Low Man on a Totem Pole

by H Allen Smith

 

Chapter 1
How to Become a Journalist

When I waswaswas five years old I fell head downwaward into an empty cistern and was not found until six hours later, at which time I was quietly eating dirt. The year after that I fell out of a neighbor's barn loft. These experiences constitute an adequate preparation for a career in journalism -- the equivalent of four years in college.

There was nothing remarkable about the fall into the cistern, beyond the fact that it didn't kill me, but I lay claim to a certain juvenile celebrity for the barn-loft plunge. In this case I landed head downward in a large bucket filled with broken beer bottles. I still bear several scars on my scalp and one over my right eyebrow as a consequence of this adventure.

Those two dry dives are almost all I can remember about life in McLeansboro, a little town in the southern part of Illinois, where I was born. The date of my birth was December 19, 1907, and I did not learn of its significance until I had passed thirty. I now know that December 19 is a fairly wonderful day to be born. The Romans had a god of seed corn called Saturn, and December 19 was his day -- the day of the Saturnalia. On this great festival all business, public and private, was closed down. Executions and military operations were called off. Slaves were freed for the day and were permitted to sound off as much as they chose. The Romans hailed one another by saying "io Saturnalia!" and expensive presents were exchanged. Gambling with dice, generally forbidden, was permitted, poker not having been invented. Everybody got cockeyed drunk and slept with everybody else's wives if they felt like it. That's my day.

I know of no other circumstance connected with my birth which has any significance, except that barbed wire also came out of Illinois, having been invented at DeKalb some years before my time.

By the time I was nine we were living in Decatur, which is Abe Lincoln country, and my mother had decided it was time to guide me into a career. She chose it for me. She decided that I should be a telegrapher. She sent away to a mail-order house for a sounder, a key, some batteries and a manual of the Morse code. Then she put me to work at it, just as other mothers goad their kids into practice at the piano.

I never really learned to distinguish between a dot and a dash, though in after years I often caught myself wishing my mother had succeeded. I have known a lot of telegraph operators. With a few exceptions, they are a noble and profligate breed. They get drunk and gamble and kick hell out of their wives and live most of the time according to the Morris Plan. They have a wonderful, ingenious code which they employ in calling each other obscene names across great distances. They have a good time.

But my mother was too busy to keep me bent over the magic key. From 1900 on she was turning out Smiths at an alarming rate, and, having turned them out, it was quite a job to keep them in clothes, keep the clothes washed, feed them and, most important of all, bring them up in the Catholic Church.

Before the current was turned off there were nine children. They all inherit a magnificent sense of responsibility from my father who when he grows weary of life at home drops out of sight for three or four months at a stretch and finally comes home with wondrous tales of adventure.

After a few years in Decatur the family moved to Defiance, O., where I ate my first oyster and tried parting my hair in the middle, and in 1919 we forsook Defiance for Huntington, Ind. This is the town where I entered the newspaper business and was arrested for a wonderful crime against society.

My father fed buttermilk to chickens in a poultry house, and during one summer I had a job there, helping pick the chickens he had fattened. This is one of the most god-awful jobs in the whole category of industry, for it involves wallowing in blood and feathers and the personal accumulation of chicken lice. I loved it.

I loved it because of Eunice. She was one of the twenty-odd men and women employed in the picking room. She was, to my way of thinking, a very beautiful young woman. She labored at a chicken line not far from my own, and my work suffered from my inability to concentrate on pin feathers in her presence. I used to gaze cow-eyed at her, standing there, so cute in her blood-caked, feather-crusted old apron, scratching gracefully wherever the indiscreet lice might be crawling, and I used to vow to myself that someday I would marry her.

I attended St. Mary's parochial school but, thinking back now, I can't recall that I ever learned anything. To this day I scarcely know the difference between long division and short division and I was twenty-five years old before I ever heard of copulative verbs.

In those days I was an altar boy, serving Mass regularly, although, to be truthful about it, I never had the remotest idea what et cum spiritu tuo meant. It was the custom at St. Mary's for the altar boys to receive cash gratuities after serving at a wedding or a funeral. A wedding was usually worth a dollar and a half to each boy, whereas a funeral brought two dollars and a half. I can remember that the serious illness of a prominent member of the parish always filled me with a certain exultation and on more than one occasion I prayed fervently for death to strike swiftly because I needed dough.

The behavior of altar boys in the Middle West is traditional. Almost every man who ever served Mass will admit that when the service was over it was a custom for the acolytes to sneak back of the altar and drain off the few drops of wine the priest may have left in the cruet. A good many altar boys will confess, too, that at one time or another they snitched a quarter or so from the collection basket after it had been brought into the sacristy. I did these things, but they got me into no trouble, and when I confessed them I was simply given my penance to do and told to desist. My trouble came when I undertook to revitalize the serving of the Mass.

A boy named Theodore was usually my partner in serving Mass, and we were assigned to the seven-thirty service on Sundays. One day the thought came to me that the ceremony needed brightening up, that altar boys had been serving Mass in the same old way for hundreds of years and that the ritual was getting stuffy with age.

I sounded out Theodore and was able to convince him that I had a praiseworthy scheme. For two or three days we worked together in secret, perfecting a fresh technique. Then one Sunday morning we popped it on the parish.

The new system was not given an amiable reception. It was, in fact, roundly condemned. Theodore and I had not tipped anyone off. Even Father Murphy didn't know what was coming.

From the very beginning of the service Theodore and I ran counter to tradition. We executed double genuflections when we came together in front of the altar -- quick, precise bobbings instead of the old, more dignified single genuflections. When we stood together at the side of the altar with the cruets containing water and wine we were not content to pass them on to Father Murphy's hands as he indicated his wants. We had little crisscrossings of arms and we managed to clink the cruets musically. The whole business was fancied up, and the congregation sat wall-eyed as Theodore and I caracoled and swooped and did little dance steps about the altar. It was the last Mass I ever served.

I had not yet reached my sixteenth birthday when I went to work in Neil Ashley's six-chair barbershop on Market Street. My job was to shine shoes, sweep up hair and operate a wonderful machine which sharpened old safety razor blades. Mr. Ashley had this contrivance set up in the front window of his shop. In appearance it was like a lathe and it sharpened old blades at the rate of eight in a single operation. It never occurred to me that Mr. Ashley, by purchasing this machine and installing it in his shop, was engaged on a project aimed at destroying himself. The machine posed a pretty problem in higher economics, but I never understood economics anyway.

One afternoon I was feeding old razor blades to the machine and enjoying my situation there in the window, for all the world to see, when a customer announced that he wanted his shoes shined. I switched off the sharpener and hurried back to the shoeshine chair because all income from that direction was clear profit for me.

My shine customer was Donnelly Sullivan. I knew him because he was courting my oldest sister. He had attended Notre Dame for a year or two and he was a wonderful liar. Every time I came into his presence he began telling stories of his football experiences at Notre Dame -- how Rock told him this and George Gipp told him that and how he had run eighty-two yards to a touchdown. I never believed a word of it.

As I worked on his shoes I carried on a friendly conversation with him and casually asked him where he was working.

"Didn't you hear?" he asked. "I'm a reporter now -- over at the Huntington Press."

So far as I can recall, I hadn't read a book up to that time but I must have read something somewhere that had given me the notion that reporters were the most glamorous souls operating on earth. I know I was immensely thrilled with the knowledge that I was shining the shoes of a real reporter and that, moreover, this real reporter was in love with my own sister. I must have indicated the nature of my thoughts, for he said:

"How would you like to be a reporter?"

That prospect was more remote than the presidency of Guatemala, but I hadn't reckoned on how much Mr. Sullivan adored my sister. He told me I would hear from him later, and within a week I was summoned to the offices of the Huntington Press, a morning daily. I was hired to read proof on both news and ad copy at a wage of three dollars a week.

Within a month I was being sent around to hay stores to collect personal items about farmers, and not long after that they gave me the job of covering undertakers.

There were three undertaking parlors in Huntington, and I had to visit each of them twice daily. The composition of obituary notices and funeral

reports was a simple matter, all done by formula, and the important part of the job was to get the correct spelling of names. Hell hath no fury like that of an honorary pallbearer whose name has been misspelled in the newspaper.

Late one afternoon I walked into one of the undertaking parlors and found the front office deserted. By this time my identity was known around the place, so I poked about and finally saw a light shining through the crack of a door in the rear of the building. I walked back through two rows of caskets and pushed open the door of the little room where the light was burning.

I saw Joe Poore, the old embalmer, bending over the naked corpse of a little old man, a man with chin whiskers, a body that seemed extraordinarily white below his leathery face and clothed in nothing save socks and heavy work shoes.

"Come in," said Joe Poore. I swallowed a couple of times and moved into the room.

Joe was a big man whose face was always flushed and who wheezed noisily whenever he moved about. He was wheezing and puffing now as he made his way to the foot of the embalming bier.

"Charlie Miller," he said, indicating the body. "Farmer out near Markle. I've knowed him since he was a boy. Went to school with him. Out ridin' a hay tedder this mornin'. God-damn horse run away with him. Wheel hit a rock. Threw Charlie off and broke his neck."

Through this disconnected narrative Joe busied himself removing Charlie Miller's shoes. As he pulled off the first sock he straightened up and glowered in the direction of the little farmer's head. Then he said:

"Charlie, you old son of a bitch, why didn't you warsh your feet!"

True enough, Charlie Miller's feet were dirty -- black dirty. But he had been working in the fields, and his dirty feet didn't shock me nearly so much as did Joe's behavior. But old Joe had to wash those feet and he was infuriated, cursing Charlie Miller with a fine Midwestern eloquence. While he cursed and sponged I edged toward the door and soon escaped to the street. I was sick.

This little experience made me ashamed of myself. After all, I was a reporter and I was supposed to be hard and unflinching. I decided that the best way to cure myself of this squeamishness would be to see Joe Poore at work more often. Before long I had even become a sort of helper to Joe, running the pump, handing him his tools and listening to his wonderful conversations with the dead. He knew everybody in the county and he loved to talk to them as he prepared them for the tomb.

"Bill," he would say to a corpse, "you never got it, did you? Never got all that money. That dirty son-of-a-bitch wife of yourn, she'll get it now, won't she, Bill?"

I learned a lot about people in that little room.

Joe Poore was a rabid Democrat, and it was a lovely experience to attend the embalming of a lifelong Republican at his hands. Contemplating an over-dormant Republican, Joe achieved oratorical heights not equaled even on the floor of the United States Senate. His cussing was impure beauty. I choose to let your imagination consider it while I move on to the celebrated "Stranded on a Davenport" case.

 

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