BACK-ALLEY BOY WITH CHEEK
When I was but a small kid my mom used to read a lot. I do not remember exactly what she read, except for “Cheaper by The Dozen”, “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn”, and “The Egg and I”, and one special one: “Barefoot Boy with Cheek.” I am not really sure what this expression means, but I think it has something to do with a youngster who is a bit of a Ragga Muffin with some sort of “attitude.’ I have always taken this title to heart because I think it reflects my early years as a kid who was largely on his own in the back-alleys of a small town. The year was 1938 and I was five. Here’s how it all went down.
My Mom divorced my dad when I was about one and tried to make it on her own during the Great Depression with me taggin’ along. She made multiple sandwiches for beer parlors and pool halls and farmed me out to different families who needed some extra income during those especially hard times. She married again, but soon gave that up also, and we went to living in a one-room apartment above the small sandwich shop she managed. I stayed pretty close to home for the first couple of years living there but began to roam around in town once I reached school age. I did not do well at school and did not get along there either.
One summer day when I was about five my Mom gave me a nickel to spend as I liked. I went a couple of blocks down to the corner store and bought a small candy bar. As I was walking back to the hotel I passed a tavern, interestingly enough it was named “The Blue Moon”. I should explain that in those days it was not uncommon for kids to frequent taverns during the daytime. I went in, sat at the empty counter and ordered a milkshake, completely forgetting that I had already spent my nickel on the candy. When the man brought the milkshake, I realized my mistake and confessed that I did not have any money. The man decided to have some fun with me and went straight to the phone and said “Get me the police.”
I was scared to death, jumped off the stool and ran all the way back to the hotel. Later my Mom assured me that the man was only teasing me. Nevertheless, after that whenever I walked down that street, I was careful to cross to the other side so as not to be seen by the man in the tavern. This was my initial foray into the adult world and although it did not sit well, I soon gained the confidence to wander the streets of our small-town seeking adventure. Across the street was a small, cheap movie theater called “The People’s Theater”, and I soon learned I could get in there to see a cowboy movie for a nickel. I guess I went to the “Peeps”, as it was called, almost every day while my Mom was working. They soon simply let me in for free because I came so often.
As I wandered around the streets of our town of about 30,000 people, I made many discoveries, such as the town dump, and played there fairly often, looking for treasures, etc. but never acquiring anything very special, except, unfortunately, dirty pants and some bad smells. We had one street that was double in size so that some now-out -of- use railroad trains could make their way through town. I was afraid to walk across this wide street by myself. Fortunately, some independent moving-vans were parked in the middle of the street and when one of the guys in one of them would see me he would come to the corner, take my hand and walk me across. He did so on my way back as well. Even though I was pretty much on my own in the town, I was well known and cared for. Indeed, as I was to find out years later, nearly everyone in town knew who I was.
I used to prowl around in the five-and-dime stores to pass the time. Whenever I saw some item, like toy soldiers, cars, or tiny sports dolls I would pocket a couple for my play time back at the hotel. Once or twice, when she discovered my stashes, my Mom took me to the appropriate store and waited at the door while I went up to the manager, handed over my sack of toys, said I was , sorry, but I never really believed it. I was never punished for this sort of thing and I’m not sure why. Eventually I outgrew my interest in small toys.
When I was about ten my Mom became the manager of the coffee shop of the largest hotel in town, The Bellingham, and we moved there to live in another one-room apartment. Moving to that hotel opened a goldmine of opportunity for a young “prowler” like me. First off, the Bellingham Hotel was 13 stories high and I had a great time running the elevator by myself when old Mr. Sanger was off-shift. Secondly, the hotel had several banquet rooms which lay idle most of the time, and I spent many hours in them building forts and tunnels amongst their chairs and tables. Most importantly, there was an indoor garage connected to the hotel and I had a great time climbing down into the stacked used tires and annoying the various drivers with my strange yelps and whistles when they came and went in the garage.
I wedged a small piece of wood between two tires about halfway down in the stack so I could see the people coming and going in the garage. Most of them simply ignored me, but once a particular driver was curious about the sounds I was making and came straight over to inspect the tire stack. I was, of course, petrified that he would push the stack over or report me to the management. I remained very still while he poked around and then left. It was quite a while before I had the courage to crawl back up and out of the tire stack. Naturally, as usual, I got very filthy crawling around amongst the dirty, used tires. My Mom somehow rarely noticed my appearance. She was always very busy running a large hotel restaurant.
The hotel also had a small malt shop just off the lobby, and this is where I ate most of my meals. Burgers and fries were my main source of food, especially when I was eating lunch. From time to time, I ate dinner or lunch in the main dining room with my Mom. One day in the malt shop I discovered Bromo-Seltzer envelopes which foamed up big-time when you swished them back and forth from one glass to another like a soda-jerk. I thought this was a very cool adventure and so I managed to down at least one, if not two, Bromo-Seltzer “shakes” every day. From the malt-shop I also copped various advertising signs and empty cigar boxes for which I never devised a purpose. They sat around in the corner of our room until my Mom got tired of them and threw them out. One special item was a life-sized cardboard Phillip Morris “Johnnie” bellboy. He stood in our room for several months.
Perhaps the greatest thing about living in the hotel was that once a year my Mom held my birthday parties in the ballroom, inviting all my Junior High classmates there to eat, play games, and pretend we were dancing. Most of the time there was no one “supervising” the chaos and so we were able to play “spin the bottle” and sneak in some adolescent kisses. In the years we were not living in the Hotel my Mom often set these parties up at other establishments, mostly at restaurants and the YWCA. These forays and escapades made me very popular with my classmates. I found out later on that several of their parents were pretty suspicious of these parties, but they never really kept their kids from attending.
Near bye to the hotel there was a very large empty lot pretty much covered over with small trees and a huge briar patch of some kind of berries. I discovered that if I brought large cardboard boxes into the patch, I could use them both as protection against the thorns as I would force my way into the deep center of the patch and also as the walls of the fort I built within the maze of branches and briars. Of course, while building this fort I did get scratched up a good deal, but it was a lot of fun building the fort and even more fun pretending to be carrying out warfare from within it. Unfortunately, I had no opponents against whom wage the war, but it was easy to pretend. As usual, I engaged in such enterprises by myself. However, I was never lonely nor discouraged. My imagination seemed to carry me along.
My other major form of entertainment was attending the local movie theaters. There were five such establishments in our small town: the Mt. Baker, the Grand, the American, the Avalon, and the People’s. I knew each of these places like the back of my hand, visiting at least one of them every week all during my childhood. While we lived in the Bellingham Hotel, we were right across the street from the Mt. Baker and I must have gone to the movies there at least every week. I actually remember seeing “Gone with The Wind” there when I was about six years old and being shocked by the fact that it was the first movie with an Intermission. The usher had to inform my uncle Dale, who was two years older, and me of this as we were fixing to leave. Of course, we stayed for the rest, even though we hardly understood any of it, except for Clark Gable’s shocking statement: “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
As I grew older the movie theaters continued to offer ever more creative challenges to a young alley kid. On Friday nights there was always a long line of folks waiting to get in after they had bought their tickets. I would slip into the line in front of a family and when I got to the usher I would point back over my shoulder and say “Dad’s got the tickets”. Then it was a small matter of quickly disappearing into the crowd. It worked every single time. During the war years we had a friend named Howard Hawks, the same name as a famous film director at that time. We would all wait for his name to come up on screen just before the movie started and then we would stand up, along with Howard, and cheer loudly.
Another gambit we often used was to ask the usher at the front door if we could look for our sister because our Mom was sick. After looking we would walk out saying “Thanks. We couldn’t find her.” While looking we would slip behind the curtain in front of the side door and wedge a hat or newspaper into the lock. On the way out we always thanked the usher. Then we would go out into the alley and carefully slip into the theater through the door we had rigged open. This almost always worked like a charm, though you could not use this trick too often.
Another angle on this trick was to slip a magazine or hat in the door of the upstairs balcony at the Mt. Baker theater that led out onto the second story of the fire-escape. Once when I had done this I went out to the fire-escape to discover over a dozen guys waiting there to sneak in. Very carefully they went in, one at a time, slipping into the darkness. When it came to be my turn, the usher caught me by the shoulder and marched me down to the manager’s office. He was very angry and said “We’ve caught the ring leader”. When he turned his back to call the police, I shot out the door, across the lobby, and ran all the way home in the dark. It was a long time before I visited that theater again.
When I entered high school “I put away childish things”. Actually, not quite. One Friday night we found a way to sneak into the Playland Amusement Park in nearbye Seattle. We had siphoned some gas out of someone’s car into our own so we could drive the 100 miles from our hometown in Bellingham to Seattle. This was a usual way to obtain gas in those days when you were operating on a small budget. In all these escapades I learned a lot about how to get bye in the alleys and back streets of my hometown. When a senior in high school I “got religion” and may have completely changed my ways.