As a South Side kid, Nelson developed his lifelong obsession with baseball, and its ensuing disappointments. One summer day in 1920 when he was eleven, Nelson set out with a fellow newspaper seller nicknamed Nephew to see the “Miracle Sox” play against the New York Yankees. In one version of this story, Nelson was part of a gate-crashing riot that got him a seat behind left fielder “Shoeless” Joe Jackson; in another, he and Nephew hid out under the bleachers before the game, to emerge when play began. He remembered seeing the French Canadian pitcher Cicotte strike out Babe Ruth, and he somehow acquired a Louisville Slugger wooden bat autographed by Swede Risberg, whose nickname Nelson adopted for the next ten years. He even tried walking pigeon-toed because the Swede did it.
In 1920 Gerson bought a brick two-flat at 4834 North Troy Street and the family moved to the North Side, to Albany Park. It was a busy, prosperous, mostly Jewish neighborhood, at the end of the Ravenswood elevated line—businesses along Lawrence Avenue included a bookstore, the Kosher Purity Restaurant, a Spiegel’s department store, and in 1926 a palatial 2,500-seat Balaban & Katz Terminal movie theater, which had a make-out corner for hot dates and had replaced a smaller venue. As in Park Manor, the family rented one floor, and Gerson had a tire and battery shop on nearby Kedzie Avenue. Bernice, the family’s strongest character, was studying to be a teacher at Chicago Normal College. Nelson needed some time to adjust—the North Side culture was different: no one would be nicknamed Nephew or Cousin up here, and no one liked the Sox. The North Side was the home of the National League Cubs, who in 1920 had shamefully gone a whole twelve years without winning the World Series. For a South Sider to come into a Cubs neighborhood was like a Muslim moving into a Jewish neighborhood, Nelson recalled. “Baseball was the most important thing in everybody’s life.” Asked for his favorite player, Nelson named Swede Risberg. They grudgingly accepted his choice when he was able to produce a program showing he had actually been to a Sox game.
But something terrible happened that fall: eight talented but underpaid heroes of Nelson’s childhood—including Cicotte, Risberg, and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson—were indicted for taking money to throw the 1919 World Series. They were acquitted the next year, but commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned then from ever playing baseball again. The Troy Street boys made it clear that Nelson could no longer keep faith with the Swede, heavy with the shame of the South Side. “We all make mistakes, fellas,” Nelson told them, oily and cowering, eager for acceptance. He even traded off his Risberg bat. For the rest of his life, he saw the indictment as a great symbol of institutional injustice. He acted like a clown on the field—when he missed an easy fly ball, he’d follow through by falling on his face in the alien North Side grass—anything for a laugh.
Nelson went to Hibbard Grammar School, and then Hibbard High, later renamed for Theodore Roosevelt. Here again, he wanted to be accepted. He kept a clothbound autograph book, into which he had pasted fingernail-sized pictures of his classmates and teachers. It was filled with what passed as wit among thirteen-year-olds in 1923: “Dearest, sweetest, funniest Nelson—Don’t be Don’t be Just be
O.” He was proud of his wool high school sweater, and hoped to get a letter on it someday, trying track and civics club. When he was sixteen, he and his friends formed a neighborhood basketball team—the Uptown Arrows—which had a single miserable season, soberly chronicled, apparently by Nelson, in a notebook that ends with a sketch of the Arrows’ name on a tombstone, a flowerpot over the mound. Nelson also managed to get on the Hibbard lightweight baseball team, which won the city championship in 1927, as a sub. In the gushing two-page description of that season in The Lantern yearbook, Nelson is mentioned only briefly at the end, with a compliment just short of a sneer: “Nelson Abraham’s great height helped him considerably in gaining the honor of membership on our city championship team.” The win was celebrated in grand hooligan fashion. Dozens of students took over a Western Avenue streetcar from downtown on the night of their victory, singing and shouting. When the conductor tried to collect their fares, some broke light-bulbs and windows, causing women to scream and the police to be called. Police caught eighteen or nineteen students and put them in paddy wagons. Nelson may not have been among those arrested, since he generally bragged of all encounters with the law.
To earn his allowance, Nelson worked in his father’s garage. They jacked up Ford Model Ts and Chrysler B-70s all day, to take the wheels off and then pry out the inner tubes. The rubber tube would go into a tin trough full of water, and they would watch where the bubbles formed. That would show the leak. The spot would be marked with a pencil, cleaned with gasoline, and patched with rubber. For all this, Gerson charged a dollar or a dollar and a half. As they worked in the extremes of Chicago’s heat and cold, Gerson told the same jokes, over and over. He had to have the plots of movies explained. Nelson tried to talk him into taking more money from the young North Side swells who came in, in a hurry for their dates. Gerson’s idea of a profit was the half dollar he charged for taking out the old tire and putting in the new one. Nelson tried to explain that this was the cost of his labor—the profit should be on top of that. Gerson got angry at that: “I can’t charge more than what I paid for it, can I?”
“Of course,” Nelson replied, exasperated. Did not the grocer sell his goods for more than he paid for them?
“That’s different,” said Gerson, holding an inflated tube under the icy water. “He’s a businessman.” Gerson was almost sixty, and the creases in his rough hands were permanently blackened from bits of rubber. It was the 1920s, and it must have seemed like everyone but Gerson was making easy money, buying Samuel Insull’s electric stock or selling bootleg liquor out of basements and garages.
Gerson also scoffed at Nelson’s assertion that cops went to drink at a speakeasy posing as the Hunting House Dancing Academy above Johnson’s gambling hall on Kedzie. “A cop can’t do that,” Gerson protested. “They’d put him in jail.” He did not want to listen to crazy talk from Nelson about cops drinking, stealing, and taking bribes. As he had at McCormick Reaper, Gerson somehow missed or chose not to know what was going on all around—even Chicago mayor Big “Bill” Thompson had liquor served at his reelection party. Nelson hated to see the twenty-year-olds with their leather-gloved hands and pomaded hair, sitting warm inside the shop while Gerson worked out on the freezing pavement, wrenching up their fathers’ cars. “Hurry up, Abe, I got a date,” they’d call, and then drive off without paying, promising that their dads would make it up later. Nelson found something satisfying about the work, especially if they could save a badly damaged tire. “Yet I’d feel a pang of shame when I’d see the old man on his knees in the gutter,” Nelson recalled later. And every Sunday, when Gerson would write up his accounts in pencil in his little rubber-blackened book on the back porch, he would find himself a few dollars short. If Goldie gave Nelson his toughness, Gerson gave him his lack of business sense.
Nelson, meanwhile, had developed other interests. He started to hang out in a pool hall when he was fourteen, evading Goldie’s prohibition against the premature wearing of long pants by buying his own pair and changing in the pool hall washroom. He had become tall and handsome—his high school graduation picture shows a serious young man with dark eyes, a full mouth, and sandy hair combed carefully down the middle. He lost his virginity at seventeen—he did not say to whom. His fellow high school seniors named him as class prophet, apparently referring to the job of making joke yearbook predictions. The Lantern yearbook gives an early example of his absurdist humor. Two of his female classmates would open the “Kum-Inn,” a charitable organization to support the “Home for Feeble-Minded Mosquitoes.” Hazel Baron would swim the English Channel in four and half hours, stop for a breath, and then swim back. His basketball friend Ben Curtis, previously just in charge of the monkey house, would one day head the whole zoo. The prophecy for Nelson was in the form of an ad insert, “Tell your tire troubles to Nelson Abraham,” as if that was all the future
held.
But Nelson was already finding other ways to make money. One Saturday night, he won forty dollars shooting craps and refused to get up the next morning to open the tire shop. “Open it yourself,” he called to Gerson from his bed, though this was the old man’s only day off.
His father did not reproach him for it, but something broke in their relationship on that Sunday. Gerson had worked hard his whole life to be what his father had not been, and now his beloved only son held him in contempt. Another hero had fallen along with the “Black Sox,” and Nelson was on the outside, looking up instead to the neighborhood pool sharks, gamblers, bootleggers, and sand-lot baseball stars. He was looking for some way to be a man, and to be himself.
2
COLLEGE AND THE CRASH
Oh why don’t you work
Like other men do?
How the hell can I work
When there’s no work to do?
—“HALLELUJAH, I’M A BUM” (TRADITIONAL)
Nelson boasted in later years that it took him five years to graduate high school, and then he was 141st in a class of 149. “Had the faculty tolerated me for one more semester, I could have passed up those eight idiots behind me,” he said. “If I couldn’t be the brightest kid in sight, I wanted to be the dumbest.” He told writer H. E. F. Donohue that he had flunked everything. This was not true—Nelson liked to exaggerate his ineptitude to comic effect. Chicago schools used to operate on a half-year system, with some kids graduating in winter and some in spring. He’d started high school in February 1923, when he was thirteen, and graduated in June 1927 after four and a half years. His grades were spotty at first—he failed algebra, Latin, geometry, and even English—but they improved as he went along, and he passed everything in his last two years, doing particularly well in Spanish and history. His older sister Bernice, who had become a teacher, was keeping an eye on him and signed off on some of his grade reports in Goldie’s place.
Nelson never got on with his oldest sister, Irene, a homely, over-stuffed office worker who liked novels to have happy endings and later in life developed what Nelson regarded as a repulsive affection for the old South. But bookish Bernice was his idol. “She was the only one in the family I could talk to,” Nelson remembered. If his mother wanted him to do something, she wouldn’t bother asking him directly, but would ask Bernice to ask him, and then he would always agree. Everyone else in the family listened to her, too. Gerson had feebly suggested that maybe Nelson, who liked to draw, could be a draftsman or something. But Bernice, now married to chemist Morris Joffe, said Nelson should go to college, so to college he went. She had him enroll at the University of Illinois in down-state Champaign-Urbana, loaning him fifty dollars for tuition.
Touched by Bernice’s belief in him, languid, hoop-shooting Nelson became serious. Sports did not matter anymore—books were the thing, and he filled his solitary rented room with them. He read Matthew Arnold, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Walt Whitman, Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickens, Stephen Crane, William Shakespeare, and revolutionary Zionist writer Max Nordau, who raged against the rapid growth of cities and its effects on human beings. Nordau also wrote that ordinary people lacked any real power in republics—heady ideas for a boy who had been in the civics club in a middle-class Chicago high school. Nelson’s new hero was the stoic Roman philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius, who taught that “nowhere can a man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.”
Nelson thought of himself as a Stoic, waking up at dawn to wait tables at the fraternities around the fairyland campus of the university, with its gothic and Beaux-Arts stone buildings imitating Europe. He would sell sandwiches to the fraternity boys cramming before exams late at night. He tried to avoid idle chatter, so he could hear lines from Shakespeare in his head, instead of college-boy nonsense about football, or the soaring stock market, which even undergraduates followed in those years. It seemed like everyone was going to get rich. Will Rogers joked, “Give this country four more years of Unparalleled Prosperity and the people will be so tired of having everything they want it’ll be a pleasure to get poor again.” Everyone was preaching the gospel of success—that there were fortunes to be made for the bold, that you should bet on America’s future.
Nelson took cold baths and kept an austere diet, avoiding desserts and alcohol, and eating oatmeal with just a little salt and no milk. He wanted to live nobly, free from the temptations of the flesh, and think of nothing but poetry and philosophy. This was impossible to maintain, and Nelson struggled, like Jekyll trying to squelch Hyde. He remembered walking down Walnut Street in Champaign and finding a house of prostitution. Shyly, he knocked on the door and told the woman inside that he had a few dollars. She called for assistance, and Nelson sneaked off without trying to buy what he had come for or even asking the price. Later, he could not find the place. He did not have a “healthy attitude” toward sex, he remembered. He was “certainly a mixed-up kid.”
Nelson rarely went home, keeping in touch with life on Troy Street by exchanging postcards with his mother. He led a lonely life until his third year, when he started an affair with his landlady, a woman in her thirties, with whom he stayed for three semesters. He kept a B average, but his grades varied wildly by subject—with Ds in subjects like chemistry and “artillery drill,” and As in the areas he really cared about, like English literature and the literary study of the Bible. He tried a smattering of languages—after a D in Spanish literature, he pulled Bs in French and German. Especially interesting to him was the new field of sociology, which looked at groups of people under a microscope, the way scientists studied protozoa, and examined how social conditions affected behavior. One of the professors who excited his interest was Donald Taft, a professor of human migration and criminology.
But money was tight—it was mostly the upper class that went to college in those days, and Bernice, who now had baby Robert, could not keep giving her brother loans. The market crashes of late 1929 had started to look like something that would go beyond New York. By March 1930 unemployment had doubled in five months to 3.2 million, though President Herbert Hoover assured the public that the worst would be over before June. After his third year, Nelson was ready to quit. Lawrence Murphy, director of the relatively new school of journalism, talked him into staying—if he graduated, he’d be sure of a job. It was still the golden days of newspapers—the era of The Front Page and sharpies in fedoras shouting into candlestick telephones. Nelson could still bet on America’s future. So he took a $200 loan. He worked as a night assistant with the school paper, the Daily Illini, and enjoyed going to the city jail to watch the petty crooks come in, waiting for things to happen. Meanwhile, between the pleasant stone and red brick campus towers, the nation’s worst economic disaster was seeping like a fog. Students sold personal items, from needles to shoelaces, to make a little money rather than write home for it. Some had to quit school. But it was still possible to imagine it would not last any longer than previous downturns, and anyone who was smart enough to get a degree could surely get a job.
Nelson thought about being a sociologist, but knew that would require a graduate degree, which would mean borrowing more money, and he had had enough of school. So in 1931, he graduated with a bachelor of science in journalism; got a card saying that he was a qualified editorial writer, “entitled” to work as a sports reporter, editor, columnist, and foreign correspondent; and headed home.
But when he got back to Chicago, he found that the city—which had risen so high in the last decade, with its skyscrapers and fountains, the new four-million-square-foot Merchandise Mart and Balaban & Katz’s gilded theaters like Oriental fantasies—was now staggering from the market collapse. The fall of Chicago energy magnate Sam Insull’s companies alone had cost residents more than the Great Fire—investors lost three-quarters of a billion dollars, and Insull’s useless stock certificates papered the walls of the posh Union League Club. Even the gangster Al Capone had opened a bread-line, givi
ng out free coffee and doughnuts for the unemployed. The downtown still glittered, its towers “lifting against the sky like towers in a dream,” as journalist Morris Markey commented in 1931. But just out of sight, people camped on Lower Wacker Drive or formed Hoovervilles in public parks. By 1932 seven hundred thousand Chicagoans were out of work and desperate, without any unemployment insurance or organized relief outside of private charity. At the Chicago dump, as soon as garbage trucks were unloaded, crowds of men, women, and children were waiting to drag anything edible off the steaming piles. Strikes were breaking out in factories.
The Depression had exploded over the United States like a bomb, eradicating life savings, turning homemakers into beggars and prostitutes, and factory workers into thieves. It took everything promised by the American Dream and made it a mockery. “Idle, depressed, hungry, defeated, withdrawn, brooding people began to feel that somehow they were to blame for everything, that somehow, somewhere, they had failed,” wrote historian Edward Robb Ellis.
Back at the Albany Park two-flat, Goldie and Gerson were struggling, borrowing money on the house through the summer of 1931. Their usual squabbling must have been unbearable in the brutal heat—it was the second-warmest year in Chicago history, with the temperature hitting one hundred degrees Fahrenheit before the Fourth of July, and the humidity lifting the paper off the walls. Wasn’t it bad enough that Gerson had never made foreman, and now they’re going to lose their house? Wasn’t it bad enough that Gerson never got what he was owed from the tire shop—why did he have to make a sucker’s investment in Florida real estate? Nelson hid like a kid in his old bedroom, trying to read and gasping for air. He took refuge in air-cooled movie theaters, where he could dream about Sylvia Sidney in An American Tragedy. He joked later that the film about the factory worker who tries to rise in society by drowning his pregnant girlfriend would determine “the entire course of my life.” He also could escape the heat at the cottage in the Indiana Dunes that Bernice had bought with her schoolteacher friends, where he could look at the stiff, green and yellow sand grasses and blue sparkling waves on Lake Michigan and pretend that none of this was happening. Bernice’s friends sat on the sands and complained about how they had gotten cheated—Chicago public school teachers were owed $20 million in back pay. Some teachers hadn’t been paid for six months; one lost a child because she could not pay for a doctor. No job was safe.
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