The Sandburg Treasury

by Carl Sandburg

  An idea began growing in me that if I played and practiced a lot I might become good enough to get on a team. Once on a minor-league team I would have my chance to show what I could do and I might end up in the majors—who knows about a thing like that? It was a secret ambition. In what spare time I could find I played with the boys and did fairly well in left field on a scrub team.

  Then came an afternoon in early October when I was sixteen. I had managed to buy secondhand a fielder’s glove, a regular big-league affair I was proud of. Skinny Seeley and I went to a pasture and knocked up flies. He hit a high one to me and I was running top speed for it. I believed I would make a brilliant catch, the kind I would make when maybe one of the minor-league clubs had taken me on. Suddenly my right foot stashed into a hole and I fell on my face. When I looked at my foot I saw a gash in the shoe leather and blood oozing from the tangled yarn of the sock. In the hole there was a broken beer bottle, and into this my foot had crashed.

  I limped across the pasture, about a block, to the house of Dr. Taggart. Out on his front porch he had me take off the shoe, then slowly the sock. He cleaned the cut, picked out yarn and glass, applied antiseptic. Then he brought out a curved needle and sewed four stitches at about the middle of the foot just below the instep. He bandaged my foot and I limped home. My mother spoke sorrow and pity. My father asked when would I ever learn any sense and quit wasting my time with baseball.

  From that day on I was completely through with any and all hopes of becoming a big-time ballplayer. I went on playing occasional games, but those four stitches marked the end of my first real secret ambition.

  Six: Fair and Circus Days

  WE WERE BETWEEN nine and twelve when we took in the Knox County Fair one year after another for three years. We walked the four and a half miles to the fair grounds just outside of Knoxville—Husky Larson, his brother AI, and one or two other boys. The dust lay thick on the road. We walked barefoot, carrying our shoes and putting them on when we came to the fair grounds so we wouldn’t get our bare toes stepped on in the crowds. We walked to save the round-trip railroad fare and after paying twenty-five cents admission, we watched our few nickels.

  One nickel went to the man who had the new and amazing Edison Talking Phonograph. Around the machine stood people watching what it did to the faces of those who clapped on the earphones and were listening. Some faces sober and doubting stayed sober and came away saying, “It works, doggone it, you can hear that brass band playing like it was right here on the fair grounds.” Most faces, however, wore smiles, and came away saying, “It’s pretty cute, I tell you. The machine talks like it’s human.”

  We stepped up with our nickels. We plugged our ears with the phone ends. We watched the cylinder on the machine turning. We heard a voice saying this was the Edison Talking Phonograph and that next we would hear a famous brass band playing. We looked at one another and nodded and smiled, “It works! I can hear it! Ain’t it the dog-gonedest thingamajig? I wouldn’t believe it if I wasn’t hearing it.”

  We watched the stallions and mares, bulls and cows, boars and sows, cocks and hens—and the judges awarding prizes and blue ribbons. We saw farmers proud of what they had bred and raised. We felt something in the air very different from a circus. Many a farmer and his boy had come to learn. Their work the year round was in trying to make the land and the animals bring bigger crops and more food. They had on their best clothes but their muscles stood out in little humps and bunches so that their coats hung on them. Their women carried the signs of hard work, some of them taking pride in the jellies and preserves they had entered for showing. The biggest Knox County potato of the year was worth seeing, as also the largest rutabaga.

  We didn’t have the two bits for grandstand seats to see the horse races. We stood at the board fence next to the grandstand and watched the fastest horses in Knox County—saddle horses, thoroughbreds, pacers and trotters, with drivers in sulkies with high wheels, spokes of wood, and the rims iron. Several of the drivers, like Fred Seacord, we had seen on the streets of Galesburg exercising their horses and getting them used to the sulkies.

  There was a “special feature”—“The Only Pacing Dog in the World.” Occasionally we had seen Mr. Redfield with his Irish setter on Main Street. And we knew it was no common dog. Now at last we saw Mr. Redfield come out on the track with his horse and sulky. Alongside the right wheel so the grandstand could see him was the Irish setter, handsome with his coat of brown hair gleaming, his gait that of a pacer, the legs in that peculiar continuous sidewise throw. Twice around the half-mile track went the pacing dog. He wasn’t as fast as pacing horses but the crowd believed he was the only pacing dog in the world and they cheered him and Mr. Redfield.

  That year we caught a ride in a hayrack from the fair grounds to Galesburg. Arriving home we talked most about having heard the first Edison Talking Phonograph in Knox County and having seen the only pacing dog in the world. About the dog Papa merely remarked that it was interesting. That Edison Talking Phonograph, however, giving you a band concert without bringing you the band, that was curious and he said, “Wat will dey tink up next?” When the talking machine later came to a vacant store on Main Street he spent several nickels listening to the newfangled contraption.

  When the circus came to town, we managed to shake out of sleep at four o’clock in the morning, grab a slice of bread and butter, and make a fast walk to the Q. yards to watch the unloading in early daylight. A grand clear voice the man had who rode his horse a halfblock ahead of the elephants in the parade and cried out, “The elephants are coming, watch your horses!” First to one side of the street and then the other he cried it and those who had skittish horses watched them.

  The great P. T. Barnum himself never met my eyes but on a bright summer morning I did see Mr. Bailey of the firm of Barnum & Bailey in a black swallowtail coat giving orders and running the circus in the big green pasture that soon was subdivided into city lots. And with the other kids who had seen Bailey I joined in saying, “Wasn’t he something to look at? And think of it, he’s nearly as great a man as Barnum himself!”

  After the unloading we went home for a quick breakfast and then a run to the circus grounds, a big pasture at Main and Farnham near the city limits. If we were lucky we got jobs at carrying water for the elephants or lugging to the big tent the boards for the audience to sit on. After three or four hours of this work we were presented with slips of paper that let us in to see the big show in the afternoon. If we hadn’t been lucky and if we didn’t have the fifty cents for a ticket we tried to slide under the canvas and crawl to where we could peek through boards and between legs to see the grand march, the acrobats, the trapezists, the clowns, the hippodrome chariot race given before our eyes as it was in the time of Nero in Rome. Once as I was nearly through the canvas a pair of strong hands caught me by the ankles, yanked me out and threw me for a fall, and a voice told me I could get going.

  I walked around to the Side Show. There out front as a free show I saw the man with the elastic skin. He would pull it out from his face and neck and it would snap back into place. There I saw the tattooed man with fish, birds, brunette girls, ships, and many other shapes inked deep into his skin—and there too the Oriental Dancing Girl smiling to some giggling farm hands.

  The spieler, a man with a thick uncurled mustache, turned to the crowd and let go in a smooth, loud voice: “La-deez and gen-tul-men, beneath yon canvas we have the curi-aw-si-ties and the mon-straw-si-ties—the Wild Man of Borneo, the smallest dwarf ever seen of mankind and the tallest giant that ever came into existence, the most marvelous snake ever brought to your fair city, a man-eating python captured in the darkest jungles of Africa ever penetrated by man. And I would call your particular attention to Jo Jo, the dogfaced boy born forty miles from land and forty miles from sea. The price of admission, la-deez and gen-tul-men, is a dime, ten cents only, the tenth part of a dollar. Buy your tickets now before the big rush comes.”

  I had a dime and a nick
el. With the dime, I bought a ticket. I went in and I saw the Wild Man of Borneo was a sad little shrimp and his whiskers messy. The Fat Woman, the Dwarf, the Giant seemed to me to be mistakes God had made, that God was absent-minded when he shaped them. I hung around the midget and his wife, watched them sign their names to photographs they sold at ten cents—and they were so pleasant and witty that I saw I had guessed wrong about them and they were having more fun out of life than some of the men in the Q. shops.

  I stood a long while watching the Giant and noticed he was quiet and satisfied about things. If a smarty asked, “How’s the weather up there?” he might lift one eyebrow and let it pass, for he had heard it often enough. Nor did I feel sorry for the python. He may have been a man-eater but he was sleeping as if he had forgotten whoever it was he had swallowed and digested. After a third or fourth time around, the only one I felt sorry for was the Wild Man of Borneo. He could have been the only lonely creature among all the freaks. The Oriental Dancing Girl certainly was no freak, an average good-looking showgirl, somewhat dark of skin and probably a gypsy.

  Later it came over me that at first sight of the freaks I was sad because I was bashful. Except at home and among playmates, it didn’t come easy for me to be looked at. I would pass people on the street and when they had gone by, I would wonder if they had turned their heads for another look at me. Walking down a church aisle between hundreds of people, I had a feeling of eyes on me. This was silly, but when you’re bashful you have that feeling of eyes following you and boring through you. And there at the side show were these people, the freaks—and the business, the work, of each one of them was to be looked at. Every week, day by day, they sat or stood up to be looked at by thousands of people and they were paid to be looked at. If some one of them was more looked at than any others there was danger of jealousy on the part of those who didn’t get looked at as much as they wished. Only the Wild Man of Borneo and the python seemed to be careless about whether anyone looked at them or not.

  I walked out of the side show with my nickel still in my pocket. I passed the cane stand where a man held out rings and spoke like his tongue was oiled, “Only ten cents for a ring and the cane you ring is the cane you get.” I stopped where a man was cheerfully calling with no letup, “Lem-o-nade, ice-cold lem-o-nade, a nice cool refreshing drink for a nickel, five cents, the twentieth part of a dollar.” I passed by him to hear a laughing voice, “Here’s where you get your hot roasted peanuts, those big double-jointed humpbacked peanuts, five a sack.” I passed him by and still had my nickel.

  Then I came to a man sitting on the ground, a deep-chested man with a face that had quiet on it and wouldn’t bawl at you. I noticed he was barefoot. I looked up from his bare feet to see only stumps of arms at his shoulders. Between the first two toes of his right foot he held a card and lifted it toward me and said, “Take it and read it.” I read in perfect handwriting, “I can write your name for you on a card for you to keep. The charge is only ten cents.” I said, “I would if I had the ten cents. All I’ve got is a nickel.” I took out the nickel and turned my pockets inside out and showed him that besides the nickel there was only a knife, a piece of string, and a buckeye. He took the nickel in his left foot. He put a pen between the first two toes of his right foot and on the card wrote “Charles A. Sandburg,” lifted the foot up toward me, and I took the card. It was the prettiest my name had ever been written. His face didn’t change. All the time it kept that quiet look that didn’t strictly belong with a circus. I was near crying. I said some kind of thanks and picked up my feet and ran.

  Seven: The Hangout

  THERE WAS A row of buildings running west from Chambers Street on the north side of Berrien. On the corner stood the wooden grocery building of “Swan H. Olson & Bro.” Swan had a red chin beard, always neatly trimmed, and waited on customers quietly and politely. He had arrived from Sweden in 1854, twenty years old, worked on Knox County farms, enlisted in 1862, fought in the Atlanta campaign, marched with Sherman to the sea, across the Carolinas and on up to Washington for the Grand Review. Not until later years when I studied the marches and campaigns in which Swan Olson served did I come to a full respect for him. He was a foot soldier whose feet had taken him more than two thousand miles. He had been in wild and bloody battles, had waded creeks and rivers and marched in heavy rains day after day carrying rifle and blanket roll—but you couldn’t tell it by seeing him measuring a quart of cranberries for Mrs. Nelson or hanging out a stockfish in front of the store on a winter morning to let the Swedes know their favorite holiday sea food had arrived.

  His brother William, with the most elegantly spreading and curled red mustache in the Seventh Ward, was more of a talker than Swan. Both brothers hung their coats in the back of the store and put on black sleeves up to the elbows to keep their cuffs clean when they dipped into coffee sacks or dusty bins. Like all grocers, they fastened strong wire screens over the tops of apple baskets. At times one or two boys would watch inside the store and when the two brothers were busy with customers they would signal a boy outside who worked the wire screen loose and would run off with as many apples as his pockets and hat could hold.

  I was six or seven when I learned a lesson about dealing at the Olson store. After Will Olson had wrapped what I was sent for, I handed him the book mother had given me and told him, “Put it on the book.” He wrote in the book and handed it back to me. Then I asked how much would be a stick of licorice that caught my eye. “Five cents,” said Will Olson and I said, “Put it on the book.” Until then I had never bought anything for more than a penny. Now I had found a way to get something for nothing. I walked home hoping I would be sent often to the grocery with “the book.” When I got home they saw my lips and chin black with licorice and asked about it. I said the grocery man gave me a big stick of licorice. “Did you pay him for it? Where did you get the money?” “I told him to put it on the book.” It was then I heard the book was for the family, and not for me to be a mean little pig. My mother gave me a slap and told me, “Go and wash your dirty face,” saying further that if it happened again I would get a licking I would remember.

  On payday my father would take the book to the Olson store and they would figure up what he owed for the past month’s groceries. After he paid they would give him a sack of candy for the children and a five-cent cigar for himself. He smoked an inch or two of the cigar each Sunday and it lasted till the next payday, when he got another cigar. The only smoking he ever did was these payday cigars. He couldn’t waste them, so he smoked them.

  There was an alley next to the Olsons’ wooden building. Then came a one-story brick building where Franz Nelson ran a butcher shop. Here we would stop in and ask Franz when he was going to do some butchering. We liked to go with him to the slaughterhouse southeast of town and watch him knock a sledge into the head of a steer or stick a knife into the neck of a hog. At first we shivered at seeing the blood gushing from the slit in the hog’s throat—then we got used to it. We helped at bringing water and carrying things to Franz and we watched him cutting steaks and chops on a tree-trunk chopping block. He gave us calf or beef liver to take home, and when a customer asked, “How about a piece of liver?” Franz would hand over liver without charge. He was freehanded with us boys when it came to baloney. We cut what we wanted and stood around eating it.

  Next to the Franz Nelson butcher shop, in the same brick building, was our favorite hangout, the Julius Schulz cigar shop. In the front room were a wide aisle and two glass showcases filled with Schulz-made cigars and a line of pipes and smoking tobaccos. Mr. Schulz we didn’t see often; he was out drumming up trade. He was mediumsized, wore a heavy brown mustache and matching it a brown suit and a brown derby, a gold watch chain on his brown vest. He would come into the store, look over his account books, fill a valise with samples, and go away without a look at us kids whether there were two, five, or six of us hanging around. We all liked Mr. Schulz. He didn’t know our names nor bother to speak to us, but summer or wint
er he let us hang around and use his place for a kind of clubroom.

  The back room was the main hangout. There sat “Nig” Bohnenberger, whose folks spoke German but he hadn’t learned it. “They got to calling me Nig because I’m dark-complected,” he said. He had a hawk nose, a pale face, a thin body, and a mind that was always thinking things over. He read the papers and while he rolled cigars and licked the wrappers he told us what was wrong with the country and the town. He often ended what he said with, “Of that I can tell you I’m pos-i-tive.” He liked to be positive and we liked him being pos-i-tive. We saw him in coughing spells and slowly fade away from consumption. One boy came from Nig’s funeral saying, “He looked so natural in the coffin I couldn’t keep from crying.”

  To the cigar shop came the boys in the between-times of work and play. In warmer weather on nights and Sundays when the cigar store was closed, we met on the sidewalk in front and sang. There was tall, skinny, bony John Hultgren, a Swede boy who worked in the Boyer broom factory, and chubby, cheek-puffed, bright-eyed John Kerrigan, an Irish lad learning the plumber’s trade under his father—both of them tenors. There was Willis (“Bohunk”) Calkins and myself who were fair at baritone and bass. This quartet could give “In the Evening by the Moonlight,” “Swanee River,” “Carry Me Back to Old Virginia,” “I Found a Horseshoe”—and we said we were good and when A1 Field’s Minstrels came to town they ought to hear us. Bohunk a couple of nights brought his banjo.

  One morning about nine I drifted into the Schulz store to find excitement. In the night someone had broken open a back window and taken what money there was, maybe eight or ten dollars. Heavy rain had been falling all night. The thief, it was said, probably counted on few people being on the street and they would be hurrying through the rain, not stopping to look in on the store. We had been reading Old Cap Collier and Nick Carter and we tried sleuthing for clues. We hoped to find something the thief had dropped, but he hadn’t dropped anything. There was mud on the floor from his shoes when he stepped in from the window and then less and less mud on a line toward the money drawer—but not a clue!