CHAPTER 1. CHILDHOOD – YOUTH 6
Apples, and cider from the barrel in the dark cellar form the pleasant memory of that winter. Sometimes when the snow was very deep I walked; at other times I went horseback or with horse and buggy. Mother Bloor came to East Palestine and I drove her, with horse and buggy, to organize the first Socialist local among the miners in my home town of Negley. She was a wonderful woman and an inspiration. I was also on the track team and in the mile and half mile run. I was not so fast but I had a lot of endurance. It seemed that the more I had to do the more I did. But this winter was enough of the farm for me. I determined to seek my fortune in the city for the summer.
To Wisconsin
A former Sunday School teacher of mine took crews out each summer to sell cornflakes, house to house. I had never been to a large city or even seen a street car. The first day in Cleveland I made $8, got lost, and ended up knocking at a door across the hall from where I should have knocked, and being abashed by meeting a roomful of girls. By the next summer I had a crew of my own in Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota. I sold to retailers and wholesalers.
Meanwhile I had entered Hiram, Ohio, college as a freshman; started a Socialist club there, and had speakers such as J. G. Phelps Stokes and C.E. Ruthenberg, later to be the founder of the Communist Party. Vachel Lindsay had attended this college and here I first became acquainted with his troubadour poetry. Away from home now I thought it was smart to smoke cigarettes, get drunk, play penny ante until daylight, steal canned fruit from the cellar of the Dean's house (for which I was sent home in disgrace for two weeks). This was all of my Baptist "dont's" coming out.
In Portage, Wisconsin, the next summer, I sold a package of cornflakes to a young lady who seemed very nearly to glide down the banister to answer the door. She appeared holding a copy of Jack London's Iron Heel in her hand. I was reading the same book from the town library. This was beautiful Zona Gale, author of Lulu Bett; she persuaded me that the University of Wisconsin was better than Dartmouth, so I went to Madison in the fall.
Here I took journalism in the same class attended by Bob LaFollette, Jr. There were a dozen Socialist legislators here, and I earned $17 space rates telling about them for the NEW YORK CALL, and also credit in my course in journalism. I especially liked my class in geology, and if I had not thought a revolution more important I might have been a geologist. I remember seminars of an unofficial sort at the home of the radical Horace M. Kallen. I washed pots and pans at a frat house for my meals, and carried a paper route. At times I would spend a quarter for tickets and popcorn, and take dark, cold, and beautiful Miriam Gaylord, daughter of the Socialist state senator, to a cheap movie. Randolph Bourne lectured here and my roommate, Bill Brockhausen, and I gave up our bed for him. I did not catch much of his message then, but in later years I was to remember his opposition to war and his aphorism: "War is the health of the state." He was the only New Republic liberal who did not fall for the war. Emma Goldman, the fiery anarchist who spoke about "free love"
