When the Calkins family moved out the Sjodins moved in—Swedes who had lived in Chicago fifteen years and lost their Swedish accent. Mr. Sjodin was a journeyman tailor, could measure, cut, and sew a suit of clothes. He walked with his head high and his shoulders erect and thrown back as if to say, “I am a free man and I bow to no masters or overlords. I cringe before no man.” He was the first real radical I knew. He wanted a new society, a new world where no man had to cringe before another. He was an anarchist, a Populist, and a Socialist, at home with anyone who was against the government and the plutocrats who rob the poor. He was a skilled tailor who took good care of his wife, one daughter, and two sons and liked nothing better than a few glasses of beer with plenty of talk about politics and the coming revolution.
John Sjodin was two or three years older than I and had worked two years in a Milwaukee Avenue department store in Chicago. He had taken three lessons in clog dancing and from him I learned three steps to clog and never forgot them. He had absorbed much of Chicago’s vivid and reckless flair and could give the feel of it in his talk. He had read widely. We lay on the grass next to the ditch in front of his home on summer nights. He could talk on and on about the exploits of a detective named Macon Moore. We both rated Macon Moore higher than Old Cap Collier and Nick Carter.
With John Sjodin and his brother Albert, another boy, and Mart, I chipped in and we bought one bonerack horse for two dollars and another for three dollars. We hitched them to light wagons we borrowed, drove some fifty miles to the Illinois River between Peoria and Chillicothe opposite Spring Green, where we camped, fished, and went swimming. The three-dollar horse died on us and we buried him with respect and many jokes. We scraped our pockets and raised five dollars that bought us another horse for the trip home to Galesburg, where we sold it for three dollars to the man who had sold us the three-dollar horse that died. The man who sold us the two-dollar horse wouldn’t let us sell it back to him and I forget what we did with it, though we spoke highly of it as a willing horse that had staying power.
John at that time could be jolly, liked jokes and funny stories and had plenty of them. He was, like his father, a hard-and-fast political-action radical. “The big corporations” were running the country, as John saw it, and the time would come when the working people, farmers and laborers, would organize and get political power and take over the big corporations, beginning with the government ownership of railroads. Always John was sensitive about the extremes of the rich and the poor, the poor never knowing what tomorrow would bring and the rich having more than they knew what to do with.
I never saw John in a fight and I know he wouldn’t have made any kind of a leader of a mob or riot. He would argue his points with anybody but he wouldn’t let an argument or a debate run into a quarrel. He had his own reverence for life and said many a time that he couldn’t hate a millionaire and most of the rich were sorry fools who didn’t know what to do with their money except to put it to work making more money.
I asked John many questions and he nearly always had answers. I didn’t argue with him. He believed deeply in a tide of feeling among the masses of the people. This tide would grow and become stronger and in generations to come the American people would challenge and break the power of the corporations, the interests of special privilege. John was not yet a voter but he favored the People’s Party, the Populists. His main influence on me was to start me thinking. He made me know I ought to know more about what was going on in politics, industry, business, and crime over the widespread American scene.
Nine: First Paydays
I WAS ELEVEN when I had the first regular job that paid me cash. There had been odd jobs for earning money and Saturdays and after school hours we took gunny sacks and went around streets, alleys, barns, and houses hunting in ditches and rubbish piles for rags, bones, scrap iron, and bottles, for which cash was paid us, my gunny sack one week bringing me eighteen cents. Now I was wearing long pants and every Friday was payday.
My employer was the real estate firm of Callender & Rodine on the second floor of a building on Main midway between Kellogg and Prairie. Mr. Callender was a heavy man with a large blond mustache. His head was wide between the ears and he had a smooth, round “bay window.” Mr. Rodine was lean and had a pink face with blue eyes.
Their office was large and I would guess it was ten paces from the west wall where Mr. Callender had his desk to the east wall where Mr. Rodine also had a big roll-top desk with pigeonholes to stick papers in. It was Mr. Callender who told me about pigeonholes and what they are for. It came into my head, but I didn’t mention it to Mr. Callender, that some of the pigeonholes were so thin you couldn’t find a pigeon that could fly into one. Nor did I mention to him that it would be fun to bring in five or six pigeons and put them in the pigeonholes so that when Mr. Callender and Mr. Rodine rolled back the tops of their desks first thing in the morning, the office would be full of pigeons flapping and fluttering. This idea I liked to roll around in my head and I told other boys about it. One boy said, “If you did that, they would prosecute you.” We made him tell us what it is to be prosecuted and for several weeks we saluted him, “Hello, Prosecutor” or “Here’s Little Prosecutor again.”
Mr. Callender and Mr. Rodine treated me fair. The longest talk I had with either of them was when Mr. Callender told me what my work was to be. After that, for month after month, about the only talk between us was on Friday morning when Mr. Callender handed me my pay, saying, “Here you are,” and I said, “Thanks,” and skipped.
They gave me a key to the office and I unlocked the door about a quarter to eight each morning, Monday through Friday. I swept the office, digging in for the dust in the corners and every crack in the floorboards, then sweeping the dust out into the hall and along the hall six or eight feet to the top of the wide stairway leading to the street. Reaching the bottom of the stairs I swept the accumulations of my earnest and busy broom onto the sidewalk of Main Street and across the sidewalk. With two or three grand final strokes I swept a half-bushel of dust and paper and string and cigar butts out on the cobblestones to join other sweepings and layers of horse droppings. If a strong east wind was blowing, it would be no time until my sweepings were scattered all along Main Street.
Back upstairs, I carried the brass spittoon that stood at Mr. Callender’s desk out in the hall to a cubbyhole with a faucet and running cold water. I dumped, washed, rinsed, and rinsed again and took the honorable and serviceable spittoon back to its place at Mr. Callender’s desk. Then I did the same cleaning of Mr. Rodine’s spittoon. About once in six or eight weeks I polished the spittoons till they were bright and shining.
This morning service of mine for Callender & Rodine took less than a half-hour. I was pleased and thankful when on Friday morning Mr. Callender would bring his right hand out of a pocket and, with a look on his face as though he had almost forgotten it, hand me a coin with “Here you are.” And I would take the coin, say “Thanks,” skip down the stairway, and on the sidewalk open my hand to look at what it held. There it was, twenty-five cents, a silver quarter of a dollar.
On the second floor a few doors west of the Callender & Rodine office was the printing press and office of the Galesburg Republican-Register, to which we carrier boys went as soon as school let out at half-past three. As the papers came off the flat bed press, we took them to a table and folded them. When I had folded the fifty or sixty papers for my route, I took them to a man who counted them again to make sure my count was correct, with one “extra” for myself. If a single paper seemed a little thick, the man would look to see whether one paper had been stuck inside of another, a trick some boys worked too often. Then with a bundle of papers under my arm, I went down the stairs to Main Street, turned north at the next corner, and went up Prairie Street. I learned how to cross-fold a paper so it could be thrown spang against a front door. If a house was near enough, I didn’t have to leave the sidewalk to make my throw. On Prairie Street, however, the rich and the well-to-do l
ived, most of their houses set back so far from the sidewalk that I had to walk in halfway or more before making my throw.
At one house set well back a man would often be at home and expecting me—more yet, expecting the latest telegraphed news over America and the wide world. He would step out of the door to take the paper from my hand, the most roly-poly fat man in town. He was round everywhere you looked at him—a waddly barrel of a man, with a double chin, a round face, a gray mustache and goatee. This was the Honorable Clark E. Carr, mentioned often as the Republican Party boss of Knox County and having a hand in national politics. He had been appointed postmaster by Republican Presidents. He was to serve as United States Minister to Denmark.
Having left Mr. Carr with the latest news about how President Cleveland and the Democrats were ruining the country, I went along Prairie Street and threw a paper on the front porch of the biggest house in town. People said, “It cost more than any house ever put up in Galesburg, eighty thousand dollars.” It was gray stone, three stories, with towers and fancy curves. Here lived the Honorable George A. Lawrence. He married a good woman who had a big fortune. He was a lawyer with brown sideburns that stood out and waved and shook in a strong wind.
I went on with my papers to the end of Prairie Street, went a block west to Cherry, turned south to Main, and had one copy of the Republican-Register left to take home. I had walked about two miles. When there was mud or snow or stormy weather it took about an hour and a half to carry my route and in good weather about an hour and a quarter. The Republican-Register paid me one dollar a week. I was more than satisfied with that weekly silver dollar.
Walking between rows of houses, many of them set widely apart—wider lots than at a later time—I came to know yards and trees—trees that I had seen in sun and rain in summer, and cloud and snow in winter, branches bending down with ice on them. Here and there in a back yard would be a tomato patch and carrots asking to be pulled out of the ground. Some yards had apple trees, and I helped myself to the windfalls.
For the little building in every back yard some said “backhouse,” some said “privy.” Carrying newspapers and later slinging milk I saw all the different styles of backhouses—the clean, roomy, elegant ones with latticework in front, those with leaky roofs and loose boards where the cold rain and wind came through, a few with soft paper that had no printing, but mostly it was newspapers neatly cut, or catalogues. When you had to go to the backhouse you stepped out into the weather—in rain or sleet. If the thermometer said zero you left your warm spot near the stove and the minute you were out the back door the cold put a crimp and a shiver in you.
About once a year a Negro we called Mister Elsey would come in the night with his wagon and clean the vault of our privy. He lived on Pine Street in a house he owned. We had respect for him and called him Mister. His work was always done at night. He came and went like a shadow in the moon.
I came to know the houses and yards of Prominent People. Their names were often in the paper. When they left for Kewanee, Peoria, or Chicago, I would read a “personal” about it in the paper. And I would notice the green blinds pulled over the front windows and three or four days of my papers waiting for them on the front porch when they came back from Kewanee, Peoria, or Chicago. If snow or rain was blowing in on the porch floor I would pull the doormat over the papers and have a feeling that I was not completely useless.
I had seen at his work one morning the man who went up and down Main Street and got the “personals,” a short man with sandy hair, thin sandy sideburns, and a freckled face. He was writing in a notebook. I went closer and heard him asking a man how names were spelled. He thanked the man, put the book in his pocket, and went into Kellogg & Drake’s dry-goods store. There I saw him speaking to Ed Drake, with the notebook again in his left hand as he wrote. Mr. Callender happening along, I asked him who was the man writing names in a book. “That’s Fred Jeliff, reporter for the Republican-Register,” said Mr. Callender.
I was fascinated. I could see Fred Jeliff walking back to the Republican-Register office and sitting at a table to write with a lead pencil on the same kind of paper the Republican-Register was printed on. Then he would carry the sheets to the man they called a “typesetter,” and when the Republican-Register for that day was printed the names would be spelled like Fred Jeliff wrote them in his notebook up and down Main Street. I believed you could be a newspaper reporter if you could spell names and write them with a pencil on paper.
A year came when I was deep in the newspaper business. In addition to the afternoon route of the Republican-Register at a dollar a week, I carried a morning route of Chicago papers at seventy-five cents a week. Every morning, weekday and Sunday, I was on a Q. depot platform when the Fast Mail train from Chicago came in at seven-ten. Out of a mail car as the train slowed to a stop rolled the bundles we picked up and carried across Seminary Street to the front of the Crocker & Robbins grocery where a covered platform kept rain or snow off us.
We were working for Mr. Edwards, who had a store on Main Street where he sold books and stationery and kept a newsstand. He had long red whiskers and a Santa Claus look if he wasn’t excited. When he told us what to do he wasn’t bossy or fussed up. When two or three boys started scuffling he would step in like a mother hen who was going to have peace and no blood spilled.
We cut the ropes from the bundles, and there fresh as summer-morning dew or winter-daybreak frost were the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Record, Chicago Inter-Ocean, Chicago Times, Chicago Herald, and Chicago Chronicle. Each boy got his papers and started on his route, knowing well what he would catch if he threw a Democratic Chicago Times on the porch of a house where they were paying for the Republican Chicago Tribune. Where the other papers were two cents a copy, the Chicago Record, started by Victor Lawson, was one cent. You couldn’t tell whether a man was taking the Record because it was cheapest or because it was the only Chicago paper independent in politics and giving what both sides had to say. When a house was taking two papers, one of them was the Record.
On the morning route I covered South and Mulberry streets and ended on Main. On Sunday mornings from seven-thirty till around noon, I pulled a little wagon of the Chicago papers, selling them at five cents a copy and getting one cent for myself out of each copy sold. I had about fifty regular customers and when there was extra-special big news, such as the assassination of Mayor Carter Harrison in Chicago, I sold ten or twenty more papers.
Along with the other boys I would end up about one o’clock at Mr. Edwards’ store. After we turned in our money to Mr. Edwards, five or six of us would cross the street to a lunch counter. Always what we did was the same as the Sunday before. We climbed up on stools and each of us said with a grin, “One and a bun,” meaning one fried egg laid between a split bun. We were hungry and we smacked and talked between bites of our five-cent snack. Each of us paid his nickel and felt chesty about it. It was like we were grown men and we had money we’d earned and could eat away from home. Some of us had pants that needed patching but we were little independent merchants spending a nickel of our profits.
What with spading two or three gardens, picking a pail or two of potato bugs, selling Pennsylvania Grit along Main Street, and other odd jobs, I made about twelve dollars a month. One odd job was “cleaning brick.” A brick house or store torn down, we took trowels, knocked off the dried mortar and tried to make an old brick look new. Our pay ran so much a hundred of brick cleaned. I worked at it between my paper routes and averaged about fifteen cents an hour.
But it was more sport than work when we answered the cry, “The English sparrow must go!” The state was paying one cent for each dead English sparrow and I brought down more than thirty. I tried killing them with a “rubber gun” of my own make, a crotched stick with rubber bands holding a leather sling you put your stone in; then you pulled back the rubber, aimed at the sparrow, and let ’er go. Out of hundreds of rubber-gun shots I brought down one sparrow. Then I got an air rifle. I half believed a Swedi
sh neighbor boy Axel Johnson when he said that an air rifle or a rubber gun was better for killing birds than a shotgun or a rifle using powder. “The birds can smell powder a mile off,” said Axel, and he had me thinking hard about the smelling power of birds.
Ten: Milk Wagon Days
I WAS FOURTEEN, near fifteen, in October of 1892. My mother would wake me at half-past five in the morning. She had ready for me when I came down from the garret a breakfast of buckwheat cakes, fried side pork, maybe applesauce or prunes, and coffee. I walked about two miles to the house and barn of George Burton, who had two milk wagons. I could have saved myself half the walk by taking a trolley but I saved instead the nickel carfare.
In this October were days I had a sore throat. I went to bed two days and sent word to Mr. Burton that I wasn’t able to work. On reporting for work, I explained to him and he looked at me with suspicion and said not a word. I still had throat pains and was weak, but I didn’t explain this to Mr. Burton; he looked suspicious enough.
That same week Mart went down with a sore throat and it was four days before he was up and around. Then the two youngest boys stayed in bed with throats so sore they couldn’t eat. Freddie was two years old and Emil was seven. Emil had a broad freckled face, blue eyes, a quick beaming smile from a large mouth. He was strong for his age. He and I wrestled, scuffled, knocked off hats, and played tricks on each other. We liked the same stories and I read to him my favorites from the Grimm stories. He called often for “The Knapsack, the Hat, and the Horn.”
The Sandburg Treasury Page 31