Both of the banks my father had headed closed during that time, but he took over yet another one, the Metropolitan Trust Company of Chicago. After he died in 1954, I closed it by merging it with Grove Press. This astonished everybody, just the idea of merging a bank with a publishing company, especially one like Grove Press, which was already beginning to be known for its un-bankerlike character. And it was the first time that anyone in the state of Illinois had ever given up a charter to run a bank without being forced to. I followed state laws and tried to contact every depositor to make sure they got their deposits back. When some failed to respond, I went to the state office for banking in Illinois and said, “In accordance with your laws, I want you to hold the uncollected money.” They were reluctant so I had to sue them at their request to get them to take the deposits.
While my parents and I never lacked in life’s essentials, we felt the bite of the Depression like most Americans. Chicago during the Depression was, to put it mildly, a dangerous place to live. This was an era of native gangsters regarded by many people as Robin Hoods. Among them were Pretty Boy Floyd, Ma Barker, Bonnie and Clyde, and John Dillinger. They were people mainly from, let’s say, Oklahoma and Texas, and they were robbing banks, the depositories for the rich. They were, in effect, trying to destroy the system. And my hero Dillinger was the most spectacular because when he got caught he often escaped from jail. I thought that he was a fantastic person who, with his cohorts, was my equivalent of the Russian Communist leaders. We were in big trouble and Herbert Hoover was not our solution, so I got my classmates to join me in signing a petition to send to the government—this was my first school, the progressive Gateway School—asking that Dillinger be named to replace Hoover and saying, “Let Dillinger alone, don’t arrest him, he’s too important! We need people like that at this time in our history!”
Hoover did not take our advice. My family and I eventually lived not far from the movie theater where Hoover’s FBI shot John Dillinger. He is a hero of mine to this day.
When I was about ten, we lived on the Near North Side, near Sheridan Road and Diversey. My parents were friendly with Catholic priests who spent a great deal of time in our apartment. My father must have had thoughts about converting to Catholicism, but I never asked him, and he never talked about it. Given the fact that he was Jewish and my mother Irish Catholic, it is significant that I never went to a synagogue, and my trips to the local church were few and far between. There was something about the church that frightened and repelled me—the priests in their black gowns, the nuns so severe in their equally austere habits. I never spoke about it with anybody, but I do remember overhearing my pious Irish grandmother and her friends discussing my not being an observant Catholic. At my parents’ insistence I went to church for a while—I would accompany my mother to services, but when she was too lazy to go, or so it seemed to me, I was supposed to go alone. I did that for a very brief time, and then one day when I was still in grammar school I abruptly quit. Since I didn’t believe in God, I thought it was all crazy. Not knowing how precocious I was being, I declared myself an atheist at an early age.
As an only child, I felt lucky because my parents’ attention was focused entirely on me, while I myself lavished all of my love on my stuffed toy dog, Molly. I was shocked the one time my father told me they had wanted to have more children. I felt hurt and frightened. But at the same time I invented brothers for myself. I had a little roulette wheel that somebody gave me, and it had six numbers, 1 through 6. I became number 3 and my brother was number 4, and then 1, 2, 5, and 6, all boys, were my very close friends and enemies. They became absolutely real people to me, and I hated my brother, number 4. Number 3 remained my lucky number, always. When I played football in high school, my number was 33—we didn’t have single numbers. Many years later, when I published Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, I assigned it the number 33 in the Evergreen paperback series. This was not by accident.
I was nine when I first went to summer camp just outside of Minoqua, Wisconsin. All of the campers were Jewish except, you could say, for half of me. In my eyes Camp Kawaga was a terrible place. I spent three consecutive, miserable summers there and felt that the place had been organized for the purpose of torturing me. Kawaga was like a pale version of a Marine Corps’ boot camp and the rabbi who ran it was the drill sergeant. After that camp, the infantry was almost gentle—at any rate, much more humane. Whenever they had religious goings-on, I would hide under the bed. I was simply frightened. They would have to drag me out, and they did.
My many unpleasant memories include having to jump nude into an icy lake at about 6:00 every morning. Then there were the boxing matches I was pushed into with a kid in the next cabin, named Zippy Lippman, just to see if we could hurt each other or at least amuse the other campers. Poor Zippy was very fat and I was very skinny. I couldn’t see very well, and Zippy couldn’t move very well. It was like throwing two mangy lions into a den to kill each other.
I had one friend there who, like me, would end up going to the progressive Francis Parker School in Chicago. He was a child genius. His name was Ralph Eisenschiml. His father, Otto, wrote bestsellers about Abraham Lincoln but was a chemist by profession. Ralph wrote piano sonatas and poems for his mother. He was not any older than me, maybe even a year or so younger, but I sort of clung to him. People liked him—they didn’t like me. I can remember hearing conversations where Ralph would be asked, “Why do you hang out with that guy? He’s so ugly and you’re so good-looking.” That hurts when you’re nine or ten.
We had to swim across the lake to qualify to swim outside a roped-in area. I did it but everybody always thought I was drowning. I never learned the technique of the crawl. I was always just flailing. But I did it. I swam across that goddamn lake, with a rowboat following, waiting to drag me in. I may have never become a good swimmer while at camp but I did learn how to run. They held cross-country races. I would start off slowly, but I was always first at the end. It gave me some pride in myself.
At breakfast all the campers sang songs together. The big hit was “Where Do You Live?” and the lyrics went, “Where do you live? I live in the deep dark woods.” That was it, day after day. They served oatmeal and you had to eat it. I couldn’t swallow it, and the rabbi’s chief honchos would keep me in the dining area for a very long time, trying to get me to finish it. But even when smothered in sugar and butter, the lumps would not go down.
My two counselors, Danny and Flip, were would-be actors from Brooklyn and they called themselves the Bohemians. I never knew what that meant, but they had a song, “We’re bohemians, we’re birds of a feather, we flock together.” I did not know what bohemian living was. Sometimes I envisioned birds flying over a verdant landscape.
At our table Danny and Flip gave each of us kids a nickname. I was “The Sword Swallower” because of the way I used my knife to eat. They were good guys. I had another problem at that camp—I wet the bed. They would get me up at four or five in the morning to go and pee so I wouldn’t wet it again. But I did anyway, my would-be saviors could not help me. I would pee in my sleep, get up at six-thirty or seven and wash the sheets in the lake, and hang them to dry. That got me no sympathy from the rabbi and his son.
My parents sent me a Chicago newspaper every day and I made imaginary bets on the horses after carefully studying the racing forms. (My mother got me interested in racing because she constantly took me to the racetracks— Arlington, Washington, Hawthorne, even one little bedraggled track in Aurora, Illinois.) Then the next day I’d look to see if I won or lost. It kept me alive. I even remember the names of some of the horses—Gallant Fox, Twenty Grand, Sun Beau. They were almost as exciting to me as the “Fighting Irish,” the football players of Notre Dame, who beat Northwestern, elite Protestants. The hero I remember best from then was Marchmont Schwartz of Notre Dame. Would you have guessed? He was half-Irish, or at least I thought he was.
When after three years my parents finally realized that they had sent m
e to the wrong camp and I had piled enough guilt on them, they asked, “Where would you like to go?” I studied camps all over the United States and picked one in Estes Park, Colorado, called Cheley Camp.
At Cheley there were more horses than campers. I still wet the bed. One night I dreamed that I was in the latrine peeing, but actually I was peeing in the riding boot of my friend Tom Pancoast who was sleeping in the bunk above me. In the morning, it seems some of my bunkmates had guessed what happened. Maybe they could smell something. They watched as Tom stuck his foot into the boot. He divined instantly what had happened. No expression, no words. He just glanced knowingly at me and walked out of the cabin. I became a pretty good polo player at Cheley. But it can be a dangerous sport. Two weeks later Tom’s helmet fell off and another guy accidentally hit him on the head with his mallet. The cut became infected and Tom died. His kindness to me made me feel he really was a divine angel, like Jean Genet’s Angel Divine.
Tom’s family owned a top-of-the-line hotel right on Miami Beach, the Pancoast, near the Roney Plaza, but unlike the Roney, no Jews were allowed at the Pancoast, not then. We vacationed in Miami Beach in 1932 when Roosevelt closed the banks for four days. Even my father, who had voted for Hoover, was happy. Eddie Cantor sang “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and “Roll Out the Barrel” was heard all over, celebrating the end of Prohibition. That year we stayed at a hotel two blocks from the beach, the Bowman. It took in Jews. My mother had to change into her swimsuit at the public facility. With her Irish-red hair and white skin I thought she looked out of place. I felt embarrassed for her.
The next year we moved up, to the Miami Biltmore in Coral Gables, outside of Miami proper. There I saw Ray Bolger and Bert Lahr in the hotel’s nightclub. It was the Depression era of “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” Bolger went on to play the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, along with Lahr as the Cowardly Lion. In years to come, Bert’s son, John, would work at Grove Press. And in 1956, Bert Lahr himself would perform the role of Estragon in the first American production of Waiting for Godot, which opened in a new theater, Coconut Grove, in Coral Gables. When it opened, Walter Winchell proclaimed it a Communist play. The joke of the week was: “Where is the hardest place in Miami to get a taxi?” Answer: “Standing in front of the Coconut Grove after the first act of Waiting for Godot.” Now the theater proudly celebrates the fact that the first American production of Godot was put on there.
I went back to Wisconsin only once after my Kawaga camp experiences, in the summer of 1941 for an American Student Union camp. It was a radical students’ American history camp, and we sang songs like “Joe Hill,” the ballad of the charismatic labor leader.
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
Alive as you and me.
Says I, “But Joe, you’re ten years dead.”
“I never died,” said he.
When I later heard Pete Seeger, standing next to Paul Robeson, sing that song in Philadelphia at the 1948 Progressive Party convention, I started to cry.
2
Progressive Educations: Experimental Schools and Falling in Love
My first school in Chicago—where I was studying when I circulated those John Dillinger petitions—was extraordinarily progressive. The Gateway School provided a very innovative curriculum on the north side in a big brownstone mansion. It was a tiny, wonderful place with only ten or twelve students in each class up through, as I recall, the eighth grade. The year was around 1927, and many refugees had already begun to flood in from Germany and other countries to Chicago. Designers and architects of the Bauhaus school were getting to be known there, as well as various others who would influence the evolution of Chicago as a great architectural, art, theater, and medical center.
I remember going with my mother to the first day of kindergarten and feeling that I was being abandoned when she left me—a terrifying experience. I attended Gateway until the middle of the seventh grade. Sono and Teru Osato, my half-Japanese friends, were fellow pupils, and their upper class Irish-French Canadian mother, Francis Fitzpatrick, was my second-grade French teacher. A great society beauty and debutante in Omaha, Nebraska, she had married a Japanese photographer, Shoji Osato, who would later be interned in Chicago during World War II.3
When I was in the third grade we students organized our own Olympic Games. Our concept was, yes, that you ran and jumped, but you also wore Greek costumes and recited poetry. Then we bestowed laurel wreaths on the best poets and athletes. I can remember Sono, with her long legs, being the best runner, wearing a helmet and carrying a sword and a shield. Gateway was that kind of school, shedding light in the darkness at the height of the Great Depression.
As a student, I had a terrible time learning the alphabet, but I could grasp entire words very quickly. I could not write right-handed. Fortunately, at Gateway they didn’t teach penmanship; we wrote everything in print characters that looked the same from the left or the right. But in the public school in Marquette, penmanship was of extreme importance, and there I was considered a dunce. They literally put me on a dunce’s stool in the classroom because my penmanship was so bad. It made me physically ill to attempt to write with my right hand, so when the teacher would walk out of the room I would switch to my left. That hardly helped improve their opinion of me. Yet I thoroughly confused them when I won spelling bees—how could this kid spell who could not even write?
I was madly in love with a girl in my class at Gateway. Her name was Priscilla Braun. Her family did not like me and I suppose they had reason. I hounded her. A friend and I saved money, 50 cents a week, for three months until we had enough to buy a radio for her from Carson, Pirie, Scott &
Company department store. My friend Billy O’Leary’s grandmother had her chauffeur drive us in her electric limousine to the store to make our weekly deposit. It was the only electric car I ever rode in. But when we presented the radio to Priscilla her mother wouldn’t let her keep it. It was a crushing blow, but worse was yet to come.
During the middle of my seventh-grade school year, we were told Gateway was closing—it had simply gone broke because of the impact of the economy. It was terrifying, like being orphaned overnight, because that school was our real home. So we had to enroll in other schools. Like most of the Gateway kids, I went to Francis W. Parker, a private school, heavily subsidized by a woman who was a liberal aristocrat. Parker seemed huge after Gateway. There were probably, on average, twenty-five students to a class, up through high school.
I never found out how and why my parents picked Parker for me, but it turned out to have a decisive influence on my life. One member of the faculty, Alfred Adler, had recently arrived from Vienna. He was distantly related to the famous psychiatrist with the same name. He taught foreign languages and psychology and took a personal interest in me. Many years later, in an unpublished interview with Edward de Grazia, Adler recalled, “[Barney] had a very mature way of talking about things. At the same time he seemed to be gnashing his teeth, in a way, at everything. He was able to enjoy life acutely and also suffer acutely about practically everything.”4
It was at Parker that my long relationship, so to speak, with the Federal Bureau of Investigation began. In the seventh grade I read George H. Seldes’ book on Mussolini, Sawdust Caesar, which was destined to play a big role in my government files. It made a deep impression on me. I detested Mussolini. Seldes made it very clear that Il Duce was powerful and very dangerous. Subsequently, the FBI reported that I was a “fascist” and an admirer of Mussolini. The reason for this outright lie remains a mystery. After years of obtaining documents from my huge file through the Freedom of Information Act, I determined that I was only called a fascist while I was in grade school. They tagged me as a “radical” from high school on—“radical” was much more to their taste.
My FBI files also revealed that the bureau had investigated my high school years very thoroughly. In a typical statement made about me by “DELETED,” he or she said:
… while attending the Parker High
School, Subject absorbed many radical ideals of his classmates and some of his instructors. Many of these classmates were reported to be Communists. As a result of this Subject became a member of the American Student Union, read Communist literature, and entertained thoughts that there should not be any rich men in the world. However, Subject did not himself live in accordance with his radical ideals, inasmuch as he had everything he desired, including a riding horse, a highly powered automobile, and spent money freely. … Subject’s father is a wealthy banker in Chicago and is very much a capitalist. In fact Subject’s actions in this regard have nearly broken his father’s heart.5
Not quite accurate, but not all wrong—we were in fact quite “radicalized” by the time we were in eighth grade. One member of the faculty, Sarah Greenebaum, who taught us in eighth grade, was a marvelous teacher and a genuine progressive. She was certainly a force for “radicalization.” She had us study a version of Robinson Crusoe that she had written, one quite different from Defoe’s narrative. Crusoe was portrayed as a villain who took money, land, and food away from the people he found on the island after he had been cast ashore. But some people on the island wanted a socialist economic system and they overthrew Crusoe. A few of the kids in my class took this unusual story home and, of course, some of their parents read it and got very upset. They were not pleased that Parker had more than a few faculty members who were, like Sarah Greenebaum, a bit too progressive.6
Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship Page 2