Hard Times (72 page)

Thank goodness, things changed. I came back. I came back. It was the end of 1944. If I had stayed in the factory I would probably still be on relief. Lotta people, even my wife, they told me don’t go. We have only a few hundred dollar saved, you’re gonna throw it out into the street. I said I’m not going back in the factory.

 

 

1928 to 1944. I was realizing that many and many other people are in the same boat. That gave me a little encouragement. I was looking at these people, waiting in line to get their relief, and I said, My God, I am not the only one. And those were wealthy people … they had failed. But still my heart won’t tick. Because I always prayed in my heart that I should never depend on anybody for support. When that time came, it hurted me. I couldn’t take it.

Shame? You tellin’ me? I would go stand on that relief line, I would look this way and that way and see if there’s nobody around that knows me. I would bend my head low so nobody would recognize me. The only scar it left on me is my pride, my pride.

 

 

They were the same thing, the same thing. A lot of them are well-to-do
now and have much more money than I have. But in those days, we were all on relief and they were going around selling razor blades and shoe laces.

We were going to each other’s. That was the only way we could drown our sorrow. We were all living within a block of each other. We’d come to each other’s house and sit and talk and josh around and try to make a little cheerfulness.

Today we live far away from the rest of our friends. Depression days, that time, we were all poor. After things got better and people became richer and everyone had their own property at different neighborhoods, we fall apart from each other.

I DON’T KNOW how I survived. I was working with a bond house on LaSalle Street. We were specializing in foreign securities. I was so grateful we were not mixed up in the stock market. Thank goodness, it wasn’t going to affect me. The next thing I know, we failed. The head of the company disappeared with $7 million worth of assets.

Oh gosh, a friend of mine was making $25,000 a year. They cut him to $5,000. He walked right over the Board of Trade Building, the top, and jumped. I wasn’t even makin’ five at the time. (Laughs.)

I don’t think I should have been in the investment business. It was pressure from my wife. A man in that business has to know lots of people with money. I was never an opportunist. I like people because they’re people. They could be broke.

I got a job with the Cook County Board of Public Welfare. I had to eat. I earned $95 a month—I was going to say a week. (Laughs.) My boss was as nice a colored woman as you ever met in your life. I had a title—I keep saying it. I don’t know whether it was true or not. I was Director of Occupational Assistance and Self Help. There was no status working for Illinois Emergency Relief. My wife felt it a great deal more than I did. She dolled it up. She used that title among her friends. I really enjoyed some of the experiences, I really did.

I have to pay tribute to my wife. She managed an apartment building in Evanston. We got a six-room apartment free. I also picked up gadgets that I bought for fifty cents and sold for a dollar. It bought my lunch, paid my carfare. I drove some of my friends nuts. Every time I got a new gadget, I was in to sell it to ’em. They had jobs.

There was a fellow invented something called Bergenize. It was beautiful to demonstrate. You’d dip your hands in a can of it. It was colorless.
Then you’d dip your hands in the dirtiest grease, wash it off with cold water, and they’d be as clean as could be.

I had six cans of Bergenize. Before I went out to sell, I’d dip my hands in this stuff. I walked into a garage and went to the grease pit. I dipped my hands into it, walked over to the faucet and turned the water on. My hands got dirtier and dirtier and dirtier. (Laughs.) You see, I had washed my hands back home and forgot to put the stuff back on. I can still remember the garageman looking at me and shaking his head. I panicked and walked out. (Laughs.)

 

“
My dad was sales manager for a leading coffee. house. He was over sixty-five and still earning an excellent salary. This was in the early Thirties. Jesus, I remember this as though it were yesterday. My mother was playing the piano, I was playing the mandolin, my brother and sister were singing. The doorbell rang. A special delivery for my dad. He was fired. After thirty-eight years with the company. Just like that. A cloud over the whole festive… .

 

I think I drank more than I should have. It was a release. I didn’t lose my job because of it. But … my wife’s mother lived with us. She wasn’t a member of the WCTU
¹⁸²
but she was close. She considered it a weakness on my part that I wasn’t able to withstand all the tensions without some release. In the afternoon, I had a few drinks. I had to time it so I didn’t get home until after she was in bed. (Laughs.)

My wife did such a good job of managing that Evanston building, the bank moved us to a four-room flat on the South Side. A hell of a neighborhood. She had rented all but our own apartment, so the bank said: Out. They got $150 for it. This was the reward for doing a good job.

We had four generations living in that four room. My son, my wife, her mother and her mother’s mother. Grandma was delightful, but trouble! Margaret and I slept under the table.

Oh, I tell you…. If I only had the guts and knowledge I could have done so much better. I would have gone into something that I felt….

When I got out of school in 1921, we had kind of a depression in ’21. (Laughs.) While at the University, I managed the
Illinois Agriculturalist
. I think my place was with
Prairie Farmer
or something of that nature. But I happened to get into the investment business. If I had gone into agriculture….

POSTSCRIPT:
“I’ll never forget that Depression Easter Sunday. Our son was four years old. I bought ten or fifteen cents’ worth of eggs. You didn’t get too many eggs for that. But we were down. Margaret said, ‘Why he’ll find those in five minutes.’ I had a couple in the piano and all around. Tommy got his little Easter basket, and as he would find the eggs, I’d steal ’em out of the basket and re-hide them. The kid had more fun that Easter than he ever had. He hunted Easter eggs for three hours and he never knew the difference
. (
Laughs
.)

“
My son is now thirty-nine years old. And I bore him to death every Easter with the story. He never even noticed his bag full of Easter eggs
never got any fuller… .”

 

IT’S A LONG WAY from Maxwell Street,
¹⁸³
I’ll tell ya. Where I had to dig for a loaf of bread. If I told my children exactly what a kid had to do in them days to get something to eat in his stomach in order to live….

The first thing that hits me about the Depression is my dad. His business—he’s coming up from downstairs. We’re living above the machine shop that my dad owned. He was in the cap business, making caps for milk bottles. I remember him coming up the stairs and saying: “Well, the business is gone. We’re broke. And the banks have no money.”

And my mother being a European woman of Polish ancestry, and knowing how to make ends meet, I remember her for many, many weeks, pots of soup. And the main ingredient was that loaf of bread. I had been
used to going for bread. But from now on, it was a daily venture. In them days, we used to wear knickers. This daily venture was always full of peril.

I think it was only a nickel a loaf. I had to take that nickel and make sure I got to that Maxwell Street. There was a long viaduct, and you had to be sure you ducked through there to save that nickel. Coming back with that bread was full of danger, too. There was always somebody waitin’ to grab it off ya. Poor kids, too. No doubt they were hungry. Negro kids. I was such a good runner, later I got to be a track man.

The reason I fight probably as I do, I remember my dad organizing a committee of depositors for closed banks. And passing out handbills is one of the things I remember. For many a month and many a year, he held meetings. He did a pretty good job on this, ’cause I remember him saying you got two cents on the dollar back, that would be quite a windfall. He often wondered how he’d pay his mortgage off. The few cents he was able to get out was enough to pay the mortgage on the house.

He had to sell the machinery for so much on the dollar in order to pay off his debts. He never did owe anybody. When he went bankrupt, everybody got paid off on whatever he owed. Not like you read today, in today’s paper, a guy owes six, eight million dollars and they laugh it off. In them days it was some kind of scandal if you owed somebody any money.

I remember my first bank account. I carried a sign during the Depression. In Chicago, there was a great day in them days, was May Day. And it wasn’t Communistically affiliated. In Chicago, May Day was the day for everybody to express themselves. Whether they were a bum, he could get in line of the parade. Or a big fraternity alliance.

My dad was president of the depositors of the closed Polish banks. I’ll never forget the sign I carried: I AM A BOY. YOU HAVE TAKEN MY MONEY. DOES MONEY MEAN AS MUCH TO YOU AS IT DOES TO ME IN YOUR BANK? IF YOU NEED THIS MONEY, TAKE THE KEYS TO THIS BANK, THROW ‘EM IN THE LAKE AND STAY IN JAIL. The man in jail at the time was the banker. He is buried in St. Adalbert’s—he committed suicide. I’m tryin’ to think of his name, ’cause he was a great legend behind closed banks.

If you’d say a thing like that: it’s Communist. Well, it isn’t Communist. I remember the unions being organized in them days. And little splotches of factory environment that was dissatisfied would march in these parades. Certain factions would assemble on May Day: WESTERN ELECTRIC EMPLOYEES: ORGANIZE FOR BETTER BENEFITS. DON’T JOIN THE COMPANY UNION. That was a bad word.

As a kid, I remember picking up ten milk bottles for a penny in the junk yard to get that penny. And with these pennies, I was able to accumulate enough pennies to buy a bag of marbles. I used to get a hundred marbles for a dime. That was ten marbles for a penny. Then I’d sell ‘em five marbles for a penny. Which made me a penny. Even then, I was trying to
accumulate money by buying something and selling it. And to this day, it seems to instill itself upon me as I’m always buying and selling. It seems to get in your blood, it seems you seem to get like Jewish. I’m doin’ the same thing with my kids now. I’m trying to instill that they can buy something, sell for a profit, put the profit away, take the next and reinvest it. The Depression taught me this.

I say we shouldn’t go through another, it was so horrible. I feel for some of these people today that feel that we owe them a living that perhaps this is what we need. But then I go back and say: well, if it happens to them, where will we … to try to say to my children you’ll have to go through Depression. Or that loaf of bread that’s so easy getting now, that they’d have to go get it like I had to chase somewhere. And who would give it to ’em for a nickel?

My mother used to go with me down Maxwell Street. I can still see the mess of people walking back and forth, and barkers trying to get you into the doors and gypsy women trying to tell your fortune. Even now that I know about prostitution, I can just imagine they used to operate on that street in them days, winkin’ at ya. Women on the corner winkin’. What was she winkin’ about? In them days, you didn’t know what she was winkin’ about. Today you’d know.

And oh, how could I forget the booze, the beer-running days. I used to go to Sacred Heart Church. The man that used to distill the booze and beer used to hide it in the basement of the church. Revenue officers would never believe that the church was the sanctity for the beer. I remember going down in the basement of the church, the beer smell was there. I’d say: what are all these barrels of beer doing here? And good Father Healy, he used to be quite a little devil with all that beer down there. I think he survived because he used to hold the beer down there. If the revenue agents ever knew that the churches were the sanctity for beer runners! Joe Fusco—he was investigated several years ago for his tie-in with Capone and all that—Joe Fusco was a great supporter of the Sacred Heart Church. Of course, Sacred Heart Church was a great supporter of Joe Fusco, too.

Beer, there was a Depression, but they still had their beer. I don’t remember anyone being alcoholic or get out of hand like they do today. I own a liquor store. How’d I ever get in the liquor business? I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I love children. And people in Chicago hate me. They think I’m a bigot and a racist.

You try to show your children respect, and you try to show your children authority, but there’s always gonna be in this world somebody that thinks they’re better than the law. Today it’s the breakdown of law and order today causing all this turmoil that we’re having today. I don’t think it would be allowed in them days to let it get out of hand, where you can spit at an officer or hit him or dare him to touch you. You woulda been
smashed. Why, you didn’t even talk to ’em, you were thrun in. It never happened to me, but I can still see some of the older folks that something happened, they were thrun in the old paddy wagon. I remember crawling in the alley of the old Scotland Yard station to see the men behind the bars. By looking at those people behind the bars that I gained respect for law and order.