Authors: Joseph Mitchell
“Dad,” interrupted Mrs. Sunday, “I think you’re tired out. I think you better go back to sleep now. You’ve talked too much today.”
“That’s right,” said the obedient evangelist. He turned over on his side and closed his eyes.
One blistering afternoon I was sitting in the dressing room of the Brooklyn Dodgers, which is reputed to be a baseball team, when John (Buddy) Hassett walked in. Mr. Hassett is twenty-five years old and he is a plumbers’ helper, a crooner and a left-handed first baseman. He lives in the Bronx and to reach Ebbets Field he had to ride one hour and twenty minutes on the subway. However, he was cheerful.
He walked to his locker, and while he pulled off his green, blue and yellow necktie and his dark blue shirt he began to croon. He crooned a favorite of his, “That’s How I Spell Ireland.” All over the dressing room ball-players began to shout and moan. Several stuck fingers in their ears, and whimpered as if in extreme pain. Ragged Bronx cheers issued from the mouths of others.
“What is that awful noise?” shouted a ballplayer in the dim recesses of the room.
“It must have been something he et,” yelled another.
“I am being haunted,” yelled another.
“Why are you so cruel to us?” yelled another.
Mr. Hassett did not pay any attention to his pained colleagues. When he finished crooning about the manner in which he is accustomed to spell Ireland
he began another song, “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” which is also one of his favorites.
When he completed that number I edged up to him and asked him some questions about his art.
“I never took a lesson,” said Mr. Hassett with pride in his voice. “I can croon and I can sing, but in the summer I generally croon.”
“Don’t you ever plan to develop this wonderful talent of yours?” he was asked.
“Why, yes indeed,” said Mr. Hassett. “I expect to take some lessons in the fall. I figure I may as well capitalize on my voice. It may be the means of making me some money. On the road with the ball club I often sing. Like when we put up at a hotel where they have an orchestra the fellows usually frame me up, and I am asked to sing, which I do. Also I sang last year at the dinner of the Baseball Writers’ Association. Also I have been on the program at many Holy Name Society affairs.”
Mr. Hassett said he began his musical career when he was a little boy. His father, John J. Hassett, former member of the Examining Board of Plumbers and Democratic leader of the Eighth Assembly District in the Bronx, used to take him to his club, the Shamrock Democratic Club, and young Hassett would stand up and sing old Irish favorites.
“They would have beer and sandwiches after the
meeting and some entertainment,” said Mr. Hassett, “and I would get up and sing. Lately, just to kid me, the members got up a petition asking me to get some new numbers.”
“I imagine you are a lover of grand opera, Mr. Hassett?” I asked.
“Can’t say I am,” said the first baseman. “I never been to one in my life. It never appealed to me. I like to relax, and you cannot relax when you have to keep looking at a little book to find out what they are singing about. My favorite singer is Bing Crosby. I like his style.
“If I was washed up in baseball I could turn to plumbing or crooning. My father is a journeyman plumber, and I hold a plumbers’ helper card in Local 463 of the Plumbers and Steamfitters Union. However, I do not like plumbing very much.”
Mr. Hassett was born in the San Juan Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, where he played sandlot baseball. He moved to the Bronx in 1925. He played baseball and basketball for Manhattan College, from which he was graduated in 1933. He played with the Shamrocks and the Bay Parkways, semi-pro teams, and immediately after the graduation exercises at Manhattan he reported to the Wheeling, West Virginia Stogies. Then he played for the Norfolk Tars. The Dodgers bought him from Newark. Casey Stengel thinks highly of his ability as a first baseman
and also likes to hear him sing “The Last Rose of Summer.”
Music is the only subject about which Mr. Hassett is talkative. He will open up about his ability as a crooner; but about other matters he is an extremely suspicious conversationalist, weighing his answers like a Yankee farmer. Sometimes he sits for hours in the dugout without uttering a word.
“It’s going to be a hot day,” I said, moving out of the blazing sun.
“Well, it might get a bit warm,” said the cautious first baseman, swinging two Louisville Sluggers to limber up his arms.
I had a bet on Joe Louis to win in the first round. I bet $1.50, and won $16 but it will not do me any good, because when Arthur Donovan counted ten I jumped up and knocked a table-lamp to the floor in my home and kicked over a cabinet in which I had a collection of Bessie Smith records, any one of which was worth $16, now that Bessie is dead and gone.
I drew the bet out of a pool made up in a saloon. It was a pool with thirty-two chances, a chance on Louis and a chance on Schmeling in each round and two decision chances. Each chance was 50 cents.
The first chance I bought was Schmeling in the
eleventh. I was disgusted because I do not admire Schmeling and never have, and even if he won I did not want to win any money on him. So I bought another. It was Schmeling in the eighth. I felt very tragic. So I bought another. That turned out to be Schmeling by a decision. Then I broke down and began to sob.
“You are a big fool,” said the proprietor of the saloon. “You haven’t got the sense God gave a billy-goat. Schmeling in the eleventh is the best chance in the pool.”
I told him it was against my principles to have a bet of any kind on Schmeling. I have always admired Joe Louis, not only because he is a great fighter, but because he never says an unnecessary word. I am not that way. I am always putting my foot in my mouth. If I am in a roomful of people and there is something that absolutely shouldn’t be said in that room, I always say it; I never miss.
So I stood there at the bar, with three chances on Schmeling, feeling very tragic and down and out. Then a copyreader who hangs out in the saloon heard I had Schmeling in the eleventh.
“You want to swap?” he asked. “I got Louis in the first.”
“Don’t say any more,” I said.
So that is how I bet on Louis in the first round. By nightfall I will be telling people that I not only
had a bet on Louis in the first round, but that I had bet on him to knock out Schmeling in two minutes and four seconds. Even now I think I am a fight expert. By next week I will be applying for Arthur Donovan’s job.
However, I wish I had not broken all of my Bessie Smith records.
The bars, poolrooms, sporting cafés, and basement cabarets of Harlem were packed tight today with loud-laughing citizens from the Negro sections of every large city in the United States, but they were all too busy shaping up their bets and making flamboyant predictions about the horrible state Max Baer will be in when Joe Louis gets through with him to shoot pool or eat fried fish.
Harlem was described as “looking like a corn patch when the fence broke down and the milk-cows got in” by Gill Holton, the Lenox Avenue gambler, who has opened and lost three cabarets since repeal closed up his famous establishment, the Broken Leg and Busted Bar & Grill, which was celebrated for a brief period in 1931 as the wildest cabaret in the Western Hemisphere.
“Way I look at it,” said Holton, who put three rubber bands around his wallet at noon and resolved to bet no more, “if Joe Louis loses this fight, every
Negro sporting man in this great country of ours will have teardrops in his eyes as big as oysters. Only an act of God will stop him from winning, like a tornado might come up and strike Yankee Stadium right in the belly, because you know and I know they will be a lot of mean people in that place tonight, and I don’t like to be in the midst of so many mean people. Like being under some trees when the lightning is striking.
“Yes, sir, unless a tornado strikes, Joe will win. When Mr. Baer stick his head out it’s going to be touched. Like a man stick his head into the dumbwaiter and a ice wagon fall on it. People up here got every cent they own put up for Joe except the money they saved to be buried with—funeral money, I mean.”
Holton stood in front of the North Carolina Barber Shop, at 424 Lenox Avenue, and gave out his predictions. One of the old bartenders, James P. Melvin, seconded him.
“When I collect my money,” said Melvin, who weighs 278 pounds in the summer and 302 in the winter, “I’m going down to 125th Street and get me a T-bone steak and one dozen little yellow yams and some chitterlings and crackling bread and a big pound cake, and then I’m going to work my way up town, stopping off at every eating place on the way until I get to 140th Street. When I get there I’m
going to call me a taxicab and go home and see what Mrs. Melvin cooked up for me.”
Every saloon in Lenox Avenue had pictures and statues of Joe Louis in the windows, except the Melon King’s Inn at No. 438. In its window was a painting of a great iceberg watermelon, dripping with red juice and black seeds, and a photograph of Haile Selassie on a white horse. There was a charcoal sketch of Louis in the Southern-Oriental Café, at No. 386, and the sketch was offered as a prize to the one who thought up the best four-word title for it. Salesmen walked the streets selling little plaster casts of Louis, painted bronze, and a bent old man stood in front of the Big Apple, the most popular rendezvous of sporting figures, at 2300 Seventh Avenue, selling a life of Joe Louis.
At the Brittwood Bar and Grill, 594 Lenox Avenue, there was a big sign across the front, “Only Official Headquarters for Detroit Boosters’ Club.” Inside, sitting in booths, were a group of the wealthiest Negro real estate and pressing-club owners in the Middle West.
They were drinking straight rye and slapping each other on the back. One man had a wad of bills big enough to choke a dragon and at intervals shouted, “He’ll go into the ring even up, but now it’s 7 to 5. Bring me a drink of Old Taylor.”
“Wait to tonight,” said Fred D. Hudson, the manager.
“Everybody up here’ll be full of beefsteak and beer, and the boys will be laying bets on fights which won’t happen until 1939.”
Hudson’s establishment is the headquarters of Jack Johnson, the former heavyweight champion, who now wears a blue beret and drinks Bourbon through a straw. Johnson was at home getting in plenty of sleep today, but he is scheduled to appear at the Brittwood at dinner time to make his prediction concerning the round in which Louis will knock Baer into the deepest part of the Harlem River.
Before the fight with Primo Carnera the former Negro champion said he thought Carnera would win, but now he is for Louis, although Louis has made it plain that Johnson’s opinion does not interest him.
In the Harlem beauty parlors the romance between Louis and Miss Marva Trotter was discussed endlessly and crowds waited for her to show up at the Big Apple, but she went into hiding.
“The luckiest girl in the world is the way I figure her,” said Mabel Gillmore, tapdancer and blues singer, who sat in the Big Apple and entertained the out-of-town sports with backroom tales. “I sure do feel sorry for Mr. Baer. Joe sure going to knock his eyeteeth out. Time he get through with that man he won’t eat no breakfast for months and months. Dinner either.”
The icy wind ripped across City Hall Park and the shawled, heavily bundled woman who sits all night beside the newsstand at the west stairway of the elevated terminal at Brooklyn Bridge reached over and threw a stick of wood into the blazing fire she keeps burning in an old oil drum.
At midnight, the wind blew color into the faces of undernourished men hurrying along Park Row for the scratch houses, the quarter-a-night hotels on the Bowery. It pushed against swinging signs above the streets and made them creak.
At 2 A.M. a homeless man walked into the Municipal Lodging House and was given the last cot in the pier-shed annex. Under the city’s faded khaki blankets, 4,524 homeless men escaped the windy streets.
At 2:30 A.M. a man walked into the tiled hallway
of a Bowery hotel, tilted a pint bottle, grunted, savagely threw the bottle toward the gutter, and walked up the stairway to the second-floor hotel.
The Bowery was not deserted. Men with newspaper-covered bundles stood in hallways. In a white-tiled hamburger establishment hollow-eyed night workers sat on counter stools eating and reading newspapers at the same time.
In a coffeepot—a place which advertises, “We do not use stale coffee bags”—a crowd of taxi drivers sat drinking coffee and muttering at one another. The cold night made them irritable.
In Washington Market, under the hanging electric lights of the produce sheds, men and women examined with numb fingers the contents of refuse cans.
“It’s a bad night for them,” said a commission merchant, lighting his frayed cigar. “Vegetables don’t go bad in cold weather. The market hawks will have a tough time filling their baskets tonight.”
Except for two melancholy policemen, the wind-cleaned streets of Chinatown were deserted. In a basement restaurant in Mott Street, kept open at night for curiosity-seeking citizens, four girls and a man sat around a table reading tabloid newspapers. An Italian cook, dirty-aproned and drowsy-eyed, leaned against the swinging door leading to the kitchen and smoked a cigarette.
One of the girls applied cosmetics to her face, got
up, said, “I’ll be seeing you,” and left. The other persons around the table did not look up from their newspapers.