I recall once visiting the Saratoga racecourse in the administration of President Fillmore and meeting a man named Bud Fisher, a portrait painter and fancier of horse flesh. He had just paid $12.00 or $12,000, I forget which, for a horse named Hyperion, had engaged a star jockey, Earl Sande, to ride him and advised me and other acquaintances to bet on him. We followed the advice, and the horse ran a very good race, but the jockey was left at the post, sitting in the middle of the track. It was quite laughable.
VII
New York’s Noon Life
The furore over the invention of horses by Thomas A. Edison had no sooner abated than the country was thrown into a new ferment of grape juice by John F. (“Peaches”) Hylan’s discovery of the subway. People who now ride in subways in various cities and complain of strap-hanging, overcrowding, etc., would scarcely believe the facts concerning that first New York subway, or tuber as it was called on account of its resemblance to a potato. Instead of being obliged to pay a nickel apiece for a ride, passengers were sent engraved invitations and the number of same was limited to the seating, or rather, lying down, capacity of the trains; say forty or fifty individuals who expected to be particularly busy at their office on Monday received subway cards for that day; forty or fifty others, whose busy day was Tuesday, were invited to ride that day, and so on through the week.
Each car was equipped with half a dozen four poster beds, half a dozen twin beds, three or four easy chairs and a chaise lounge. Later the twin beds were taken out of the equipment because so few twins seemed to be in business in New York; more correctly, many sets of twins were in business, but not in the same line and not particularly busy on the same day. For example, the Kitchell twins, Howell and Growell; they both had offices downtown, but Howell was a fishmonger with an exclusive Friday trade, while Growell sold welts and by tacit agreement, out-of-town welt buyers visited New York Mondays only. And it was the same with other sets of twins.12
These early subway cars had straps, stout leather straps, but they were not fastened to the roofs of the cars. They were loose and were used either for sharpening razors or for amusement purposes. Passengers used to play a game called “Have You Heard This One?” Each passenger was required to tell a story and if any of the other passengers had heard it before, the raconteur was given a hiding with the straps. This was where Growell Kitchell picked up most of his welts.
It was during the early days of the subway that Emile Zola visited New York and remarked in broken French: “Why, you New Yorkers are like ze little animals, what you call them, ze moles. You are always burrowing in ze ground.” Horace Greeley was much taken with this comment and made a suggestion that was afterwards put into effect—that the city be divided into burrows, the Burrow of Brooklyn, the Burrow of the Bronx, etc.13
At this time Lily Langtry was the toast of New York. Co-starred with the Marx Brothers in A Texas Steer, she swept Broadway and was next given a job sweeping the cross streets. Mayor Walker presented her with the keys to St. Louis, but she refused to take the hint and it became my duty to show her around Gotham.14
Unlike Jane Austen, who had insisted on visiting the night clubs, Lily wanted to see the city’s noon life. Nothing gave her more of a thrill than to lunch at one of the sidewalk tables outside the Pennsylvania station and watch the zinc-workers and hatters at their midday revels.
“Vive!” she would shout as some particularly daring peasant girl tossed a ringer or a leaner, or an extra hilarious traffic policeman successfully coaxed a perambulator in front of a taxi or Halloa cab as they were then called.
“But listen, Lil,” I often remonstrated, “don’t you want to even get an impression of what goes on in places like the Knickerbocker Club or the Lambs or Sophie Tucker’s or places like that?”
“No, Lardy,” she would reply.15
So a party of four or five of us, usually consisting of H. L. Mencken, the Marx Brothers, Ward and Vokes, Barnum and Bailey, the Duncan Sisters, the Striblings, the Bison City Quartet, the Happiness Boys and the Four Horsemen, besides myself and the Langtry, would daily engage a corner table at Seventh Avenue and Thirty-third street and, as I have said, enjoy the antics of the tradesmen out for their noon lark.
At length Mayor Walker asked me to take Lil to Atlantic City as she had never seen an auction sale. But it happened that just at this period a law had been passed against auctions, said to be the only law ever passed in New Jersey. So all that the Langtry and I could find to do was walk up and down, walk up and down. I noticed that she grew more and more uninterested and one day she yawned several times and then uttered an exclamation of tedium.
“No wonder,” she said, “they call this the Bored Walk.”
VIII
Football Trick Uncorked
All this happened in the summer of my seventeenth year and in the fall I made up my mind to go to college. As told in a previous chapter, I had decided to start in at the University of Michigan, but at the last moment I received a better offer from Yale and the first day of September found me in Lancaster,
