Back to history. When I was two years old we moved from Connecticut to New York City. Right into the opening days of the Great Depression, which soon had its teeth firmly clamped onto everyone’s life. Those dark years are very hard to talk about to anyone who has not felt their unending embrace. To really understand them you had to have lived through them. Cold and inescapable, the Depression controlled every facet of our lives. This went on, unceasing, until the advent of war ended the gray existence that politics and business had sunk us into.
All during those grim years when I was growing up in Queens my father was employed at the New York Daily News, or almost employed, since he was a substitute, or a sub. Meaning he showed up at the newspaper at one A.M. for the late-night lobster shift every night, fit and ready for work. He then waited to see if someone called in sick who he could sub for, which was not very often. Then he would return home—often walking the seventeen miles from Manhattan to Queens to save a nickel.
Some weeks he would work only one shift; sometimes none. This meant that there was little money at any time; how my mother coped I shudder to think. But I was shielded from the rigors of grim necessity; there was always food on the table. However, I did wear darned socks and the same few clothes for a very long time, but then so did everyone else and no one bothered to notice. I was undoubtedly shaped by these harsh times and what did and did not happen to me, but it must not be forgotten that all of the other writers of my generation lived through the same impoverished Depression and managed to survive. It was mostly a dark and grim existence; fun it was not.
For one thing we moved home a lot, often more than once in a year, because even landlords were squeezed by the Depression. If you moved into a new apartment all you had to pay was the first month’s rent, then you got a three-month concession. That is, no rent for the next three months. Not bad. Particularly when the iceman, with horse and cart, came at midnight before the third month was up and moved you to a new apartment with a new concession. The iceman received fifteen dollars for this moonlight flit.
This constant moving was easy on my father’s pocket, but hard on my school records. Not to mention friendships, which simply didn’t exist. Whether I was naturally a loner or not is hard to tell because I had no choice. I was skinny and short, first in line in a school photograph where we were all arranged by height. But weight and height did not affect children’s cruelty toward the outsider. I was never in one school long enough to make any friends. Kids can be very cruel. I can clearly remember leaving one of our rented apartments and the children in the street singing—
We hate to see you go
We hate to see you go
We hope to hell you never come back
We hate to see you go.
The fact that I can clearly recall this some seventy-eight years later is some indication of how I felt at the time.
Forced by circumstance, I duly learned to live with the loneliness that had been wished upon me. It wasn’t until I was ten years old that we finally settled down, and I went to one school for any extended length of time. This was Public School 117 in Queens. It was there at PS 117 that I made my first friends.
There were three of us and we were all loners, and as intellectual as you can be at that age. Hubert Pritchard’s father was dead and his mother worked as a bookkeeper at the Jamaica Carpet Cleaning Company to support their small household. Henry Mann, rejected by his parents, was brought up in a string of foster homes. He read the classic Greek and Roman authors in translation. Hubert was a keen amateur astronomer. I was devoted to science fiction. We were all outsiders and got along well together.
Did early incidents in my life cast their shadows before them into the future? Such as the one-act play that I wrote at the age of twelve for our grammar school class Christmas party. I remember very little of it save that it was about funny Nazis (perhaps an earlier working of the plot of The Producers?). In 1937, the Nazis were still considered butts of humor. But I do recall the song Hubert, Henry, and I sang to the melody of “Tipperary”:
Good-bye to Unter den Linden,
Farewell Brandenburg Tor,
It’s a long, long way to Berchtesgaden—
But our Führer is there!
For a nascent playwright this was a pretty poor start; scratch one career choice.
The poem I wrote at about the same time was equally grim. This was published in the PS 117 school newspaper and strangely enough was plagiarized a few years later by a fellow student. He actually had it accepted under his own name, James Moody, for the Jamaica High School paper. I recall the opening lines—which is more than enough, thank you:
I looked into the fire bright,
And watched the flickering firelight …
The shapes of fairies, dwarfs and gnomes,
Cities, castles, country homes …
My career as a poet stopped right there.
After school there was no avoiding the Depression; it was relentless and all-pervading. Pocket money was never mentioned because it did not exist—unless you earned it yourself. I spent most of my high school years working weekends on a newsstand. The widow who owned it knew my mother through the League of Women Voters. Her inheritance had been a wooden kiosk built under the steel stairs of the elevated part of the IRT subway on Jamaica Avenue. It supported her, two full-time workers, and me, working weekends.
Saturday was the busy night when there were two of us there. I sold the Saturday papers, magazines, and racing tip sheets, then unpacked the Sunday sections when they were delivered—all of the newspaper except the news section. When this main section was delivered about ten at night things became hectic, cutting the binding wires and folding in the completed papers, then selling them to the Saturday crowds that were out for dinner or a movie. Carefully counting the delivery first, since the truck drivers had a petty racket holding back a section or two. This continued until about midnight when, really exhausted, I took the Q44 bus home.
Sunday on the newsstand was a quiet day. I was responsible—from the age of fourteen on—for the cash and sales, and quite a variety it was. We sold The Times, the Herald Tribune, the Amsterdam News (a black newspaper—and just a few copies in this part of racially segregated New York). All these were in English. In addition there were two Yiddish papers, Forverts, and Morgen Freiheit, the Italian Giornale, the German Deutsche Beobachter Herald, and the Spanish La Prensa.
The newspapers were very cheap compared to today’s prices. The tabloids were two cents daily, a nickel on Sundays, and The Sunday Times a big dime. However the two racing tip sheets for the horse players were all of one dollar, and I looked on the gamblers as rich, big-time players.
The newsstand job folded—for reasons long forgotten—and was replaced by my golf career. I worked as a caddy at the golf course farther out the island, but still in Queens. Reaching this resort required a bus trip to Flushing, then a transfer to get to the municipal golf course. It was not easy work. You carried the bag of clubs—no wheels!—for eighteen holes for a big buck; one dollar for a day’s hard work. And I never remember getting a tip. The bus fare was a nickel each way and the temptation of a piece of apple pie—five cents in the caddy shack—irresistible after working the round, which meant eighty-five cents for a day’s work.
Money was not easy to come by during the Depression—but a little did go a long way. Saturday was our day off and Hubert, Henry, and I headed for Manhattan, by subway of course. For a single payment of a nickel you had over a hundred miles of lines available. But we headed for Forty-second Street, the hub of entertainment in the city. We even managed to beat the subway fare by using the west end of the 168th entrance to the Independent. This entrance had no change booth but instead had a walled turnstile that was supposed to admit one passenger at a time. However there was no trouble squeezing two skinny kids in, one on the other’s shoulders. Once—with immense effort—all three of us managed to squeeze through at a time; this was not repeated.
Forty-second Stree
t between Broadway and Eighth Avenue had once been the heart of the legitimate theater district—with at least eight venues. The actors left with the arrival of the Depression and the theaters were converted to cinemas. It was ten cents for a double feature—with trailers. Three and a half hours at least; we stumbled out blinking like owls.
The Apollo was our favorite for it only showed foreign language, subtitled films. For budding intellectuals this was a wonderful look into these foreign minds. All of Jean Cocteau, Eisenstein, the best. Then up around the corner of Seventh Avenue was another theater—this one had only Russian films, and it was also very closely observed, we discovered much later. Only after the war was it revealed the FBI had an office there in the Times Building, overlooking the theater, where they photographed all the commie customers.
I had an early file with the FBI! It was a quarter well spent for our day out—a dime for the subway and another for the movie. The remaining nickel went for lunch. You could get a good hot dog for a nickel—or in a grease pit next door, a repulsive dog, and a free root beer. Thirst usually won.
There was, of course, far better food on Forty-second Street—if you could afford it. The best investment was a five-cent cup of coffee at the Waldorf Cafeteria. This admitted one to the busy social life there. In small groups at certain tables, like-minded individuals gathered together. I remember that the communists met on the balcony on the left side—of course!—with the Trotskyites a few tables away. On the right side of the balcony the deaf and dumb got together; dummies as we called them with youthful stupidity. Then, halfway between the two groups were the deaf and dumb communists.
New York was a big, big city and in this house were many mansions.
On the days when we had more than the basic two bits, there were the secondhand magazine shops around the corner on Eighth Avenue. Here, for a nickel apiece, were all of the pulps that cost as much as a quarter on the newsstand. Astounding, Amazing, Thrilling Wonder Stories, all the science fiction mags. As well as Doc Savage, The Shadow, G-8 and His Battle Aces, treasures beyond counting. But I had to count because one of the shops had a terrible and terribly attractive offer. Turn in three pulps—and get another one in return.
So I, in the fullness of time, must have read every SF magazine ever published. Read it and reread it. Then finally—and reluctantly—passed it back for the lure of just one more.…
In addition to the commercial joys of Midtown Manhattan there was, a bit further uptown—and free!—the Museum of Natural History, which contained the Hayden Planetarium. For an amateur astronomer there were delights galore here. There was a class where you learned to make your own reflective lens. The lens tool was fixed to a barrel, while a second glass blank was moved across it as you slowly worked around the barrel. With patience enough, grinding powder, and time, you ended up with a good lens that was still spherical. Then the careful slow lapping to turn it into a parabolic cross section, to be followed by silvering. If you did your work well you ended up with a parabolic lens and you had yourself a telescope, if you could afford the mounting tube and the eyepiece.
I had first started to read science fiction when my father had brought home one of the old large-size issues of Amazing in the 1930s when I was five years old. In the gray and empty Depression years the science fiction magazines rang out like a fire bell in the night. They had color, imagination, excitement, inspiration, everything that the real world had not.
At this same time, science fiction readership was taking on a new dimension. Through the readers’ column of the magazines, readers found and contacted other fans. They met, enthused over SF, formed clubs—on a strictly geographic basis—and SF fandom was born. I, and other local readers, met together in Jimmie Taurasi’s basement in Flushing and wrote a one-page constitution; the Queens Science Fiction League was born. In Manhattan the same thing was happening with the Futurians.
Far too much has been written about SF fandom and this literature is easily available. From a personal point of view it was just a pleasure to meet with other like-minded boys. (No girls! Ghu forbid!) Still in the future were fan feuds, conventions, fannish politics, fanzines, and all the rest of the apparatus of the true fan.
I sink into fanspeak. “Fen” is the plural of “fan.” “Femfan,” a female fan—but they came later, much later! “Ghu”—the god of fandom. “Gafiate”—get away from it all. Leave fandom. And more—a closed society indeed.
From a personal point of view I enjoyed SF and fandom. I went to the first ever world SF convention in Manhattan in 1939; couldn’t afford the nickel entrance fee so had to sneak in. I read all of the magazines, Astounding Science Fiction in particular, and always felt myself a part of the greater whole of SF.
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But there was thunder in the distance and my quiet world was about to be shaken to its roots and I must leave the early record at this point. I’m afraid that these brief entries must sum up my childhood years for the curious, all of the period right up until my sixteenth year and the traumatic event that was Pearl Harbor Day.
December 7, 1941. The day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and America was at war. I don’t believe that I even knew where Pearl Harbor was at that time. Nor was I filled with patriotic enthusiasm like my cousin Kenneth, who went out the next day and enlisted in the army. For the rest of us teenagers nothing basically changed. Yes there were shortages and rationing, gasoline was in great demand, but our already lean diet didn’t change—and we had no car. So I—and my peer group—just went on serving time in school, numbly checking off the days until our eighteenth birthdays when the draft boards would reach out and seize us up. Other than volunteering there was nothing else that we could do.
However, we all found out quickly enough what the future would be like now that the United States had become a country engaged in a global conflict. America’s industrial capacity grew and grew to meet the physical needs of a global war, almost incidentally ending the Depression. Now there was full employment—for those not seized by the draft boards. There was a shortage of printers and my father worked a full week now, so that our family fortunes were greatly improved. The military machine was expanding as well, and men were needed to man the mighty war machine that was being constructed.
I had been almost sixteen years old when the war began. As the months went by I, and all of the other male high school students of my age, became aware of the swift passage of time and its effect upon our future existence. The war was expanding and, if anything, was getting steadily worse for our side. The Allies appeared to be losing on all fronts. The fighting was bitter and deadly, with no guarantee that it would ever end in victory for our armed forces.
Time was running out for my peer group. If the war were still on—and it appeared that it certainly would be in a few short years’ time—then we would soon be joining it. The draft age was eighteen and the culling was ruthless. Not only were pink-faced eighteen-year-olds being forcibly drafted into the army and navy—but were also being pushed into the theoretically volunteers-only Marine Corps. What could I, as an individual, do to get through this war alive? Was there anything that I could do to affect my destiny?
It must be understood that this was not a matter of patriotism or loyalty to one’s country. I shared with my fellow teenagers a sense of fate inescapable. Whatever happened, no matter how we felt, no matter what we did, when we reached our eighteenth year we were going to be dragged into the military machine.
Up to this time, a middle-class or blue-collar child growing up in the ’30s in America had few if any choices to make. The law required you to attend school for a good number of years, to be first fed into kindergarten and then pushed on into grade school, high school at fourteen, to graduate at eighteen. One maiden aunt of mine, Rose Kirjassoff, had even saved enough money to put me through college someday. My life was predictable and appeared to be about as orderly as life could possibly be. It was not to be questioned; just to be endured.
Then came the war. I would gra
duate high school in January of 1943. Two months later, on my birthday, the jaws of the draft board would open to consume and engulf me. What to do?
I remember being gloomily fatalistic about my future. I knew that if I did nothing I would be drafted into the army and would be shot. Or if not that, then I would go into the navy where I would drown. Or into the marines where I would be both shot and drowned at the same time. The prospects were not encouraging. What could I do that would separate me from the mass of other eighteen-year-old chunks of cannon fodder? I had no desire or intention of escaping the draft—it was unavoidable, and I really believed that the cause we were fighting was a just one. But how could I be fed into the meat grinder and come out alive? It was time for me to make a decision that could save my life. I am certain that my existence as an aware and separate entity began at this point.
The individual steps of my logic are a little vague some sixty-eight years later—but I remember the results quite clearly. I would go into the Army Air Corps, where the chance of survival was a good deal greater than in the other services. I had a boy’s dream of being a pilot, impossible to achieve, since I wore glasses. Or even of being a glider pilot, since they were permitted to wear glasses (an opportunity happily missed, when the mortality rate of glider pilots is examined well after the fact). Simply, one had a better chance of living through the war in the U.S. Army Air Corps. At this time there were something like thirty-eight soldiers on the ground to every one in the air. I would enlist the law of averages on my side.
This was not any attempt to escape my military destiny. I was not a “draft-dodger,” as they were so endearingly called at the time. I thought of this as a war that had to be fought and won. My mother’s Russian-Jewish side of the family had helped relatives in Europe escape the coming Holocaust, among them that excellent photographer Philip Halsman. I have somewhere his portrait of me as a teenager, more a tribute to familial ties than to my physical assets at the time.
Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison! Page 3