Daily Excerpt: Forget the Goal, the Journey Counts (Stites) - Absorbing the Twenties (1)
Excerpt from Forget the Goal, the Journey Counts (Stites)
Absorbing the ‘20s!
I don’t remember much before I was six years old except that as a little kid I was happy in those bubbling days of the 1920s. It was called the Roaring Twenties, and everyone seemed to be doing just great. In the 1928 presidential election, the candidate Al Smith said he would see that the whole country had a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage. Things were that good! Calvin Coolidge had been president, and my dad said he was an all right president even if he didn’t say much. Dad said they called him Silent Cal, and that he wouldn’t run for another term because he had “had enough.” He never did say enough of what. So Hoover ran and won. Dad said it was because Democrat Al Smith was a Catholic and no Catholic could ever be elected president. Dad had Hoover and Smith buttons along with buttons and rib bons from presidential elections all the way back into the 1800’s. He collected stuff like that. Years later Mother threw them all out.
Everybody was happy in that decade after the end of the War to End All Wars, which is what WWI was called, and they danced a jiggling hop-up dance called the Charleston. Some writers called those ten years the Jazz Age, but mostly it was known as the Roaring Twenties! With an exclamation point. In 1920, right at the beginning of all that happy time, some people Dad called “bible thumpers” got a law passed that no one could drink whiskey anymore. That’s when the twenties started to roar! Just about everybody started to drink because you weren’t supposed to. Some people made their own, called it Bathtub Gin, and then said it tasted terrible. For years, the whole country drank hootch, gin, booze, and corn although corn was mostly inland in Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, and down into Georgia where they liked whisky made from corn. Some spilled over in the metropolitan areas, but mainly corn stayed in the rural middle of the country. It was exciting to hear the newspaper stories about how the country boys were making “corn licker” in the woods, then driving it to the city in tanks that were welded under the car and leaving the cops in their dust. Some of the bootleggers’ cars got up to 50 miles an hour! Dad said their cars were “juiced up.”
The big eastern and mid-west cities got their good booze from Canada. There were regular highways of liquor from the U.S. border down into all the cities. Of course, the government never had enough border patrol or police to control anything near what was needed, so mostly the booze just kept coming. The Great Lakes had a lane of motorboats carrying cases of Canadian liquor—the good stuff—over from Canada. That’s when the gangster era started that led to the Mafia later on. Alfonso Capone was a big-time gangster who pretty much ran Chicago. He was smart to open his own “speakeasies,” which were clubs where people could get drunk. Dad said that Capone controlled sales of booze to10,000 speakeasies. He must have been really busy.
Now people say that some really prominent families made their money that way, like the Kennedys. Everyone thought that the father Joseph Kennedy brought whisky in from Canada. They said he was smart enough to line up all the good clubs, the fancy restaurants, and the wealthy families, like the Cabots and the Lodges in Bos ton, and the Vanderbilts and the Whitneys in New York, and charge them up the wazzoo for good quality hootch. Of course, there was a whole network of pay-offs in place that allowed all the illegal trafficking. Dad said the cops, judges, and the politi cians were all “in on it and getting their cut” and that was the main reason Congress passed the prohibition law.
When the government shut down the bars, some owners opened “speakeasies” where, I guess, everyone would speak real easy and quiet so as not to disturb the law. I was just a kid of six in 1928, but I knew of one speakeasy in Plainfield, New Jersey where we lived. It was downtown, and one Saturday afternoon I was riding my bike home from Marciano’s Candy store when I saw two men walk up to a door and look around like they were afraid. They knocked on it, and a little peephole opened up. The men whispered something, and the door opened and shut quickly after they walked in. I knew that was the speakeasy I had heard Dad talking to Mom about one day.
Those were great times. To my mind, prohibition meant that everyone could do something illegal and not get caught, at least not the drinkers. That little bit of spice sprinkled over the decade kept everyone without a care in the world. Money was flowing like the booze, and skirts got shorter and shorter. I thought women had really ugly knees. The ladies had short haircuts and wore a sweat band on their fore heads; they dressed in shapeless silk dresses and wore long rows of pearls that hung down to their middle. Once, when friends of Mom and Dad came to visit and we had a party, all the women looked the same. They all hopped around the same, too. My two brothers, Bud (Joe, Jr.) and George, had the job of keeping glasses clean and plates coming, but I was lucky because my job was to keep the Victrola wound up and change the records. We had the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, Red Nichols’ Band, a singer called Whispering Jack Smith, and another named Rudy Vallee. I played Rudy when it was time for people to leave because he sang Goodnight Sweetheart. Everybody danced when I played a record that had a singer called Bing Crosby and The Rhythm Boys. But it really didn’t matter what I played, anyway, so long as the punch held out. Dad said it really did have a punch because it was mostly hootch. I 2 Forget the Goal, the Journey Counts…71 Jobs Later sneaked a taste, and it was awful. As a kid I wondered why people partied until they got foolish and couldn’t walk straight. They were always laughing, which I guess was the good side of partying.
There were a whole lot of people getting rich in the Roaring Twenties, and some of it trickled down to Mr. and Mrs. America because manufacturing plants were sprouting all over the place. The automobile was catching on, and oil was getting to be a big thing in places like Pennsylvania and California. Big stores were beginning to sell all kinds of goods and products in different sections and became known as department stores. The steel industry was booming in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley as Bethlehem Steel became the largest steel manufacturer in the world. Then there was the biggest thing of all: moving pictures, or the “movies” as we called them. They started even before the war but were a big thing by the twenties, and everybody went to see Theta Barrie, Fatty Arbuckle, Valentino, Mary Pickford, Chaplin, and the Keystone Cops.
Radio was another new thing that started. You could put your head down by an Atwater Kent radio that stood on the floor, and you could hear a man talking or hear music like Al Jolson singing. Someone even came up with the idea of putting a needle on a crystal—it was called a crystal set—and sound would come out of the air, something most people had trouble coming to grips with. It was said that with a crystal set you could tap into the energy of the crystal. How that was I did not know, but I made my own set and used to listen to Jack Teagarden and his trombone at night when I went to bed. There certainly were miracles happening almost every week in those days. It was an amazing time to be a little kid.
Another new contraption called the telephone was becoming a common thing, and we had one. We boys weren’t allowed to use it, though. George and I (we shared a bedroom) had our own version. We took two tin cans, punched a hole in the bot tom, and ran a thin string between each can, then pulled it taut. We could talk to each other from across the room when we were in bed, keeping quiet so Mom and Dad couldn’t hear. I never did figure out how what I said traveled down that string.
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