“Antarctica was desolate and forbearing,” he told one group of grown men, “the loneliest of continents, and the absence of a woman’s touch is particularly noted in the region about the South Pole.” Fortunately, his religious parents were not in the room to hear that reveal. Reporters on the Byrd beat (which was getting less prestigious by the day) thought “the boy stowaway” did a splendid—and, above all, entertaining—job, his speeches filled with tantalizing tidbits about why the juices of the whale’s stomach were used in the finest perfumes, and how man-eating sharks would start by ripping out a person’s tongue, apparently “a great delicacy.” At least once, he was followed onstage by a barbershop quartet of singing whalers, young and old.
After Billy’s fine press, Ash McKinley soon had good news: he’d secured the kid an unusual temporary position as assistant lecturer and usher traveling the Northeast by railroad car with the American Pacific Whaling Company, the only American whalers still actively in business, based out of San Clemente, California. What the position of “whale usher” entailed was a long story, but Billy, desperate for money, stopped McKinley cold and accepted without asking how much the job paid. (Which was not much: on par with menial labor.)
Good things come in pairs. Admiral Byrd took time out of his wearying fund-raising and bill paying—the expedition was still $100,000 short—to check in on his former stowaway, asking how the kid was getting on. He should write if he needed anything. Billy mulled over what Byrd could do for him; he was sure he could think of something. For the moment, though, he was gainfully employed.
The ads in the papers were enticing:
Have you seen the whale? The famous whale of San Clemente in its own railroad car?
Bring the Children!
“Not a Stuffed Dummy!”
“Actual in the flesh!”
“A Sight of a Lifetime”
When Billy reported for work, whale master William M. Roddy explained that he’d hired him to show off a “monster” fifty-six-foot-long, seventy-two-ton whale being hauled around the United States in a glass-and-steel railroad car. The finback had been harpooned six months earlier off William J. Wrigley’s Catalina Island. When not on display, its parts were contained in thirty-eight barrels of embalming fluid so that it could be transported easily. Now in the Northeast, the traveling show had added the Antarctic stowaway as an extra thrill.
“Worth Coming Miles to Witness”: Hear “Gavronski” Byrd Lecturer
Hurry! Note Sensible Admission Prices. Adults 25 cents, Children 10 c. Hurry!
Billy was slightly ashamed at first of the downgrade from the Byrd expedition but found he enjoyed working alongside veteran whale master Captain Sherman Gaule and a good-natured old salt named “Barnacle” Bill Garrett. But papers wanted to interview only the kid. At least a dozen articles appeared in the Northeast touting the newest member of the traveling sea specimen show. Not that his fellow whale handlers minded: the boy was good for business, and they all were getting paid in hard times.
Over the next few weeks, as the railroad car crisscrossed the Northeast, Billy added intriguing details about the dangerous sea leopards infesting the icy waters of the Ross Sea. He told audiences how the sailors liked to get in the rigging and fire bullets into the pods of “vicious” orca whales. Why, yes, he’d whipped off a shot or two himself. One Connecticut journalist assigned to his story was flabbergasted by the knowledge that the former “juvenile delinquent” had gleaned.
In later years, Billy would write to a friend in Poland that he had come to be ashamed of the grislier parts of his speeches that summer—killing as titillation. He was grateful, reflecting back, that he usually closed his lecture with a warning to the public that the indiscriminate killing of whales would lead to their extinction.
• • •
Trading on an all-time-high interest in Antarctica, it was announced that the southernmost continent would soon become a tourist destination: exclusively for travelers on the six-thousand-ton Norwegian Stella Polaris. Passengers would be able to see penguins and whales “without having to give up their armchairs, bathrooms with hot or cold water, bar, or dancing deck.”
The published plan was to leave Southampton, England, for a 143-day tour around the world. Said the captain, Commander Joseph Russell Stenhouse: “We shall visit Admiral Byrd’s old headquarters on the barrier, see Mount Erebus, the steaming volcano, and watch the great whaling fleets in action.” Twelve clients signed on at first, setting aside a then astounding $2,500 to $6,500, with four women among that early dozen. If everything went as planned, they would be the first females ever to look upon the mighty barrier.
Commander Stenhouse soon admitted he was deluged with women the world over eager for adventure; considerably more than half of the applicants were female, to his surprise. At that news, even more women signed on, including the grieving Emily Dorman, the famous “Lady Shackleton,” a widow desperate to connect to her lost hero husband. (Interestingly, according to the book Ice Captain, Stenhouse had captained the ship Aurora as part of Shackleton’s 1914 expedition to the South Pole.) The corporate sponsors had found their unexpected market. Fifty women in all were to be on board a cruise that would leave December 10, 1930, with the ladies promised that they would be able to witness whales being electrocuted—a newfangled method of slaughter. The reality of the Depression soon killed this rather unique sightseeing excursion, but what a trip it would have been.
• • •
Billy’s lecturing gig came to an end in August. What now? Where could he go from dead-whale handler? He wasn’t a child anymore; he needed to help support his family in the faltering economy—but must he take whatever work came his way? Would he fritter away the rest of his life? His father had once desperately wanted him to get a degree, but how could Billy do that when he knew his family couldn’t afford groceries? Maybe he could reapply to the tuition-free Cooper Union, but interior design was still not the path he saw for himself. He wanted to be an explorer. Sure, the expedition had not allowed him to overwinter, but he hadn’t given up on his dreams. (And isn’t that how nostalgia works? You forget the bitter cold and the backbreaking work and remember how happy you were playing with seals.)
Didn’t Admiral Byrd tell him he needed a proper education to be a proper explorer? When Byrd selected the forty-one men to remain with him on the ice, he chose specialists in particular lines of work. Billy needed to master something useful. Something impressive.
Billy took three subways to the Columbia University campus in uptown Manhattan, one of the Ivy League universities that men like Byrd respected most. If accepted at Columbia, he could probably save costs by commuting from Bayside. That brought it into the realm of possibility, right?
He stared at the blank columns of the application form. Didn’t Byrd write to contact him if he needed anything? A friendly administrator on campus had told Billy that a strong letter of recommendation would be essential. Who better to ask than Admiral Richard E. Byrd? But attending college to become an explorer would sound flaky, even to the world’s foremost explorer. To approach Byrd for help, he must seem more levelheaded. On the spot, Billy decided he would apply to the university’s dental school.
Only two problems remained: he would need a scholarship, and it was already September. The fall semester started that coming Thursday.
• • •
Even the admiral was having difficulty securing paying work for his expedition men, who were growing increasingly resentful of their years of unpaid heroism, now that they found themselves unable to support loved ones at home. The letters from staff were getting increasingly desperate, if never outright angry, but getting a kid admitted to Columbia was doable. A reference letter was penned to President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University.
Byrd’s letter did the trick: Billy got a partial scholarship as a twenty-year-old freshman. The university newspaper, the Spectator, deemed his admission the most exciting in the entire class of 451 incoming men. (There
were no women at Columbia back then, a university only since 1896.) At a gathering of incoming freshmen in John Jay Hall, the boy explorer thrilled his new classmates with tales of his adventures; they broke out in applause when he promised to bring unreleased scientific films to campus. He soon pledged to the elite Sigma Alpha Upsilon fraternity.
Admiral Byrd visited campus in late September with his new illustrated lecture, “Exploring at the South Pole.” McMillin Theatre held 1,300 people, and so great was demand for the “Only Man Who Flew to Both Ends of Earth” that he gave his talk twice. Most in the audience had seen the Paramount picture With Byrd at the South Pole, and, to his fans’ delight, the adventurer brought outtakes. At both lectures, he called his old friend William Gawronski to the stage and wished him well on his academic studies at Columbia. The college boys cheered.
NINE
GREAT DEPRESSION
By 1932, if Billy wanted to return to Columbia, he would have to take off a semester, even with a partial scholarship. Rather than start his sophomore spring semester, he took a brief stint as a seaman on the SS Leviathan, the mammoth ship that had been docked next to the New York that night three and a half years earlier when he swam in the Hudson River to stow away. He’d save up some money and reenroll in the fall.
Some months before, after his freshman year, Billy had had second thoughts about committing to dentistry, and—again by letter—asked Byrd if he could help him get an internship with the American Museum of Natural History. He wanted to pursue studies that would make him a well-equipped naturalist. Byrd wrote to his good friend Dr. George H. Sherwood, the museum’s curator in chief, who arranged for an unpaid internship. Billy read the letter at home. Unpaid? How had this backfired? His parents needed him to bring home dollars. He declined the internship.
When his tour aboard the Leviathan ended several months later, he resolved to try again. Billy wrote Byrd that he had resumed his search for a position ashore, especially at some museum or zoological institution, but that his attempts seemed futile. He implored the admiral for any leads on paying employment so that he could go back to school in the fall.
What could Byrd write? Everyone he had worked with was in his “greatest” financial peril, even him. He sent a note that he would keep Billy in mind.
Billy was not the only Gawronski writing to the admiral in the summer of 1932. Francesca, too, had struck up an epistolary exchange with the man, one of the strangest correspondences in Antarctic expedition history. Billy’s meddling mother began this years-long exchange by needling Byrd first about her son’s long-overdue medal, and then about whether he might do her the honor of autographing the book of newspaper clippings she had collected so fervently while her boy was at sea. She sent letter after letter when he failed to reply until his secretary told her to just send the damn album—which she did, along with pillows from the Gawronski upholstery business. (Billy knew about some of his mother’s mortifying letters, but not all.)
Word soon leaked that Byrd was planning a second Antarctic expedition, and Billy could imagine himself in the running for a spot on the crew. He had been a sworn member of the Byrd Loyalty Club, had done everything asked of him without complaint. Should he write to Byrd again and formally ask to be considered? He did.
• • •
The economy continued to nose-dive through the fall, more than anyone thought possible. Apprehension was replaced by outright desperation. On November 24 the Soldiers and Sailors Club, a YMCA on the Hudson and an offshoot of the charitable Seamen’s Church Institute, offered a free Thanksgiving meal well attended even by officers down on their luck—or, in unemployed-sailor parlance, “on the beach.”
With little money in their pockets, Byrd’s once-extolled men bumped into one another there—a chance reunion. Thirty-year-old second mate on the Bolling, Harry King, arrived first from Brooklyn; then in walked fifty-year-old Aussie Arthur “Hump” Creagh. Look! There was their favorite scamp, three inches taller and thirty pounds heavier than when they first met, finally more man than boy. (There was not much money for a Thanksgiving spread at the Gawronski home, and Billy’s mother was a not-so-gentle nag, especially in these hard times.) Billy, knowing that King was a Columbia University graduate, must have told him he was a student now; the twenty-two-year-old had managed to scrape up enough to proceed with his sophomore year.
Thirty-year-old John Cody took a ferry from Staten Island and dropped in to the Seamen’s Church Institute dining room, too. He’d been the Bolling’s genial first assistant engineer, livening the seas with stories of his early life on a Staten Island farm even when the “Evermore Rolling” seemed about to tip. It felt good to laugh again! The men remembered how Cody loved his monkey wrenches and coal shovels, kept under his bunk, near the mess room; they’d made a huge noise every time the ship pitched.
Over there! Another Byrd man cashing in on a free turkey meal: his stokehold buddy Kess with that special Black Gang bond from stoking the coals in unbearable heat. Yeah, Kess was still single, but at least he was living in New York—his overbearing mother having been left behind in DC.
Then, impossible! Isaac Erickson arrived. He’d come up from Virginia as a hand on a ship, with no work to get back home. He knew Billy well and had traveled with Captain Melville after both were sent back to Dunedin, unnecessary in the winter months. They had returned to the barrier together in fierce storms to rescue the ones who’d stayed: men who were awarded gold medals despite having faced less danger.
A Seamen’s Institute worker who watched the men all greet one another in shock and delight tipped off the Associated Press to what had to be a great story: six broke members of Byrd’s illustrious expedition reduced to handouts. The Associated Press sent a man over.
“We’ll get by,” Creagh told the reporter who raced to the scene. “Times may be tough, but we are eating turkey again.”
The reporter tried hard to end his piece on the struggling “Adventurous Six” optimistically, settling on, “High adventures every true adventurer always knows are waiting just beyond the horizon.” Could he be right? Captain Brown had been living at the Seamen’s Institute but wasn’t there that Thanksgiving. Maybe the lucky could still find a paying stint at sea.
• • •
By the start of 1933, Rudy and Francesca were on the verge of losing their once-prosperous interior design business to bankruptcy, reduced to surviving off vegetables grown on a vacant lot next door, purchased cheaply and fortuitously in 1929. Rudy, like many breadwinners of this era, struggled to explain how this could have happened.
Billy could not in good conscience continue to drain his parents. Asking for Columbia University tuition, even if he lived at home on a partial scholarship, was perverse given the current financial woes. His folks had stood by him, and it was time to man up, do the right thing, and quit college. He would go back to the interior decorating business, help drum up sales, and then, when the family finances stabilized, return to school—whenever and wherever that might be. His parents wept openly but conceded he must quit.
However, even with his youthful energy, Billy could not save the family business. Fine upholstery work was not in demand in 1933.
With pennies to his name, he received an electrifying offer from the government of Poland asking the “Polish stowaway” to be a cadet on a Polish training ship, Dar Pomorza. He had to pass, though, again for financial reasons. A great honor would not pay the bills.
The offer nagged at him, but served as a reminder. Wasn’t there always work for a good sailor? The officers on the Leviathan were thrilled that Billy did not have to be trained. A job at the port or at sea might not be Columbia University, but who cared at this point? He would get fed and be able to send cash home. Dishearteningly, Billy found even menial shipping jobs hard to come by, but the overwhelmed men assigning jobs on the dock brightened when he said that he’d worked in the dreaded stokehold. He was back to the dirty, hot jobs few people wanted, even in financial doom.
Billy g
ave it one last shot with the admiral, updating him on his employment woes (even stokehold jobs were few and far between; nothing approaching continuous employment)—and dropping a hint that he was available for Byrd’s forthcoming second expedition. Then, just to cover all bases, he mentioned he had heard that after the March 4 inauguration of the thirty-second president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who’d steamrolled incumbent Herbert Hoover in November, there would be many vacant positions in the US Department of Internal Revenue. Could the admiral intercede on his behalf with Mr. James A. Farley, the man he would need to see for such an appointment? A family friend who had introduced him in a celebratory dinner back in 1929, Edward C. Rybicki—director of the New York City Free Employment Bureau and a member of Polish Falcons Nest 7—had told his father that Farley was a powerful decision maker. He’d read that Byrd knew him.
This request did not sit well with the admiral. He was not going to use up his chits with someone like Farley over an ex-stowaway. The forty-five-year-old Farley was Roosevelt’s influential campaign manager, often called a kingmaker, and one of the first Irish Catholics to achieve political success on a national level. (Today New York City’s main post office, which stretches a block on Eighth Avenue, is named in his honor.)
Byrd was getting letters from every member of the expedition, and he’d just about had enough with these bullheaded Gawronskis. He tersely asked what experience Billy had for the job.
Experience? For a clerical job? “Jobs as Deputy Collectors require pure commonsense,” Billy wrote back, elated, adding jocularly, in an increasingly rare glimpse of the goofy kid he once was, “perhaps I lack even that.”
Perhaps he did. The admiral gave no reply.
• • •
Come April, and still no word, Francesca wrote to Byrd. (In shaky handwriting: you can almost feel the desperation holding the letter in your hands.)
The Stowaway Page 17