We moved a narrow bed down to the kitchen, the one room that had a stove. Next to the west window, with afternoon sun pouring in, we put Emil and Freddie side by side in the bed, each with a throat looking queer. They seemed to be getting weaker, and though we knew it would be a dollar and a half for a call from Doctor Wilson, I walked to his Main Street office and told him to come as soon as he could.
Doctor Wilson came in about an hour, stepping into our kitchen in his elegant long black coat, white shirt and collar, and silk necktie. He had a good name as a doctor. He took a flat steel instrument from his case, put it on Emil’s tongue and pressed down and looked keen and long at Emil’s throat. He did the same for Freddie. Then Doctor Wilson stood up, turned to my father and mother and his face was sober and sorry as he said, “It is diphtheria.”
Late that afternoon the city health commissioner nailed a big red card on our front door: DIPHTHERIA, warning people not to come to our house because it had a catching disease. I went to work next morning with a feeling that Mr. Burton wouldn’t like it if I stayed home, that he would be suspicious like he was when I came back after two days off. I told him we had diphtheria at our house with a red card on the front door. He didn’t say anything. So I went with my milk cans from one house to another across the town from seven in the morning till about one in the afternoon. The next two mornings again I peddled milk for Mr. Burton and there were houses where women were anxious, saying, “Do you think it right you should be handling our milk if you have diphtheria at your house?” I said I had told Mr. Burton about it, but he didn’t say anything and I thought he wouldn’t like it if I stayed home. And the women had worried faces and said, “It doesn’t look right.”
On the third day when Doctor Wilson made his third call, he said the boys were not making any improvement. He shook his head and said, “All we can do now is to hope. They might get better. They might get worse. I can’t tell.” Late that afternoon we were all there, with a west sun shining in on Emil and Freddie where they lay with their eyes closed. It was Freddie who first stopped breathing. Mother, touching his forehead and hands, her voice shaking and tears coming down her face, said, “He is cold. Our Freddie is gone.” We watched Emil. He had had a rugged body and we hoped he might pull through. But his breathing came slower and in less than a half-hour he seemed to have stopped breathing. Mother put her hands on him and said with her body shaking, “Oh God, Emil is gone too.”
The grief hit us all hard. In the Front Room the marble-topped center table with the big Family Bible was moved to a corner. In its place were two small white caskets. Neighbors and friends came, some with flowers. The Kranses and the Holmeses came to look at the faces of their two little relations. The Reverend Carl A. Nyblad spoke the Swedish Lutheran service. A quartet sang “Jesus, Lover of My Soul.” The undertaker moved here and there as though it was what he did every day. Mother cried, but it was a quiet crying and she didn’t shake her shoulders like when she said, “Oh God, Emil is gone too.” Mart and I didn’t cry. We kept our eyes dry and our faces hard. For two nights we had cried before going to sleep and waking in the night we had cried more, and it was our secret why we weren’t crying at a public funeral.
We saw the two little white caskets carried out the front door and put in the black hearse with glass windows at the sides and end, four black tassels on the top corners.
We followed in a closed carriage. At the grave we heard the words, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” saw the two little coffins lowered and a handful of earth dropped on them, the sober faces of the Kranses and the Holmeses having grains of comfort for us.
We were driven home in the closed carriage, father and mother, sisters Mary and Esther, Mart and I. We went into the house. It was all over. The clock had struck for two lives and would never strike again for them. Freddie hadn’t lived long enough to get any tangles in my heart. But Emil I missed; for years I missed him and had my wonder-ings about what a chum he would have made.
There were two days I didn’t report to George Burton for work in that diphtheria and burial week. When I did report to him he was like before, not a word, not even “Hard luck,” or “Too bad.” Mr. Burton had a lean face with a brown mustache he liked to twirl in his fingers—and a “retreating” chin. He had a beautiful wife and his face lighted up at the sight of her. He had two or three fast horses he liked to drive with a sulky. One was a yearling bred from a glossy black mare he owned. The mare had a small head and her thin scrawny neck didn’t match her heavy body. Mr. Burton said she was pedigreed and had class yet about half the time he had her hitched to his milk wagon. He enjoyed clucking at her to get a burst of speed and then pulling her in.
After Emil and Freddie died, doctor and undertaker bills, the cemetery lot, took regular cuts out of the month’s wages of my father. We were now a family of seven, and besides money for food, clothes, coal, schoolbooks, Papa had to make his payments or lose the house. And Mary in her third and last year of high school had to have better clothes than in the grade schools. The twelve dollars a month George Burton paid me came in handy for the family. It was a hard winter and somehow I couldn’t see my way to take out of my pay two dollars for a pair of felt boots, or even a dollar for overshoes. On my milk route I had wet feet, numb feet, and feet with shooting pains. If it hadn’t been for the five-minute stop at a grocery hot stove, or a housewife saying, “Poor boy, wouldn’t you like to come in and warm yourself?” I would have had a case of bad feet for a long time. I learned a word for what my feet kept singing, “chilblains.”
Once I was ten minutes late meeting Mr. Burton where he sat in his wagon in his felt boots. He said, “You’re a slowpoke today.” I told him, “My feet were near frozen and I had to stop to warm them.” He said, “Why don’t you get yourself a pair of felt boots like I have?” I said, “We’re hard up at our house and I can’t spare the two dollars.” Mr. Burton sniffed a “humph” as though he couldn’t understand what I was saying—which I’m sure he couldn’t.
Mr. Burton never sang for himself or me, never joked to me, never told a funny story, never talked about what was in the newspapers or town gossip, never played any kind of music or talked about listening to it, never talked about men or women he liked or funny or mean customers. I wondered sometimes whether George Burton had ever been a boy. What few times I tried to talk with him like I thought a boy could talk with a man, he either cut me off short or he said nothing to me as though I had said nothing to him. But he would stop the horse and wagon for a ten- or fifteen-minute talk with a man in a sulky driving a racehorse. On and on they would talk horse talk.
I came to see that Mr. Burton wasn’t ashamed of being a milkman and neither was he proud of it. What he was proud of were two or three horses he had that he hoped to build into a string of horses that would make a name for him. He hoped the milk business might make him enough money to get more horses to breed some world record-breakers. I caught myself saying one day, “He doesn’t know boys and if you don’t know boys you can’t know colts and if you don’t know colts you’ll never be a big-time horse man.”
I got tired of seeing him every day grumpy and frozen-faced, and sometime early in 1893 when he had paid me for my month’s work I told him I guessed I didn’t want to work for him any more. He said, “Well, I guess that’ll be no loss to me.” And I thought of two or three answers I could make but I played a hunch and walked away after saying only “Good-by, Mr. Burton.”
Eleven: In and Out of Jobs
THE TINNER HAD his shop on Seminary Street a half-block south of Main in a wooden building no bigger than a freight-train caboose, with the paint peeling off the boards. A sign in the window read, Tin Work of All Kinds. I had often seen the tinner going in and coming out. He was a medium-small man in clothes that hung loose on him and a slouch hat crumpled on his head. He needed a haircut and hair would stick out from a hole in the hat. I knew he had been in this shop a year or more and that people came to him for tinwork.
I opened
the door and walked in one October day to ask if he had a job. He said, without asking whether I had any experience or recommendations or where I last worked, “You can start tomorrow morning at seven.” He studied a knothole in the floor half a minute. “I can pay you three dollars a week. Come seven in the morning.” He didn’t ask my name and I didn’t know his.
Next morning I was at the shop at seven. I found the door locked and stood around and waited. Near eight he came along in a one-horse wagon. We loaded an outfit on the wagon and drove out to Broad Street and the house of the well-known Galesburg photographer Osgood. We set up ladders and went up to the low sloping tin roof of the kitchen. I helped him pull loose old and worn tin sheets and carry them to the ladder and down to the ground.
At twelve the boss said we could knock off. I ate a lunch I had brought in a paper bag. It was near two when the boss came back. I hadn’t been sure before, but this time I did get a whiff of his whisky breath. He was fumbly going up the ladder. His feet slipped once but his hands kept their hold and he made it to the roof. I followed him with a soldering outfit and made two trips bringing up new sheets of tin. He soldered two or three sheets, and near four said we would knock off for the day.
Next morning I was on hand at seven, and it was nine when my boss came in the wagon, the whisky breath still on him. We drove out to the Osgood house again and he soldered maybe three or four sheets on the roof. At twelve he said we would quit for the day. I was glad because he had slipped again on the ladder and had nearly slid down the roof once. The next morning I was at the shop at eight, waited till ten, walked up and down Main Street awhile, came back at eleven and again at twelve to find the door locked.
Then and there I decided I didn’t want to learn the tinner’s trade. I felt sorry for the tinner and I said, “I won’t go back and ask him for my pay—he’s too near his finish.” A few weeks later I saw the place closed and the sign Tin Work of All Kinds gone.
When I took a job washing bottles in a pop bottling works one summer I knew the future in the job was the same as the past. You washed the same kind of bottles in the morning and afternoon today as you would be washing in the morning and afternoon tomorrow, and yesterday had been the same. You could see the used bottles coming in and the washed bottles going out and it was the same from seven in the morning till six at night. There was one point about the job they told you when they hired you; you could drink all the pop you wanted. I began drinking pop, bottle after bottle. On the fourth day I stopped drinking pop. I had had enough pop to last me a lifetime. At the end of two weeks I quit the job. I didn’t like the sight of pop bottles coming in and going out and today the same as yesterday and tomorrow.
There was the late fall and winter I worked in the drugstore of Harvey M. Craig. I had a key and opened the front door at seven in the morning. I swept the floors of the store and prescription room and about half-past seven Mr. Hinman, the pharmacist, came in. I would take a chamois skin and go over the showcases. From the prescription room I took bottles that needed filling and went down in the cellar and turned the spigots of wine barrels and casks of rum and whisky and filled the bottles. There I had my first taste of port wine and claret and found they tasted better than I expected, though I was still leery of what they might do to me. I tasted whisky and decided it was not for me. From the carboys—the champion of all bottles, standing three or four feet high, and the glass two or three inches thick—I poured sulphuric acid and muriatic acid, wood alcohol, turpentine, and other stuff needed upstairs.
At nine o’clock Harvey Craig would come through the front door and nearly always his wife was with him. Mr. Craig was a fairly heavy man, though not big-bodied like his father, Justice A. M. Craig of the Illinois State Supreme Court. He had something of his father’s face, the mouth stern and the lip ends pulled down a little. He was kindly with Mr. Hinman and me, though there was no fun or frolics when he was around. His wife was small alongside of him and had quiet and charm. She usually left before noon.
I liked working with Mr. Hinman. He was slim, somewhat dark-skinned, with a neat small dark mustache like Edgar Allan Poe. His eyes smiled when his mouth did. He took an interest in being a pharmacist, had pride about handling drugs and medicines, kept studying the latest finds in medicine. His sense of humor was always there. He liked to tell about a boy coming into a drugstore on a hot summer Sunday and asking for “ten cents’ worth of asafoetida.” The clerk climbed up to a shelf and brought down a bottle, weighed out ten cents’ worth, and climbed up and put the bottle back, then climbed down and wrapped the asafoetida and handed it to the boy. The boy said, “Charge it.” The clerk asked, “What’s the name?” “August Schimmelderfer.” At which the clerk blurted out “You little devil, run home with you. I wouldn’t spell asafoetida and Schimmelderfer for ten cents!”
In the prescription room was the biggest and thickest book I had ever handled except Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. The name was on the front and back covers: The Pharmacopoeia. In it were the names of all the drugs there are and what they will do to you. I rambled here and there in it. I asked Mr. Hinman questions about what I read in the book and he was patient and kindly. He liked to share his learning with a younger fellow who had more hopes than he knew what to do with.
For a month or two one winter I took a whirl at the mail-order business. John Sjodin sold me on the idea. He had taken several weekly and monthly papers that were filled with mail-order advertising. He pointed to Comofort in Augusta, Maine, with a million subscribers, the biggest circulation of any paper in the country, its columns filled with ads for selling medicines, chickens, kazoos, eyewash, tool kit, knives, music boxes, toys, cheap watches, penny pencils, and more medicines. John said there had been fortunes made in the mailorder business; men now millionaires had started with just a little printing press. John had bought somewhere for five or ten dollars a set of type and a tricky little press that would print a sheet five inches by four. I threw into the scheme two or three dollars I had saved. I was the junior partner and would share in the profits the same percentage as I had put in.
We were going to print a “mail-order journal.” John said, “We will have room in it for advertising only, so we can’t expect to sell it. The subscription price will be not a cent; so that’s what we will name our mail-order journal.” We ran off fifty or sixty copies, and at the top of the first page was the name of this new publication in the advertising and selling field: Not a Cent. We followed the first issue with a second. I forget all that we advertised. But I do remember we offered for sale one Waterbury watch “slightly used,” a couple of knives “slightly used,” and we gave the names of several books “slightly used.” We couldn’t afford the postage to mail our “mail-order journal.” We gave out here and there among friends and strangers over half the copies and kept the rest to look at and say, “We’re publishers.”
The Sjodin family had moved to the north side in a working-class neighborhood east of the Q. tracks. We did our printing in the hayloft of the barn, on cold days wearing our overcoats and running to the house once in a while to get warm. It was a mile walk across town for me and I ate with John in the Sjodin kitchen. John laughed from beginning to end of this plunge of ours in the mail-order business. Away back in our minds, of course, was a slim glimmering hope—that something would turn up, that a twist of chance might come along and all of a sudden, like it happens every once in a while in a business starting small, we would be on Easy Street. When we quit the business, when Not a Cent stopped publication, we laughed the same way as when we first got set for the plunge.
There was the summer I was going to learn the potter’s trade. East of Day Street, next to the Peoria tracks, stood a pottery that had been going a year or two. On the ground floor were the turners. You had to be a real potter, who had learned his trade, to be a turner. A turner had a “ball pounder” next to him at the bench. The ball pounder—that was me—weighed on a wooden scale enough clay to make a jug. I would throw this clay on the
bench without touching it with my fingers. The fingers wouldn’t give the lift needed to carry it in the air and bring it down and cut it in two across a wire. It was a neat trick to learn how to brace your wrists and throw the lower half of the palms of the hands into the clay for this operation. I was warned that my wrists would be sore for a week or two, but after ten days the soreness was over and I could talk to the other ball pounders like I was one of them.
The “ball” you pounded out to a finish was cake-shaped, its size depending on the size of the jug to come. The turner threw it on a turning iron disk, sprinkled water on it, guided it with a hand scraper, and built it up into a jug. Then he stopped the turning disk and slicked out a handle that he smoothed onto the jug. Next, with my hands careful, I moved the jug off the disk and put it on a near-by rack to dry a little before it went for baking to a dome-shaped kiln outside the main building.
On the second floor were the molders, who didn’t class up with the turners. They threw the clay into plaster-of-Paris molds on a turning wheel, scraped the inside of the crock or jar, and the mold and the wheel did the rest.
One morning I went down to breakfast to hear that the pottery had burned down in the night. I went out and walked around the smoking walls to see the fire had made a clean sweep of it. It was easy to decide I wouldn’t be a potter.
On the main road running past the end of Lake George was a steep hill where the trolley-car motormen put on the brakes going downhill. On the uphill trip it was slow and hard going. So they decided to grade the hill. Men drove mule teams with scrapers, one man driving the mules, another man walking between the handles of the scraper. When the big shovel of the scraper filled up they turned around and dumped it lower down the hill. They went on with this till the hill was a long slope. I was a water boy on this job for three hot summer weeks. I carried two buckets of water from a pump, with two tin cups for each bucket. Some of the men called me “sonny,” and it was, “This way, sonny,” and “I can stand some of that, sonny,” and “You come to the right man, sonny.” Then between-times the mules had to have water. I would rather have been water boy just to the men and not to the mules. A mule would often drink nearly a whole pail of water, and it was a hundred yards to the pump.
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