Competition in the ring was very tough and a boy had to be good to get anywhere at all. Usually that meant a year or two fighting four-or six-round bouts before a fighter got a shot at anything longer. During those years he was learning, discovering how to cope with the different styles of fighting, and refining his own. Probably the last fighter who went through that mill was Sugar Ray Robinson, who was also one of the greatest.
How I met Pete Petrolle I do not recall, but evidently I heard he was looking for somebody to spar with. I was fourteen, but tall, with a good reach, and I knew enough about boxing to take care of myself. In the next few weeks I learned a lot more. I would guess I worked at least fifty rounds with Pete on various days before I met Billy, and then I worked with them both. They took it easy with me, but I enjoyed the workouts and was learning rapidly.
At the time a boxing magazine was published in St. Paul, Minnesota (one of the great fight towns in its day). It was printed on pink paper like the more famous Police Gazette and was called the Boxing Blade. Aside from articles on boxers and boxing, old and new, it also published the decisions in fights all over the world. These decisions usually covered two or three pages in relatively fine print, and I was an avid reader of this weekly, with a good memory for who had fought whom and the result. I also learned how certain fighters reacted to southpaws, fancy-dan boxers, and the like.
None of this interfered with my reading, which continued in every spare moment.
Our library was a gift to the town by Alfred Dickey and was named for him. He was known to both my parents but had passed on, I believe, before my time of awareness. Certainly no gift ever presented to a community was more appreciated, and especially so by me. The foundation of my education was laid there, and I learned not only how to use a library but what unexpected riches may lie hidden away on dusty shelves. That library was the first of many in my life, and I spent hours there, dipping into book after book, completing many.
It is often said that one has but one life to live, but that is nonsense. For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.
So it was with me. I saved myself much hardship by learning from the experiences of others, learning what to expect and what to avoid. I have no doubt that my vicarious experience saved me from mistakes I might otherwise have made—not to say I did not make many along the way.
No doubt reading Martin Eden by Jack London, as well as other life stories of writers, prepared me for the rejections to come, and the difficulty I would have in getting published. Because of what I had read I knew there would be rejections, but I had no idea there would be so many.
Hunger I was to experience many times, but it was reassuring to know others had survived, although most written accounts of hunger are by those who never experienced it. Knut Hamsun is the only one I can think of offhand who wrote with any knowledge of the experience. In the movies one always sees a hungry man stuffing himself with food when first he gets a chance to eat. That’s ridiculous, of course, for a truly hungry man eats very slowly, savoring every bite, and is almost overcome by having food at last. Moreover, hunger shrinks the stomach and one’s capacity is slight. On the second and third day after hunger, of course, there is no satisfying him. At first, he cannot eat very much. He does, however, long for food that tastes, something either spicy or sweet. At least, such has been my experience and that of others whom I have observed.
On at least three occasions I have gone four days without eating anything, and that after long periods of eating very little.
When in my stories I write of hunger, thirst, and cold, these things I have experienced. Here and there I’ve taken some brutal beatings, the worst of them in fights I won. I lost fights, too, in the amateur rings. Outside the ring I never lost a fight but my first one.
Often, when people hear of my career and the many jobs at which I worked, they believe I did this for writing experience. That’s nonsense. I worked at those many jobs because work was hard to get and one took what was available at the time. During the Depression years and immediately before, jobs were scarce and a man had to keep hustling to keep working. A job might last for an hour or two, or perhaps for several days, and often weeks went by with no work at all.
All loose things seem to drift down to the sea, and so did I. Perhaps it was the sea stories I had read, or even some inherited memory, if there are such things, but I drifted down to the waterfronts and wound up with a seaman’s job I was glad to get. What I did not know was that no one wanted to ship aboard that old craft and they had a hard time getting a crew. If there was anything to read aboard that ship but a few battered magazines, I never found it. In any event there was no time. When I came off watch I fell into my bunk, happy to have even a few minutes’ rest.
On my second trip to sea, out of Galveston, Texas, to Liverpool and Manchester, England, there were books. Not many, but books nonetheless. If I recall correctly I was shipped as a deck boy. Supposedly a deck boy is an apprentice officer, but actually he, or at least I, functioned as an ordinary seaman but without equal wages.
People who live away from the sea often assume a merchant marine sailor has joined some kind of a service similar to the Navy.
Nothing of the kind. He is simply a seagoing laborer who wears no uniform and works in any clothes he may have or can buy from the Slop Chest (a store aboard a ship where a seaman can buy such odds and ends of clothing or equipment as are necessary). Although on most ships he will stand a wheel watch, he will also spend much time chipping rust, touching up the chipped spots with red lead paint, and then painting over with the ship’s colors, whatever they may be.
There is never any scarcity of work at sea. The First Mate and the Bo’sun see to that.
The title of the first book I read aboard the S.S. Steadfast has long been forgotten. It was, however, an attempt to prove that the plays of Shakespeare were actually written by Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe had been killed in what was called a tavern brawl in Deptford, England. More likely it was a planned assassination, for all involved had been engaged in undercover work.
Marlowe had written a number of successful plays in the same general style as that adopted by Shakespeare, including Tamburlaine the Great and The Jew of Malta. The story I read aboard the Steadfast maintained that instead of Marlowe’s being killed, another man was buried in his place (this is also claimed to be the story of both Billy the Kid and Jesse James). Marlowe then hid out in an old abbey, writing the plays which were produced under the name of his actor friend William Shakespeare. I thought then and think now this was arrant nonsense.
Many people seem offended that Shakespeare, who never attended a university, could write so brilliantly, and ever since his fame began, there have been efforts to prove that a dozen other people wrote his plays, including Sir Francis Bacon, who never managed to find the time to complete the work so dear to him in philosophy.
Known in his time largely as an actor, Shakespeare wrote his plays for his company at the Globe, of which he was part owner. Many of his plays and some of his poetry had been published, but his plays were not collected until after his death. He was considered a journeyman writer of some importance in his time, though many did not rank him, for example, with Ben Jonson or Marlowe.
Shakespeare’s plays were written for a popular audience of some four hundred years ago, an audience made up largely of artisans and their apprentices, a few shopkeepers, and whoever else could be drawn to buy a ticket. His sources were few and are well known, but he was very topical. His play The Tempest was based on an actual shipwreck in the Bermudas which was a big news story at the time.
A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.
Elizabethan England was not a time g
iven to introspection. It was a time of action, of often swift, heedless action. One must remember that this was the time of Sir John Hawkins, of Sir Francis Drake, of Sir Martin Frobisher and Sir Walter Raleigh; it was a time when the British were sailing into the harbor of Cadiz and sinking ships under the guns of a fort.
Hamlet, for example, needs to be read in terms of the time. He has usually been portrayed by those who did not understand him at all, or were trying to view him through Freudian eyes rather than those of his own time.
His problem was very real. His suspicions might be great, but what evidence did he have? The word of a ghost. Shakespeare, several times in the play, touches upon the various attitudes toward ghosts, but the prevailing opinion was that ghosts were manifestations of the Devil.
So what did Hamlet have? The word of the Devil suggesting he kill a king? To kill a king at any time was a serious matter, and especially so for a prince who would inherit the throne. Hamlet was not a weak character but a strong one. But he was also a reasonable man. He had to have more evidence, and he set about trying to get it.
Our working days aboard ship were divided into two four-hour watches, separated by eight-hour interludes. A seaman on the Steadfast, as on many other ships, spent two hours each day and two hours each night at the wheel. At night he also spent two hours on lookout in the bow. By day the two hours were devoted to work around the deck. Deck boys or ordinary seamen, however, spent all their time working, keeping things shipshape under direction of the Bo’sun. (The word is properly boatswain, but I never heard it spoken in that way.) Often when chipping rust or touching up paint, I thought about what I had been reading, and as our ship was heading for England, recalling the book on Marlowe and Shakespeare was especially interesting.
On that voyage I also read Jack London’s The Sea Wolf, H. Rider Haggard’s The Ivory Child, and The White Company by Arthur Conan Doyle. The latter book, by the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was the story of a company of mercenaries, an exciting, romantic story.
The voyage over was rough and I had my first bout with seasickness off Cape Hatteras, my first and my worst. It lasted for three days. On my previous voyage I had come through a West Indies hurricane and had the mistaken idea I was immune. Cape Hatteras proved me wrong, as it has many another seafaring man. Our return trip was by way of the Azores and a relatively calm, easy voyage with sun-filled days, beautiful starlit nights, and only the very slightest roll to the ship; not at all like those days on the way over when the Bo’sun would look into the fo’c’sle and yell, “All out! Sea boots and oilskins!” Which meant it was raining, we were shipping seas (taking on water), or both.
The Steadfast was a flush-decker of, if I recall correctly, 4,800 tons.*1
We had only a couple of weeks in England and, as was usually the case, never got far from the waterfront. We docked in Liverpool, where the main hangout was the American Bar on Lime Street, or the London Wine House not far away. I was sixteen, passing as twenty-two, but not interested in drinking. I had ideas that I might make boxing a career, and had worked hard to get myself and keep myself in shape.
One of my particular friends aboard ship was an able-bodied seaman (called an A.B.) named Harry Warren, referred to usually as Shorty.
He was an Australian, an excellent seaman except that, like Lord Nelson, he was seasick on every trip. Why he continued to follow the sea under the circumstances I have no idea, but he did. In Manchester—actually in Salford—Shorty introduced me to a strong-arm man named Reggie, who worked the waterfronts. Reggie taught me several tricks of waterfront fighting that were often useful. One was the so-called Liverpool Kiss, where you catch a man behind his neck and jerk his face down to meet your upcoming skull. Done properly it can obliterate, for the time being, a man’s features and make him less than anxious to pursue the argument. Education, you see, has many aspects.
Shorty had been around and he had friends. Never a drinker, he knew his way about the seaports of the world and had made friends in them all. Aboard ship he had a mandolin he had made himself and which he played, singing many of the old sea chanteys as well as British, Irish, and Scottish folk songs.
Another particular friend aboard ship was Pete Boering, a big Dutchman from Amsterdam, and perhaps the finest merchant seaman I was ever to meet. He was twenty-eight at the time I knew him and had spent eighteen years at sea, starting as cabin boy on his father’s own ship.
When fifteen he had been washed overboard during a typhoon. They threw him a life ring, which he got, but they were unable to pick him up. Three days later he was found by an Australia-bound vessel and taken there. In the years that followed he had never been home.
It was the old story, dramatized by Eugene O’Neill (himself a merchant seaman for a time) in The Long Voyage Home. A sailor saves his money, planning to return home to see his family but not wishing to go empty-handed. Once ashore, everybody wishes him well and somebody suggests a farewell drink. Hours later the seaman is back aboard a ship, broke again.
Pete was planning to go home when I met him, and he was planning to go home when I last saw him, on the docks in Houston.
With a few dollars saved, I grabbed an armful of boxcars and headed west, again on the Southern Pacific. Before boarding the freight train I stopped at a newsstand and bought a double handful of Little Blue Books.
I do not now remember all the titles, but I know I had Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” Charles Finger’s Great Escapes, and a collection of Emerson’s essays.
THE TRIP WEST was a rough one. For the first time when riding freights I had enough, although barely enough, for occasional meals. It was never advisable to allow those with whom you traveled to know you had money, however little. Moreover, I was anxious not to arrive home without some money. This was my first venture into the world alone and I wished to return with enough to hold me until I could find a job.
As always, I found myself traveling with three others, and several times we were put off the train and had to wait to catch a later one. At such times we gathered about a fire in the hobo “jungle” and swapped stories. Mostly, I listened.
One of the men, a machinist, was promised a job in El Paso, if he could get there. He had left his wife and two children in Shreveport to wait until he could send for them. What money he had, he’d left with them, taking only six dollars for the trip. Mentally, I crossed my fingers for him, for I had already learned that promises are often lightly made with no expectation that a man would travel so far for a job.
Another of the men was a black boxer, a welterweight who looked good. In those days, boxing in California was limited to four rounds per fight, and he had been told he would do well out there, with his style. We sat in the door of an empty boxcar and talked of fights and fighters, and of many of the good black fighters, including Tiger Flowers, a middleweight out of Georgia who was one of the best in the game, as long as he could stay away from Jack Delaney, a light heavyweight who had his number and knocked him out twice.
In El Paso our machinist friend went his way while I bought a few Little Blue Books, including “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and some shorter pieces by Coleridge. The black fighter got off there, too, after seeing a poster advertising a fight. He was hoping they might need another boxer in the event that someone failed to appear, as was sometimes the case.
Inadvertently I found myself in the company of a young steelworker who had never been away from home before and never out of a job. He had only himself to worry about, but was overwhelmed with self-pity. When I told him of the machinist he was not impressed. The only tragedy he could grasp was his own, and he seemed to feel the world out there should have been waiting for him with open arms.
A tough railroad detective put us off the train in the desert on a lonely siding at night. Hustling around, and with no help from the young man, I found some fragments of wood and a few mesquite branches and started a fire. Several times in the bitterly cold night I awakened to add fuel to keep our fire
going. My traveling companion never stirred, and it was so cold I could not get back to sleep.
The same thing happened on the third night, but on the morning following, a train was sidetracked to allow a passenger train to pass and we scrambled aboard, finding an empty car where we could keep out of sight. For the rest of the day he complained and I read Coleridge. In Deming, New Mexico, we were again put off the train and found the town filled with drifters like ourselves who had been put off trains and were unable to get out.
Every possible job had been done long ago and there was no chance for work. What money I had I kept out of sight. I watched for a chance to leave town, and hoped to leave my traveling companion behind, but he clung to me like lint to a blue serge suit, and when I finally got out west of town and snagged a westbound freight, he was right with me.
Each night in Deming we slept out, and each night I built the fire and kept it going, and each night, once awakened by the cold, I found it virtually impossible to get back to sleep. My traveling companion never so much as budged. Somebody, he was sure, would take care of him. He was his mother’s boy and somebody always had.
The end came at Stein’s Pass, New Mexico. We were put off the train there and ducked into the small station, where there was a potbellied stove, glowing and red, and we were cold. The station agent and telegrapher let us huddle close to the fire until the time came for him to close up.
“I’d like to let you stay, boys, but I’ve got to lock up.”
Reluctantly, we went out into the cold wind and found our way into a hollow near the tracks. There, with little help, I gathered some coal from along the track, some scraps of wood, and built a fire.
Education of a Wandering Man Page 3