by Jon Scieszka
“Your mother and I are lucky,” Da said. “This accident knocked the wind out of me. But I hope to send you both back to school by fall.”
Then, just when I had all the information I needed, I got caught. It happened one afternoon when I went outside to get a drink of water at the pump. As I leaned over, my notebook fell out of my back pocket.
At first, I didn’t realize Mr. Glander was standing behind me. But he was.
Not only that, but my notebook had landed open, showing a drawing of a cow in a sling. I looked down at it in horror. I wasn’t fast enough. His boot landed on my outstretched fingers.
“What’s this?”
“Give it back!” I cried, desperate.
He pushed me aside, picked up the notebook, and began turning the pages. His long face turned red with rage. “Why, you little scoundrel!”
I couldn’t let him keep it. Without thinking, I lunged, kicking him hard in the shins and snatching the notebook from his hands. He reached for me, but I ducked and began running, slipping and squelching through puddles and mud and filth.
“Stop that boy!” Mr. Glander yelled.
But no one could. No one would.
I fell once, but I scrambled up and kept running. I ran out of the yard, past the distillery, and down Hudson Street. I ran all the way to the address I had memorized: 19 City Hall Square.
When I got there, I flung open the door. The sign on it read: FRANK LESLIE’S ILLUSTRATED NEWSPAPER.
“Hallo, there! Are you all right, lad?” A man got up from a desk. He looked startled to see me. No wonder: I was covered in mud and panting hard.
“Can we help you?” he asked.
I tried to catch my breath. My knees were weak.
“My name is Danny Daley,” I gasped. I held out my notebook. “I need to give this to Frank Leslie.”
The man took it. “What’s this all about, lad?”
“Swill milk.” I panted. “Swill milk is hurting babies.”
He turned over one page, then another. Once, he gave a low whistle. “This is true, what you’ve drawn here—about the cows and what they put into the milk?”
“Yes, sir. I work at the Sixteenth Street Dairy. My boss caught me with this. I grabbed it and ran.”
“Ah. Well, you don’t work there anymore,” he said with a grin. “After this you can never go back.”
He was right, of course. I had lost my job.
“How did you know to come here?” the man asked.
“I read the paper all the time. I looked up the address. I thought . . . I wanted . . .”
“You thought Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper should take on the villains behind this scandal, is that it?”
Had I been wrong in coming here?
I thought of Bitsy. I raised my head and met his eyes. “Yes, sir. I do think so. Someone needs to expose this scandal. Babies are getting sick from this milk. Some might even have died. And the animals suffer, too.”
It was the longest speech I’d ever made.
The man looked at me for a moment. Then he nodded and called out to a teenage boy nearby. “Thomas, can you bring a glass of water for our young hero here?”
“I’m not a hero at all! I was scared,” I whispered, shaking my head. “I’m . . . I’m just an ordinary boy.”
If I hadn’t waited so long to act, I might have saved Daffodil. And maybe Bitsy wouldn’t have gotten so sick.
“Most heroes are just ordinary people. And I’d bet most of them also feel scared at some point,” the man said. “Now, come sit down. You look as if you’re about to topple over.”
“I shouldn’t. I stink. And I’m covered in mud.”
“Nonsense,” said the man with a laugh. “Reporters are always up to their necks in mud, one way or the other. That’s the only way to get the story.”
I nodded, but I wasn’t sure I believed him. “Is Mr. Leslie here today?”
“My boy, I’m Frank Leslie. Ah, here’s your water.” He took the glass from the boy and handed it to me. I gulped it down.
“And this is my crack illustrator, Thomas Nast, who’s not much older than you. He’s seventeen. Thomas, this is a boy who wants to make a stink about swill milk. His name is Danny Daley. Or better yet, I think we should call him ‘Stink Daley.’ Does that suit you, lad?”
Stink Daley. I grinned. “Yes, sir. I think it does.”
Frank Leslie grinned too and reached out to shake my hand. “Welcome, Stink. You’ve come to the right place.”
So, that’s the story of how I got my name—and my start as an illustrator.
I learned three important things my first week as a part-time newsboy and apprentice artist at Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.
The first was to keep my head up.
The second was to raise my voice and never be afraid to make a stink.
And the third was always to ask hard questions, because that was the only way to get to the truth.
Mr. Leslie assigned me to work under Thomas Nast, who seemed glad not to be the youngest artist anymore. I worked ten hours a day to make my sketches perfect. But I had more fun doing it than anything I’d ever done.
And it turned out that the scandal was even bigger than I imagined. The Sixteenth Street Dairy wasn’t the only one making swill milk. Mr. Leslie himself took on the investigation, visiting other dairies in New York City and Brooklyn, and discovered mistreated cows and contaminated milk. And Thomas drew more pictures for the story.
A few weeks later, in May of 1858, the front page of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper carried a startling exposure of the swill-milk trade, calling particular attention to the awful conditions at the Sixteenth Street Dairy owned by Mr. Johnson.
Mr. Leslie paid a call on my parents to give them a copy of the paper and tell them how proud they should be of me. As you might expect, after meeting Kathleen, he was so impressed he offered my sister a part-time job in the paper’s accounting department—on the condition that both of us go back to school.
I wish I could tell you our efforts led to the immediate downfall of distillery owners like Mr. Johnson and his friends, who tried to cover up the swill-milk scandal because profits were more important to them than people’s health.
But those villains fought back tooth and nail.
In the end, it took years to pass laws to protect babies like Bitsy and many others who got sick or even died because of swill milk. It took the hard work of investigators like Frank Leslie and Thomas Nast.
And it took ordinary people brave enough to raise their voices and make a stink. Like Frank Leslie said, most heroes are just ordinary people.
People like me: Stink Daley.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
“How I Became Stink Daley” is historical fiction based on real events. While Danny and his family are imagined, there really was a swill-milk scandal in the mid-1800s in New York City.
Thanks to the investigative journalists and artists of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, the scandal was exposed in its May 8, 1858, issue with the lead article entitled “Startling Exposure of the Milk Trade of New York and Brooklyn.” Among the Leslie artists was the eighteen-year-old Thomas Nast, a political cartoonist who later became known as “Father of the American cartoon.”
The issue drew attention to distilleries that ran dairies that fed cows the swill, or waste, from the distillery process. The animals were packed into crowded barns in stalls three feet by eleven feet. Many suffered from diseases such as distemper. The swill milk, suspected as a cause of infant death, was doctored by adding other substances to stretch the quantities, including water, flour, molasses, chalk, and plaster of Paris.
Responding to public outrage, the board of health established a committee to review the allegations. It was headed by a politician named Michael “Butcher Mike” Tuomey, who had—with several other members—conspired in a cover-up by secretly warning distillery owners as to when inspections were going to take place, so that diseased cows could be remo
ved and replaced with healthy ones. But reporters from Leslie’s paper kept the committee members under watch and exposed Tuomey.
Even so, unsanitary and scandalous practices continued until the 1870s, and it wasn’t until 1893—when a philanthropist named Nathan Straus helped to finance milk depots that sold clean, pasteurized milk to poor families in New York—that infant mortality rates dropped.
Corruption and cover-ups in milk and water and food are not simply the stuff of the past. In 2008 there was a scandal involving baby formula in China. In 2015 it was discovered that officials knew of high levels of lead in the water of Flint, Michigan, and did nothing until ordinary people became heroes and took action.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. “Startling Exposure of the Milk Trade of New York and Brooklyn.” May 8, 1858.
———. “The Swill Milk Committee Render Their Report at Last.” July 10, 1858.
The New York Times. “They Ought to Be Beaten: ‘Swill-Milk’ Tuomey.” October 29, 1878.
Wilson, Bee. Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
THE WAGER
BY CATHY CAMPER and RAÚL THE THIRD
KALASH
BY EUGENE YELCHIN
Ever since my brother and I nearly got ourselves killed speeding across Moscow, our relationship has taken a turn for the better. Up until that lunatic chase (tires gripping, brakes screeching, guns blaring), my brother and I had no relationship to speak of. For example, the day my brother walked into our flat after a two-year stint in the army, he didn’t even say hello to me. Instead, he said hello to the TV and the couch. I might have even allowed my brother to waste his life away on our legless couch smelling of armpits if not for certain jackasses at school. For the two years that he had been away, my “bighearted” schoolmates had enjoyed knocking the living daylights out of me at recess. I’d taken to hiding in the boiler room of our school. If I couldn’t get my big brother off the couch and covering my back, the jackasses would bury me in snow and you wouldn’t find my body until the spring melt.
“We are witnessing the coldest January on record,” a cute lady said on TV, and opened her eyes real big. “A snowfall such as our Russian capital hasn’t seen in one hundred and thirty years.”
“Is that a fact?” I said. “That’s stupid, lady. How can Moscow see anything? It’s not a human person.”
I laughed madly, hoping my brother would join me (he didn’t). He hogged the couch, lolling on his belly, his skinny arm drooping down to the floor. The rolled-up shirtsleeve of his filthy thermal showed off a tattooed assault rifle, like the one he’d carried in the army, an AK-47.
“‘Shed Blood for Mother Russia,’” I read aloud the words inked into his bluish skin below the gun. “Can I see your wounds?”
He grunted and turned onto his back, never taking his eyes off the cute lady on TV, but I wondered what he saw. He was nearly blind, always squinting through eyeglasses (thick as my finger, left lens cracked in half).
“What about medals? Can I see medals?”
The barrel of the AK-47 on his arm twitched a little as he scratched the seat of his army-issued long johns.
“If I had medals,” I said, “I’d pin them on my chest and walk my little brother to school so his friends could see I shed blood for Mother Russia.”
He squinted at me with disgust. “I’m not allowed to wear them.”
The sound of his voice startled me; the first words he’d said to me since his return.
“You’re not?” I said.
He slapped the couch lazily, looking for the TV remote, but couldn’t find it. He was lying on it.
“I’m not allowed to wear my medals,” he said, “because I was decorated for secret missions. I’ve been sent deep undercover behind enemy lines.”
Everyone knew that the Russian soldiers had been ordered to cut off their patches and shoulder straps before they were sent to fight the Ukrainians (who’d suddenly lost their minds and joined up with the Americans). But since the TV was all hush-hush about our guys fighting in the Ukraine, I decided not to pry. I could appreciate the complexities of modern warfare and international politics. I’m not stupid.
“So you’re, what?” I said. “A secret war hero?”
“Who cares if I am a hero?” he groaned, turning on his side. The TV remote fell to the floor, but he didn’t pick it up. “My life is over.”
“Your life is over?” I snatched the remote off the floor and laid it on the couch beside his hand. “Dude, you’re only nineteen!”
Something crashed upstairs in our neighbor Krookin’s flat, and our ceiling fixture lurched wildly. Boots hip-hopped the floor so hard, white flakes of ceiling plaster snowed down.
“Krookin is having a party again,” I said, watching the fixture swinging over my brother’s head. “Better move. That lamp fell three times while you were gone.”
He didn’t move, watching the cute lady on TV opening and closing her mouth. She was talking about snowfall, but you could hardly hear it because of the hip-hoppers upstairs. My brother squeezed all the volume out of the remote, but even at full blast, our wardrobe-sized TV (older than grandma) was no match for Krookin’s subwoofers. With a groan, my brother lifted himself off the couch just enough to hurl the remote at the screen. He missed it. The remote smacked against the wall and cracked open, ejecting two tiny batteries.
“You’re angry,” I said. “That’s good. Anger scares people. Why not ask Krookin for a job? His bodyguards are all war heroes like you, and he changes them all the time.”
“Know why he changes them?” my brother said. “His bodyguards get killed. Gunned down in the bright of day on the streets of our capital.”
He sat up so suddenly, I ducked. You never knew what he might do. He was often weird.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “But you’re wrong. I’m not afraid to die. I’ve been shot at by automatic weapons, grenades thrown at me, high explosives. I’ve been captured in a surprise attack, tortured by the enemy, but I kept my mouth shut the whole beautiful time until my unit bailed me out in a surprise counterattack. I’m not afraid, but I refuse to give Krookin the satisfaction of turning me down.”
“How do you know he’d turn you down?”
“Because he would. He’s been a jackass to me from kindergarten through high school. He’d be a jackass to me now.”
I wasn’t about to argue. I knew about jackasses. If not for the record snowfall that had shut down schools, they’d be dragging me out of the boiler room just about right now.
Krookin’s front door was finished in bulletproof steel, heavily studded. When I stepped onto the doormat (it said “Not Welcome”), a security camera at the top of the doorframe swung down at me. A siren went off. I leaped off the doormat and turned to run. The door banged behind me, and someone caught the back of my collar and yanked me into the hallway of the flat. The siren was louder there. Red lights strobed. I dangled three feet from the floor, pinned to the wall by Krookin himself.
“Hand it over!”
“Hand what over?”
He lifted me away from the wall and slammed me back against it. “Don’t be wise with me, worm. Let us have what you were sent for.”
“Don’t you remember me?” I whined. “I live in the flat below.”
The strobe lights reflected off Krookin’s mirror-shaven head brighter than a disco ball. He looked like what he was (dark shades, white sneakers, purple tracksuit with golden zippers): a grown-up jackass. He blinked behind the shades and took his hands off me. I went to the floor in a heap.
“Your mom’s chandelier down again?” he said, annoyed but not angry. A roll of bills packed thick as a snowball appeared in his hand. “Get her a floor lamp.” He peeled one bill from the roll. “And don’t bug me again. I’m busy.” He held the bill out for me to take (American dollars!), but I surprised him. I didn’t take the mon
ey.
“It’s not about the chandelier. It’s about my brother.”
“Oh, yeah?” The roll of bills vanished, as if it was never there. “I didn’t know he was back from the army.” He looked into the security camera watching us from the wall and shouted, “Turn the damn thing off!” and right away the siren and the lights quit. “Was there a coming home party? I love your bro. He was my best bud at school. Did he tell you that?”
“Sure,” I agreed. “He loves you, too.”
“Oh, yeah?” He grinned ear to ear. (His teeth were capped in gold.) “Why don’t you step into my office? We’ll talk in private.”
Every flat in our crumbling building was supposed to be a dead ringer. Three tiny, cramped rooms cramped together. Shabby, livable, and no one jealous. But Krookin must’ve scored the whole floor to himself. His hallway, plastered with mirrored wallpaper in black and gold, went on and on, zigzagging, with so many doors on either side, I lost count. I tried to peek into the room where the hip-hop was blasting from. “Don’t go in there!” he snapped, and shoved me into his “office” (a dim yellow bulb, stacks of cardboard boxes, Chinese labels).
“I’m in the import-export business,” he explained, slipping off his shades. “You take a little, you give a little, and everyone’s happy.” He had small, quick eyes that matched the color of his tracksuit. “So what is it about your brother? I’m all ears.”
We sat on two boxes, facing each other, and I laid out my plan for him in detail. Since Krookin’s bodyguards got killed all the time, which prevented them from staying on the job for long, he needed to hire my brother instead, a decorated war hero with loads of combat experience.
“Oh, yeah?” Krookin said. “He’s got medals to show?”
I told him why my brother wasn’t allowed to wear his medals.
“Secret missions?” he echoed after me. “Undercover?” And he burst out laughing so hard his gold teeth went ablaze in his mouth. “For the record,” he said after he cooled off a bit, “nobody’s killing my bodyguards. I fire them. Not my fault each one is dumber than the one before. I’d hire a smarty like your brother, but he lacks basic qualities required to carry protective duties.”