17. The Junkman Cometh; or, Vignettes From the Age of Coal
“RAGS A LION!” The shouted words resounded down the
alley. Moments later, a swaybacked horse appeared, its head bobbing
wearily from side to side as it slowly pulled a dilapidated wooden freight
wagon piled with junk. On the wagon's
seat a grimy, stubble‑faced man loosely held the reins and again and again
bawled what sounded like “RAGS A LION!”
The junkman. He made his living by collecting and selling other people's cast‑off clothing, old car parts, unwanted furniture, and dead appliances. Once a month, his plodding horse pulled his wagon through the alley behind our house, the junk man yelling for people to bring him their "RAGS! OLD IRON!”
In the Chicago of 1940, the junk man wasn't the only one who used a horse. The nearby dairy used horse‑drawn wagons, in addition to trucks, to deliver milk. A few Tripp Avenue families, those who still had iceboxes instead of electric refrigerators, bought ice from a man driving a horse‑drawn wagon.
My parents were born in the horse‑and‑buggy days but never spoke fondly of them. I think that their reluctance to recall those memories is typical of many people who had to put up with the horse. For all of the beauty and romance attached to the animal, taking care of one was a lot of work. Moreover, many people were afraid to ride horseback.
And in a big city like Chicago, before the car became popular, horse‑drawn transportation meant that people chose their paths carefully when crossing the street. Rank‑smelling waste ran brown in the gutters and drew millions of flies. On dry days, pulverized manure flew in the faces of people. Iron‑shod horses created a cacophony of noise day and night. And horses were horribly mistreated in those days; in the decade or so before the car came into use, municipal carts hauled off more than 10,000 dead horses per year from Chicago's streets.
Coal
At the time we lived on North Tripp,
Dobbin was on the way out, and if the horse could go, coal could go too, and
even faster, many people wished. By the
1940s, much of the nation was using fuel oil and natural gas for heating. Not in Chicago, however, for at that time,
Chicagoans were being soiled daily by the soot and grime of one of the blackest
rocks on earth—coal.
Collars and cuffs of shirts were black at the end of one day's wearing. Bathwater turned sickeningly gray. Sandblasting crews worked virtually year‑round at scouring buildings, removing layers of soot to reveal magnificent brick‑and‑stone exteriors.
Our house was heated with coal, as were
many homes and private businesses and public buildings; coal fueled many of the
locomotives on the railroads that served Chicago. People who had converted their furnaces to
fuel oil bragged about how nice it was not to put up with coal. Natural gas was available—most Chicago homes
had gas ranges for cooking—but many Chicagoans used coal for heating.
Coal was delivered by a large truck. The truck's driver and his helper, two men black from head to foot with coal dust, pushed wheelbarrows full of coal to the house's coal bin, a room near the furnace in the basement. At a window open to the coal bin, the wheelbarrow was tipped, and the coal tumbled into the bin. As the coal hit the basement floor, coal dust rose, then settled, waiting to be walked on and tramped around the basement and the house.
Thus, the coal bin door had to be kept closed when coal was delivered. Otherwise, clouds of coal dust billowed out of the coal bin, migrated around the basement, and settled everywhere.
It was also mandatory to stay out of the coal bin unless absolutely necessary. Coal dust seemed to have a magnetic property; if you just got near it, it was attracted to your clothing and your skin. Therefore, the only sensible reason for going into the coal bin was to get a shovelful of coal to throw into the furnace.
Tending the Furnace
One of my chores was that of furnace tender, which is not one of the grandest rituals on earth. Maybe it builds character, maybe it doesn't, but for certain it leaves a person feeling a heck of a lot better about the whole thing when it's over.
“A job begun is half done,” my mother liked to say when I was slow getting down to the basement. Right. Aphorisms are always easy to use on the other person.
The floor near the furnace and the coal bin was covered with old rugs and towels, put there to absorb the coal dust on the soles of the shoes of whoever came down to feed the furnace. The shoveling of coal had to be done adroitly; to be careless was to raise clouds of coal dust. When the job of stoking the fire was finished, the shoes were wiped on the rugs and towels near the steps leading to upstairs. Then and only then could the fire tender return to the house's living quarters.
There was no cheating at this, by the way. What I mean is that I couldn't shovel in a half ton of coal in the hopes of not having to come back to the basement for hours on end. Whenever I tried to get away with that, the fire blazed up like crazy, a gusher of hot air rose through the ducting and into the rooms upstairs, my parents began closing registers as the sweat started to drip off them, and my mother muttered at me about the amount of coal money going up the chimney.
The whole process was sort of like going to Hell and back—descending from the coziness of upstairs and into the dark depths of the coal bin, facing the flames of the furnace, and returning upstairs. And once upstairs, the hands were thoroughly washed at the kitchen sink before the fire tender was allowed to rejoin the civilized world.
Ashes periodically had to be removed from the furnace. Now the threat was not coal dust black as night but the fine white dust that was left after the coal burned itself out. Where coal dust was black and oily, the dust from the ashes was as fine as talcum powder. Where coal dust settled on everything, the dust from the ashes hung in the air waiting to be sucked into a person's lungs.
Removing the ashes was simple. You first made sure that the door of the compartment under the firebox was completely closed. Then you grabbed the handle of a rod that extended from outside the furnace to the grate of the firebox. A few vigorous shakes of the rod caused the ashes to fall through the grate and into the closed‑off area under the firebox. There they were left to cool for days. And when you finally did shovel the ashes out, there was no way in the world to prevent raising clouds of a fine white dust that would linger in the air for hours, bringing about hacking and sneezing from anyone who walked through the cloud.
Grandma Beuchat
It was about this time, 1940 or so, that Grandma Beuchat came to visit us. She was the only one of my grandparents I remember meeting. I might have met my father's mother, but I have no recollection of it. As for my grandfathers, both died years before I was born. As a child born to parents late in their lives, I never had any kind of relationship with any of my grandparents.
A photograph of Erma Miche Beuchat, taken when she was twenty, shows her to be petite and girlish. Another photograph, taken when she was about sixty, shows a smiling woman, a sprite, who looked like she could be a lot of fun. Regardless of what the photographs show, Erma Miche Beuchat possessed the spirit and strength of a woman who came to this country, a stranger in a strange land, bore six children, helped her husband operate a dairy farm, ran the household, cooked for her family and the hired hands, raised her children, and outlived two of them and her husband.
When Grandma Beuchat visited us, I can't say that my mother went overboard with preparations such as cleaning the house until it was spotless and telling me time and again how to behave. Nevertheless, I was more than adequately warned, briefed, and prepped for the grand visit.
Then she was there . . . and gone. Somebody, one of my uncles, brought her and took her away. All I remember of her visit was the specter of an old woman hovering around our living room.
Wendell Willkie
And then there was the autumn of 1940, when we staged a feeble, get‑out‑the‑vote campaign on behalf of Wendell Willkie.
Willkie was unique in American politics. Although he never held public office, he won the Republican presidential nomination in 1940. A lawyer and a utility company executive, he had been a member of the Democratic party until 1938 when he switched his registration to Republican. He was a vigorous critic of the economic policies and New Deal programs of his opponent, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was running for his third term. Otherwise, Willkie was an internationalist who sided with FDR's overseas policies.
For some reason, my mother and father came out for Willkie, and I was drafted into their campaign. To show our support for Willkie, we pinned to our clothing buttons that said, “We Want Willkie.” Everywhere we went, we advertised the idea that an upstart Republican was the best man to run a country still struggling to get out of the Great Depression and headed for war.
For years after the election, my red, white, and blue “We Want Willkie” button lay in the dresser drawer where I kept souvenirs and trinkets. Every time I saw the button, I remembered how funny I felt with it on. Conspicuous and embarrassed are the proper words. It was as though I'd daubed a splotch of paint on my shirt.
The button is long gone. Maybe I should have saved it as a collectible, a relic that would mean something only to another type of relic, a Republican over the age of seventy.
I have no idea why in the world we did this. My parents were not joiners, except for my father's sole affiliation of being a union member. He took me to union meetings where we sat off to one side and listened to belligerent, raucous men argue and complain; in the true spirit of Paxson noninvolvement, my father said nothing.
Maybe he was trying to cover all angles. In Chicago, a Democratic party stronghold, he voted Republican and belonged to a union aligned with Democratic party ideas.
In all, we were quiet, timid people. If we'd had a coat of arms, it would have displayed the Latin for “Not me!”
In addition, politics was an area that my parents didn't normally put a lot of effort into. My father was a Republican who played his politics the same as his cards, close to his vest. He didn't talk about how he voted or why. If my mother had any politics, they escaped my notice entirely.
Anything to do with getting a Republican elected in Chicago was an exercise in futility. Chicago politics of the time were dominated by the Democratic Kelly‑Nash machine, probably the biggest, most powerful, and most corrupt local political machine in the United States. The machine was named for Mayor Edward J. Kelly and his sidekick Pat Nash.
Under the Kelly‑Nash machine, much of the money intended for schools, city services, and Depression relief went instead into the pockets of politicians and party hangers‑on. Aldermen and precinct captains occupied fat sinecures while guaranteeing a large Democratic vote. This they did by buying votes, not always with cash but by providing residents with favors such as jobs, food, and hospital care.
Perhaps my parents liked Willkie's personality; many Americans did, and he drew great grass‑roots support. Perhaps the fact that Willkie was from Indiana pushed my father toward him.
Willkie lost. Nationwide many voters were suspicious of Republican economic policies. After all, the Republicans had been in power during the Crash of 1929 and had proven powerless in the face of the Great Depression. Voters were not about to forget that.
Moreover, the American electorate did not want to change leaders in perilous times. The German dictator Adolf Hitler had set his armies on a path to conquer Europe and had entered into mutual‑support pacts with the Japanese military and the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Mussolini's forces had conquered Ethiopia and British Somaliland and were fighting in Egypt and Greece. On the other side of the world, the eight‑year‑old Japanese invasion of Manchuria had blown up into a full‑scale war in China.
The United States, though not yet at war, was furnishing weapons to the British and was suspicious of Japanese intentions toward American territory in the Pacific. Congress had authorized conscription, known popularly as “the draft” and officially by the euphemism “Selective Service.” Thus, America's young men faced military service in a war that seemed inevitable.
18. Money Had Something to Do with It
Once a month, on a Saturday morning, my
mother and I went to Six Corners, a large shopping center on Chicago’s
northwest side. It was a trip that I
liked to make during the Christmas shopping season when I could roam through
the Sears toy department, ogling goodies that I could not have. We didn’t go to Six Corners to entertain me,
however. Money had something to do with
it.
We went so that my mother could make a payment on our loan from the Household Finance Corporation office next to Sears. The Household Finance Corporation, probably the largest consumer lending company in the nation, offered a repayment installment plan, under which a consumer loan could be repaid through regular monthly amounts rather than a lump sum on the due date. It also loaned money to people with no collateral, and our family had none—no house, no car, no furniture.
I don’t know why my mother dragged me along, but at some point, the trips ended, leaving me with Saturday to call my own.
Having touched on the subject of money, I’ll mention that no matter how badly my parents were hurting for money, they always came through with a weekly allowance for me. As I grew older and had part-time jobs, the allowance stopped, and rightfully so, but if the job stopped, the allowance restarted automatically.
They had money problems, for certain, but money woes were never a topic of conversation. They were working stiffs during the Great Depression with a kid to raise, yet they didn’t complain about their lot. It was almost as if they were shielding me from the cold, cruel world.
Besides an allowance, I had another source of income, albeit small and spotty—old men who sat on porches.
Up and down Tripp Avenue homes had front porches, and on some of those porches elderly men sat, getting fresh air. I would pass those porches on my walks to Irving Park Road. Every now and then, one of those men would beckon me up to his porch, hand me a dollar bill or a few coins, and ask me to bring him tobacco or a pack of cigarettes. I would do that, and be rewarded with maybe a nickel, sometimes as much as a quarter. A nickel doesn’t sound like much, but it was enough to pay for a Coke at the corner store.
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