile.

  Straight across the street from the house next east to ours was an average two-story frame house, with a porch. In the street in front of this house was our home base when playing ball. Often we saw on that porch in a rocking chair a little old woman, her hair snow-white with the years. She had a past, a rather bright though not dazzling past. She could lay claim to fame, if she chose. Millions of children reading the McGuffey and other school readers had met her name and memorized lines she had written. For there was in the course of her years no short poem in the English language more widely published, known, and recited than her lines about “Little Things”:

  Little drops of water,

  Little grains of sand,

  Make the mighty ocean

  And the pleasant land . . .

  Little deeds of kindness,

  Little words of love,

  Help to make earth happy

  Like the heaven above.

  She was Julia Carney. Her sons Fletcher and James were Universalists and Lombard graduates, Fletcher serving three or four terms as mayor of Galesburg. There she sat in the quiet of her backward-gazing thoughts, sometimes gently rocking, an image of silence and rest, while the air rang with boy screams, “Hit it bang on the nose now!” “Aw, he couldn’t hit a balloon!” “Down went McGinty to the bottom of the sea!” Rarely she turned her head to see what we were doing. To us she was just one more nice old woman who wouldn’t bother boys at play. We should have heard about her in school. We should have read little pieces about her in the papers. She has a tiny quaint niche in the history of American literature under which one line could be written: “She loved children and wrote poems she hoped children would love.”

  In early years we would stop our play and follow the lamplighter when he came along before dusk. He carried a small ladder he would set against the lamppost, and we would watch him climb up, swing open the door of the glass case holding a gas burner, turn on the gas, and with a lighted taper put the flame to the escaping gas. Then he would climb down and move on from the corner of Pearl and Berrien to the corner of Day and Berrien, a block east. Then came the electric lights, one arc lamp at every se
cond corner, exactly in the center of the four street crossings, high enough so a man driving a load of hay couldn’t reach up and touch the globe. The lamplighter was gone. We missed him.

  It wasn’t long before the fathers and mothers along Berrien Street had new troubles with their boys. Under that electric light at Day and Berrien the boys had a new playground. They could turn night into day. There was night baseball, night shinny, night duck-on-a-rock, night tug-of-war. There were winners yelling because they had won. There were losers yelling that next time they would make the winners eat dirt. Vehement remarks floated through windows into rooms where honest Q. shopmen and worthy railroad firemen and brakemen were trying for a little sleep.

  One of the sleepers who couldn’t sleep had a voice like a big-league umpire when one night he clamored from his bedroom window, “You boys shut up and go home with you. If you don’t I’ll get the police on you.” The noise stopped. We sat cross-legged on a patch of grass next to a sidewalk and talked in whispers: “Do you s’pose he means it?” “Aw, we got a right to holler, this is a free country.” “Yeah, but what if he means it? We’ll get run in.” “Yeah, I don’t want no patrol-wagon ride.” About then came a woman who wanted her sonny-boy; she took him by one ear and led him away and his face had a sheepish look. Then came two men, fathers. They spotted their boys, collared them, and led them away like two sheep for slaughter. Mart and I went home. If we didn’t get into the house by nine o’clock we would get scoldings or worse.

  On a later night the boys forgot themselves and the hullabaloo they made could be heard a block away. Then as promised, the patrol wagon came. Before it could stop, five or six boys skedaddled. That left five or six of us who weren’t going to run and show we were scared. We stood in a huddle waiting. Out of the patrol wagon came two policemen, their nickel-plated stars shining on their coats. One of them, Frank Peterson, weighed about two hundred and twenty pounds, and looked like a battleship coming toward us. We expected hard words from Policeman Peterson. But he spoke in a soft voice like what he was saying was confidential. “Don’t you boys know you’re disturbing people who are trying to sleep?” What could we say to a quiet intelligent question like that? One boy said, “Yes,” another, “Well, you know we were just trying to have some fun.” “Yes,” said Peterson, again quiet and confidential like, “but ain’t there some way you can have your fun without keeping people awake that’s trying to sleep?” We had come to like Policeman Peterson. We saw he wasn’t mad at us and it didn’t look like we were going to be put in the wagon and hauled to the calaboose. We said yes, we would try to have our fun without making so much noise.

  Before walking away Peterson said, “Now that’s a promise, boys, and I expect you to keep it. If you don’t stop your noise, we’ll have to run you in.” And his voice got a little hard as he said, “Remember that. We don’t like to arrest young fellows like you but sometimes we have to do it.” That word “arrest” stuck in our ears. They could have arrested us. When you’re arrested that means you’re a criminal. And if you’re a criminal, where are you?

  The patrol wagon drove away. When the rumble of its wheels had died away, we sat on the grass and talked in low tones near a whisper. All of us agreed that from now on we had better try to have our fun without yelling. All agreed except the boy who had on another night said, “Aw, we got a right to holler, this is a free country.” This boy guessed he’d rather stay away and have some other kind of fun than come around and be a nice boy like the police told him. And he did stay away and later he took to the poolrooms and the saloons and still later put in a year in the Pontiac reformatory for petty larceny.

  We went on playing under the electric light and trying to keep quiet but it was a strain. I had a job where I had to report at six-thirty in the morning and had gone home early one night, leaving the boys in a hot game of shinny, back in their old hooting and yelling. They told me next day that a railroad fireman had come out in his nightshirt with a club and a revolver. He shot in the air twice to show the gun was loaded. He sent a bullet into a sidewalk plank and had them look at the bullet. He was wild-eyed, cursed them, slapped one of them, kicked another, then took out a watch and said if every last one of them wasn’t gone in two minutes he would shoot to kill. Half the boys ran and the rest went away on a fast walk. From then on not as many boys came to that corner at night; it became reasonably quiet, and decent people could sleep. There was hate for the shooting-iron fireman. And Policeman Frank Peterson we would point out with, “He ain’t a bad fellow, do you know?”

  Four lots to the east of our house was a vacant double lot where later we laid out a small diamond. At the time a good-natured Jersey cow was pastured there. We never hit the cow but when the ball landed near her and the fielder ran toward her it disturbed her. Also it disturbed the owner of the cow, who said he would have the police on us. So we played in the street till the day the cow was gone and we heard it had been sold. Then we went back to our pasture.

  On the narrow lot next to the pasture was Mrs. Moore’s house. She was the widow of a Civil War veteran, living alone on a Federal pension. She was a tall woman with dark hair streaked with gray—a quiet woman, smoking her clay pipe, keeping to herself and raising vegetables and flowers. She had the nicest all-round flower garden in our block, the front of her lot filled with hollyhocks, begonias, salvia, asters, and morning-glories climbing the fences. First base was only ten feet from her fence and every so often a fly or a foul ball would go over into her potatoes, carrots, and hollyhocks. A boy would climb the fence and go stomping around hunting the lost ball. At such times as Mrs. Moore stood between the boy and the place where he believed the ball fell it was not pleasant for either party concerned. “Why must you boys do this to my place?” she would ask. When the boy answered, “We’ll try never to do it again,” her reply would come, “See that you don’t do it again. I don’t want to make trouble for you boys.”

  Again and again we sent the ball over into her well-kept yard. She tried scolding but she just naturally wasn’t a scold. She quietly hinted she might have to go to the police, but she didn’t go to the police or to our parents. She had property rights and we were trespassing on her property, and she forgave us our trespasses even though we went on trespassing. She was a woman of rare inner grace who had gathered wisdom from potatoes and hollyhocks.

  In our early games played in the street, the bat was a broom handle, the ball handmade—a five-cent rubber ball wrapped round with grocery string. The home plate was a brick, first base a brick, second base a tin can, third another tin can. We played barehanded till we learned how to stuff a large man-sized glove with cotton, wool, or hair to take the sting out of a fast ball.

  The days came when we played in the cow pasture with a Spalding big-league regulation ball. We gathered round the boy who first brought it. “Well, what do you know!” we said, “a dollar and a half.” And we told it around as a kind of wonder, “We been playing today with a dollar and a half”—the same ball that Amos Rusie was throwing in the big league, the same ball Big Bill Lange was hitting with the Chicago team. When I carried Chicago newspapers and read sports news I learned about the “elusive pill” thrown by Amos Rusie. I was among those who grieved later to hear of Amos Rusie taking to drink, being dropped from major and minor clubs, and being found one day digging gas mains at a dollar-fifty a day. He was doing ten cents a day better than my father at the Q. shop but still I was more sorry for him than for my father.

  When Galesburg played Chillicothe or Peoria or Rock Island on the Knox campus, the Berrien Street kids, lacking the two bits’ admission, watched the games through knotholes in the fence. Or we climbed a tree fifty yards from the home plate, found a crotch to sit in, and had as much fun as though we were in the two-bit bleachers.

  The most exciting baseball year the town had was when a City League was organized and played one or two games a week. The Main Street clerks had one team, the railroad shopmen another, and there were two other teams. Out o
f the tall grass around Victoria came a team that had surprises. Galesburg had picked the best nine in the town to meet them and the word was that maybe Galesburg would “goose-egg” them. But the country boys played fast ball, among them the Spratt brothers, Bob and Jack, who later went into minor-league clubs. Their center fielder was a tall gawk wearing a derby! As the game got going Victoria took the lead by one or two runs and kept the lead till near the closing inning, when Galesburg with one out got two men on bases and one of its heaviest sluggers came to bat. He hit the ball high and handsome and sent it sailing away out to deep center field. The tall gawk in the derby made a fast run, made a leap for it, caught it with one hand and threw it straight to second to catch a man off base—and Victoria was victorious in one of the craziest, sweetest pieces of baseball drama I have ever seen.

  On many a summer day I played baseball starting at eight in the morning, running home at noon for a quick meal and again with fielding and batting till it was too dark to see the ball. There were times my head seemed empty of everything but baseball names and figures. I could name the leading teams and the tailenders in the National League and the American Association. I could name the players who led in batting and fielding and the pitchers who had won the most games. And I had my opinions about who was better than anybody else in the national game.