Two famous theater names were Anna Held and John Drew. In cigar stores and saloons a picture hung on the wall showing a woman’s hand holding five cards from a deck and the words “This is the hand that Anna Held.” And under five cards in a man’s hand were the words “This is the hand that John Drew.”
If I was on a milk wagon or some other job when minstrels came to town I would manage to have two bits for a ticket to the top gallery. I would try to be on Main Street when the minstrels paraded in tan top hats matching their tan cutaway coats and tan spats, with horns and music in the lead. And when the curtain went up always there would be that Middleman, Mister In-ter-loc-u-tor—on one side six burnt-cork faces over white boiled shirts clicking the rattlebones, on the other side six more with tambourines opening with a song. More than once we heard an End Man ask the Middleman, “Why do the policemen in Monmouth wear rubber boots?” The Middleman couldn’t think why in the world the policemen in Monmouth wear rubber boot, and the End Man would reply: “Why, everybody in Monmouth knows the policemen wear rubber boots so as not to wake up the other policemen.” We laughed because Galesburg and Monmouth, sixteen miles apart, were jealous of each other and we liked any joke that made Monmouth look silly. We learned that over in Monmouth the minstrels asked why the policemen in Galesburg wore rubber boots! And we giggled at and passed on: “I have pants from Pantsylvania, a vest from Vest Virginia, a coat from Dacoata, and a hat from Manhattan—am I not an American?”
I missed none of AI Field’s minstrel shows. I believed that AI Field was “the undisputed King of the Banjo.” When I went to a minstrel show I was satisfied I got my two bits’ worth in “Nigger Heaven.” You could hear the peanut-eaters cracking the shells, and dropping the shells on the floor. That was expected in the top gallery. On the main floor and in the parquet nobody would dare to be seen eating a peanut. And down there they couldn’t yell for a good act nor “mee-ouw” at a bad one.
Thirteen: Learning a Trade
THEY KNEW AT home that I was a helper through the Hard Times, that what I earned counted. They knew I would rather have gone to school. When Mary graduated from high school it was the few dollars I threw in that gave her a nice white dress so she looked as good as any of them on Graduation Day when she stepped out and bowed and took her diploma. We knew that diploma would count. Now she could teach school and be a help and no longer an expense to the family. The next fall she had a country school at thirty dollars a month. Mary’s high-school books were a help to me. I didn’t study her algebra and Latin textbooks, but I thumbed back and forth in them and got glimmerings. I read Irving’s Sketch Book, Ivanhoe, and The Scarlet Letter and talked with Mary about what the teachers said those novels meant. But the great book Mary brought home—great for what it did to me at that time, opening my eyes about law, government, history, and people—was Civil Government in the United States by John Fiske. Here for the first time I read answers to many questions: What are taxes? Who has the taxing power? What is the difference between taxation and robbery? Under what conditions may taxation become robbery? Why does a policeman wear a uniform? What is government? Here I first read the Constitution of the United States and tried to get my head around the English Magna Carta.
There were several months when I read every day in the Galesburg Evening Mail the column written in Washington by Walter Wellman. I did a lot of wondering about how one man could know so much about what the Government was doing, making plain to millions of people what was going on. From John Fiske’s book I learned there are three branches of the Government—the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judicial. Walter Wellman made me think I knew what all three branches were doing.
It came over me often that I wasn’t getting anywhere in particular. I wanted a job where I could learn a trade. I asked plumbers, carpenters, house painters, and they said there was no opening or I might come around later. When I asked Q. machinists and boilermakers what were the chances they said the Hard Times were still on, old hands waiting to go back. I heard that the Union Hotel barbershop wanted a porter. I said, “Barbering is a trade. A barber can travel, can work in other towns from coast to coast. At barbering you might be shaving a man who’ll offer you a job with better money than you can ever make barbering.”
I hired to Mr. Humphrey at three dollars a week, plus shoeshine money, and tips. The shop was under the Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Bank, in a half-basement with big windows that let you see the shoes of walkers on the sidewalk. By going up eight steps you could see the Public Square, down Broad Street to the courthouse park, and beyond that the Knox College campus. The floor of the shop was black and white square tiles which I mopped every morning. In rainy weather or snow, with mud tracked in, I gave the floor a once-over again in the afternoon. The big windows to the street I went over once a week with soap and water, sponge and chamois. And the four brass cuspidors had a brisk cleanout every day. Four barber chairs faced a long wall mirror and three times a week I would put a white cleaning fluid on the glass, then with a chamois skin I would wipe off the white stuff.
Mr. Humphrey, Head Barber and Proprietor, had the first chair. At the second chair was a tall fellow with a mustache; his first name John. At the third chair was Frank Wykoff, smooth-faced, with silky golden hair. He had manners and a reputation as a dancer. The fourth chair was worked by Mr. Humphrey’s eighteen-year-old son on Saturdays and before holidays when a rush was on.
Of what us kids called “the big bugs on the North Side,” many came to the Union Hotel barbershop. “You will meet the bon ton of Galesburg while you work here, Charlie,” Mr. Humphrey had said to me. “It’s a bluestocking trade comes to our shop and we want to keep the place shipshape, everything clean as a whistle.”
Mr. Humphrey was a barber and a gentleman. He would smile and in his pleasant voice say to a regular customer with a nod of the head and a bend of the back and shoulders that was nearly a bow, “Mister Higby, what is the good word with you?” or “Mister Applegreen, how does the world go round for you today?” or “Mister Hagenjos, it’s about time we were seeing your good face again.” He had a round face with a thin, straight-lined mouth. He was the Boss of the shop and ran it smooth and all had respect for him.
At half-past ten or eleven in the morning, when I saw there would be no customer out of a chair in ten or fifteen minutes, I would go up a back stairs, cross the big main office of the Union Hotel, and go into the most elegant saloon in that part of Illinois. There was a polished mahogany bar, a shining brass rail, tall brass spittoons, a long mirror so those standing at the bar could look at themselves or the other faces at the bar, and wood carving like lace or embroidery on the top and sides of the mirror. Near the end of the bar they set out the free lunch at halfpast ten—ham, cheese, pickles, rye and white bread, and sometimes deer or bear meat—and I helped myself. Then I went back to the barbershop thankful to the bartenders for not asking what a minor was doing in the place, and thankful to Solomon Frolich and Henry Gardt, the two German Jews who owned the saloon. I tried to do an extra-special job when I ran my whisk broom over them or gave them a shoeshine.
The Union Hotel got most of the big-time people who came to town, show people, lecturers, minstrels, star actors who had been playing on Broadway and were taking their play from Galesburg to Omaha, to Denver, to Salt Lake City, to San Francisco. Galesburg made a nice one-night stand for them—in the Auditorium across Broad Street from the hotel. In the hotel office, watching people come in and register, I would try to figure out whether they were traveling men or show people. And the pink-sheet Police Gazette in the barbershop which I read every week had me on the lookout for the high-class confidence men and gamblers who always stopped at high-class hotels.
At the desk was James or “Jimmy” Otway, an Englishman who reminded me of people and talk I had met in Dickens’ novels. He was short with a blond face, blond hair combed back fancy and wavy, and a thick blond mustache that would have run out far only he kept it well curled, the curliest mustach
e in town, unless it was Will Olson’s. He wore light tweed suits, stiff stand-up collars and stiff starched cuffs, colored neckties, and was spick-and-span. He bred blooded beagles and there might be two or three of his brown-and-white-haired dogs running around the office. Jimmy Otway belonged to the town and you were not quite a Galesburger unless you knew about him. I waited around sometimes to see whether he would drop his “aitches” and I learned there are Englishmen who don’t drop their “aitches.”
On my seventeenth birthday, January 6, 1895, General Philip Sidney Post died. He had served five terms as Congressman from our district, and was beginning his sixth when he died. Senators and Congressmen, old soldiers of the Civil War, politicians from far and near, came to his funeral. At the Q. depot I watched a noon train from Chicago pull in with a special car loaded with men wearing Prinz Albert coats and high silk hats. Then I walked to the Union Hotel barbershop to find every barber chair filled and a line of customers wearing Prinz Albert coats in the waiting chairs. The hatrack was filled with silk hats, and more of the same shiny hats were in a row on two window ledges.
I took to my shoeshine stand, where already the first customer was waiting. I shined the shoes of four Senators, eight Congressmen, two or three majors, and two pairs of knee-high boots of the same kind Lincoln wore. It was my banner day as a shoeshine boy. Most of them handed me the regular nickel pay. Some gave me a dime and two whose breath told me they could have been at the Union Hotel bar dropped a quarter into the hand I held out. For the first time I earned $1.40 in one day.
When I had seen Philip Sidney Post on the streets, I didn’t think of him as any special hero. He was a man of stocky build, thick through the body, with a round head and face and a straight nose. He was a little bald over the forehead and had a longish dark mustache and a little goatee you had to look twice to see. Later I learned that Post was a great fighting man, one of the best soldiers who answered Lincoln’s call for troops in ’61. He was a young lawyer out in Wyandotte, Kansas, when the call came. He went east to Galesburg, enlisted, became second lieutenant of Company A, 59th Illinois Volunteer Infantry, and fought in some of the bloodiest battles of the war, taking wounds, getting honorable mentions, moving up to major, colonel, and brigadier general. Pea Ridge, Perryville, Murfreesboro, Chickamauga were bloody grounds, and Post was there. After the war his corps commander, General George H. Thomas, asked the Secretary of War to make him a colonel in the regular army.
Post had come back to Galesburg in 1879 after serving thirteen years as consul and then consul-general at Vienna, and he went into the real estate business. One day General Post with two other men came into the Union Hotel barbershop. All three had shaves and two had shines. One of the two whose shoes I shined was Philip Sidney Post. If I had known where those feet had been in their time I would have tried to turn out the best and brightest shine I ever put on shoe leather.
In the barbershop on Saturday I was here, there, and everywhere. Next to the shop was a bathroom with eight tubs and partitions between, twenty-five cents for a bath. For those who asked it I would get a tub of hot water ready. There were two or three regulars who would call me in to scrub their backs with a brush. Nearly always those I gave special help to paid me a quarter.
The worst mistake I made was one they guyed me about for a long time. The gentleman had had a shave, a haircut, and a shampoo. I gave him a shoe-shine. He looked good for a dime tip, at least a nickel. I swung my whisk broom over his Prinz Albert coat and his pants down to the shoes. Then I took his high silk hat off the hatrack. I began swinging my whisk broom up, down, and around his hat, the first hat of the kind I had ever handled. He had finished paying his bill to Mr. Humphrey when he looked over to where I was. He let out a howl and rushed over yelling, “You can’t do that!” I saw at once what he meant; I had been an ignoramus about silk hats. I tried to mumble something about being sorry. I saw the two barbers trying to keep from laughing. Mr. Humphrey came up and I heard him say the only sharp words he ever said to me, ending up with talking natural, “Charlie, you ought to have a soft brush for silk hats or a satin cloth.” The customer had snatched his hat out of my hands and held it as though I might of a sudden jump at him and tear the hat away. He handed me a nickel for the shine and walked out as though he certainly would never come back to this place. The next day I had a soft satin cloth on hand and a brush with hairs so soft you could hardly feel them running over the palm of your hand. And after that when once in a while a silk hat came into the shop I was ready for it. I had what they call “confidence” because I had been through what they call “experience.”
The barbers, among themselves as barbers, talked about razors. Most of them swore by the Wade & Butcher razor. It interested me that there was a razormaker whose name was Butcher. A fellow with a tough and tangled beard they called a “squirrel.” One of them had just gone out the door when Frank Wykoff, who had shaved him, was saying, “He was a squirrel, all right. After I started on him I knew I had to lather him again and rub it in deep. I stropped my razor six times. You can’t cut his whiskers. You have to whittle ’em.”
Two or three times a week I would meet two other boys who were portering in barbershops. We talked about what blacking was best for a shoe, the rougher shoes that need two coats of blacking before you put on the brushes, and how to look at a customer or what to say that would make him think it would be a good idea to pay you a dime instead of a nickel. One of these boys, Harry Wade, thought he had a sidewise look up into the customer’s face, along with a smile, that sometimes brought him an extra nickel. The other homely porter and I said to Harry, “You’re a good-looker and wear smart clothes and that’s more than half of why you get more tips than we do.” Harry might not like the looks of a customer and after he gave him a brush-off that had everything, if he got no tip, he could say “Thank you” with a sarcastic sneer. The Head Barber caught on to this and said, “You’re a good porter, Harry, but if you keep that up, we’ll have to let you go.”
Harry and the other porters used to dress in their fanciest clothes and Sunday noon walk into the Brown’s Hotel dining room and order a fifty-cent dinner. They called it “classy.” Their home folks set a good table, but after being barbershop porters all week they wanted to “sit with the bon ton.” Harry Wade had the only snare drum in our neighborhood. He brought it to the Berrien Street pasture, where at night the boys sat on the grass while he stood and gave us all the drum taps he knew. Harry’s arms and wrists were fast with the sticks; he practiced hard and hoped to get on with a band and travel. Every one of us wished he had a classy snare drum and was good with the sticks like Harry. He had class enough without eating fifty-cent dinners at Brown’s Hotel on Sundays.
Harry came along one night in 1893 to where we were sitting in the pasture. He had just got off a train from Chicago, where he had had three days at the World’s Fair, the great Columbian Exposition. He sat down with us and talked for an hour about the fair. When he quit talking we put questions to him and he went on talking and gave us the feel of that World’s Fair up in Chicago. We couldn’t afford to go and Harry brought parts of it to us.
Spring came after fall and winter months in the barbershop and doubts had been growing in me that I wasn’t cut out for a barber. Spring moved in with smells on the air, and Sam Barlow came into my life. He had sold his farm up near Galva and gone into the milk business. He was a jolly, laughing man, short, tough-muscled, a little stoop-shouldered, with a ruddy, well-weathered face, brown eyes, a thick sandy mustache, and a voice I liked. He had been a barn-dance fiddler, and still liked to play.
Barlow stopped his milk wagon one day, called me from a sidewalk, and asked if I wanted to go to work for him at twelve dollars a month and dinner with him and his wife every day. I took him up on it. It would be outdoor work; I would see plenty of sky every day. The barbershop had been getting stuffy. I parted from Mr. Humphrey and it wasn’t easy to tell him, “You’ve been fine to me, Mr. Humphrey, but I’ve got to be leavin
g. I don’t think I’m cut out for a barber.”
Fourteen: A Milk Route Again
EVERY MORNING FOR sixteen months or more I walked from home at half-past six, west on Berrien Street, crossing the Q. switchyard tracks, on past Mike O’Connor’s cheap livery stable, past the Boyer broom factory, then across the Knox College campus and past the front of the Old Main building. Every morning I saw the east front of Old Main where they had put up the platform for Lincoln and Douglas to debate in October 1858. At the north front of Old Main many times I read on a bronze plate words spoken by Lincoln and by Douglas. They stayed with me, and sometimes I would stop to read those words only, what Lincoln said to twenty thousand people on a cold windy October day: “He is blowing out the moral lights around us, when he contends that whoever wants slaves has a right to hold them.” I read them in winter sunrise, in broad summer daylight, in falling snow or rain, in all the weathers of a year.
Then I continued along South Street to Monmouth Boulevard to the house and barn of Samuel Kossuth Barlow. There I shook out straw and shoveled clean the stalls of three horses, sometimes packed mud into the sore foot of a horse, hitched a horse to a wagon. By that time Bill Walters, a good-looking husky with a brown mustache, would have come in from two farms west of town, bringing the day’s milk to be delivered. Mr. Barlow would be out of the house, and Harry (“Fatty”) Hart would show up. He wasn’t fat but the boys had hung the nickname of “Fatty” on him and it stuck. He was straight and squareshouldered, with round cheeks maybe puffed out a little, and black hair, black eyes, and a bright quick smile. While Bill Walters went with his wagon and worked to the north, Mr. Barlow and Fatty and I covered the south side of town.
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