Touch and Go

by Studs Terkel

  During all these birth years of the twenty-first century, the unique landmarks of American cities have been replaced by Golden Arches, Red Lobsters, Pizza Huts, and Marriotts, so you can no longer tell one neon wilderness from another. As your plane lands, you no longer see old landmarks, old signatures. You have no idea where you may be. A few years ago, while I was on a wearisome book tour, I mumbled to the switchboard operator at the motel, “Please wake me at six a.m. I must be in Cleveland by noon.” Came the response: “Sir, you are in Cleveland.” That Chicago, too, has so been affected is of small matter. It has been and always will be, in the memory of the nine-year-old boy arriving here, the archetypal American city.

  One year after Warren G. Harding’s anointment, almost to the day, the boy stepped off the coach at the La Salle Street depot. He had come from east of the Hudson and had been warned by the kids on the Bronx block to watch out for Indians. The Blackhawks. The boy felt not unlike Ruggles, the British butler, on his way to Red Gap. Envisioning painted faces and feathered war bonnets.

  In Kiev, in 1963, I ran into kids who on hearing me say “Chicago” burst into laughter. They waved imaginary hockey sticks and howled out “Blackhawks!”

  AUGUST 1921. The boy had sat up all night, but had never been more awake and exhilarated. At Buffalo, the vendors had passed through the aisles. A cheese sandwich and a half-pint carton of milk was all he had had during the twenty-hour ride. But on this morning of the great awakening, he wasn’t hungry.

  His older brother was there at the station. Grinning, gently jabbing at his shoulder. He twisted the boy’s cap around. “Hey, Nick Altrock,” the brother said. He knew the boy knew that this baseball clown with the turned-around cap had once been a great pitcher for the White Sox. The boy’s head as well as his cap was awhirl.

  There was expensive-looking luggage carried off the Pullmans. Those were the cars up front, a distant planet away from the day coaches. There were cool Palm Beach–suited men and even cooler, lightly clad women stepping down from these cars. Black men in red caps—all called George—were wheeling luggage carts toward the terminal. My God, all those bags for just two people. “Twentieth Century Limited,” the brother whispered. “Even got a barbershop on that baby.”

  There were straw suitcases and bulky bundles borne elsewhere. There were all those other travelers, some lost, others excitable in heavy, unseasonable clothing. Their talk was broken English or a strange language or an American accent foreign to the boy. Where were the Indians?

  This was Chicago, indubitably the center of the nation’s railways, as the Swede from Galesburg had so often sung out. Chicago to Los Angeles. Chicago to Anywhere. All roads led to and from Chicago. No wonder the boy was bewitched.

  Chicago has always been and still is the City of Hands. Horny, calloused hands. Yet, here they came: the French voyageurs; the Anglo traders; the German burghers, many of whom were the children of those dreamers who dared dream of better worlds. So it was that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra came into being; one of the world’s most highly regarded. It was originally Teutonic in its repertoire; now it is universal.

  They came, too, from Eastern Europe as hands. The Polish population of Chicago is second only to that of Warsaw. They came from the Mediterranean and from below the Rio Grande; and there was always the inner migration from Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee. The African American journalist grandson of slaves spoke with a touch of nostalgia, memories of his hometown, Paris. That is, Paris, Tennessee. “Out in the fields, we’d hear the whistle of the Illinois Central engineer. OOOweee! There goes the IC to—Chica-a-ago!” It was even referred to in the gospel song “City Called Heaven.”

  The city called heaven, where there were good jobs in the mills and you did not have to get off the sidewalk when a white passed by. Jimmy Rushing sang the upbeat blues, “Goin’ to Chicago, Baby, Sorry I Can’t Take You.”

  It wasn’t quite heaven. In 1919, an African American boy swam into a zone considered white and was stoned into the waves, setting off the riots of 1919.

  Here I came in 1921, the nine-year-old, who for the next fifteen years lived and clerked at the rooming house, run by my mother, and the Wells-Grand Hotel. (My ailing father ran it for its first several years, and then my mother, a much tougher customer, took over.)

  To me, it was simply referred to as the Grand, the Chicago prototype of the posh pre-Hitler Berlin Hotel. It was here I encountered our aristocrats as guests: the boomer firemen, who blazed our railroad engines; the seafarers who sailed the Great Lakes; the self-educated craftsmen, known as the Wobblies but whose proper name was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Here in our lobby, they went head-to-head with their bêtes noires, the anti-union stalwarts, who tabbed “IWW” as the acronym for “I Won’t Work.”

  Oh, those were wild, splendiferous debates, outdoing in decibel power the Lincoln-Douglas bouts. These were the Hands of Chicago making themselves heard loud and clear. It was the truly Grand Hotel, and I felt like the concierge of the Ritz of Paris.

  There were labor battles, historic ones, where the fight for the eight-hour day had begun. It brought forth the song: “Eight hours we’d have for working, eight hours we’d have for play, eight hours for sleeping, in free Amerikay.” It was in Chicago that the Haymarket Affair took place and four men were hanged in a farcical trial that earned our city the world’s opprobrium. Yet it is to our city’s honor that our governor, John Peter Altgeld, pardoned the three surviving defendants in one of the most eloquent documents ever issued on behalf of justice.

  The simple truth is that our God, Chicago’s God, is Janus, the two-faced one. One is that of Warner Brothers films with Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson as our sociopathic icons. The other is that of Jane Addams, who introduced the idea of the Chicago Woman and world citizen.

  It was Chicago that brought forth Louis Sullivan, whom Frank Lloyd Wright referred to as “Lieber Meister.” Sullivan envisioned the skyscraper. It was here that he wanted to touch the heavens. Nor was it any accident that young Sullivan corresponded with the elderly Walt Whitman, because they both dreamed of democratic vistas, where Chicago was the City of Man rather than the City of Things. Though Sullivan died broke and neglected, it is his memory that glows as he is recalled by those who followed Wright.

  What the nine-year-old boy felt about Chicago in 1921 is a bit more mellow and seared. He is aware of its carbuncles and warts, a place far from heaven, but it is his town, the only one he calls home.

  Nelson Algren, Chicago’s bard, said it best: “Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”

  3

  The Rooming House

  The Gilded Age was coming to an end as a new century was beginning. The robber barons had a lush life, mostly at the expense of immigrant women slaving away at the textile mills and their men at the railroad yards.

  The Republican, Warren Gamaliel Harding, had become president and promised an era of “back to normalcy.”

  The changes had taken place: the Jazz Age, the Stutz Bearcat, the pocket flask, the bobbed hair.

  WE HAD FIFTY ROOMS, corner of Ashland and Flournoy, on Chicago’s Near West Side. The area was primarily Italian, though there were several rooming houses around and about. Single-room occupancies were what they really were, though there were a couple of “suites” where hotplates and light housekeeping was in certain circumstances allowed.

  Cook County Hospital, the biggest medical institution in the world, was only two years old and a few blocks away. Many of the dormitories had not yet been built. There was, you may imagine, a mingling of student nurses and interns in our establishment, and something considerably more than mingling on occasion. Laborers and semi-skilled workers, working for the city, were, by and large, our patrons.

  One of them, an Italian railroad worker, brought in his maiden aunt Josefina, who had been raised in a Calabrian village and never had left it until this moment. She was a s
tranger in a strange land. He had paid her way to America and paid her rent at the rooming house. He made it clear to my mother, hoping she’d consent, that Josefina would need special attention. My mother was sympathetic enough to allow her light-housekeeping privileges. In fact, she helped her guest in shopping. And when there were occasional complaints about the exotic aroma of Italian food, Annie shushed them immediately. Annie treated her as a soft person in a hard world. This was the paradox that was my mother.

  Annie was sympathetic to women who were in trouble. She was a crazy kind of feminist, a red-stocking feminist. This young hooker lived at the rooming house, though she didn’t bring people up to her room. This little guy Froggy was the pimp who kept her, paid for her room. One day screaming is heard. Froggy is beating the hell out of her, smacking her around. Mother comes in and starts swinging at him. Bam, bam, bam. Not little scratches; tight little fists, bone-hard. He didn’t know what the hell to do. “You touch her again, I’ll kill you.” Poor Froggy ended up all bloody, and that was the last we saw of him.

  Among the other guests were single women doing secretarial work. One such was Helena Turner, the “protégé” of a successful florist, Jimmy Bonavaglia, who paid her weekly rent. At one time, he was delinquent for several weeks. My mother approached him and asked for the money. He was about Annie’s height, and raised himself to his full five-feet-one. He said, “Do you know who you’re talking to?”

  “No, who am I talking to?”

  “Jimmy Bonavaglia.”

  “Do you know who you’re talking to?

  “Who am I talking to?”

  “You’re talking to Annie Terkel.” She collected.

  There’s a poignant postscript to the story of Helena Turner. She was obviously a lonesome dove. My brother Ben was then about eighteen and something of a precocious Don Giovanni. He had worked as a shipping clerk at a mail-order house nearby, as well as beginning a career as a shoe dog, a salesman. His big night was Friday, when he attended Paddy Harmon’s Dreamland Ballroom. It’s where young women who did the anonymous work of offices in tall buildings went—secretaries, operators, and file clerks. And sometimes, if my brother was fortunate, a nurse. Nurses were considered a cut above the others.

  (I frequently followed Ben to the Dreamland Ballroom. I was caught by this music that so excited me—jazz. The patrons, lowly though their status in life may have been, were solely white. The musicians were all black. How could I forget Lottie Hightower and her High Steppers, and, on occasion, Charlie Cook? There was, of course, a quid pro quo to this privilege. As soon as I sensed a score on my brother’s part, I’d rush back to the rooming house, make certain our mother was asleep, enter a vacant room, and prepare the bed with fresh linens. Oh God, when I think what I might have become. With these natural instincts of mine, I might have been a favored advisor to presidents, or a corporate executive knowing the thoughts and longings of the CEO. Think of it: suggest firing several thousand of the lowlies, pick up a million-dollar bonus, and make the front page of the business section of our favorite newspaper.)

  Helena Turner never went to such ballrooms. I’ve a hunch she’d have delighted to dance with Ben; but Jimmy Bonavaglia kept a sharp eye on Helena as well as on his stockpile of gladioli. What I do know as a certainty: Ben visited Helena in her room more than now and then. Some years later, just before we sold the rooming house, Ben picked up the newspaper. He was casually having a look-see at the sports page when a notice in the obituaries caught his attention. His mumbling suddenly stopped; his easy-come, easy-go manner vanished as his face assumed a bloodless pallor. He showed me the obit notice: Helena Turner had committed suicide. “Do you remember who she was?”

  “The name rings a bell.” A pause; something of a sigh.

  “She was someone I knew.” And he knew I knew.

  SOME YEARS LATER, when I came across Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe, I associated Annie Terkel with Eliza Gant, the narrator’s mother: small, bony, swift, and murder on deadbeats. Eliza ran Dixieland, a boarding house in Altamont (Asheville). American Style was its generic name: meals along with rooms. Ours was European Style: rooms only. Now and then, a guest working in the city’s sanitation department, after the thankless job of keeping Chicago clean, was too weary to visit the all-night diner nearby. My mother, for two bits, would toss him a piece of lettuce, a thin slab of beef, and a boiled potato. On seeing the greenery, what little there was of it, an indignant howl was heard from the usually quiet man, “What am I, a rabbit?”

  “Hetty Green”—Henrietta Howland Green, 1835–1916. My mother knew all about her when she took over the rooming house in 1921. I never could figure out how she came to know Hetty so much better than she knew Jane Addams, who founded Hull House only blocks away from us. How could this be, a matter of defying both geography and the calendar? I think I know. It was a sudden empathy my mother felt for a genius of her gender beating the male of the species at his own game.

  Hetty Green, at the age of six, was immersed in reading the financial section of the newspaper to her ailing father. Yes, Annie knew of Mme. Curie and Rosa Raisa,5 but their giftedness is not what attracted Annie. Hetty became known as the richest woman in the world—her spheres were special: investment, real estate holdings, understanding of the market, free or free-fall. She also had a reputation for being the most miserly; that she was tight-fisted was obvious to anyone who had dealings with her. She never turned on the heat, nor used hot water. She wore one old black dress and undergarments that she changed only after they’d been worn out. Yet in the panic of 1907, she bailed out New York City with a million-dollar loan. It was not a philanthropist’s gesture: she took it out in short-term bonds and picked up millions in repayment.

  In defense of Annie, though in all business dealings she simply assumed she was about to be cheated, my mother never reached Hetty’s level of parsimony. Though on occasion, Annie did try to save a penny or two in buying Octagon soap, a product quite abrasive and not meant for the human body. My father would sometimes sneak in a bar of Ivory soap: 99 and 44/100 percent pure. Annie could never have been indicted for undue philanthropy. She had a coin or two for the wayfaring mendicant, provided the unfortunate one was a woman. Males with outstretched hands were beggars and bums.

  Of course, she knew of the Triangle Fire in Manhattan where management had locked exits while working girls died after flying through the air. Of course, she was for labor unions. She, as a matter of rote, even expressed admiration for Gene Debs. But it was the saga of Hetty Green that most enthralled her. She would not have minded being called the “Witch of Wall Street.” Hetty caught the brass ring; my mother missed it, though she flew through the air. Luckily there was a net: the rooming house.

  In seeing William Bolcom’s opera McTeague, based upon the Frank Norris novel and Erich von Stroheim’s film Greed, I thought of my mother, Eliza Gant, and Hetty Green. Catherine Malfitano, the soprano who played the role of Trina, the young charwoman who wins the lottery, sensed a real challenge.

  “I feel uplifted by Alban Berg’s Lulu, who is murdered by Jack the Ripper. Salome, after having this man decapitated and singing to that head, I felt uplifted, really. I did not feel so after McTeague.” She spoke of a key scene in which Trina is in bed with the gold coins as though with a lover. “There is nothing uplifting in loving an inanimate subject, especially when it’s money.” [I’m reminded of current perverse and, to me, pornographic TV commercials, where flesh-and-blood actors court machines, usually cars.] “There is something empty in that emotional experience of being so in love with money and fearful of falling in love with other humans. Isn’t that called a fetish? Trina is the embodiment of this kind of avarice. To have a scene where you can be in bed with all your golden coins and let them fall all over your body like the gentlest caress of a lover is frightening beyond belief. She is no longer with McTeague. She is just a cleaning woman . . . she forgets all about her exhaustion, her cares, as she gives herself to the magic sound of her golde
n babies.”6

  MEYER WAS BACK AND FORTH between Chicago and New York. Much of the time, he was absent from the family while in New York earning his degree in education at CCNY and courting his childhood sweetheart, Sophie, to whom he was to be married; their union would last thirty years.

  My father’s heart, by this time, was in worse shape than ever, and he was frustrated at being stuck to his bed. I had been, for most of my life, my father’s bedmate. And again, we were together listening to the crystal set, which consisted of a piece of mineral and a thin wire you had to wind around and around. We’d hear KYW, with Wendell Hall at the ukelele. The red-headed music maker he was called, and of course, the song we knew:It ain’t gonna rain, no more, no more.

  It ain’t gonna rain no more.

  How in the heck are you gonna wash your neck

  if it ain’t gonna rain no more?

  It was 1925 and we listened to WGN, with Quinn Ryan at the microphone, broadcasting the Scopes Trial of Dayton, Tennessee— the Monkey Trial. A young teacher was being penalized for violating a state ordinance prohibiting the teaching of Darwin. His defense attorney was Clarence Darrow, the brilliant agnostic. The prosecution’s most prestigious witness was William Jennings Bryan. We were listening as the world heard Darrow humiliating Bryan on the matter of Jonah and the whale; the Nebraskan claiming that Jonah set up light housekeeping in the belly of the whale. It was Bryan who said, “Instead of studying the age of rocks, sing ‘Rock of Ages.’ ” The week after the trial ended, Bryan died. It was attributed to diabetes, but we know deep down it was the humiliation and the heartbreak he suffered. Therein lay the tragedy of the populist William Jennings Bryan. Out of Nebraska, he was known as the Boy Orator of North Platte. When he spoke, the audience was mesmerized. He was anti-corporate, anti–the Big Boys, and pro–the small farmer. During the 1896 Democratic convention at the Coliseum, he was at his most eloquent: “You shall not press down upon the brow of Labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold.”