By 1900 the railroad was the city’s largest employer, and many of the men who worked there—blacksmiths, woodworkers, painters, machinists—found a vibrant neighborhood of cottages, single-family frame houses, and spacious duplexes just up the steps in Merrill Park. Mostly they were Germans and Poles, first- and second-generation Americans who brought their skills with them from Europe. The Irish influx started in 1892, after a disastrous fire in the Third Ward left many of them homeless. The Irish were the men on the trains—the engineers, firemen, brakemen, switchmen—and soon they came to dominate. Merrill Park wasn’t entirely Irish, but by the turn of the century it sure seemed that way.
So it was to Merrill Park that John Tracy naturally came in 1899, installing his young family on the first floor of a modest duplex at 3003 St. Paul Avenue, just a block from the Clybourn business district and two from St. Rose’s. Like a lot of other people in the neighborhood, he worked for the St. Paul, but he wasn’t in the shops nor on the trains either. Rather, he clerked in offices contained in a nondescript brick building around the corner from Union Depot, where he could gaze out the window at almost any hour of the day or night and watch freight and passenger stock roll gracefully across Second Street, arcing to the west toward Fourth. It was a factory district, the heart of the original village, where boots and soap and stoves got made, and where ironworks and hardware companies sat alongside packing plants and warehouses.
John Edward Tracy was born into railroading. His father, John D. Tracy, emigrated from Galway during the Great Famine and went to work for the Vermont Central at the age of fifteen. In 1854 he moved to Wisconsin and joined the Milwaukee & St. Paul as a section foreman. He made roadmaster in Savanna, Illinois, then settled in Freeport, in 1870, where he was in charge of the track to Rock Island. He had four sons, three of whom worked for the line. John, born in 1873, had a head for numbers and became a bookkeeper. His brother Andrew, born in 1883, held a similar position with the Illinois Central.
The Tracys were unusually prominent for a railroad family. J.D. was treasurer of the building committee for St. Mary’s Catholic Church, which anchored a section of town that became known as Piety Hill. He contributed a pillared altar of marble and onyx, and for years was one of the directors of St. Mary’s School. He was also one of the organizers of the State Bank of Freeport, and one of its directors from the very beginning. It could be said the Tracys lived on the right side of the tracks, if only just barely. Liberty Division abutted the easements, which ran roughly parallel to the Pecatonica River. John D. Tracy shared a four-bedroom wood frame house with his wife Mary, their daughter Jenny, and their sons John, William, and Andrew. Two daughters by his first wife, Letitia, became nuns, and a son, Frank, a journalist and newspaper editor. Letitia died in childbirth in 1865, and John wed Mary Guhin, from County Kerry, the following year.
John D. Tracy was honest, industrious, charitable, a pillar of the community, but the Tracys were still lace curtain Irish, devoutly Catholic in a town that was largely Methodist and Presbyterian. Freeport was known for its Henney Buggies, its Stover windmills and bicycles, and the coffee mills and cast iron toys manufactured by Arcade. Rail service was the landbound city’s lifeline, but when John Tracy, the younger, began courting the twenty-year-old daughter of Edward S. Brown, son of the late Caleb Wescott Brown of the Browns of Rhode Island, John’s upright father couldn’t begin to pass muster with the merchant miller of Stephenson County.
According to family lore, Caleb Brown was directly descended from the famous mercantile family of Providence, specifically Nicholas Brown, who entered the family business at an early age and whose son was the Brown after whom Brown University was named. Caleb Brown came to Freeport by way of Buffalo, Oneco, Cedarville, and Silver Creek. In 1857 he built a flouring mill on the banks of the Pecatonica, which, starting in 1865, supplied a grain-and-feed store he opened on Galena Avenue. He bought the Prentice house, a ponderous brick showplace on West Stephenson Street, and joined the First Methodist Church. Gradually, the operation of both Brown’s Mill and the store fell to his eldest son, Ed, a Civil War veteran who was also town supervisor and a member of the First Presbyterian Church. Ed Brown married Abigail Stebbins of Silver Creek in 1867, and the couple had three children who lived to adulthood: Emma, Caroline, and Frank.
Exactly how John Tracy made the acquaintance of Carrie Brown is unknown, but it is unlikely that they met socially. John attended school at St. Mary’s and the University of Notre Dame, while Carrie graduated from Freeport High and spent only a short time in college. It may be that they met through the family business, or perhaps at the bank, where John had been a teller. She was one of the most beautiful girls in Freeport, a “down easterner” who didn’t lack for proper suitors. When word got around she was seeing an Irish Catholic from Liberty Street, the town was properly scandalized. Ed Brown, in fact, may well have had a word with Tracy Sr. on the matter, for J.D. imposed a strict curfew on his two eldest boys.
“This door will be locked at ten o’clock,” he declared, “and nobody will be allowed in after ten o’clock!” Both John and Will appealed to their sister Jenny for help. “I would sit up on the stairs or at the upstairs window and wait for those two to come home,” Jenny later told her daughter Jane. “I would sneak down and open the door so that they would be able to come in the house, and God knows sometimes it was two or three o’clock in the morning and I would have sat there all night. My nerves were ruined when I was a very young girl.”
There was little love lost between the Tracy boys and their rigid old man, but Jenny adored her father and faithfully went to Benediction with him every Sunday night. J.D. wasn’t any happier about his son’s relationship with a Protestant girl than were Ed Brown and his family, but John and Carrie were the real thing, a genuine love match at a time when arranged marriages were still common among the Irish. Amid much gnashing of teeth, the union was made legal on the evening of August 29, 1894. The Browns opened their home on upper Stephenson for the event, and Father W. A. Horan of St. Mary’s agreed to officiate. “In accordance with the wishes of the bride and groom the wedding was a very quiet and informal affair,” the Daily Journal reported, “no attempt at display being made excepting that the parlors were very prettily decorated for the occasion.” Only a week earlier, the groom had traveled to LaSalle to accept the position of assistant cashier with a new bank, and so after the formalities of “a bountiful feast” had played themselves out, the newlyweds left town, putting a good one hundred miles between them and Freeport and their painfully incompatible families.
It was in LaSalle that Carrie Tracy first sensed the physical intolerance her husband displayed toward alcohol, a characteristic passed to both John and his brother Will through the Guhin line of the family. Carrie herself never drank and her husband rarely did so at home, but when he did the results were immediate and profound. There is no evidence that John Tracy was a mean or even a disagreeable drunk. Drink, in fact, may well have brought out his genial side, but he was prone to disappear, leaving Carrie at home alone, sometimes for days, with no word as to where he was. Without the sobering influence of his father at hand, John developed a reputation at the bank as being unreliable. Then there was a whispered story within the family that he had been caught with his hand in the till. Within a year they were back in Freeport, where John’s father had gotten his son his first job out of college as a teller at the State Bank, and where he now settled him as a bookkeeper with the St. Paul.
The home of John D. Tracy and family, Freeport, Illinois. (SUSIE TRACY)
Living in the same house with John and Mary and Jenny and Will and Andrew was trying for the two of them—especially Carrie, who was used to grander things—and the close quarters got downright stifling with the birth of a ten-pound boy on the morning of June 15, 1896. The baby was baptized Carroll Edward Tracy, with his aunt and uncle serving as godparents. Shortly thereafter, John and Carrie moved in with the Browns, where there was considerably more room and staff, b
ut where the atmosphere was no less strained or uncomfortable. On the whole, it was a better arrangement than before, but the Browns were a starchy bunch, sociable but distant, and John’s occasional binges didn’t endear him to his in-laws. When a job opening presented itself in Milwaukee, John Tracy pursued it with all the charm and resolve he could muster, and when the time came to again say goodbye to Freeport, the relief all around was palpable.
It wasn’t long after the Tracys’ arrival in Milwaukee that Carrie learned she was once again with child. Merrill Park was a vast improvement over Freeport, a modern neighborhood with conveniences and open space and plenty of kids. It was just far enough from the center of town to offer a pleasurable blend of urban and rural living. There were no saloons or livery stables, Sherburn Merrill having thoughtfully placed deed restrictions on such enterprises (as well as any other businesses “detrimental to the interests of a first class residence neighborhood”). The city center was just minutes away, yet one could stroll due east a block and gaze down into the Menomonee Valley, four miles long and a half mile wide, and see virtually every kind of industrial operation, from breweries to grain elevators to tanneries, stockyards, and flour mills. Carrie’s pregnancy took her through a relatively mild winter, and although she was hoping for a girl, the result delivered by Dr. O’Malley on Thursday, April 5, 1900, was another boy. Carrie made no effort to hide her disappointment, and found it impossible to come up with a name for the child.
As the unmarried girl in the family, it fell to Jenny Tracy to ensure the baby got baptized, and it was on Sunday, April 22, that she and her brother prepared to take the seventeen-day-old boy to St. Rose’s for the sacrament.
“What are we going to name him?” she asked Carrie.
“I’m so disappointed that he’s a boy,” Carrie moaned. “He was supposed to be ‘Daisy’ after my good friend Daisy Spencer.”1
“Why don’t you call him Spencer and honor Daisy that way?”
“Well …” said Carrie in a dispirited tone, “that’ll be all right.”
Jenny was so relieved to have a name for the baby that the matter of a baptismal name didn’t occur to her until she and her brother were already on their way to Mass. “John,” she said, “you know that this child has got to have a saint’s name. We can’t present him without a saint’s name. What do you want to call him?”
“I don’t know,” said John. “What do you think?”
“Why don’t we honor Bonnie?” Catherine Tracy, the younger daughter of John and Letitia Tracy, had become Bonaventure, Mother General of the Sinsinawa Dominicans.
John smiled and nodded his agreement. “That’s all right with me,” he said.
When they brought the baby, swaddled in white, up to the font, Father Durnin said, “What is the name?”
Jenny said, “Spencer Bonaventure.”
And the priest asked, “Boy or girl?”
When Carrie Tracy learned her new son had been given “Bonaventure” as a middle name, she was unhappy, as much for the baby’s sake as her own. (She may have learned that Bonaventure was the patron saint of those afflicted with bowel disorders.) When the certificate of birth was filed on June 4, 1900, the boy’s name was given as “Spencer Bernard Tracy” and it remained that way for the rest of his mother’s life.
The only industrial enterprise to rival the West Milwaukee Shops in terms of size and employment was a rolling mill that occupied nearly thirty acres at the southeastern corner of the city where the Kinnickinnic River flowed into Lake Michigan. As the shops had given birth to Merrill Park, the iron and steel mill founded in 1867 by the Milwaukee Iron Company begat the similarly self-contained village of Bay View.
Initially, the neighborhood was populated with iron and steel workers imported from Great Britain, but as factories sprang up to the west of the mill complex and the need for support services grew, the ethnic makeup of the area became considerably more diverse. By the time John Tracy moved his family to Bay View in 1903, there were Irish mill hands, a sizable Italian colony, and significant numbers of Poles and Germans. The architecture was a pleasing mix of Queen Anne, Italianate, and Greek Revival, with a few Civil War–era farmhouses remaining. New single-family frame houses were built alongside duplexes, and the dense woods on the lakeshore were only a short walk from the compact business district along Kinnickinnic Avenue.
The mill itself employed 1,600 men, transforming ore from Dodge County and the Lake Superior region into steel and iron bars, tracks, billets, rails, and the square-cut nails that held much of Bay View together. Then there were the companies that sprang up around the mill, producing products for the building and transportation industries.
One such enterprise was the Milwaukee Corrugating Company, which took its first orders for galvanized roofing shingles in 1902. Over time, the line expanded to include pressed-tin ceilings, wall tiles, skylights, and ventilators for barns and creameries. Milwaukee Corrugating was a prosperous, growing concern when John Tracy joined the company. Exactly why he left the St. Paul isn’t clear, but his promotion to general foreman in late 1901 would likely have put him in closer proximity to the numerous saloons that served the men of the shops, and a stop on the way home would not only have led to calamity but a clash with the abstentious culture so carefully shaped by Sherburn Merrill. In little more than a year, John was out at the railroad and glad to land yet another clerk’s position in the factory district north of Lincoln Avenue.
The move to Bay View coincided with Carroll Tracy’s start in school and Spencer’s emergence as a hyperactive terror. Not long after the family’s relocation to a roomy duplex on Bishop Avenue, the younger boy took a firm grip on a cast iron fire engine and brained his older brother with it. He watched calmly as his mother ministered to the screaming seven-year-old, then settled into a soothing and sympathetic chant: “Poor Ca’l, poor Ca’l …” Carroll Tracy was a good son, his mother’s favorite, but Spencer was something else again, and his aunt Emma predicted John and Carrie would have their hands full with the boy she ominously referred to as “that one.” Said Emma, “He’s a throwback. I dare say he is part Indian.”
Bay View was full of young working-class families. Rowdy kids were everywhere, yet Spencer stood out. In an early picture he radiates energy, his deep-set eyes suggesting not so much a thoughtful, well-behaved child as a malevolent raccoon. “He was in dresses when I first saw him,” said Mrs. Henry Disch, an early neighbor. “He was bubbling with life. I don’t believe he ever sat still. I can’t remember him sitting down in a chair or reading a book. His brother Carroll was a quiet boy. He liked to stay inside and listen to the talk of his elders, but Spence was always outside with the boys.” When the kids were cleaned up and brought to dinner, Spencer sat restlessly as the adults talked, kicking the legs of the chairs on either side of him and methodically peeling the enamel dots off Mrs. Disch’s new salt and pepper shakers.
It was in Bay View that Spencer’s spiritual development began with his weekly attendance at Mass, his mother remaining at home while his father walked the boys to Immaculate Conception, the Catholic parish that served the neighborhood. The sacred rite was a pageant of spectacle and wonder to an impressionable three-year-old—the singing, praying, kneeling, the nourishment of the Divine Liturgy and Holy Communion. However close he was to his indulgent mother, Spencer grew closer still to his father in those early years, the shared experience of worship a powerful bond that would hold firm in the years to come. It became Carroll’s job to corral his kid brother like a gentle sheepdog, hovering over him before and after while greetings were exchanged between their father and the neighbors on the steps in front of the church. And when it came time to put Spencer in kindergarten in 1906, it too became Carroll’s job to lead him the eight blocks to District 17 School #2 on Trowbridge Street.
School widened Spencer’s social circle and encouraged a tendency to disappear. “I began to show signs of wanderlust at seven,” he later admitted. “I wandered completely out of the neighbo
rhood and struck up an acquaintance with two delightful companions—‘Mousie’ and ‘Rattie.’ Their father owned a saloon in a very hard-boiled neighborhood. It was a lot more fun playing with them than it was going to school.” Mousie and Rattie were nine and eleven, respectively, and incorrigible truants. “Being sentimentally Irish,” Spencer said, “that common-enough episode in a kid’s life was to have a lasting effect on my future. For the first time I saw my mother cry over me. I resolved in an immature way never to make her cry again. I don’t mean to intimate that I became a model boy. I didn’t.”
The family’s pattern of movements during these years suggests they were as much a result of Spencer’s abysmal attendance record as they were for reasons of economics. In 1907 the Tracys moved closer to the school, cutting three blocks off the daily commute. In their next relocation, the family settled within sight of the building, where the route home was a short walk through a brick-paved alley. Just beyond the schoolyard was dairy pasture, forest, and, at a gravel road called Oklahoma Avenue, the Milwaukee city limits.
Spence seemed to prefer the rougher neighborhoods to Bay View proper, and frequently he would return home with a band of scruffy-looking kids who seemed as if they hadn’t eaten in a week. Invariably Mrs. Tracy would fix sandwiches—cheese on buttered bread—only to discover that Spencer had sent one or more of them home with clothes from his own closet. “I can honestly say that back of every one of Spencer’s exploits was something fine like sympathy, generosity, affection, pride, or ambition,” she said in 1937. “There was not a mean bone or thought in him. True, he broke windows with the same alarming and expensive regularity boys do today. And he would get embroiled in fights to help a friend—fights, incidentally, from which Carroll invariably would have to rescue him because he was so thin and sickly a child until he was 14 that he could never finish on his own what he was quick to start or join in … Even though it meant added work for me and bigger bills for John to pay at the stores, neither of us could find it in our hearts to punish or discourage him from such a fine philosophy.”
James Curtis Page 5