Lean Times in Boston: Depression and the Drys

THE ATLANTIC

BY CHARLES W. MORTON

ANYONE who was trying to earn his living through the Depression days is bound to have a hard time recounting the period to a later generation. The same is true of Prohibition, overlapped by the Depression for the final four years of its span. Living under the pressure of these forces in combination, with no end of either in sight, one tended to regard them as a permanent legacy for modern man — conditions which no one esteemed but which nevertheless defied amendment. It was characteristic of President Hoover that, long after Prohibition had become a national disaster, he appointed the so-called Wickersham Commission to make a protracted study of it: were the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act functioning happily, or was some slight revision called for? It was characteristic of the commission that it belatedly brought out a vast report which seemed to stimulate more arguments than it settled. The President praised the commission for its selfless devotion to the public interest, the speakeasies renewed their leases, and the Depression dragged on into its fantastic succession of bank failures. Ehe Boston Evening Transcript trotted out its biggest type in many a day for the Wickersham findings: “A Wet Commission Makes a Dry Report.”

The lead on a story from the Boston Evening American in 1931, when banks were beginning to fail in dozen lots, preserves for us the usual journalistic spirit of the times, and it would be fair to add that the Transcript was willing to report a bank failure as just that and nothing more, without insisting that every closing had a silver lining. The American’s lead:

A feeling of optimism pervaded Boston’s financial district today, following the first shock of the closing of the “sound” Federal National Bank, its branches and eight affiliates.

Brokers’ market letters of the time showed a similar determination to find the hidden reassurance in the monotonous decline in stocks and the fragility of dividends. A paragraph from a house by the name of Russell, Miller and Company remarked: “New York Central since it passed its dividend has shown distinct evidence of important long pull buying. It is likely that Pennsylvania will do the same thing once its dividend is out of the way [my italics]. Its price indicates the omission of the dividend.” (Note: Pennsylvania did not omit its dividend.)

On the larger view of the general relationship between stock prices and business activity, the Boston firm of Elmer H. Bright and Company issued an opinion that seemed to represent the reasoning of financial experts: “Much has been said about improvement in business being necessary to bring about improvement in security prices. Previously the market has been thought to discount general business improvement. Cause and effect are difficult to diagnose. We believe that rising security prices will give a material impetus to general business.”

The principal soothsayer of the period was Roger W. Babson, proprietor of an investment counseling service, who was widely credited — and still is — with having been the unique prophet of the great crash in October of 1929. His status is based on a statement in the New York Times of September 6, 1929, in which he said, and once again the italics are mine:

“I repeat what I said at this time last year and the year before that sooner or later a crash is coming which will take the leading stocks and cause a decline of 60 to 80 points in the Dow Jones barometer.” Rubbery though this statement was, it caused great indignation in the financial world and among all who were long on stocks, but it caused Babson to be enthroned after the crash as an accredited seer. One is reminded of the tobacco-will-getyou-yet comment made by friends of the heavy smoker who died at age ninety-five.

It was a period when “6% Gold Mortgage Real Estate Bonds” were often found to be mere certificates of indebtedness issued by thoughtful larcenists and worth five or ten cents on the dollar, provided the Securities Holders’ Protective Committee had not managed to get there first and lay hold of the last scrapings in the till. A sound ambition for any red-blooded American boy at the time would have been to be a referee in bankruptcy or to organize one of the countless protective committees, or, better still, to become counsel for specialists of this sort. The sheep and the goats were the people with jobs and the jobless, and any sort of job at any wage was better than none. Begging on the streets was less conspicuous in Boston, but in New York one could not walk a block anywhere in the midtown section without being accosted a half-dozen or more times by perfectly proper-looking men and woman of all ages—a dime? a nickel? anything? It was impossible to foretell from their appearance which of the others along the sidewalk would prove to be begging. Cancellation of service by telephone subscribers was a regular item of statistical news in the financial pages.

THE most corrosive effect of the Depression came from the certainty, from month to month for more than three years, that it was all going to be a lot worse before it got better. Pay cuts announced to be temporary soon proved to be temporary only in the sense that a new and larger cut was in the making.

Prices were, of course, low and continuing to decline. Fifteen or twenty cents would buy a substantial lunch at Woolworth’s, where we occasionally invested our quarter hour at noonday and where many of the customers, after eating a part of the generous portions, would wrap up the remainder in a paper napkin to take home for another meal. It became more agreeable to make a couple of sandwiches at home and lunch on them in the city room, with a five-cent cup of coffee from Sadie Kelly’s Spa, downstairs on the Milk Street side of the Transcript’s building, brought by the office boy. This led to much expertise among the staff on how to make a proper sandwich — that is, one that would neither dry out nor become soggy — and it was found that large leaves of lettuce effectively insulated the sandwich filler, for both purposes.

More intricate were the techniques of applying the wonderful new do-it-yourself half soles which the dime stores introduced along toward the bottom of the Depression. I am sure there were more Transcript shoes with holes in the soles than without them; if a man wore his rubbers throughout the day in the city room, it was not necessarily on account of the weather but rather the condition of his shoes.

The dime-store half soles, like the shoes for the Turkish Army, came in three sizes only: large, medium, and small. They were thick rubber slabs, heavily corrugated, and they gave the wearer the impression that he was walking about on something like snow tires. A pair of the soles came affixed to a cardboard instruction sheet, with a small metal grater and a tube of powerful and extraordinarily quick-acting cement. The soles themselves were impregnated with some equally abrupt adhesive, protected by a rubbery sheet which was to be stripped off at the very last instant before slapping the new sole onto the old. One began by roughening the soles with the grater and spreading on the cement from the tube. Before this could dry, the new sole had to be in place — the point of no return — and the final stage consisted in whacking the shoe violently on the floor to make sure that everything was stuck fast. Any surplus projecting around the edges was simply to be trimmed off with a knife, so the instructions read.

The soles must have been made for an extremely wide-footed trade, for the surplus was extensive. The rubber was tough — the uppers of a pair of cheap shoes thus renewed would go to pieces before the rubber showed wear — and it was hard for a man to slice around the edges without achieving the effect of a gadrooned border or a series of angular slashes, which led to much airy comment in the Transcript’s city room.

A reporter would appear of a morning affecting an elaborately formal manner, sit down at his desk, and begin, foppishly, buffing his nails on his coat sleeve, stopping from time to time to look at them complacently. This could mean various things: that he had just had some preposterous adventure on an assignment and was willing to talk about it if pressed, or that he was wearing some new purchase from Filene’s Automatic Bargain Basement, or that he had just resoled his shoes with the new dime-store materials. In the last case he would cross a leg so as to show, conspicuously, his handiwork. Comments were immediate.

“He certainly missed his cast on that right shoe.”

“I like that sawtooth edging.”

Shortly before the do-it-yourself half soles came in, I was eking out a few extra weeks of use from my solitary pair of shoes, which had holes right on through the inner sole, simply by wearing my rubbers indoors and out. A sardonic friend from Omaha happened in at the Transcript office and remarked that although the weather was fine, I had prudently worn my rubbers. “This is the Boston act, I suppose,” he said. “A real Bostonian, eh?” I told him with some hauteur that I preferred the rubbers to walking on no soles at all, and I duly confounded him by taking off a rubber and showing him the hole. Most of us got our shoes at a chain of one-price shops whose shoes at that time cost S3.20. They looked quite all right when new, but they stretched and bulged into odd shapes, and the soles simply could not take the running around that we gave them. The shoes, combined with a dollar shirt from Raymond’s, a ten-dollar blue serge suit from Filenc’s Basement, a tired necktie, and a ruinous hat were the uniform of the day — an inexpensive outfit and looking every nickel of it.

THE instantaneous view of the Depression in action — or, rather, as an interval of suspended human activity — was afforded by the Times Square breadline, in New York. Its focal point was no more than a counter, in the northernmost part of the Square, around Forty-fifth Street, as I recall it, at which a cup of coffee and two doughnuts were handed out gratis to all comers. This particular breadline — and there were many others scattered around the city — was a benefaction from William Randolph Hearst, and its peak of activity was timed to confront the evening theatergoers with a reminder that many of their fellow citizens were having a rough time of it.

Distribution began somewhere around 7 or 7:30 P.M., I believe, but the line would begin to take form as early as 6 o’clock. By 7, there were thousands of men, two abreast, in the line, which had doubled back and forth in long serpentine folds, each perhaps a block long. While the line waited for handouts to begin, it was of course stationary, and there was the spectacle: thousands of able-bodied Americans, young and old, waiting quietly for their handout. To see the line for the first time, as I happened to, in a January blizzard was to wonder what on earth it could be. The realization was slow, hardly credible, that this pattern of dark shapes was made up of men, ordinary men, who were hungry enough to stand there in the storm, in the glow of the marvelously irrelevant electric advertising displays, the finest of their kind in all the world.

I have read little or nothing about the Times Square breadline in the years that followed, although it has seemed to me ever since one of the great touchstones of the Depression years. Somewhere in the literature of the Depression, it ought to claim a few pages, as indeed should the neatly dressed men, each with his crate of apples, selling them on the street corners at a nickel apiece. Where did they get the capital to buy a crate of apples, and why apples instead of lead pencils or shoelaces?

The begging, unabashed, was everywhere, and I am reminded of a conversation overheard in a small hotel where I spent a few days in the forepart of 1932. The hotel was in the West Forties, just east of Broadway, relatively new, well furnished, and I was staying there because in this convenient midtown location a room and bath were to be had for $10.50 a week. But its clientele, embarrassingly at times, was goons and hoodlums, looking like fiction characters, minor employees of the gambling and bootlegging factions, hired to protect deliveries and collections at a fairly low level. The general tone of the hotel and of the whole Depression-ridden neighborhood is in an anecdote which an especially formidable-looking hoodlum was telling two of his cronies as we all Stood waiting one evening for an elevator in the lobby.

“Here was this old guy,” said the hoodlum, “not a bad-looking old guy, but I seen he was gonna put the bite on me. So just as he comes up to me I says to him, ‘Hey, buddy,’ I says, ‘could you let me have a dime for a cup of cawfee?’ Jeez, y’oughtaseen his face. I thought I’d die laughing.”

Most of the good restaurants along Park Avenue were posting their menus outside to attract passersby, and the prix fixe one-dollar dinner was a standard offering up and down the street in places where a dollar today would fall short of paying for a cocktail. The usual breakfast price in cafeterias and drugstores was twenty cents, for orange juice, bacon and a fried egg, toast, and coffee. The hitch was that too many people could not afford these prices, or any prices at all.

There may have been a breadline or two in Boston, but I do not remember seeing one. The most effective effort of that sort was the One-Cent Restaurant, opened by the Salvation Army a few doors off Scollay Square in a vacant store building which they had persuaded the owner to lend for the purpose. It contained the barest essentials of kitchen equipment and furnishings, but it did serve a steaming bowl of cereal with milk for one cent, and a fairly well-balanced meal could be had for a nickel. It was a model of what volunteer service could provide as direct relief, with a minimum of overhead and red tape, for those who needed it then and there.

SOMEWHAT less realistic was the direct relief scheme proclaimed by Aimee Semple McPherson, who came to town in one of the bottom periods of the Depression on an evangelistic crusade. The reigning local queen of the headlines at the time was a young widow who had just been acquitted of the murder of her husband. Her trial lasted for weeks, and no aspect of her life and personality was too trivial for press attention. Of her housewifely qualities one sob sister wrote, admiringly: “She keeps a very neat cell.” She was, without doubt, at the time of Aimee’s arrival the most widely known woman in Massachusetts, and it was inevitable that they should team up.

First on their agenda was an evening meeting in the Boston Arena, at which the young widow would be immersed by Aimee in a tank of water and “saved.” This occasion drew an overflow crowd, indicating plainly that the young widow could be useful in other capacities, and it was announced that she would take charge of a great new welfare program — codirector with Aimee was, I believe, her title — for distributing food parcels to the needy.

The immersion in the tank had been a morningpaper story and consequently not covered by the Transcript. But as the Transcript’s man responsible for news of Aimee from 9 to 2:45, it fell to me to cover the first distribution of the parcels. An unoccupied basement near Copley Square was the headquarters, but when Frank Colby, the Transcript photographer, and I arrived at the appointed hour, the young widow was the only person there, and the total largess for the needy consisted of two cardboard cartons, each containing about three dollars’ worth of canned goods and staple foodstuffs. The cartons, she explained, were of course only samples; more would be forthcoming. But after Colby made a picture and we left, we heard no more about the young widow and the direct relief program, and whatever became of the two cartons of groceries we never learned. The deal with Aimee had cooled suddenly.

I must say that during the week, more or less, in which I followed her activities, never once did Aimee fail to maintain her faultless facade of affability, graciousness to any and all of the press, and impenetrable aloofness from embarrassing questions. The same was not quite true of her entourage, one of whom was a comic figure of heroic dimensions, a bulky and unbelievably stupid young man whose name I have forgotten and who was always addressed as “Brother” by Sister Aimee and her staff.

On the first morning of the assignment, I arrived at 9 o’clock at the large parlor of Aimee’s suite in a second-rate hotel. Her secretary, an extremely good-looking girl, invited me to wait until Sister was ready for visitors, and I was sitting there reading a paper when Brother came in.

“G’morning,” he said to the secretary and unhesitatingly set a course for the door of what was obviously Sister’s bedroom.

The secretary, more sensitive than Brother to what his actions might imply to a third party, called out to him sharply. “Brother, Brother,” she said, “Sister isn’t up yet.”

Brother came to a halt, but it was plain that the secretary’s statement was causing no more than a “so what?” reaction in his thinking. The secretary was taking no chances that Brother would be able to add up the situation correctly without assistance. “Come and meet this reporter from the Transcript,” said the secretary. Her tone was so firm that even Brother suddenly got the idea. I think he had failed altogether to notice my presence up to that point. He came over to me, beaming. “Pleased to meetcha,” said Brother, and sat down beside me.

We conversed idly about Brother’s adventures on tour, and we kept getting back to his main preoccupation, that his feet were giving him trouble. He was so talkative that I was curious about what he might say of the man who had been so egregiously identified with Aimee’s affairs at the time of her famous “kidnaping” a decade or so earlier. Brother’s face darkened at the question.

“I’m a man of God,” Brother declared, although this was hardly the first impression a stranger gained of him, “and I don’t believe in vi’lence. But when I think of what this little woman had to go through on account of him, I’d just like to get my hands on that son of a bitch!”

Some companies expanded their business and profits right on through the Depression, but I doubt that any of us at the Transcript were aware of them. We were all so involved in the paper and so dependent on it that prosperity elsewhere, while the Transcript was faring so poorly, was inconceivable. I believe, on the basis of figures shown to me many years later, that the paper’s losses were overstated to us, but its circulation and advertising were certainly shrinking from month to month.

The darkest news for us came every year or so with the announcement that all hands would meet in the city room at 3:15 to hear a report from the president of the company, George S. Mandell. We all liked him, a kindly, remote personality, an improbable executive for any sort of enterprise, let alone an evening paper. He was a devoted fox hunter and horseman, with a limp and a stoop from many tumbles, and his small, cluttered office usually contained several bits of tack that he had brought into town for repair. My chief visual memory of him is of his limping through the city room, swinging a bridle or stirrup leather, humming to himself, and bowing and smiling to anyone who caught his eye. I doubt that he knew the names of half the staff.

Turnouts for these meetings included only the news and editorial people and those who worked in the “counting room.” The employees under various union contracts had no reason to attend, for they were not paying union dues for the purpose of negotiating wage cuts for themselves. I never heard of any wage cut being accepted by the typographical unions throughout the Depression and final years of the Transcript. (When I left the paper in 1936, the printers were said to be paid $57.50 a week, while Henry Claus, the editor and a really superior person, was down to $50 a week.)

The meetings were brief, merely a formal ratification of rumors that had preceded them for weeks. The extreme rumor was, of course, that the Transcript would suspend publication, and I think we always felt bucked up, if not downright cheerful, when the Old Man would begin his statement with word that this was not so: the Transcript was not suspending publication. But it was true, he continued, that losses were mounting, and it was his sad duty to inform us that, effective immediately, all salaries would be reduced by, et cetera, et cetera. It was simply then a case of going home and breaking the news to the family: if things had been bad, they would now be worse. I think we felt as sorry for the Old Man, for being obliged to make such embarrassing announcements, as we did for ourselves.

In certain other respects the Depression was more entertaining, especially in the great numbers of important personages whom it was constantly whittling down to boy’s size. No sooner did one of these magnificoes perceive that the economy had “turned the corner,” as the favored cliché of the time put it, than a new flurry of failures, foreclosures, and utterly novel disasters would break out.

THE reassuring speeches of President Hoover always seemed to presage some altogether new setback. My friend E. B. Sargent, whose desk adjoined mine in the city room, shared with me a joint stock account — small but absurdly active — and we picked up a point or so on many occasions by going short on odd lots whenever a presidential speech or message was imminent. The cyclical theorists, chart readers, economists, and rabbit’sfoot touchers never had such infallible short-term guidance as was theirs for the simple act of coppering the sanguine utterances of President Hoover. And like Prohibition and the Depression itself, there were times when it seemed as if he would be with us forever. His speeches seemed to me dull and much too long, impaired also by the muttering monotone in which he read them and his occasional struggles with the odd word which he seemed to be encountering for the first time. “Auspices” was one which tormented him especially, and I often wondered why he allowed in his text words that repeatedly trapped and tripped him.

The great argument after a major speech by Mr. Hoover was not over whether one agreed or disagreed with it, but rather over what on earth the speech had meant. It was hard to call his position mistaken, for somewhere among his musings might lie quite an opposite possibility. I have always counted the following lines, on the likelihood of there being a second world war, as one of his more sibylline obfuscations:

Certain types of propaganda are today fertilizing our soil for our entry into war. For instance, we are assured that a great war in Europe is inevitable. This is a half-truth. The setup in Europe has made a general war inevitable every hundred years since the Romans kept the peace. And until mankind makes much greater progress it will continue to be inevitable. But the pounding in of that phrase is either sensational journalistic speculation or European propaganda. Furthermore, it is dinned in our ears that we shall inevitably be drawn into this inevitable war. That depends upon our own will to keep out.

No reader need have wondered, on the basis of this excerpt, whether war was imminent, for even as Mr. Hoover’s article was emerging from the presses, in the September, 1939, issue of the Reader’s Digest, the great war had begun.

The organization of his material was even more painful: it was like listening to a long outline, laid out in sections and subsections, and at the beginning of each Mr. Hoover would tell the listener what he proposed to say in that section. He would then say it. The main subject would be divided into perhaps six principal headings, and these were identified and fully disclosed at the beginning: first, second, third, and so forth. But each of the principal headings proved to split into a series of subdivisions, also numbered, and it was disconcerting to hear the speaker end Number Four and with the word “finally” go on to Number Five, only to find that he was nowhere near the end of anything and was in fact about to take up his principal heading Number Two, with Three, Four, Five, and Six as yet untouched. “Further” was another word that kept recurring unhappily; it always came out “futher” or “futhermore.” Little is heard nowadays, in the Hoover saga, of how phenomenally unpopular he had become by the final year of his term. As Colonel Starling of the Secret Service said to us, on arriving in Boston with President Hoover after a bitter greeting from street crowds in Detroit in the 1932 campaign, “ It isn’t a pleasant thing to see people run out and spit at the President of the United States.” When Norman Thomas came to town from the Middle West in the same campaign, he reported, “Farmers are milking for sport.” Corn, at Iowa loading points, was fetching some six or seven cents a bushel, and the well-to-do, of whom a few still remained, were hoarding canned goods against the threats of Milo Reno and his proposed “farmers’ holiday.”

The real fun figures of the time were, of course, the bankers and financial experts. I had found in my teens that my bank would no more lend me money for playing the market than it would underwrite a system for shooting dice or betting on horses according to their post positions. It had astonished me, therefore, on settling down in Massachusetts at around the peak of the boom in the fall of 1928, to hear my new friends tell how their banks had helped them to buy the rather large blocks of Electric Bond and Share, Radio Corporation, Pennroad, and other favored securities that they were holding. The banks were, in fact, no wiser than Joe Doakes. The 1929 crash in itself plunged many of them into insolvency, not because of a run by depositors who wanted to get their money out, but because the bank examiners found they had made loans so hopefully that they could no longer meet their obligations.

One of the financial remedies attempted by the Hoover Administration was a ruling by the Comptroller of the Currency, whose name I recall as John W. Pole, that banks would be permitted to carry bonds in their portfolios at par, without regard to the market price, which was often anywhere from a half to a tenth of that figure. This remarkable concept received little or no comment at the time, and I have never heard it mentioned in the years that followed, but it still sounds to me like something out of Lewis Carroll. True, the resulting balance sheet might appease the examiners, but what was to happen to this delightful markup when the bank needed some fresh cash and tried to sell these same bonds?

The investment trusts proved to have little more trading acumen than the man in the street, and many of them managed to trade themselves into extra losses during the long slide. Their method was simple: sell out at the bottom of a sharp decline; take courage at the next temporary rise and buy in at its top; repeat the performance as long as the capital lasts. Statisticians have estimated that many investment trusts would have been more successful had they invested at the peak of the boom in every company listed on the New York Stock Exchange and then simply sat tight on their holdings for the next ten or twenty or thirty years. Much the same illness seemed to afflict the mutual funds in the sell-off of 1962, when the shrinkage of assets in all but a few funds proved to exceed the decline in the Dow-Jones averages.

A few cool heads must have made great fortunes in the Depression. I have in mind a Boston patriarch who converted all his securities into some millions in cash in 1928 and reinvested just before the bank holiday in 1933. His son explained the father’s reasoning to me as follows: “If the country is going to hell, it won’t make any difference anyhow, but either the country is going to hell or else General Motors is dirt cheap at $14 a share.” A whole building full of finance committees and statistical wizards could have worked long and hard without reaching an equally profitable conclusion.

BOSTON was never quite able to make up its mind about Prohibition. Through the final years of it the city was under the thumb of a police lieutenant who made no bones about being the man in charge. His connections among the higher-ups were widely conjectured, but nothing of that sort ever came to light. He raided or not, as he saw fit, and that was that. The result was that drinking and bootlegging were tolerated in Boston, provided the surroundings were unattractive. To buy a visitor a drink of whiskey in the bar frequented by newspapermen, one escorted him to a rather dirty basement kitchen where, surrounded by garbage cans and the splatter of dishwashing, the proprietor filled a tiny shot glass for the bon vivant from a pint bottle labeled Golden Wedding. Take it or leave it.

New York, by contrast, had speakeasies in abundance for every taste and purse. The dollar volume in sales and in protection money must have been astronomical, for these were wellstocked, heavily patronized places that prided themselves on supplying almost any drink called for.

I tried once, on returning from the wonders of New York, to expound the virtues of more variety in his bar inventory to the charming old Irishman who offered the supposed Golden Wedding and only one other item, needled beer. He had just set before me a small glass of needled beer, and I had laid my half-dollar for it on the bar. He listened indulgently to my preachment. He looked at the small glass of beer, then at the half-dollar, then at me, and said with a winning smile, “ This is all right.”

Of all the comic figures generated by the Depression and Prohibition, I recall Professor Irving Fisher of Yale as unique in his misconception of both issues. There were, of course, millions of others who had miscalculated the stock market and who were sure that Prohibition was a blessing, however much disguised, but few were so prominent and so excessively verbal as this revered economist. On financial subjects he managed to give the impression that it was the market that had made the mistake rather than himself, and he continued to make countless speeches on economic affairs long after another man in his position might have seriously considered taking up some new line of work. He was a rabid Prohibitionist, and during the year that I worked on the Boston Herald, before shifting to the Transcript, I covered a big Symphony Hall meeting of drys who turned out to get the straight of it all from the learned professor. I reported him at length in the Herald, but no one seemed to take his figures amiss, with the result that I sent a letter about them to the editor of the Commonweal, which was very nearly the only respectable anti-Prohibition weekly of that time. The letter, published in its issue of November 6, 1929, was as follows:

In your issue of October 16 there is a reference to Professor Irving Fisher of Yale upon which I should like to elaborate somewhat.

On October 13 Professor Fisher spoke on Prohibition here in Boston, and if my ears heard him correctly, he offered the following mathematical absurdity: a) that drinking today is some 15 percent in extent of pre-Prohibition drinking; b) that from 1920, the advent of Prohibition, the dry move showed a steady gain until 1925; c) that from 1925 to date, one half of this gain was lost.

May I suggest that a graphical representation of this hypothesis would show that, taking pre-Prohibition consumption as a basis of 100, Professor Fisher’s graph would have to drop to minus 70 in order to “lose half of its gain,” and wind up at plus 15?

Just what degree of drinking is represented by minus 70?

IN THE lean summers of the Depression, I used to spend a week or ten days of my vacation with the coast guard, on one of its regular patrols. A reporter who could write an ordinarily interesting account of a patrol was always welcomed by the service as a wardroom guest, and the only cost to him was his mess bill, which ranged anywhere from $5 to $10 a week. Why more newspapermen did not avail themselves of these pleasures I have never understood, for it was like having an oceangoing yacht at your disposal along the coast of northern New England. Every patrol yielded its magnificent seafaring scenes and some bizarre adventure, and Prohibition often intruded in all its absurdity.

One summer a year or two before Repeal, I was enjoying a cruise on the spacious old cutter Tahoe. We anchored off a small air station that the coast guard had recently set up at Salem Willows, and the officers were whiling away the day by taking rides, hospitably offered by the station’s commander, in a new amphibious plane. Suddenly came radio instructions to locate and shadow the rumrunner Pronto, then at sea some thirty-five miles east of Gloucester and seeking to make a shore contact that night with a speedboat from the Cape Ann area. So ran the message from Intelligence.

The people in a navy or coast guard vessel always count that day lost when the ship’s movie is not shown, and an hour or so after clearing Salem the captain decreed it time for the show. Evening, the usual time, might find us otherwise engaged, he felt, and he was quite right.

I came on deck at the end of the movie, just after sunset. The afterglow was fading, and the sea and clouds were a pearly gray, an opalescent effect. The Tahoe’s engines were stopped. I realized suddenly that I was looking at our quarry, the Pronto, lying motionless in the twilight calm, hardly a hundred yards away: a 110-foot converted subchaser from World War I, powered by twinscrew diesels. Her home port was Bridgetown, capital of Barbados, and she was so deeply laden with her cargo of Belgian alcohol that she looked, with scarcely any freeboard, almost like a small submarine. Two salty-looking characters in rubber boots and black oilskins were lounging outside her wheelhouse, and even as I stood gaping at the first genuine rummy I had seen in operation, they disappeared inside, and almost immediately Pronto made off toward the west.

The prodigious game of tag that followed, carried on at a speed of about twelve knots, could not have been more exciting at ten times that speed. Tahoe’s maximum was around thirteen knots, about two more than Pronto seemed to have, but the rummy’s short turning radius, with her twin screws, kept the contest even, and she could be off on a new course by the time we were just beginning to swing around in pursuit. It was easy to keep Pronto in sight in the twilight, but if she once got beyond the reach of our searchlights in the dark, we should probably lose her. The cutter had no right to interfere with a vessel of foreign registry on the high seas, so that all Tahoe could do was watch the rummy in the hope of capturing or destroying the speedboat that was seeking to take part of her cargo ashore, and, at any rate, of preventing their contact.

The situation was exasperating to Tahoe’s captain. After several especially quick changes of course, just before dark, he ordered a seaman armed with a machine gun to report to the bridge. A round-faced youngster responded, looking much too young to be lugging so threatening a weapon. “Get down there on the port rail and stand by,”the captain ordered. “Don’t fire until I give the order.” But then, as the boy was scuttling away with his gun, still within hearing, the captain shouted, somewhat ambiguously it seemed to me, “I’ll fill the bastard full of lead!”

I was enchanted, waiting for what might happen next. Out of such stuff are international incidents made. Both vessels were on a straight course, Tahoe about a hundred yards astern of Pronto and coming up on her with our two-knot advantage of speed. Tahoe’s cutwater was headed directly for the exact center of Pronto’s stern, and Pronto seemed to be slowing. With a collision only a few feet away, Tahoe turned ever so slightly and swept past the rummy. At the same time there was a great thumping, smashing of glass, shouts, and angry words.

My first thought was that the lad with the machine gun must have cut loose on his own, and I hurried out to the wing of the bridge to look. Our bow wave was just rolling across Pronto’s deck, and the two salty characters in oilskins were knee-deep in water as they ran to close a hatch on the bow. The thumping sounds were continuing and proved to be a barrage of potatoes, from the large, ventilated lockers on deck where we stored our vegetables, which two or three dozen of Tahoe’s people were heaving at Pronto’s wheelhouse.

Pronto dodged and twisted, barely within the reach of our searchlights, until around midnight, when she laid a course for the tip of Nova Scotia, her shore arrangements a failure for the time being. As she settled on her new course, a jaunty blinker message in Morse came from her: “Thanks for the spuds. Look out for the rocks. Good night.”

Potatoes, I learned, were the usual missiles in harassment of the rumrunners. Another favored tactic was for a cutter to lie alongside to windward of a rummy, as near as possible, and blow her boiler tubes, giving the rummy a thick coating of soot. But Pronto’s time was running out. About a week after I had returned to Boston, a short paragraph with a New London dateline brought word that Pronto had been rammed and sunk the night before off the Connecticut coast by U.S.C.G. cutter Argo, and what became of the two salty characters in black oilskins, I never did learn.

When legal liquor returned with Repeal in 1933, Boston was no better prepared for the occasion than it had been for Prohibition. It was a festive evening, the crowds were enormous, and the drinks in general not very attractive. The Scollay Square neighborhood served whatever was called for — Scotch, rye, bourbon, brandy—but in many places it all came out of the same bottle. Jake Wirth’s, the old-time German restaurant, was celebrated for its varieties of draft beer in preProhibition days, but the fine Latin motto carved above its bar mirror, “Suum Cuique,” had been only a mockery during the long near-beer interval. Now, jammed to capacity with ecstatic beer drinkers, Wirth’s was coming into its own again.

On a roundup of the evening for the Transcript, I dropped in at Wirth’s to get a few pointers on beer. Wirth’s headwaiter, who worked for the restaurant for sixty-five years, was known to the world as “Pop,” a slender little man who always wore a black draft cap and whose manner with customers, in contrast with that of German waiters in general, was always charmingly urbane. I found him at the fringe of the crush around the bar, watching reflectively the customers, who were acting as if this were the last chance at a seidel of beer they would ever have in their lives.

Pop was embarrassed when I asked him about the beer, but he was too fastidious a host and too conscientious a restaurateur to lie about it. Regrettably, he said, Mr. Wirth had been so late in applying for the new liquor license that it had not yet been granted.

“You mean —” I began, with a nod toward the merrymakers at the bar.

“Right,” said Pop. “Near beer. Still near beer, the same as yesterday.”