Grinding It Out (3 page)

Baseball was truly the national pastime in those days, of course, and our neighborhood games in the alley behind my house were grand contests. My father was a baseball buff, too, and he began taking me to see the Chicago Cubs play in the old west side ballpark when I was seven years old. I saw plenty of double plays pulled off by the Cubs' famous Tinker to Evers to Chance combination. The Cubs were contenders then, and I knew all the statistics about every player down to his shoe size. My father belonged to the same lodge as Joe Tinker, and that gave me the upper hand over other kids in our frequent arguments about baseball players, especially when it came to the Cubs. I had to know more about it, of course, because my old man knew Joe Tinker personally. What sweet strife those alley altercations were. And how fiercely we played the game—with a garbage can lid for home base, a well-chewed bat (pocked from hitting stones for batting practice), and a ball bandaged in black friction tape. How agonizing it was though when my mother would step out onto the back porch and call, “Raymond! It's time to come in and practice.” The other guys would mimic her voice and inflection jeeringly as the chesty expert on the Cubs shouted resentfully, “I'm coming!” and shuffled off to submit to his mother's piano instructions.

I took to the piano naturally. My facility at the keyboard pleased my mother, and I'm still thankful to her for those hours of disciplined practice, although at the time I often thought her demands were excessive. I became proficient enough to acquire a minor reputation in the neighborhood and to prompt the choirmaster of the Harvard Congregational Church to recruit me to play the organ for his practice sessions—a slight lapse of judgment on his part. I was willing and able, but the stately chords of the hymns began to oppress me. I fidgeted on the bench of the old pump organ through the entire second half of the evening. How those people managed to put up with all the interruptions, the lecturing of the choirmaster, and his repetition of the same passages over and over again I could not understand. Moreover, the music itself was so saccharine and slow that I was suffocating up there in the organ loft. When he concluded the last hymn of that seemingly interminable session and said, “That's it, ladies and gentlemen, good night.” I reacted spontaneously by playing the old vaudeville tune tag, “Shave and a haircut, two-bits.” Naturally, the choirmaster was scandalized. He never reprimanded me for that little breach of decorum, but he never asked me to play the organ again either.

My musical interest was more commercial. I admired the piano players in the big Woolworth and Kresge stores in Chicago's Loop. They would play and sing to attract customers into the music department, where there were racks of sheet music and accessories for sale. If you saw a piece of music that interested you and wanted to hear the arrangement, the piano man would oblige with a snappy rendition. I daydreamed that I was a piano man too, and the opportunity came the summer after I started high school.

I had spent the previous summer and lunch hours during the school year working in my uncle Earl Edmund Sweet's drugstore soda fountain in Oak Park. That was where I learned that you could influence people with a smile and enthusiasm and sell them a sundae when what they'd come for was a cup of coffee. In any event, I saved just about every penny I earned and finally had enough in the bank to go into the music store business with two friends. We each invested a hundred dollars and rented a little hole-in-the-wall shop for twenty-five dollars a month. We sold sheet music and novelty instruments such as ocarinas, harmonicas, and ukuleles. I was the piano man, and I did a lot of playing and singing but not much selling. The sad truth is that we didn't do enough business to put in your eye. We had a month-to-month lease, and after a few months we gave it up, sold our stock of goods to another music store, divided the money that was left three ways, and that was that.

My sophomore year in high school passed like a funeral. I began to feel about school the way I had felt earlier about the Boy Scouts. It was simply too slow for me. I'd been eager to become a Boy Scout, and I enjoyed it for a while. They made me the bugler. But a bugle is a very limited instrument, and I found myself doing the same things over and over in meetings. It was small potatoes. I wasn't progressing, so I said to hell with it. School was the same—full of aggravations and little progress.

The only thing I really enjoyed about school was debating. Here was an activity I could get my teeth into—figuratively, of course—but I would not have hesitated to bite a debate opponent if it would have advanced my argument. I loved being the center of attention, persuading the audience that my side was right. One debate that I remember in particular was on the question “Should Smoking Be Abolished?” As happened more often than not, I was on the side of the underdogs, trying to defend smoking. It was a very spirited exchange, but my opponents made the mistake of painting the demon tobacco too black, too vile, too evil to be countenanced by a sane society. Rhetoric is fine as long as it maintains some contact with reality. So I attacked their excesses by telling very simply the story of my great-grandfather and his beloved pipe. Grandpa Phossie, we called him, which means Grandpa Beard. I told of the hardships he'd undergone in Bohemia and how he had made his way to the United States. I related in pithy detail how he had built a home for his family with the sweat of his brow. Now he had little time left in life and few pleasures beyond throwing a stick for his little dog to fetch and looking into the swirls of smoke from his ancient pipe to recall scenes from happier days. “Who among you,” I asked, “would deprive that whitebearded old man of one of his last comforts on earth, his beloved pipe?” I was delighted to note that there were tears in the eyes of some of the girls in the auditorium as I finished. I wished my father could have heard that applause. It might have made up for some of his disappointment in my lack of scholastic interest.

As school ended that spring, the United States entered World War I. I took a job selling coffee beans and novelties door-to-door. I was confident I could make my way in the world and saw no reason to return to school. Besides, the war effort was more important. Everyone was singing “Over There.” And that's where I wanted to be. My parents objected strenuously, but I finally talked them into letting me join up as a Red Cross ambulance driver. I had to lie about my age, of course, but even my grandmother could accept that. In my company, which assembled in Connecticut for training, was another fellow who had lied about his age to get in. He was regarded as a strange duck, because whenever we had time off and went out on the town to chase girls, he stayed in camp drawing pictures. His name was Walt Disney.

The armistice was signed just before I was to get on the boat to ship out to France. So I went marching back home to Chicago, wondering what to do next. My parents talked me into trying school again, but I lasted only one semester. Algebra had not improved in my absence.

I wanted to be out selling and playing the piano for money, and that's what I did. I got a territory selling ribbon novelties, and I took to it like a duck takes to water. I'd have a sample room set up in whatever hotel I was staying in, and I'd learn what each buyer's taste was and sell to it. No self-respecting pitcher throws the same way to every batter, and no self-respecting salesman makes the same pitch to every client. In 1919 anyone making twenty-five or thirty dollars a week was doing well, and it wasn't long before—on good weeks with a lot of musical jobs—I was making more money than my father.

I was a regular “sheik” at seventeen—cocky and probably annoying to be around. Rudolph Valentino was driving the girls wild then, and I modeled myself after him. I parted my rather wiry hair in the middle and plastered pomade on it to get that slicked-back, patent-leather look. I bought sharp clothes and smoked Melachrino cork-tipped Turkish cigarettes when I went out on dates. After my date and I were seated I would produce my box of imported cigarettes with a flair and place it on the table to show how sophisticated I was. This was just a passing phase, but it still embarrasses me to recall it, because there's nothing I dislike more than phony sophistication. In fact, I take a kind of perverse pleasure in the memory of the night most of the “sheik” was shocked out of me.

A musician named Herbie Mintz, who always knew where work was to be found, confided to me that he knew a nightclub that was looking for a piano player with my kind of style. It was located way down in Calumet City, but it paid well above the going rates. I jumped at it. Getting from Oak Park on the west side to the far southeast suburb was a major undertaking. I rode several different buses and trains, but somehow I made it on time for the 9
P.M.
opening.

The place turned out to be a bordello. The downstairs “cabaret” where we played was decorated in the most god-awful, garish gay-nineties plush and gilt you could imagine. It was presided over by a madame who must have weighed 200 pounds. I have never seen such a getup as she wore. Her hair and makeup were as flamboyant as the decor of the place, and she reeked of cheap perfume. I got plenty of good whiffs of it as she hung over me and sang to my accompaniment. I can still see her yellow pearls bouncing on that heaving bosom, those rings flashing on her pudgy fingers, as she belted out songs in her gravelly voice.

Between sets, when she got a lull in directing traffic to the bedrooms upstairs, Big Momma came over to the piano and warmed up to me.

“Where do you live, honey?” she asked.

I had all I could do to keep my voice from quavering as I told her I came from Oak Park.

“Well, now, that's too far for you to travel late at night. Tonight, you stay here.”

I was afraid to say no, and I squirmed uneasily on the piano bench the rest of the evening, watching her out of the corner of my eye and hoping she'd keep her distance. The customers were a pretty hard and rowdy lot, so I had no reassurance there. Just before the final set, I sidled over to the bartender and called him aside. I strove mightily to act casual and keep my voice steady.

“Listen, we have only one more set to play and I've got a long ride home. I don't want to hang around,” I said. “So how about paying me off right now?”

Without a word, poker-faced but knowing, he reached under the bar and handed me my money. I hurried over to the men's room, where I stuffed the cash into my sock. I didn't trust anybody in that place. After the set, while the other guys in the band were still putting away their instruments, I was running down the street, putting as much distance as possible between me and that 200-pound madame.

I never went back.

My selling job with the ribbon novelty outfit began to hit its limits before long. It was interesting, but I could see that I was not cut out for a career of peddling rosebuds for farm wives to sew on garters and bed cushions. So I gave it up in the summer of 1919 and got a job playing in a band at Paw-Paw Lake, Michigan. That was a genuine taste of the era. We were really “with-it,” in our striped blazers and straw boaters. Talk about your “flaming youth” and “Charleston-crazed kids,” wow.

I played in a dime-a-dance pavilion called the Edgewater. The lake was a very popular summer resort in those days, and we used to draw people from the hotels all around. Late in the afternoon our whole band would get aboard one of the ferryboats that plied the lake, and we would steam along the shoreline playing frantically. One of our boys would get up in the bow with a megaphone and call out, “Dancing tonight at the Edgewater, don't miss out on the fun!”

Among the regular crowd at the lake were two sisters named Ethel and Maybelle Fleming. They came from Melrose Park, Illinois, and they helped during the summer at a hotel their parents owned directly across the lake from the Edgewater. Their father was an engineer in Chicago and was an infrequent visitor at the lake. Their mother ran the hotel, did all the cooking, and much of the housekeeping. She was a remarkably energetic woman. The sisters would canoe over to the pavilion in the evenings and hang around with our crowd. After the dancing was finished, we'd all go out for hamburgers or have wiener roasts or go canoeing in the moonlight.

Ethel and I were an item in the group almost from the start. By the time the summer was over, we were getting very interested in each other.

My next job was in Chicago's financial district as a board marker on the New York Curb, as the market that became the American Stock Exchange used to be called. My employer was a firm named Wooster-Thomas. A very substantial sound to that, I thought. My job was to read the ticker tape and translate the symbols from it into prices that I posted on the blackboard for the scrutiny of the gentlemen who frequented our office. I later learned that the impressive-sounding name fronted a bucket-shop operation that was selling watered stock all over the place.

Early in 1920, my father was promoted to a management position in ADT, a subsidiary of Western Union, and was transferred to New York. I was very reluctant to leave Ethel; we were talking about getting married as soon as possible, but my mother insisted that I move east with them. I was able to get a job with the Wooster-Thomas office in New York. This was in the cashier's cage, however, and I didn't like it nearly as well as the more active work of marking up boards. As it turned out, I didn't have to worry about it much more than a year. One day when I went to work, the office was boarded up, and the sheriff had posted a notice that they'd gone bankrupt. That hurt! They owed me a week's pay plus vacation time. I had been planning to take my time off the following week and go to Chicago to visit Ethel. Now I could see no reason for waiting, so I left the next day. My mother was upset when I told her I was leaving and that I didn't want to come back, but there wasn't much she could do about it. She hated New York herself. After I left she worked on my father until he finally gave up his promotion and moved back to Chicago.