No Fixed Address

By John I. Brooks

The Great Depression was a devastating historical event that affected everyone around the world. No one was spared as people of wealth plunged into the depths of real poverty, experienced homelessness and hunger in the hard times and unrelieved combat that lasted for years. Author John I. Brooks shares his memories as a child growing up during the Depression where many experienced No Fixed Address.

No Fixed Address is a memoir of the Depression, World War II and the events that mark the beginning of the nations postwar transformation. The author takes the reader on a journey through those times in Chicago, Southern California and New York City. His fascinating true account focuses on the struggles and joys of ordinary families in an extraordinary time. But always in the background are the massive changes taking place in the life and culture of Americans as their old world vanished and a new one was born. These seismic shifts continue to influence our lives today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 29, 2008
• ISBN: 9781462800810

Book preview

No Fixed Address

John I. Brooks

Copyright © 2008 by John Irwin Brooks.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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This is a remarkable book.

It relates the normal experiences of the author throughout childhood, through the teen years, to adulthood. Small details of everyday living are recalled with incredible accuracy. Seldom does one find a book which can quote conversations and happenings in such a realistic way.

Indeed, it takes us through the jazz age, the depression and the postwar era and lets us relive our own experiences. The author is modest about his adult years as a reporter, university professor, and staff member on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

Lillian Brown

Professor and Lecturer Georgetown University, Yale Women’s

Campaign School, George Washington University.

No Fixed Address makes for easy and compelling reading. I especially enjoyed the portrait of Swarthmore College during the war years and the stories about Auden, of course. The book gives a good sense of life in the U.S. during the ’30s and ’40s (and a little about the postwar years, too) in ways that are equally vivid and valuable.

I’d like to add the book to Swarthmore College’s McCabe library collection.

Peter Schmidt

Professor of English Literature and Department Chair

Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania

Jack helped me greatly in analyzing legislation, as well as making recommendations as to how I would probably want to vote for various amendments—and in some bills there were multitudes of amendments. His recommendations always had in mind my basic philosophy.

It meant a lot to me that Jack and I were such good friends.

Harry F. Byrd, Jr.

U.S. Senator, Virginia

Jack Brooks has penned an entertaining, yet poignant memoir of growing up not only during hard times, but under conditions that could have had devastating results for his life. He vividly captures the big city life for kids of little means and unflinchingly lays out what must have been wrenching relationships for a young person desperately wanting to have a normal family relationship. There has been a recent glut of depression era memoirs published, most of which are a good read, but this one stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Ed Speare

Woodbridge, Virginia

Contents

Prologue

One Wally and Vee

Two Grandma Mason’s

Three Roads to Chicago

Four Sandcastles and Bums

Five Ravinia

Six End of the Rainbow

Seven Depression Normality

Eight City Streets

Nine Farewell to Knickers

Ten Danny

Eleven Eastward Again

Twelve Gotham

Thirteen Miss Flynn, Parents, Teachers, and Friends . . .

Fourteen Beverly High

Fifteen Clarinet Days

Sixteen La Guerre

Seventeen Postwar

Eighteen Commencing

Nineteen Later Days

Dedication

To Rena

For her love and support

Superior Shorthand was the actual name of an enterprise. Names of persons affiliated with this enterprise have been changed to protect the innocent, even though no one in this book is accused of criminal activity and all persons associated with Superior, if alive today, would be over 100 years old as of this year.

The names of certain other persons also have been changed to avoid any embarrassment.

The reader is cautioned to keep in mind that in large part, this book records the thoughts and observations of a child and teenager. What could be verified has been; what could not is my responsibility.

John I. (Jack) Brooks

June 7, 2007

Prologue

After the divorce was final, my mother spent a lot of time in the old claw-foot bathtub at my grandmother’s flat, soaking in warm water, trying to dissolve her anger and sorrow. She had frequent painful headaches and the beginnings of the colitis that was to stay with her for the nearly forty years remaining in her life.

I know I’ve been dumb about this, she told her parents, but I just couldn’t believe Wally would go through with it.

We had moved to Grandma Mason’s just a few weeks earlier. The alimony checks wouldn’t stretch to meet the rent my mother was paying on Kenmore Street, about five miles north of her parents’ place near Wrigley Field. It was 1935, and jobs were scarcer than champagne dinners, so there was nothing to do but surrender to necessity and move in with her mother and father. Of course this was an arrangement that pleased no one, but not an unusual one in the Chicago of the depressed thirties. Doubled up families—and other crowded, improvised living arrangements—could be found from the South Side ghettos to middle-class neighborhoods like my grandmother’s on Rokeby Street.

Only a year earlier, my mother, my father, and I had been living in a rented chalet-style house in the northern suburb of Ravinia. My parents had a live-in maid, drove about in a huge blue Graham Page touring car, and threw big parties for their friends. Sometimes I could hear my father and mother quarrelling after I went to bed, but that had been going on for some time, and at the age of seven I drew no dire conclusions from these adult noises. After all, in the morning, everything seemed to be all right.

Then quite suddenly on a spring evening, my mother announced that she and I were taking a trip to California. A few more days and we were on the Sunset Limited to orange blossom country.

We came back to Chicago in September, and for months my mother carried on a spirited campaign to bring her estranged husband back to the roost. To no avail. Wallace Brooks was totally charmed by a new love, and not a little taken with his bachelor status.

When I spent time with my father, I would ask him, When are you going to come home, Dad?

Your mother asked you to say that, didn’t she? he would respond.

Of course she had, and I would confess. But I would add, truthfully, that I too wanted him at home.

Nevertheless, events marched relentlessly onward, the split became permanent, and my mother wound up in Grandma’s bathtub.

She was not the only one in distress. Our move to Rokeby Street came only two months before the end of the school term, and it was deemed unwise to have me change schools at that point. So each weekday morning I’d trudge to the bus stop and ride the Sheridan Road bus northward to Swift Elementary School, where I was coming close to flunking the third grade. I so despised this routine that I invented illnesses to stay home and once tore my only two clean shirts so that I’d have nothing to wear. My mother, knowing a trauma when she saw one, let me get away with this behavior. Finally the school term ended, and my mother managed to pull herself together. She declared that she had saved enough for two tickets to Los Angeles, and we were headed back to Southern California.

It’s time to begin a new life, my mother said.

It was to be the first of many new lives.

One

Wally and Vee

One Saturday when I was ten years old, I asked my mother’s approval to go with my friends to the Saturday matinee at the Vogue movie house on Broadway, a few blocks from our apartment on Cornelia Avenue. For reasons long forgotten, she said no, which was unusual for her in such matters. I felt a grave injustice was being done.

Golly, Mom, why can’t I? I said in my best schoolboy whine.

What did you say?

I said, why can’t I?

No, before that.

Nothing, I said, mystified.

You said ‘golly.’

Oh, that. Yeah, I guess I did.

Don’t talk that way, please.

Why not? What’s wrong? It’s not dirty, is it?

She laughed. No, Jack, it’s not dirty. It’s hayseed.

Something clicked in my head, something from a film or radio show in which some rural types went to the big city and became objects of derision for their bumpkin ways.

You mean like farm people? I asked.

That’s right. Like farmers. Farmers are good people, most of them, but you’re not growing up in the cornfields. This is Chicago.

I don’t remember if I got to go the movies, but I decided I’d better count the blessings of being urban.

Among the younger generations in the 1920s and 1930s in Chicago, nothing was more disgraceful than to be perceived as a hick. Just as New York and the other great Eastern Seaboard cities either ignored Chicago or derided it as a semicivilized outpost of America, in Chicago itself scorn was heaped on those who grew up with mud between their toes. The rest of the nation apparently concurred because professional comedians in the thirties and forties still capitalized on the perceived dim-wittedness of the agrarian population with such portrayals as Red Skelton’s Clem Kadiddlehopper and Edgar Bergen’s Mortimer Snerd.

One of the ironies of this attitude was that most Chicagoans came from families that in recent generations had lived either on farms or in small communities. Not a few, indeed, had themselves walked the fields west and south of Chicago in their years of youth. The ambitious among those who had fled the countryside were anxious to shed their rural history; the more recent the history, the greater the determination to shake it off.

So in 1923, when Wally Brooks blew in from Nebraska and Arizona by way of Kansas, replete with rural mannerisms but burning with ambition, he decided that he needed instruction in city ways. It was Wally’s urge to become citified that brought him into the world of Vee Mason, a twenty-year-old dropout from Wendell Phillips High School, daytime stenographer, and evening dance instructor who was destined to become my mother.

Vee was a self-created nickname. Violet Lorraine Mason disliked her first name, which to her seemed to drip with Victorian sentimentality. Her parents resolutely clung to it, largely because it had been given to her by her maternal grandfather, who on seeing her in his daughter’s arms for the first time said, Why, she’s like a little violet. But the nickname Vee, vetoed at home, was more successful in the world of her peers in that dawn of the Jazz Age, with girls calling one another Skippy and Bootsie. So it was Vee the Flapper that Wally Brooks encountered when he ventured into a South Side ballroom dance school to acquire some urban polish.

They would have made a handsome couple. My father, tall and blonde with piercing blue eyes, must have drawn admiring glances from many of the girls, and my mother, pretty with her happy eyes and ready laugh, would have charmed many of the swain. That evening, however, did not produce love at first sight. What it did produce was a lot of frustration for the spunky dance instructor who drew Wallace Brooks as her pupil. Try as she might, Vee Mason could not get this newcomer to listen to the beat of the music or loosen his stiff movements. I guess I have two left feet, Wally Brooks told her. She didn’t argue.

But Wally was not easily discouraged. He came back for more instruction, and more, and more again. In time he improved, and while never a smooth dancer, he managed to learn enough not to embarrass himself—and to avoid any fancy new steps that came into vogue. He always asked for Vee when he came to the dancing school, and as the weeks went by they got into conversations not related to terpsichorean skills. They must have found they had a lot in common: neither had finished high school, but my father was taking correspondence courses, and my mother read omnivorously. Both were seized by large and specific ambitions, including high incomes, spacious homes, flashy cars, and sophisticated friends. At the time they had none of these things, and I suppose an objective view of their situation would not have shown much prospect of their acquiring them.

The Mason family of East Sixty-fourth Street was typical of the recently rural and small-town families populating the South Side that, while far from prosperous, were comfortably ensconced in the city’s middle class and pleased not to be on the lone prairie. Harry and Laura Mason lived in several South Side apartments with their daughter before they migrated to the North Side in the midthirties. My grandfather worked as a dispatcher for the electrical repair crews that maintained the city’s power lines and street lights, a job that paid a modest but secure salary. In just a few years, the security of this position would keep them from the devastation of a national economic collapse.

In 1923, however, no one was thinking about a collapse. Rudy Valee and Russ Columbo serenaded the nation, and Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks treated their audiences to silent love and adventure. Hapless Warren Harding died, and Calvin Coolidge moved into the White House to keep everyone cool. Heroes like Babe Ruth and Red Grange thrilled the sports fans while the stock market was making instant paper millionaires of young men who had not a clue how to manage wealth. An upbeat, almost-euphoric mood took hold of much of the country. Even Harry and Laura Mason, raised in a tradition that didn’t hold with investments riskier than a passbook savings account, took a mad fling by putting a portion of their savings in into General Motors stock. And Wally Brooks, before toiling by night in the mailroom of the Chicago Tribune, prepared for the great future awaiting him with hours of studying little brown-covered textbooks he purchased from the Benjamin Franklin Institute.

Years later, when I was attending high school, I found those little books in my grandparents’ bookcase (I always wondered how they got there, but I never asked). They proved to be remarkable little capsules of knowledge, covering essentials of mathematics, economics, business law, accounting, and a host of other disciplines with practical applications. Whenever possible, Wally stole an evening from work and study to court his dance teacher. After a month or two my mother decided it was time for her new boyfriend to meet her parents, so Wally made an appearance at the Mason apartment.

My father’s introduction to my grandparents took place about three years before I was born, but I have no difficulty envisioning the scene. My father is dressed in his only suit, cheap but spotless and creased. My mother and father enter, she makes the introductions, my father shakes hands firmly and speaks the customary pleasantries in a voice a bit louder than the urban middle-class average. When everyone is seated in the dark north-facing living room, my father’s cross-examination begins in earnest.

My grandmother understands that he is from the West, but just where was his home? Phoenix, Arizona? Isn’t that in a desert? Who was his father? A Presbyterian minister! At this point, my mother has to struggle to suppress an attack of the giggles. She knows three things: first, her boyfriend thinks he has just scored points because of the strict upbringing assumed to be given to children of the clergy; second, however, her mother, although sincerely devout, has no use for men of the cloth; and third, my father was a hell-raising kid who hadn’t been in a church in years. My grandmother wants to know if this young man has brothers or sisters. Seven of them, she is told, and for once my grandmother is speechless. Sounds more like Catholics, she thinks to herself.

Then comes the sticking point. What is my father’s business, or as my grandmother would probably have put it, "What do you do?" What he does is sweat in the Tribune mailroom. But I have every confidence that my father finds a way to dress up his occupation. Perhaps he says, I’m in circulation at the Trib. And he doesn’t stop there. He tells of having worked at the Arizona Republic in Phoenix and Sunset magazine in San Francisco (both true, although the positions were menial), and he laces his narrative of days in the City by the Bay with descriptions of some posh hotels and swanky restaurants.

Laura Mason becomes quiet. Soon she makes her way to the kitchen to finish dinner preparations. Her husband offers Wally a Pabst Blue Ribbon, which is accepted, and the two men chat about the Cubs’ chances for the pennant. Grover Cleveland Alexander is on his way to winning more than twenty games for the North Side team, but the hitting is not holding up, and Wally Brooks and Harry Mason conclude that this isn’t the year, a situation that had prevailed since 1907 and 1908 when the Cubs won consecutive World Series (this situation still prevails in 2007). Vee listens briefly to the talk, then leaves to help her mother bring dinner to the huge mahogany dining room table. The subsequent dinner conversation is light and topical, but my grandmother is observing closely her daughter’s latest favorite.

Afterward, Vee and Wally go to the movies, and when she returns home, her parents are asleep. So it is over coffee the next morning, at a small breakfast table covered with fragrant oilcloth, that Laura Mason delivers her verdict.

Violet, do you realize that your friend Wally acts like a cowboy? He talks too loud, and his table manners are awful. He practically eats peas with a knife. And what is this circulation job he talks about? I’ll bet he delivers to the paper boys. Thus begins a lifelong animosity between my grandmother and my father.

Vee Mason did not allow her mother’s disapproval to derail her romance. She decided to abandon her dance instruction job to spend evenings with Wally when he was not at work in the mailroom, but kept the secretarial job that made it possible for her to buy her own clothes and meet other expenses while she continued to live with her parents. When her boyfriend got the advertising job, the couple set the date. With his new prosperity, my father even managed a small diamond engagement ring. Shortly afterward, on January 3, 1925, Violet Mason and Wallace Brooks were married. They moved into a small apartment a little over a mile from my grandparents’ home.

Exactly eighteen months later, early in the morning of Saturday, July 3, 1926, I made my appearance at Washington Park Hospital. The era of drive-through obstetrics being several decades in the future, my mother and I were allowed to luxuriate in the maternity ward for a few days before I was taken home to 1818 East Seventy-second Street in the heart of Chicago’s South Shore section. Or at least that is the address on my birth certificate. I have no memory of the place.

What I do remember is Grandmother Mason’s place on East Sixty-fourth Street, just about a mile away.

Two

Grandma Mason’s

I      spent a lot of my early childhood in my grandparents’ modest apartment on East Sixty-fourth Street near Cottage Grove Avenue. They moved from this place to the North Side in 1932, when I was six, yet I can recall the exact layout of its rooms and most of the furnishings.

This was a partying era, and my father believed that attending and giving parties was essential to his career. So he and his wife went out many evenings, often until quite late. When that happened, I spent the evening or an overnight at Grandma’s. I also recall spending some daytime hours there, probably when my parents went shopping.

Harry and Laura Mason’s home was a two-bedroom flat in one of thousands of three-story Chicago apartment buildings, standard housing for the city’s middle class in those days and still abundant in the old neighborhoods. One entered these buildings through a marble vestibule. On the wall were brass mailboxes, one for each apartment. On each mailbox was a doorbell button, beneath which were a speaker and microphone. You rang the bell, the occupant asked your identity through the speaker, and you would respond through the mike. If you were to be admitted, the resident would press a button upstairs, which set off a buzzer in the vestibule. You had to open the door to the stairway while the buzzer was sounding, which required some agility unless your host held down the upstairs buzzer.

Inside, the stairwell was always poorly lit. The heavy, dark-stained door to each apartment opened into a narrow hallway. Off the hallway were one or two bedrooms and the single bath. At the back end were the dining room and kitchen, and at the front was the living room and sometimes a third bedroom. My grandmother’s South Side place had an added feature that everyone loved, an extra enclosed space in front that today would be called a Florida room or lanai. I believe the Masons called theirs a sun porch.

I happily pushed my go-cart up and down my grandmother’s hallway, exploring the apartment in detail with each visit. Laura Mason always had amusements for her grandson. Sometimes she set an electric fan on the dining room table, and I sat across from it, pretending that I was a pilot behind the propeller of an airplane. Sometimes she pinned a little star on me and called me Officer Dooley as the go-cart became my police motorcycle. Best of all was when I was given a bowl, spoon, flour and water and allowed to cook. When my grandmother put a cake into the oven, I was allowed to lick the leftover raw batter off a spoon.

Occasionally I was at my grandparents’ apartment at dinnertime, and since Harry Mason worked a four-to-twelve shift, that meant that my grandmother prepared a meal for me from the food left over from the dinner that she and my grandfather had shared about two o’clock. I can still mentally savor the dishes she served, many of them from the German repertoire she inherited from her mother, long on pork, cabbage, and potatoes. After dinner we would listen to the radio until she detected some signs of weariness in her grandson.

What do you think, Junior, she asked at that point, is it time for a story?

Of course she knew the answer to the question. For me, any time was a good time for stories. So I donned the pajamas she kept at her house for my visits, hurried through my bedtime routine, and climbed into the folding cot which she had ready for me in the living room. My grandmother pulled up a chair beside the cot and produced a book of fairy tales she had read to my mother a quarter-century earlier.

And what shall we read tonight? she asked.

That wasn’t an easy question for me to answer. Stories like Goldilocks and the Three Bears had a lot of charm, but my real favorites were the ones with wicked creatures like the cruel dwarf Rumplestiltzkin or the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. The problem was that hearing about the scary characters gave me the shivers. More often than not, I took my chances with the shivers.

East Sixty-fourth Street was a treasure trove of dying Americana. From the alleyway below I could hear the ragman and the scissors grinder sound their cries, and peddlers hawked everything from fruit to cheap clothing from their pushcarts. The Sidney Wanzer dairy still delivered milk from horse-drawn wagons, and the clopping of hooves on the street and clink of milk bottles in their metal baskets were familiar sounds of the early morning. My grandmother, whose family had farmed in Iowa for two generations, used to come down from her apartment to give the horses carrots or sugar cubes.

It was not just street sounds that suggested the past. When I began my visits to my grandmother’s, she was fifty-six years old. When I first reached some kind of awareness of the place she called home and some sense of her way of expressing herself, there seemed nothing unusual about either. The apartment could not have been much different from my parents’ forgotten place on Seventy-second Street, and Grandma Mason spoke in the same flat midwestern English that the rest of us used. But as years went by, my mother pointed out to me that everything about her parents seemed old. Harry Mason wore shirts with detachable starched collars, carried a gold vest-pocket watch, and topped his summer ensembles with what he called a Panamaw, a straw hat made to resemble the palm-leaf hats beloved in Latin America. His wife wore house dresses indistinguishable from those of her contemporaries, but she spoke in the vernacular of the nineteenth century rural Midwest.

Her favorite expression was Oh, dear. Close behind came Well, I declare. In the midmorning, when her night-worker husband was still abed, she would caution me with, Put on the soft pedal, Papa’s sleeping. If she found someone’s tale too tall or statement too extreme, she would exclaim, Oh, fiddlesticks! And as she headed out to the grocery store, she would announce to all, I’m going to market.

My mother often said that her mother lived in the past. That was not true. Laura Mason lived in the twentieth century. But she mightily wished she didn’t.

Her home was a veritable museum. Most of the furniture was of mahogany or other dark, heavy wood, with carving on the glass-front bookcase, chests, and table legs. An ancient spinning wheel, complete with treadle, stood in the living room. Atop the bookcase perched delicate porcelain figurines shaped and painted in exquisite detail. Everywhere one turned, one was struck with a sense of the past.

My mother hated it.

Violet Mason Brooks was Thoroughly Modern Millie. For her, the past was something to be buried and forgotten. In her younger years she rejected the way of life represented by her parents, the ethos of the late nineteenth century, and the values of rural America. In her embittered later years, she rejected her own history. The past doesn’t matter . . . what’s done is done . . . we have to look ahead, always.

My mother saw herself as a smart, independent woman, but after the divorce there were no such women in her circle of acquaintance. She admired the actresses who portrayed such women. Sassy Joan Blondell, wise-cracking Rosalind Russell and Myrna Loy—these were favorites. Once when we were riding the Santa Fe Chief from Chicago to Los Angeles, a man rapped on the slightly open door of our compartment and said, Barbara? My mother opened the door all the way, and the stranger