Hard Times (31 page)

I never suffered. Life is not to suffer. The Depression is still here for some peoples. Depression is a disease, a mental disease. There’s bread lines today, but they’re getting money. Paid by people that works.

In the old days, the poor were more ignorant. They didn’t have television. They had to work sixteen hours a day, and they didn’t have time. The Plaza Hotel, where I used to work sixteen hours a day, my pay used to be a dollar a day. The Knickerbocker, I was frisked when I walked out, whether I had something in my pocket. They found out once I had a box of candy, so they fired me.

Today the poor are not guilty, just sick, mentally sick. Poverty is always a sign of laziness.

 

 

No. I always lived between Forty-third Street and Fifty-ninth Street. I never bumped into slums.

 

 

I was busy. I worked.

 

POSTSCRIPT :
Immediately following the conversation, he, a devoted follower of the Yoga philosophy, stood on his head and sang “La donna è mobile.
”

 

I KNEW something was terribly wrong because I heard bellboys, everybody, talking about the stock market. At the Algonquin they were grabbing as much as they could—horse betting, anything—and running to put this money on margin. It sounded nutty to me. About six weeks before the
Crash, I persuaded my mother in Rochester to let me talk to our family adviser. I wanted to sell stock which had been left to me by my father, who was president of a Rochester bank. Maybe that’s why I became a musician. I certainly didn’t want to be a banker. Anything but a banker.

I talked to this charming man and told him I wanted to unload this stock. Just because I had this feeling of disaster. He got very sentimental: “Oh, your father wouldn’t have liked you to do that.” He was so persuasive, I said O.K. I could have sold it for $160,000. Six weeks later, the Crash. Four years later, I sold it for $4,000. John Balcom was his name, I’d never seen a face as red as his. It turned out he’d been an alcoholic. So all this advice came to me through the fumes of gin. He’d finally killed himself. Oh, gentle John Balcom! Solid citizen and everything. He cost me about $155,000. I could have done nicely with that. The sage old gentleman. So I did know something was wrong.

I wasn’t mad at him, strangely enough. But 1 wanted nothing to do with money. The blow had fallen, and it was over. I was very skeptical and never invested. I became tired of people telling me: “Oh, there’s a marvelous thing happening—and if you should have any extra money …” I’d say, “Don’t talk to me about the market.” I would have nothing to do with it.

I didn’t even take money to a bank. I kept it all in my pocket. I didn’t have a bank account for years. The money was drifting in. Taxes weren’t as bad in those days, so you didn’t have to keep track of what you spent. So I just kept the money in my pockets. It was crazy. To walk around with three or four thousand dollars and not be able to pay any bills by check. Just crazy.

I carried thousand-dollar bonds around in my pocket, and whenever I would run out of money, I’d cash one. Again, I was reinforced by money. It was a counter-active against any feeling of Depression.

I met a very beautiful girl just outside a speak-easy, on the sidewalk. She was reading the funny paper about midnight. It was all very romantic. She wanted to appear in a play a friend of hers had written. So I sold my New York Central stock for $12,000. I don’t think the play cost more than ten or twelve thousand dollars to produce. Had I waited five years, I could have gotten—oh, $100,000. Of course, the play was a perfect mess. That was about ‘30 or ’31. So I did know a little bit about the Depression. (Laughs.)

I loved speak-easies. If you knew the right ones, you never worried about being poisoned by bad whiskey. I’d kept hearing about a friend of a friend who had been blinded by bad gin. I guess I was lucky. The speaks were so romantic. A pretty girl in a speak-easy was the most beautiful girl in the world. As soon as you walked in the door, you were a special person, you belonged to a special society. When I’d bring a person in, it was like dispensing largesse. I was a big man. You had to
know somebody who knew somebody. It had that marvelous movie-like quality, unreality. And the food was great. Although some pretty dreadful things did occur in them. I saw a man at the door pay off a gentleman in thousand-dollar bills to keep from being raided.

I recall the exact day Prohibition ended. I went into a restaurant that started serving booze. It was such a strange feeling, ’cause I started drinking in speaks. I didn’t know about open drinking, to go in off the street and order a drink without having an arm on your shoulder. I’d gotten used to the idea of being disreputable. A friend of mine took me to some dump up in Rochester and gave me my first glass of beer. I don’t think I’d have drunk it if it had been legal.

A very rich family up in Connecticut, before taking off for Europe, said to their children: No liquor in this house. So, under the rhododendron bush, the gin; under the hawthorne bush, the bourbon. It was all scattered just outside the house. No liquor in the house. All the drinking had to be done on the porch.

Roosevelt came in, and that was a cheery moment. Everybody seemed to know it. Even politically uninformed kids. I’m so sick of hearing how devious he was politically. So was Abraham Lincoln, for heaven’s sake. To be a politician in a country like this, you’ve got to be devious.

His miraculous quality seemed to hit everybody. His fireside chats. It was very odd to me. Although his wit and speeches were beautiful, I never could understand how the public could pick up on his voice. It wasn’t the kind of voice you hear on the street. But it grabbed them. They all mocked him, and the comedians kept doing imitations of “My friends.” Yet the moment he said it—bang!—you were home. It was really a very extraordinary experience.

My mind doesn’t move in political ways, ’cause I’m fixed on music. Away from the seamy side. Maybe it’s cowardice. That could have been part of it. I wouldn’t go up to a Hooverville and look at those shacks. I didn’t want to know too much about it, because it depressed me too much and I couldn’t write any music. That’s no excuse, but….

 

WE HAD SEVEN tracks running on the Eastern seaboard. One rider could work twenty weeks in the summertime. A minimum of five times a week.
I started in 1922 as a pro bike racer and was paid $100 a day. Later, it was from $200 up. Any good bike rider was worth that. The two-man race was the most popular. We’d go 146 hours straight.

It was a great place for show people because we ran all night. We used to have a great many people come in with top hats—society people. Tex Rickard
⁷⁹
had a group of six hundred millionaires. They came in dressed for an event. We had song pluggers. They’d have a piano on the track, in the middle of the infield. They’d sing day and night. You got so you peddled automatically to the tune that was going on. I remember “Back To the Carolinas You Love.” My legs still move to it.

We never wore helmets. We never had anything to protect us. We worked in a silk shirt and tights. If you fell, you got ripped up a little bit. It was a very tough game.

I went out with a lot of newspaper men. You’d hit four or five speak-easies in a couple of hours. Everybody seemed to feel he had to be seen in certain places. It wasn’t unusual for a big sport to put up $1,000 for a sprint. They were all kind to the athletes.

Dion O’Bannion
⁸⁰
was a great customer of mine. The bootleggers were the real big spenders. They bought the best seats. Everybody accepted them. In New York, Rickard was the big spender. He’d always come around with his cigar. He’d give the six-day race tickets to Mike Jacobs
⁸¹
to scalp. If you wanted a good pair of tickets, you’d go to Mike Jacobs. All the best tickets were given to the scalpers. If you wanted a good pair, it was worth $25.

After the stock market crash, we felt the pinch. In the middle of the Depression, the bike game went out of business. The tracks deteriorated. It cost a tremendous amount of money to replace the boards, so they were never replaced.

I quit racing in 1932, when they couldn’t meet my fee. Frankie Harmon
⁸²
and I rented the Chicago Stadium in the winter of ‘34, ’35. We ran two six-day races. They were still drawing pretty well, but it was dying. You could see it. We gave away tickets for the afternoon sessions to ladies. Only a ten-cent tax was required for each ticket. We had many well-dressed ladies, but they didn’t have the price for the tax. That was it. We always hoped this sport would come back. It never did.

 

I WAS a caged panther. It was a jungle. Survival was the law of the land. I watched so many of my partners fall along the way. I decided the modus operandi was bad. Unavailing, non-productive. After spending ten Saturdays in jail, one right after another. I changed my modus operandi.

Various allegations. All alleged. I been a con man, a heist man—you name it.

 

 

One is by force and the other is by guile. Very few people have encompassed both. I was very daring. When I came to the city and seen groceries on the sidewalk, I swore I’d never be hungry again. My family was extremely poor. My father was an unsuccessful gambler, and my mother was a missionary. Not much money was connected with either profession.

Yes, slightly. He threw the Bible in the fire. He was right, incidentally. (Laughs.) My mother didn’t see it that way.

I’m sixty-one, and I have never held a Social Security card. I’m not knocking it. I have been what society generally refers to as a parasite. But I don’t think I’d be a nicer fellow if I held two jobs.

My teacher was Count Victor Lustig. He was perhaps the greatest con man the United States has ever known. Lustig’s outstanding achievement was getting put in jail and paying a Texas sheriff off with $30,000 counterfeit. And the sheriff made the penitentiary also. He got to be a believer. And he went into the counterfeit profession.

Another teacher was Ace Campbell.
⁸³
He was the greatest card mechanic that ever arrived on the scene. Nick the Greek
⁸⁴
wouldn’t make him a butler. A footman. He couldn’t open the door for him. Ace played the crimp. A crimp is putting a weave in a card that you’d need a microscope to see it. I know the techniques, but having had my arm half removed, I had to switch left-handed, deal left-handed. I’m ambidexterous.

 

 

With a colored North American. The Twenties and early Thirties was a jungle, where only the strong survived and the weak fell by the wayside. In Chicago, at the time, the unsophisticated either belonged to the Bugs Moran mob or the Capone mob. The fellas with talent didn’t bother with either one. And went around and robbed both of ’em.

We were extremely independent. Since I’m Irish, I had a working affiliate with Bugs Moran’s outfit. In case muscle was needed beyond what I had, I called on Moran for help. On the other hand, Moran might use me to help him in one of his operations.

The nature of one operation was: if you had a load of whiskey hijacked, we went over and reloaded it on a truck, while several surrounded the place with machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, et cetera.

 

 

Many of them. You see this fellow liquidated, that fellow disposed of. Red McLaughlin had the reputation of being the toughest guy in Chicago. But when you seen Red run out of the drainage canal, you realized Red’s modus operandi was unavailing. His associates was Clifford and Adams. They were set in Al’s doorway in his hotel in Cicero. That was unavailing. Red and his partners once stole the Checker Cab Company. They took machine guns and went up and had an election, and just went and took it over. I assisted in that operation.

 

 

With a $10 bill, you wasn’t bothered. If you had a speaking acquaintance with Mayor Thompson,
⁸⁵
you could do no wrong. (Laughs.) Al spoke loud to him.

There was a long period during the Depression where the police were taking scrip. Cash had a language all of its own. One night in particular, I didn’t have my pistol with me, and the lady of the evening pointed out a large score to me. (Laughs.) A squad car came by, which I was familiar
with. A Cadillac, with a bell on it. I knew all the officers. I borrowed one of their pistols and took the score. Then I had to strip and be searched by the policemen, keeping honest in the end, as we divided the score. They wanted the right count. They thought I might be holding out on ’em. They even went into my shoes, even.