I Saw a Century Blossom

By Frank J Fitzgerald

A Brooklyn plumber born at the turn of the twentieth century looks back on his life in this 1984 memoir.

Frank J. Fitzgerald was born in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in 1902. As a teenager, he took a job as a plumber to support his family, and grew up quickly. His personal life and work gave way to many fascinating and unusual experiences. Now, in I Saw a Century Blossom, Fitzgerald recounts his storied years, tracing a path through pivotal events of the twentieth century and sharing a view of old New York not often seen in history books.

Fitzgerald begins his account as the dust is still settling from the Spanish–American War and Theodore Roosevelt has taken office as president of the United States. He concludes with the 1980 presidential election. His perspective allows readers to see what happened in everyday life while countries fought world wars and disasters struck, like the Wall Street bombing of 1920 and the Black Tom explosion. Along the way, he experiences technological advents like modern plumbing. Tag along for his first job as a plumber, back when many employers were unwilling to hire Irish Americans. Meet Fitzgerald’s interesting family and even see what a boy does for fun in early-twentieth-century Brooklyn, like swim in the East River. With stories that are sure to charm and entertain. I Saw a Century Blossom is a great choice for readers interested in New York City history and daily life during the early 1900s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philosophical Library Open Road
• Release date: Jun 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781504075893

Frank J Fitzgerald

Frank J. Fitzgerald was a Brooklyn plumber, born at the beginning of the twentieth century, who chronicled his life in New York City in his book I Saw a Century Blossom.

Book preview

I Saw a Century Blossom

When we look at a giant sequoia tree we don’t know its age, but we do know it is old, very beautiful, and may continue to bloom for many more years. If we could see inside the trunk, we could count the annual rings and we would know how old it is. Our world, today, can be compared to a tree in full bloom. It holds many secrets and may have decades more to continue to bloom and grow. Now, if we could look inside its trunk and could see the centennial rings, we would know how old it is. However, it is the present centennial ring we call the twentieth, which is just over eighty percent complete, that is of great interest to me.

In 1901, when this century started, it was not the tree it is today. It was more like a tree growing in poor soil struggling for existence and not making much headway. The setbacks of war and natural disasters were just so much pruning, which generally helps a tree to grow better, but a tree needs moisture and certain elements which it gets from fertilizer. In our century the fertilizer needed came from the fertile brains of our scientists a.nd the pruning from wars stimulated its growth as it never grew before. I look back with compassion at the miserable sapling it was in 1901. It had not then produced one billion people in all its existence, but in less than a century it has caused a population explosion which is now approaching four billion. A revolution in technology has occurred and more change has come about in the twentieth century than in all of the previous centuries combined.

Trees, like centuries, are all different. Our tree, however, is truly unique. The twentieth century saw more changes in one man’s life (for me some eighty-one years) than in all the centuries before it. It was my luck to be born in 1902. It is my choice to record for all the musings of a plumber from Brooklyn. I lived those years and it is my good fortune to be able to share them for the future: not as a scholar but as a native who lived in the times. I was there.

When the twentieth century began the smoke had not cleared away as yet from the Spanish-American War. This same year gave us Theodore Roosevelt as our President, the most colorful man of the day and a fitting character for the new century.

Although I was a little tardy in filling my part of the twentieth century, as I was born in 1902, I still think of myself as living parallel to the twentieth century. I was the first child born to my parents in this century. They must have at least thought of me in 1901.

I am writing what I remember of this century as accurately as I can. The conclusions I have come to in some cases may not be the popular conclusions.

The conclusions reached in, this book are my own. In some instances they had been long since forgotten and are, therefore, written as I best remember them. The conclusions are not intended to be factually accurate or historically correct; they are my opinions. Perhaps the reader will better understand the events of the twentieth century after considering the effect of opinions like mine. As in an election, fifty percent or more are always right or wrong depending on your viewpoint.

The history of this twentieth century can be divided into three periods. (1) The century started as a continuation of the dark days of the nineteenth century up to the First World War. (2) The second period is roughly the span of time that passed between the First and Second World Wars. (3) The third period begins at the end of the Second World War and continues to the present. The third period continues into the future, when I expect gradual progress, which will end the moment the Third World War breaks out. Then there may be a fourth period.

I got interested in history first when I read and digested the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon. I was very young and the use of oil for the production of energy was in its infancy. Although we have had many smart men in the past, they did not accomplish very much. Just think that while Julius Caesar was on a tour in Brittany he was called back to Rome. It was urgent, so he traveled day and night with many changes of horses. He finished the long journey at the astounding average speed of five miles per hour. Now it just happened almost two thousand years later that Napoleon Bonaparte found himself in the same predicament when he lost his army in Moscow. He rushed back to Paris at top speed to escape capture and to raise a new army. He made that trip from Moscow to Paris at the average speed of five miles per hour. The reason for this similarity is that they both had to rely on the horse for transportation.

Horses also transported Presidents of the United States when the twentieth century came in, except when a train or a steamboat was available.

The Rise and Fall of Sea Power

War is the greatest creator of history and the twentieth century was conceived during the repercussions of the Spanish-American and the Boer Wars. The Spanish-American War was the last adieu for Spain as a sea power. Our martyred President William McKinley,-who died September 14,1901, insured that England retained the unquestioned supremacy of the sea that it had deemed important since the days of Columbus. When Columbus proved to all seafaring people that the earth was round, it did not take long for the maritime nations to see the advantage in sea power. Magellan and Drake roamed the Pacific Ocean at will. But McKinley did not see any need to compete with England for supremacy of the waves, because he had a very large and powerful nation behind him. The world supremacy that England held with a fragile hand started to crumble when the Boer War became so prolonged that it showed that sea power alone was not enough. That was borne out by these historical occurrences: Ireland was given home rule in 1922; Canada was proclaimed a self governing Dominion within the British Empire in 1931; India was freed in 1947; the British West Indies were given independence in 1950; Burnei was given independence in 1971; and the Gilbert Islands were given independence in 1979.

When Philip II thought he would knock England out of contention he made the mistake of underestimating the task he allocated to the Armada.

In January 1556 Charles V of Spain abdicated his throne in favor of his son, who came to the throne as Philip II. Philip’s aim was worldwide power for Spain and the Catholic Church. After defeating William of Orange in the Netherlands and making France subject to his policy, he set out to subdue Great Britain.

It is easy to see why he was so ambitious. His influence on Portugal lasted his lifetime and forty years more. It was a great union. The Bull of Pope Alexander Sixth, May 4, 1493, had bestowed upon Portugal the land east of the line of demarcation, which gave it Brazil and disappointed Spain. It did not seem too bad at the time because, when the Pope divided the earth in two halfs—one half going to Spain and the other half to Portugal, in the Spanish half was the Philippines. But with Spain and Portugal together the sun could never set on Spanish soil. Philip even counted in all of North America as Spanish territory.

It has been said that he wanted to punish Queen Elizabeth for her very cruel treatment of her half-sister Mary Queen of Scots. In any event he chose to invade Great Britain and he built an Armada for the invasion. He made one small mistake and that was the result of his impatience. He ordered the ships to be built and outfitted in a mad rush. He did not allow a full two years for this big project. Everyone was driven at top speed to turn out this enormous undertaking.

On May 29, 1588 this Armada was on its way to invade Great Britain, but it was scattered by a severe storm and had to put in at Corunna to be refitted. This delay made King Philip so impatient he rushed the shipbuilders all the more. At last he got the Armada on the way again, and in early August it appeared off Plymouth, England in a line about seven miles long.

Lord Howard had amassed eighty formidable first-line warships as he had plenty of advance notice. He then waited, just as the Japanese did later in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, when they waited for the Russian Adriatic Fleet to appear.

When the Spanish arrived off Dunkirk on August 7th, the English sent down a group of eight fire ships which broke up the formation. With eighty fresh ships and men they beat off the Spanish attack. The long line of Spanish ships, two hundred and eighty of all types, looked quite formidable, but only one hundred and thirty were first-line warships. There were 8,000 sailors handling the ships and 20,000 marines for the landing. Supplies were on numerous smaller ships.

No doubt, when Lord Howard broke up the Spanish line of scrimmage he set the precedent that Lord Nelson used at Trafalgar when he broke up the French line of scrimmage. The following day the Spanish Admiral, the Duke of Medina-Sedonia, decided to call off the battle and head for home. He decided to keep moving north and go around England to the Atlantic Ocean. It was then, when the SpaniŚʼn were trying to make their getaway, that a hurricane struck them and destroyed many ships. Some ships were taken by the Dutch, some by the Norwegians, some were blown ashore in Scotland, and some were driven ashore in Ireland.

Only fifty made it back to Spain.

If Philip had allowed two or three more years for preparation, he could have had more success. The most serious mistake that he made was rushing the coopers. They had to turn out thousands and thousands of barrels and casks. They were pushed so hard that they had no chance to get seasoned lumber, and had to use green lumber. If one stick of seasoned lumber was around, it went into a ship. The men handling the lumber complained about its condition. They said it was so saturated with sap that it felt like it had been just taken out of a river.

The most important things on ships in those old sailing days were the barrels. Gun powder may seem most important, but wine and water were more important because the men could not be sustained without them. The Spanish had hundreds of barrels of pure water and wine on every ship. When these ships were at sea only a short time the staves began to shrink, as would not be expected when the lumber is cured in the process of seasoning. But this lumber was not cured, so most of the barrels lost their contents.

The King did not take the time to train large numbers of marines for boarding. When it comes to boarding and hand-to-hand fighting with steel, it takes hard training indeed.

Living conditions on the Spainish ships were very poor because most of their wine and fresh water was down in the bottom of the bilge. To the Spaniard wine was the blood of life, and fresh water is indispensible for living.

Men with little experience and low morale were no equal to the English marines, who had much experience from their travels with Sir Francis Drake. They were coming out fresh, they were at home, their morale was high, they had everything they wanted, and they were defending Queen Elizabeth and their homes. It would have taken much more preparation to offset these advantages.

This defeat was the turning point in Spanish supremacy, and it was all downhill afterwards. The English destroyed the Spanish merchant vessels by slow attrition, and this in turn destroyed the Spanish economy.

For the want of good barrels the Armada was lost, and world supremacy as well.

Progress

When I was a youngster our chief mode of travel was by horse-drawn carriage. When Woodrow Wilson was President in his first term, I saw him in a procession that passed our school in a train of horse-drawn carriages. From Caesar to Wilson the world had stood almost still! There was progress in most fields, but it was slower than a horse-drawn carriage.

As recently as 1910, when Haley’s Comet was approaching the earth, I recall numerous scares about the end of the world, the sickness the comet would bring, and the misfortune that would befall the Government. Even the astronomers could not alleviate people’s anxiety. The comet scares lasted about two years.

At the turn of the century, there was a great deal of illiteracy and poverty. Even people who finished elementary school did not often go on to higher education. Children at fourteen could go to the Board of Health, get working papers, and work full time. I myself went to work at fourteen. My family needed the help. But I was the exception, since I graduated in June 1917 after passing my examinations.

That year two hundred graduated with me. I was first in that class with an average of ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent.

I went to work and then to high school at night. I had many advantages: my mother was an academy girl, my father a printer, my oldest sister a teacher, my two aunts teachers in school just across the street, my four sisters graduates from Hunter College, my brother Vincent from Cooper Union and my brother Arthur from St. John’s College. Arthur went through the eight years of elementary school in four and a half years and sister Catherine did it in just four years. Catherine graduated from Hunter College at seventeen. I had no difficulty in getting the answers to my questions.

I was the fifth child born to my parents. There were four more children after me. But the fortunes of the four born in the nineteenth century were very sad as a result of the misguidance of my parents. With me and the new century things changed. The religious bigotry started to let up and this was reflected in better conditions for the twentieth-century children, although I did not do quite as well as the four that came after me. I did a lot better than the four that came before me.

The good fortune of the four children born after me was common for the time, so I will say very little about them. But, as the lives and mishaps of the four older children have deeply affected my life, I must dwell on them at length. It is hard to realize that the parents who were so strict and bigoted in their training of their first four children could change so drastically in the training of the younger ones so as to be quite lenient with them. I was somewhere in between. I was not blinded entirely with nineteenth-century bigotry, but I was not as free to live and learn by myself as were the younger ones. I think the change in my parents was due to the great changes that came with the twentieth century. By chance or by choice my parents gave so much more latitude to the younger ones. Unfortunately, I was still indoctrinated with some of the last century’s blindness and it took me into my late thirties before I really got my life on the even keel (reality) that it should have been on, right from my school days.

My older brothers and sisters grew up partly in the twentieth century. The early years of the twentieth century were not much different from the nineteenth century until the First World War, and then things changed very fast. Before World War I, the automobile amounted to very little. There were no gas stations or improved roads. Cars had to be hand-cranked to get started, and this was very dangerous. One day my brother Arthur went to crank my uncle’s Abbot Detroit 1912 model. It kicked and the crank flew through the air right past my brother’s head. It came down through the roof of a car traveling down Bushwick Avenue a city block away. This could have killed my brother or the driver of the other car—it was just luck that it did not. Also, there was the problem of tires, which often blew while driving. The tire was mounted on the wheel and held in place with a detachable rim. The tire carried about one hundred and ninety pounds of pressure and came off when it struck a bump in the road. The result was rims which flew like a bullet. The tires gave very poor mileage. There were few repair shops and parts were very hard to come by.

The biggest change that can be attributed to war conditions was in the labor field. Before the war, my printer father earned eighteen dollars for a sixty-hour week, which was much more than the common laborer. But when the war ended in 1918, I was fifteen, a plumber’s helper, and was earning fifty dollars for a fifty-two-hour week, By the war’s end, horse-drawn vehicles had been replaced almost entirely by automobiles, which had become increasingly practical due to the self-starter (the greatest invention since the wheel). Better tires, better roads, and the availability of gasoline assured the automobile’s future.

By the time the war ended, my family was two distinctly different families. The older children were adults by that time, and the younger ones were little children. I, at the age of fifteen, was old enough to go to work, which put me in between.

The Time Capsule

If anyone were to look back today at the fifteen years preceding the First World War, he would think that he was looking into a time capsule. My grandmother, who was ninety-eight in 1935, said to me just a short time before she died, Frank, I have seen so many wonderful changes lately that I wish I could live another hundred years. I have lived through those tough years and a great deal of what I know I have learned firsthand. I say tough, because labor had it very hard then.

The Four-Cycle Engine

As the world turned from horseback to horsepower, the first big step was steam. Steam has enormous power and it was utilized in the locomotive, but it had to have a railroad bed to follow. The steamboat utilized steam, but could not go on land. Then came steam power to turn flywheels in factories and move pullies and belts. Enter the Stanley Steamer automobile. It was heavy, expensive, and cumbersome.

At the turn of the century, the internal-combustion engine was in the embryonic stage. Every machinist who had a shop to work in was building a car. In a short time, we had a lot of experimental cars to look at. Most of these cars were very heavy. Most shops only turned out a few cars. The mass production of cars was Henry Ford’s idea. Ford got control of the vanadium steel patent, and could make a light car with the strength of a heavy car. The Model-T was on the way. Ford put out a car that was cheap and with no frills for the common man.

Out of nowhere came a man named Williams with a claim for a royalty on the internal-combustion engine that Ford was using. Williams brought suit against Henry Ford for a royalty on every car that was sold. Ford chose to fight the case, so the number of cars involved increased each year. I believe the case came to trial around 1915. The year does not matter, because Ford won the case. It seems that somewhere around 1889 this Williams, seeing the potential of internal combustion, filed for a patent on a certain type of engine and received it. It was on this patent that he was suing Henry Ford. As I understand it, Williams’s engine was a two-cycle engine, but Ford was using a four-cycle engine so drastically different that Williams’s claim did not stand up. From then on, the development of the four-cycle engine and the mobility of the car increased rapidly. The heavy-locomotive-type car soon disappeared.

A man by the name of Swanson wrote a book about his life with Henry Ford. Mr. Swanson was a patent-maker, and he said that Ford did not like to read any plans. When something new came along and the plans were given to Mr. Ford, he would give them to Mr. Swanson to have them patented. Ford liked to see things in three dimensions.

Greater New York

I was born in Brooklyn only a few years after the amalgamation with New York City to form the city of Greater New York.

Brooklyn was quite rural iń the part of Greenpoint where I lived. We lived on Humbolt Street, near Metropolitan Avenue. This was the last paved street going east towards the Newtown Creek. My parents lived there until 1904, when they moved to a House three blocks away on Skillman Avenue, just across the street from Public School 23. This was a very poor section. The neighbors were very rough and illiterate. My family fitted in like a square plug in a round hole.

My father was a printer and his family and my mother’s family were all professionals. My parents were the only members to have a large family. Our neighbors were mostly laborers who worked in the Valspar Varnish Factory for a dollar and a half for a ten-hour day, or in the pottery for the same money. There was a big Lithograph factory nearby and they paid two dollars a day. One reason why these people lived under such conditions was because there were quite a few shacks on our block with two-room apartments.

With big families and small pay checks, rent was the attraction, four dollars a month. There were no conveniences, the apartments had bare walls and floors. There was no gas or electricity in our block. The