By page twenty-two or twenty-three — no later than page thirty — Luck shows up. Our hero performs an heroic feat. Back then the cobblestoned streets of New York were abustle with runaway steeds. Half the time the rampaging horse is about to run over a chubby little tot who has toddled out into the teeming street while his nursemaid is making goo-goo eyes at the handsome Irish cop (Terence O’Hullihan). The rest of the time there is an hysterical golden-haired heiress in a runaway buggy, or the same heiress being set upon by a pickpurse, or the same idiotic young lady (you’d think she’d have learned her lesson by now) cornered by a slimy gang of strolling riffraff (she has taken a wrong turn and ended up in a filthy alley). In all cases our hero races to the rescue. The grateful father rewards our hero with a clerkship in the brokerage house where our sharp-eyed chap soon locates the inevitable defalcater (a trusted oldtimer in his dotage, forty-five, forty-six, who has fallen prey to evil women).
It is easy going after that. To the top. All giddy golden-haired heiresses are fascinated with Horatio Alger heroes. They break their engagements to snobbish rich playboys and marry our hero. Everyone — the good, that is — lives happily ever after.
Alas, would it were so with Bob Swillet, real person, confronted with real-life ebb and flow. Bob did get an early break, being orphaned at age six when his dear father, a third floor wortman at Stotlemyer’s Brewery in Hoboken, slipped on a loose wort and went flying into the huge copper brewing kettle where he quickly sank from sight. (After the chaps dredged their drowned comrade from the kettle, two of the more belligerent fellows approached Old Man Stotlemyer and asked that he allow them to dump the batch into the sewer out of respect for their departed fellow worker. Parsimonious Stotlemyer chased them out of his office with a chair leg.)
Naturally, young Widow Swillet felt bad, losing her husband. But she had backbone. She showed her true mettle by taking in washing, hiring out at the sweatshop, a lacy-blouse factory down by the waterfront (vile hangers-on flung suggestive remarks in her direction — really, since Alger was a real prude, nothing a nowadays girl wouldn’t relish), and scrubbing the floor at Gottlieb’s Butcher Shop every night (tight-fisted Gottlieb paid her in soup bones and moldy baloney). In her spare time Widow Swillet made cute little cucumber, squash, and eggplant dolls for the rich children on Regal Row. Brave little Bob did his part by hawking early morning newspapers in the busy Erie Lackawanna Railroad Station (“All aboard for Allentown, Scranton, Binghamton, Syracuse, the Anthracite Special, departing on Track 12, ALL ABOARD!”), by delivering the washing in his little red wagon (made with parts the rich kids had thrown away), and by picking up rags, empty bottles, bits of scrap iron which he sold to Izzy the Junkman, who regularly cheated the gullible little waif.
All went well for a while as it sometimes does in the real world. Things looked good for the Swillets, mother and son. There was even the possibility that a handsome fish peddler (“Today’s special, halibut, five cents a pound, get your fresh fish today!”) would, after a suitable period of mourning, pop the question. Widow Swillet had regained the bloom in her cheeks and the mischievous twinkle in her pretty brown eyes.
Alas. It was not to be. Fate had other things in mind for the poor widow, the hardworking young widow. Too hardworking, for, bone-tired from her hectic schedule, the poor woman, hastening from five o’clock morning mass at St. Nicholas of Myra (patron saint of brewery workers), not wanting to miss the lacy-blouse factory trolley, slipped on the icy church steps and that was that.
Only tearful Bob and grumpy old Gottlieb the butcher showed up for the funeral on a cold, miserable day. Two days after the funeral the First National Benevolent Loan Association of Hoboken foreclosed on the little Swillet hovel — the mortgage was down to $87.95. It was done with extreme regret but a contract is a contract and the Widow Swillet had failed to make the regular monthly payment of $18.25 (it had been her practice to rush down to the loan company during her fifteen minute lunch break at the lacy-blouse factory) on the very day she went to her eternal reward.
A complete orphan now, just as if he had been invented by Horatio Alger, young Bob Swillet was forced to quit school only a few months before the end of the seventh grade. Mother Superior Lydia understood. It was God’s will. He knew best. She hoped and prayed that Bob would not allow this temporary setback to alter his determination to lead a good, clean life on his way to the top.
“For, Bob,” the sainted nun said, “as I have told you time and again, you have all the sterling attributes a boy needs to overcome whatever obstacles the world and the devil may fling in his path. Don’t stumble, Bob, don’t stumble.”
Sniffling, but manfully holding back the tears, Bob promised to do his level best, and he thanked her for never once having beaten him over the knuckles with the glass end of her two and a half pound ruler as she had so often beaten the other boys. This caused the starched creature to beam beatifically and she impulsively pried and tugged at her habit and came forth with a set of brown scapulars which she handed to him as a going away present. Bob was overwhelmed.
That afternoon, after school was out, five or six altar boys beckoned to Bob from behind the statue of St. Nicholas of Myra (which stood in a far corner of the playground and depicted the holy person as fat, jolly, and apparently on the verge of burping). Stupid Bob, who was well aware that his fellow altar boys despised him as Mother Superior’s pet, said to himself, How kind of them. I have misjudged them and shall have to confess to Father O’Dooleygan this Saturday at my regular weekly confession. Bob figured the chaps were planning to shake his hand and wish him well. He was wrong.
So it was with fond memories of better days plus welts, bruises, sore ribs, and one black eye that Bob Swillet bid a sad adieu to schooldays at St. Nicholas of Myra. That was in January, 1926. He was thirteen years old.
Bob’s faith in mankind was immediately restored that very evening when Old Man Gottlieb offered the homeless orphan free lodging above the butcher shop — a drafty, roach-ridden, windowless garret room once occupied by a goat herdsman. In return for the free lodging, crusty old Gottlieb expected Bob to scrub the butcher shop floor every night. In no time at all the customers were complimenting Gottlieb on his spotless shop (Bob always did things up right).
Enter Fate.
In addition to his nightly duties at Gottlieb’s, Bob put in a full day’s work as newsboy, Western Union messenger, bootblack, rags, bottles, and scrap iron scavenger, and — there was no holding Bob back — as a squeaky-voiced singer of melancholy Irish ballads on a busy street corner during evening rush hour. “I’ll take you home again, Kathleen...”
It was tough going, but one blizzardly night in early February Bob, staggering home from his full day’s work, was blown into the Hoboken Free Public Library and his life was never the same. He discovered Horatio Alger’s Whetstone Phil, Or, Sharp and Sure, a tattered copy someone had left on a table.
Enthralled, lost in time, young Bob was finally brought back to earth through the persistent efforts of Miss Minnie Watson, the spinster librarian, who kept tapping him on his tousled head — it was after closing time — first with her overshoe and then with a lead pipe that her old mother had given her long ago as a weapon against nocturnal footpads and saloon corner ruffians.
By the time a reluctant spring came back to Hoboken around April tenth, Bob Swillet had devoured every Horatio Alger novel in sight, and he gradually came to the joyous realization that he, Bob Swillet, was one lucky boy. For he possessed all the wonderful disadvantages of the basic Alger hero. He became inspired, jubilant, wild with excitement. He now knew that God was at the helm, in charge, looking out for orphans.