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CHAPTER 1

The Holiday Spirits of Mrs. Tooze

Mrs. Tooze is nagging again. It's enough to drive a man to drink when she gets going.

Mrs. Tooze, of Evanston, is the president of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, which is an organization of ladies who nag about liquor.

It is one thing when a man is nagged by his own wife about drinking. Then he can reason with her until the neighbors call the police and a judge puts him under peace bond.

But there is no way to defend yourself against Mrs. Tooze and her fellow WCTU members.

You can't treat them like a wife and offer a calm, logical argument, such as: "You open your mouth once more and so help me, I'll ..."

They have been at it since 1876, poking their noses into somebody else's foam, singing their lilting jingles:

"At home, abroad, by day or night, "In the country or in town, "When asked to drink we'll smile and turn "Our glasses upside down."

They helped get Prohibition through once, which didn't accomplish much besides putting Al Capone in the bootleg business and getting the modern crime syndicate started.

They hope to do it again and often express confidence that they shall.

Because they don't like an occasional nip, they want all spigots to go dry, the neon lights to go out and the doors to be shut at thousands of fine, friendly places named "Dew Drop Inn," "Come Back Inn," and "Stash and Stella's."

Given their way, this would become a nation of sobriety and twitching nerves. They don't seem to realize that while prohibition might diminish such off-shoots of drinking as wife-beating, it could also increase husband-wife homicides.

As a man who lived in the flat upstairs used to say, when his wife lectured him:

"This bottle is your best friend. It slows down my reflexes so's I can't deliver a fatal judo chop."

Mrs. Tooze's latest message, prompted by the coming holiday season, is full of information that she assumes is startling and frightening.

She points out, for instance, that there are more than 425,000 taverns and other places selling liquor throughout the country.

This is bad news, as far as Mrs. Tooze is concerned. It does not occur to her that the great number of taverns is responsible for one of the few remaining expressions of independence in this world of tightening restrictions.

They make it possible for a drinker to lurch off a stool, eye an unfriendly bartender, and majestically announce:

"Awright, Harry. If my money ain't good here, I'll go somewheres else." And with 424,999 other places, this is no idle threat.

Mrs. Tooze also points out that several thousand billion gallons of spirits are sold every year.

This is impressive, but if everybody would pitch in, we could get rid of it all.

Because Mrs. Tooze and others like her refuse to drink their share, much is left over. Others have to pick up the slack and this can cause them to become lushes.

The WCTU has, in the past, chided everybody from presidents down to soldiers for drinking.

In 1951, the ladies sent fruit juice to the troops in Korea, which was surely as big a treat as the movies that the medics and the chaplains liked to show.

In return, they received this letter:

"Dear Ladies: We, the men of the 76th Engineers Combat Battalion, really do appreciate the fruit juices you are sending over here in place of beer.

"It doesn't quite take the place of beer, but you can get a better buzz on with it.

"We just add a little yeast and sugar to it, heat it on the stove and get some of the finest wine ever brewed.

"As yeast and sugar are scarce over here, we would appreciate it very much if you would send some with your next shipment."

The WCTU should abandon its hopeless crusade and embark on something else.

They might try to get a law passed in Evanston, their dry home-city, permitting taverns to operate.

It is a traffic hazard, all those Evanstonians running across the street to the Chicago side, where they can get a drink.

Good Teen-Ager a Pain

Dear Good Teen-ager:

I received another one of your letters today. You are getting to be a pain in the neck. I wish your mommy and daddy would take your personalized stationery away from you.

For a long time now, you've been writing me the same letter over and over again.

You think you are clever because you keep switching names, from Toni to Bobbi to Rod. But I'm wise to you because you always say the same things.

You always begin by demanding that Good Teen-agers be given more credit for not being Bad Teen-agers.

You also say that your precious image is being distorted by a few Bad Teenagers.

Then you say that nobody understands you. And you point out how valiantly you have resisted being a hot-rodder, a robber, a smoker of pot, a sniffer of glue, a dropout, and a menace to society.

Besides, you don't hit your teacher and you study and maybe you work after school and are a joy to your parents.

Then you conclude by proclaiming that you are a Good Teen-ager and you want to be given full credit for it.

Once in a while, you shift gears by writing about how we Adults ought to mind our own business about the Beatles. So now politics, religion and the Beatles are not subjects to be discussed.

Good Teen-ager, I'm sick of it, do you hear?

I'm a Good Adult. I don't go around taking pep pills and shooting people.

My reward is that I don't get thrown in jail. That is also your reward.

You don't punch your teacher. I don't punch my boss. So you get an education and I keep my job.

You don't hot rod your car? I don't hot rod mine, either. We'll both live longer and maybe save some money on tickets.

You cut the lawn and carry out the garbage? Kid, I pay for the lawn and the garbage, too.

You work after school. I work after work. And sometimes after that. We both get money, which is an excellent reward. And don't forget that for years I have been contributing part of mine to building those schools you are so generously not dropping out of.

Despite the fact that I am a Good Adult, you never tell me how much you appreciate it. I can't remember the last time a Good Teen-ager came up to me on the street, shook my hand and said: "Gee, Good Adult, thanks for not being a Bad Adult."

But I struggle on without your praise, bravely sharing the blame for the things that a few Bad Adults do.

I even try to be polite to your numerous allies — the Adults who Appreciate Good Teen-agers.

One of them, an editor, comes by all the time and says it would be nice if I wrote things about Good Teen-agers — and not once have I thrown anything at him.

I realize that this letter will probably mean that you won't write me anymore.

But, who knows? Maybe I'll get a letter from an eighty-year-old lady, telling me how rough it is to live all alone on $100 a month in a cold water flat. I've never had a letter like that, although there are many people who could write them.

Or maybe there will be one from a man who lost a limb or two on Iwo Jima or at the Yalu, and feels like complaining about how rough life is for him. I've never received one like that, either.

There might even be a letter from the stout, sturdy scrub lady who is quietly cleaning this office late at night. She never complains. She seldom talks. She just scrubs.

Meanwhile, this is it for us, Kid. We've all got problems.

And don't try that other tricky one on me — that business of the Good Teen-agers being the Generation of the Future.

I used to be a Generation of the Future myself. And now I've got a thirty-seven-inch waist and a couple of kids who think it's funny to punch me in it.

Goodbye, Good Teen-ager. Just remember, in a few years it will be all over.

Then you'll be a full-fledged Post-Teen-ager.

Sincerely, GOOD ADULT.

A Sacrifice to Antipoverty Gods

Jim Lee Osborne's people have always lived around Raven, Va. He doesn't know how far back they go. They might have come in fighting Indians.

Now they're called hillbillies. The men hack a living out of coal mines. They marry young, work hard, age fast, and end up poor, bent-backed and illiterate.

Jim Lee's mother, Wanda, was fifteen when he was born. When she turned thirty there were twelve others.

Jim Lee's father, Vista Lee, rode down the mine shaft when he was fourteen. A few months ago a doctor told him to quit or the silicosis in his lungs would kill him. He's forty-two.

The Osbornes live in a four-room shanty. Jim Lee says: "You could stand anywhere in the place and urinate through a crack."

Raven has no doctors or dentists. You go to the next town. And you try to avoid sickness.

When Jim Lee was thirteen, he took off. He figured that anything was better than scratching it out in Raven.

He went to Alabama and picked cotton with Negroes. Ancient dislikes don't matter when you are young and hungry.

Then he went to Colorado and a job digging a tunnel. He drifted on, to the furnished-room belts and the day-labor gangs in St. Louis, Baltimore, Los Angeles and New York.

He was seventeen when he hit Chicago. Four years of wandering had given him a strong back, a few tattoos, calluses, and a deep loneliness. His eighth-grade schooling got him a factory job.

When he was eighteen he married; at nineteen he was a father; at twenty the marriage was falling apart and he was a drunk and a brawler. Sometimes he rolled other drunks or snatched a purse to finance his binges.

He was in a tavern on Wilson Avenue, a long way from Virginia's hills, when a minister struck up a conversation.

That's part of the Rev. George Morey's job — prowling the bars and trying to salvage someone's soul, or at least their liver.

"He talked to me and I listened," Osborne recalled. "I needed help, counseling. I knew it. Everything seemed hopeless and I was heading for the bottom."

That was little more than a year ago. Here's what has happened since.

Mr. Morey was running a local federally financed poverty program. He needed help. Jim Lee seemed to have a good, quick, eager mind, so Mr. Morey brought him into a job.

He made Jim Lee a street worker at $80 a week. The young man was a natural. He knew the problems of the Southern whites in the big city because he had had the same kind of problems. But he knew more because he had been around more than most of them had.

The best way to forget your own problem is to worry about someone else's. He did, working fifteen to eighteen hours a day. He got jobs for people, found help for destitute families, formed clubs for kids, self-improvement classes for adults and steered people to medical and social help.

Some of it doesn't sound like much on paper. But the big city to a rural or small-town white Southerner is as foreign as a coal mine to a white-collar worker.

When he had time to spare, Jim Lee studied. He decided he didn't want to be ignorant any more. He got tutoring from nuns who do social work in the area.

Right now, he probably could pass most college freshman tests. That, plus his hard-earned street savvy, makes him an impressive young man.

"I've got to talk two languages. I've got to be able to talk to college-trained people in social work and to the guy who just came out of the hills."

Last April his troubles started again. Mr. Morey suggested that he go to a big poverty war meeting in Washington. Presbyterian churches, not the taxpayers, would pay his way. The minister felt it would be educational for a Wilson Avenue street worker to hear what the Washington brass had to say.

He went. And that was the big meeting at which R. Sargent Shriver was booed into silence by street workers who didn't like the way the program was being run. Jim Lee took part in the booing.

"I was in the middle of a bunch of others. I'll admit it. I got carried away by them. I've never been in a place like that. I looked around and saw all that money being spent in a fancy hotel and I figured: 'Hell, put it into the streets where it can do people some good. There's too much being spent for big salaries for people who sit at desks.'"

The meeting ended. Jim Lee came back and went to work again.

Mr. Morey told him to put the two days in Washington on his time sheet. He reasoned that the trip was part of Jim Lee's poverty work and he should be paid. It amounted to about $30.

Jim Lee was fired for falsifying those time sheets.

The community-level poverty committee didn't want him fired. Those people — priests, ministers, nuns, businessmen, police captains, social workers and aldermen — opposed the firing. They think he's a fantastic bargain at $80 a week. But they had no say in the matter.

Someone downtown made the decision. Jim Lee had no hearing and there is no way he can appeal.

He pleaded. He offered to pay back the $30 — double. He pointed out that he has piled up several hundred hours of overtime, for which he was to be given time off later.

He pointed out that his supervisor, Mr. Morey, had thought it was OK to put the two days on his time sheet.

It didn't matter what he and the others said.

As far as the well-paid antipoverty pencil-pushers downtown are concerned, Jim Lee is out. The matter is closed. Move his card to a new file, please.

As far as the Mayor's citywide committee of prominent citizens is concerned, it is busy sitting on the federal money bag. Jim Lee could be a name on a Chinese laundry.

And somewhere, a $350-a-week poverty official is probably drafting another speech about how, gosh, no, it isn't true at all that the local people have no say in their own program.

If this is the way the generals treat the foot soldiers in the great war on poverty — list me as a conscientious objector.

Bugs in the Bug

I wasn't 100 per cent sure until this morning, so I didn't tell this story to anyone.

My car hates me. It is trying to destroy me and has been doing so for at least three years.

I, in turn, hate and fear my car and have been trying to destroy it while defending myself against its attacks.

There was no reason to suspect that it was an evil car when I bought it. I would have laughed at the thought.

It is a foreign economy car, and while I won't mention its brand name, I will say that it is made by a people renowned for their craftsmanship, philosophers, musicians and bratwurst.

I bought it after friends told me wonderful tales of driving from here to California on a thimbleful of gas and the oil from their pocket combs. And these autos were mechanically perfect and almost indestructible.

In fairness, this appears to be true most of the time. I have heard few complaints from other owners. I can only conclude that the day my car was made, something evil was in the air. Maybe it was Hitler's birthday. This car was cursed.

A few weeks after I brought it home, the first sign appeared. I was on an expressway in heavy traffic and even heavier rain. The windshield wipers suddenly stopped.

Then there was the heater. On the hottest day of my first summer with the car, I was one hundred miles from Chicago. Suddenly the heater began throwing hot air in my face, almost baking me alive.

An isolated incident, you say? In three years the heater was repaired about six times.

Then there is the door on the driver's side. It frequently refuses to open. If you get it opened, it refuses to close. A mechanic once told me that this happens because I park the car on the street and salt gets in the hinges.

I always park in a driveway at home or a parking lot at work — never on the street.

One morning I had to put my shoulder to the door and force it shut, climbing in on the other side.

While I was doing about sixty on the expressway, there was a noise, something like "boing" — and the door snapped open, as if the car were trying to eject me.

I managed to survive these assassination attempts (call a spade a spade). This forced the car to try something bolder.

Again, it came during a furious summer thunderstorm when I was on the Kennedy Expressway.

First the wipers went out. I was used to that and had developed excellent vision through water.

Then the heater attacked. Then the battery and oil lights glowed, the engine started missing, and then — smoke filled the car.

I somehow got onto the shoulder and tried to get out. The door jammed. I crawled to the other side and escaped. I ran along the shoulder for about fifty yards, expecting to hear an explosion and feel shrapnel tearing into my back. But the car was too clever to destroy itself — even to get me.

Since then, I have fought back. During the winter, I let salt devour its cold-blue hide. I try to poison it with cheap gas and oil. I encourage pigeons to bombard it. It has taken on an evil look that matches its evil soul. Spiders nest in its convertible top.

A neighbor child who tried to scrawl "wash me" on a fender was abed with fever for two days. A neighbor's dog sniffed at one of the tires, then bit his master. Coincidence?

Last week, when a thunderstorm hit, I was at my desk. Remembering that the top was down, I went into the driving rain. The top refused to close and lock. The rain poured into the car, flooding it. That night I drove home with water sloshing up to the clutch pedal.

It took most of the week for the car to dry out and I didn't approach it until this morning. I happened to glance into the storage space behind the back seat. What I saw made me cry out.

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Excerpted from "Early Royko"
by .
Copyright © 1967 Judy Roko.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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