The Crainrona was a cattle boat but it didn’t carry any cattle unless you call us cattle, and sometimes that’s just how we felt. For that matter, the food did mostly taste like fodder; and the weather was pretty rough. But we had fun because we were all in a great business, we were young and we were delighted to be going where we were going. One morning we heard there was land in the distance. I’ll never forget the details of what happened next. We were all on deck, sitting, watching the land in the mist. Suddenly Charlie ran to the railing, took off his hat, waved it and shouted, “America, I am coming to conquer you! Every man, woman and child shall have my name on their lips — Charles Spencer Chaplin!” We all booed him affectionately, and he bowed to us very formally and sat down again. Years later whenever I met any of the old [Karno] troupe, that was the one thing about those years we remembered the best, and we used to marvel on how right Charlie had been.
— Stan Laurel1
WHETHER THEY PAID FO R THEIR PASSAGE OR STOWED AWAY on passenger ships, cattle boats, or other conveyances during those peak immigration years from 1905 to 1914, ten and a half million equally hopeful and ambitious refugees and adventurers made the same voyage as Chaplin. Like the twenty-one-year-old actor, one or two others may have actually shouted their plans to conquer America from the deck of their ship when it first came in sight of the promised land. But whether they dreamed or screamed it, most came with similar hopes and plans.
Charlie was the third member of the family to make the trip. Charlie Sr. had done so in 1890, and Syd sixteen years later. Both had played New York and returned to London, where they had resumed their music hall careers as well-paid featured performers. While Charlie reassured the Guv’nor that he had no plans to “jump ship” and stay in the States, that was precisely what he hoped to do if he got the chance:
Since my major setback at the Oxford Music Hall, I was full of the idea of going to America, not alone for the thrill and adventure of it, but because it would mean renewed hope, a new beginning in a new world.…
This chance to go to the United States was what I needed. In England I felt I had reached the limit of my prospects; besides, my opportunities there were circumscribed. With scant educational background, if I failed as a music-hall comedian I would have little chance but to do menial work. In the States the prospects were brighter.2
Having recently lost a couple of fully trained Karno comedians to the better-paying American vaudeville stage, the Guv’nor had decided to send Charlie to the States and keep Sydney in England. By now Syd Chaplin had four years of experience as a Karno comedian and had in 1909 written his first successful comedy sketch, Skating. He was a much more valuable business property and promising star than his highstrung kid brother, who with only two years of seasoning was still learning the ropes. From Karno’s perspective, developing a young actor with raw talent into a full-fledged “speechless comedian” was an elaborate educational and training process that required a great deal of time and effort. While Karno undoubtedly recognized that Charlie was a motivated fast learner, he regarded venerable old-timers like thirty-eight-year-old Fred Kitchen as master comedians. In addition to working the halls as Karno’s highest-paid principal performer, Kitchen wrote sketches with and for the Guv’nor, coached some of his touring companies, and worked with the younger actors.
Stan Laurel, Charlie’s roommate on the American tour, recalled the Guv’nor’s invaluable personal instruction:
Fred Karno didn’t teach Charlie and me all we know about comedy. He just taught us most of it. If I had to pick an adjective to fit Karno, it would be supple.… He was flexible in just about everything, and above all he taught us to be supple. Just as importantly he taught us to be precise. Out of all that endless rehearsal and performance came Charlie, the most supple and precise comedian of our time.3
For his part, Chaplin remembered Karno more as a manager than a teacher. When he said, “Karno required us to know a number of parts so that the players could be interchanged,”4 Charlie saw the instruction as secondary to the interchangeability.
Still, as a prospective immigrant, Charlie had a distinct advantage over the average greenhorn. Unlike other young men just off the boat, he was receiving a first-rate paid education in his chosen profession, he had a secure job, there was no ostensible language barrier, and he was free to return to England and his recently established position as a budding music hall star if he couldn’t find a better opportunity in the States. It would take Chaplin two American tours, lasting twenty-two and fifteen months respectively between 1910 and 1913, before he finally got the right offer.
However, as Charlie discovered soon after stepping on American soil, when an irate Jersey City bartender almost knocked him unconscious with a barrel stave upon mistakenly assuming that Chaplin was mocking him, American and British versions of the English language were not the same. Attempting to order a beer, Cockney Charlie had said, “Well, old top, I fancy I should like a mug of mulled ale and a toasted biscuit.” Before the offended barkeep could tear his head off, the Karno troupe’s actor-manager, Alf Reeves, stepped in and straightened out the misunderstanding.5
Reeves, who later served as the general manager of the Chaplin Film Studio from 1918 to 1946, was also responsible for recruiting Charlie and bringing him to America in the first place. Back in London in the winter of 1910, when he was looking for fresh talent for the Karno troupe for its next American touring season, thirty-four-year-old Reeves heard about Charlie and checked out his act at the Holloway Empire, where he was playing the lead role of Jimmy. A sketch whose full title was Jimmy the Fearless, or The Boy ’Ero, it was a Cockney comedy about a daydreaming adolescent who is addicted to reading penny dreadfuls (dime novels) and whose escapist yearnings for romance and adventure are forever being shattered by harsh reminders of the realities of his working-class life. (Chaplin would employ this Walter Mitty-like device, punctuated by frustrated awakenings from pipe dreams and sleep dreams, with hilarious results in His Prehistoric Past, The Bank, Shoulder Arms, The Idle Class, The Kid, The Gold Rush, and Modern Times.) Alf Reeves never forgot his initial impression of the young Karno comedian: “Just as I popped in he was putting great dramatic fire into the good old speech, ‘Another shot rang out, and another redskin bit the dust!’…
He looked the typical London street urchin, who knows every inch of the town as he darts through hurrying throngs and dodges in and out of rushing traffic, managing by some miracle to escape with his life. He had a cap on the back of his head and wore a shabby old suit, short in the sleeves and frayed at the cuffs — a suit he had long since outgrown.
But it was not until he did something strikingly characteristic that I realised he was a real find. His father in the skit was ordering him to drop his novel and eat his supper. “Get on with it now, m’lad,” and jabbing a loaf of bread at him. Charlie, I noticed, cut the bread without once taking his eyes off his book. But what particularly attracted my attention was that while he absentmindedly kept cutting the bread.… The next thing I knew, he had carved that loaf into the shape of a concertina.6
Reeves instantly recognized that Chaplin’s dreamily transforming a loaf of bread into a concertina, and then “playing” it to drown out the Polonius-like buzz of his father’s dinner table conversation, was an unmistakable mark of comic creativity. Not since the days when the legendary Grimaldi had seized on two loaves of bread to serve as a pair of boxing gloves in order to fight with the Vegetable Man, a fantasy monster constructed entirely from vegetables (intended as a parody of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) had the English comedy stage seen such flights of comic imagination achieved with a common penny loaf.
And while Chaplin would later perform an even more dazzling bread routine — the “Dance of the Rolls” in The Gold Rush — it was his uncanny ability to surprise audiences by wittily transforming commonplace physical objects into unique creations that marked him a future master clown in Alf Reeves’s experienced eye. The highly respected Swiss pantomimist Adrian Wettach (Grock), an honorary member of the International Clown Hall of Fame like Chaplin, described the whimsy that kind of comedy required:
Ever since I can remember, all kinds of inanimate objects have had a way of looking at me reproachfully and whispering to me in unguarded moments: “We’ve been waiting for you … at last you’ve come … take us now, and turn us into something different … we’ve been so bored waiting.”7
After five years’ experience in Repairs, Casey’s Court Circus, and several Karno sketches, Chaplin, now twenty-one, was beginning to acquire the requisite acting skills and creative imagination to craft those startling transformation gags for which he later became famous as a movie actor. In his films, Charlie the screen character would transform himself into at least six distinct types — the tipsy bumbler, the wily trickster, the streetwise hustler, the comic misfit, the clever chameleon, and the poet-magician — and his universe into countless variations. Turning a cow into a milk machine by pumping its tail; drying teacups and dinner plates with the laundry wringer of an old-fashioned washing machine; fashioning an old sock into a change purse and a handkerchief; storing his lunch in an office safe, and employing a cuspidor as a baby potty were a few of his comic misfit transformations. As a tipsy bumbler he would transform a cigarette into a door key, its ashes into a cab driver’s tip, and a light bulb into a match. As a streetwise hustler dodging the bobbies, he could transform himself into a wall by freezing flat against that structure and pretending to be invisible in order to avoid capture. A wily trickster, he stuck a lampshade over his head, froze on the spot, and became a standing lamp in order to avoid a confrontation with a romantic rival. Chameleonlike, he could transform himself into an anesthesiologist who anesthetizes a street bully with a street-corner gas lamp while conscientiously monitoring his patient’s pulse, or a cardiologist who employs his stethoscope to diagnose an alarm clock’s bum ticker, or an internist who takes his patient’s pulse with clinical aplomb and then orders him to stick out his tongue to moisten a postage stamp. And the dreamy poet-magician could, of course, transform dinner rolls into ballet slippers.
Chaplin never specified what he learned from Karno as an actor. Stan Laurel did:
Wistful. I don’t think I even knew what in the hell wistful meant at the time. But I gradually got at least part of the idea when Karno used to say it to some of the old-timers in the troupe. I don’t remember if he was the one who originated the idea of putting a bit of sentiment right in the midst of a funny music hall turn, but I know he did it all the time.… it was a bit touching. Karno encouraged that sort of thing. “Wistful” for him I think meant putting in that serious touch once in a while.… you would have to look sorry, really sorry, for a few seconds.… Karno would say, “Wistful, please, wistful!” It was only a bit of a look, but somehow it made the whole thing funnier. The audience didn’t expect that serious look. Karno really knew how to sharpen comedy in that way.8
Stan apparently credited his own trademark gesture of wistfulness, that slow cry and head scratch, to Fred Karno’s lessons in seriocomic counterpoint. But Charlie never as generously acknowledged what he had learned from the Guv’nor. Nor did he credit what, if anything, he’d learned from his fellow clowns at the Fun Factory.
Of all the comedy material Chaplin may have unconsciously absorbed or overtly copied from other Karno performers before departing for America, the Little Tramp’s signature “ashtray kick” was his single most incontrovertible borrowing, with the most easily traceable source. Fred Kitchen, one of Charlie’s Karno mentors, was the person who taught him how to casually toss a lit cigarette over his shoulder and effortlessly back-kick it away without turning his head. When asked by British reporters late in life why he had never toured America, master clown Kitchen claimed it was because everyone would have automatically assumed that he was trying to imitate his former pupil’s screen character, since Kitchen’s stage character also wore big boots and ambled with a comic gait while tossing lucifers and back-kicking fags.
The origin of Chaplin’s ashtray kick has never been disputed by music hall historians, but the big boots are more problematic.
Not only Kitchen but also another music hall droll by the name of Little Tich (Harry Relph) has been credited as the possible source of inspiration for the Little Tramp’s big boots — as well as for Chaplin’s funny business with his hat and cane. After playing on the bill with him at the Folies Bergère in 1909, Chaplin “came back from Paris inspired by what he had seen Tich doing and soon began duplicating a great many elements of his art,” wrote one reputable theatrical historian.9
A gracefully coordinated, pint-sized dancer in iconic slap-shoes, whose trademark chapeau ran circles around him while his signature cane also got the better of him, Relph has sometimes been credited with inspiring Chaplin’s derby-tipping-and-flipping antics and his comic canesmanship. While Tich’s world-class act may or may not have influenced Chaplin’s choice of character moes and taught him a thing or two about using those props, it is also the case that “Chaplin was able to put more substance into his walking-stick than there were electrons in the Hiroshima Bomb,” in the words of Buster Keaton.10 In addition to manicuring its owner’s fingernails and being put to bed like a baby, Chaplin’s cane would trip his rivals, bring girls close, and hoist their skirts — and then get spanked by Charlie for such naughty behavior. His cane would serve as a billiard cue, a toothpick, a conductor’s baton, a swagger stick, a golf club, and a dueling sword. All of these transformations were ones his fellow clown Harry Relph couldn’t have helped but admire.
Part of the problem in cataloguing most of the borrowed comedy material that twenty-one-year-old Charlie packed in his mental theatrical trunk was his mounting “anxiety of influence” late in life. With an eye on posterity as well as an understandable fear of being consigned to oblivion by the modern filmmaking establishment, Chaplin was careful not to dilute his own claim to genius by frankly acknowledging the influence of music hall greats like Leno, Lloyd, Karno, Kitchen, and Relph. As a homesick expat in the 1920s and 1930s, on the other hand, he had loved to do those dead-on takeoffs of his former idols, whose acts he remembered catching and studying with photographic precision back in dear old Blighty as a stagestruck youngster and a struggling young actor. By the time he sat down to pen his memoirs, however, the original subjects of those earlier graphic tributes had conveniently slipped his memory.
Even though Chaplin’s late-life silence makes it difficult to pinpoint precisely who influenced him most, there is no doubt that by the time he arrived in New York City on a balmy Indian-summer day in 1910, he was well furnished with a bag of bits and shticks, many of which had been lifted wholesale from other comedians’ acts and assimilated into his own. In Chaplin’s defense, such unacknowledged borrowing from predecessors is a time-honored tradition in the profession. And in the half century since his death, Chaplin’s art has continued to receive a similar tribute from a long, distinguished list of contemporary comedians.
In addition to “adopting” gags, Chaplin also refined his own acting technique by studying other people’s acting — particularly the nonverbal performances of music hall singers. His knowledge of facial, gestural, and postural expressive acting by the time he left England was prodigious. Equipped with perfect recall for lyrics, tunes, and, most important, the signature delivery for almost every music hall song he ever heard, Chaplin had learned volumes about pantomime acting by observing and copying topical vocalists, despite the fact that he himself was a speechless comedian, not a singer.
No one would disagree with Marcel Marceau’s observation that Chaplin “adapted his style of English Music Hall pantomime to cinematography.”11 That remark was meant to include the profound influence of those topical ballads and comic character songs whose plot structure, style of delivery, and philosophical point of view were in Charlie’s bones by the time he hit Hollywood. Marceau was not restricting the term “pantomime” to its narrowest sense — his own specialty of dumb show. He was using it in its broader sense to include those complex nonverbal acting skills that music hall vocalists routinely used to get the story lines of their songs across with vivid immediacy to the audience. It was those pantomime aspects of their musical delivery that were filled with carefully crafted bits of stage business: gems of nonverbal invention, gestural inflection, and facial expression that immeasurably advanced the telling of their tales.
Just as these pantomime storytelling skills would prove an enormous asset for Chaplin the actor, so the stories in the ballads would be invaluable as sources for Chaplin the writer, inspiring scenarios and plots for his slapstick film sketches. Again, there is no way to identify and trace systematically the songs from his boyhood and adolescence, whose story lines were transformed into his short films. But there are striking similiarities between the subject matter of Chaplin’s early one- and two-reelers and the standard sitcom story lines of typical British music hall comedy ballads. Such themes as the landlady and the lodger, the coy flirt and the would-be masher in the park, the henpecked married man and his battle-ax wife, the tipsy philandering husband and his long-suffering spouse, the constabulary boob and the shady trickster — these are but a few of the typical stock comedy situations in both of these proletarian art forms. Moreover, the slapstick sequencing device of multiplying misfortunes portrayed in musical hall comedy songs is strikingly similar to the cascading calamities so characteristic of Keystone Comedy films.
Although he acknowledged that there had been a relationship between music hall songs and his early one- and two-reelers, Chaplin never identified most of the songs that had shaped those films. He did reveal two examples of that shaping process: his use of “Mrs. Grundy” to set the mood for The Immigrant, and of “The Honeysuckle and the Bee” in The Vagabond. He also mentioned in passing that one of Charlie Sr.’s signature songs shaped one of his early films, His Trysting Place, but he never said which. Given these tantalizing glimpses, there’s room to ponder the full extent of the use Chaplin made of his balladic repetoire in shaping his art.
His most striking use of music in silent film was, of course, José Padilla’s “La Violetera” in City Lights. And his most overt tribute to British music hall songs was “The Animal Trainer” and “The Sardine Song” in his sound film Limelight. Harry Crocker described being holed up with Chaplin on a creative brainstorming session in which he was treated to a extensive repertoire of British music hall songs, but he never mentioned the names of the songs and the artistes Charlie did.
It does not require a great stretch of the imagination to recognize the wistful humor and schmaltzy Cockney worldview Chaplin exported with him to America as inherent to those earthy music hall ballads. Delivered in a bawdy comic vernacular, they offered their lowly audiences an elevated view of themselves and their lives by serenading them with the nostalgic trials and tribulations of working-class underdogs like themselves. The hilarious musical misadventures reflected a vicarious spiritual triumph over the poverty, suffering, and class humiliation that was the audience’s common lot. Joining in the chorus, and singing along with the stage performer, became a unifying spiritual experience for audiences that almost served as a class-conscious communion. Even more important than the plot of any ballad’s story line was that homespun brand of hardboiled sentimentality (often softened by beer suds and gin) with which those tales were colorfully imbued — a crucial stylistic forerunner of the wistful mixture of pathos and slapstick that later became known as Chaplinesque.
Arriving in New York City at ten o’clock that sunny Sunday morning in September, Charlie hopped a trolley to Times Square where “newspapers were blowing about the road and pavement, and Broadway looked seedy, like a slovenly woman just out of bed.” Until dusk, that is, when throngs of theatergoers came out and she lit up with a jeweled elegance that hid her stark squalor and made Charlie feel less “homesick.”12
Charlie’s spirits swung in tandem with his perceptions of the urban environment. Stan Laurel recalled:
He was very moody and often very shabby in appearance. Then suddenly he would astonish us all by getting dressed to kill. It seemed that every once in a while he would get an urge to look very smart. At these times he would wear a derby hat (an expensive one), gloves, smart suit, fancy vest, two-tone side button shoes, and carry a cane.13
Since he received a principal’s salary of seventy-five dollars per week (of which he regularly banked fifty), Charlie’s bouts of sartorial squalor were self-imposed: a mixture of moody indifference, economizing self-discipline, and dreamy absentmindedness. Apart from sightseeing and practicing the violin several hours a day, he was starting to spend his spare time reading ambitiously, a painstaking project that required the constant use of a dictionary. An extension of his earlier plan to improve his vocabulary, his reading program marked the beginning of a lifelong attempt to fill in the massive gaps in his education.
Browsing secondhand bookshops in towns wherever he played, he began reading the classics and would later recall: “in my dressing room between shows I also had the pleasure of meeting Twain, Poe, Hawthorne, Irving and Hazlitt.” But his most memorable American discovery would be Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance,” whose emphasis on discovering one’s own genius rapidly became Chaplin’s personal credo. Or, as he put it, “I felt I had been handed a golden birthright.”14 Emerson wrote:
Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.… Where is the master who could have taught Shakspeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every man is an unique.… Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned thee, and thou canst not hope too much or dare too much.15
Given Charlie’s introspective nature, moody temperament, and tendency toward shyness, it’s understandable that some members of the troupe mistook his reserve for superiority. The fact that he “lived like a monk and had a horror of drink,”16 as Karno put it, did not help make him one of the boys. But his monasticism did not exclude female companionship; that shared interest helped him cement ties of masculine friendship with his fellow players. Or, as he put it,
We made many friends with the members of other vaudeville companies. In each town we would get together in the red-light district, six or more of us. Sometimes we won the affection of the madam of a bordel and she would close up the “joint” for the night and we would take over.17
Although the logistics of touring — never staying long enough in any one town to meet suitable women and form solid emotional attachments — probably help explain Charlie’s youthful whoring, there is a certain aging memoirist’s delight with which Chaplin nostalgically recollects his adventures with ladies of the night in Paris, London, Chicago, Butte (Montana), and points west in My Autobiography. His account lends credence to his late-life claim that he slept with more than two thousand women: a modest number compared to Wilt Chamberlain’s self-claimed record of fifteen thousand, but far in excess of that dapper, lady-killing Frenchman Henri Landru’s personal best. (Monsieur Landru would serve as the real-life model for Chaplin’s semiautobiographical turn as the compulsive womanizer Monsieur Verdoux in the 1947 film of the same name.)
Mile after mile and town after town, the small band of Karno players made their way across America: “Such cities as Cleveland, St. Louis, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Kansas City, Denver, Butte, Billings, throbbed with the dynamism of the future, and I was imbued with it.”18 After criss-crossing America from New York to California twice in the space of twenty-one months, they returned to England in the late spring of 1912, where Charlie was stunned and dismayed to learn “I was homeless.”19
Waiting at Waterloo Station, bursting with impatience to share his glad tidings, Syd announced his recent marriage to Minnie Gilbert, a fellow Karno player, and said he had given up their cozy bachelor digs for a honeymoon flat of his own. That news, followed by a depressing Sunday outing to Cane Hill with Syd, where Charlie was unable to bring himself to visit Hannah after being told she was blue in the face from ice water hy-drotherapy to control her tendency to belt out rousing Christian marching songs like a music hall trouper, was enough to harden Chaplin’s resolve to hurry back to the States and settle there.
Still, there were consolations and nostalgic pleasures to be had during this four-month interlude of combined professional touring and vacationing in England. An invitation from the Guv’nor for a weekend as his personal guest on his Thames houseboat was gratifying proof of the twenty-three-year-old star’s rapid rise in his employer’s esteem. Yet Karno refused to grant Charlie equal footing professionally by following his advice to modify the American touring company’s program for the next season, which only intensified his restless dissatisfaction.
Charlie had dutifully reported how limited was the reception of The Wow Wows, or A Night in a London Secret Society, a sketch that was as overly wordy as its title suggests, with talky dialogue and obscure, in-group British humor. But for some reason, Karno remained convinced that his clunker satirizing British upper-class clubmanship was just the thing the American public wanted. Originally, against everyone else’s advice, he had insisted that Reeves retain it as the centerpiece for the last tour. (When Kick In, an American comedy of college campus life, played London two years later, English audiences required a program containing a glossary of American words and phrases to help them out.)
Having already spiced up The Wow Wows by getting every member of the cast to add bits of nonverbal funny business (Charlie showcased his talent for doing drunks by turning his character into a souse), the troupe was not too worried about the adamancy with which Karno insisted on making his pet piece their American centerpiece. Besides, as they had already discovered during the previous season, the touring company was in fact free to play that great crowd-pleaser A Night in an English Music Hall just about as often as they and the American theatergoing public agreed they were mutually interested — which was, in fact, far more frequently than the Guv’nor apparently realized.
Returning to the States on the SS Oceanic in October 1912, Charlie felt more at home than he had on the first tour. New York was less bewildering and unfriendly than during his earlier sojourn, when he had lived in a brownstone back room above a dry cleaning shop off Forty-third Street. Even its skyscrapers — the forty-one-story Singer Building, the fifty-story Metropolitan Tower, the sixty-story Woolworth Building — which had “seemed ruthlessly arrogant and to care little for… ordinary people,”20 now struck him as less menacing: “This time I felt at home in the States — a foreigner among foreigners, allied with the rest.”21
Also, the novelty of travel had worn off. Every place where they played, he had played before. The time between performances hung more heavily on his hands, so Chaplin was able to settle down more seriously to his course of systematic self-improvement by reading with diligence. Like many a foreign-born immigrant before him, Charlie was learning the language of literacy. And in October of 1913, after another full year’s touring, he put some of those recently acquired skills into practice by writing a letter to Syd. As it happened, he had some glad tidings of his own to share with his brother.
I have just to sign a contract for 150 Dollars a week. ‘Now comes the glad news.’ Oh Sid I can see you!! Beaming now as you read this, those sparkling eyes of yours scanning this scrible and wondering what coming next. I’ll tell you how the land lyes. I have had an offer from a moving picture company … the New York Motion Picture Co., a most reliable firm … they have about four companies … [including] ‘Keystone’ which I am about to joyne. I am to take Fred Mace place. He is a big man in the movies. So you bet they think a lot of me.… I went over to New York and saw them personaly, I had no idea they would pay any money but a pal of mine told me that Fred Mace was getting four hundred a week well I ask them for two hundred … Well we hagled for quite a long time and then I had to do all my business by writing them and you bet I put a good business letter together with the help of a dictionary. Finaly we came to this arrangement i.e. A year’s contract. Salary for the first three months 150 per week and if I make good after three months 175 per week with no expences at all and in Los Angeles the whole time. I don’t know whether you have seen any Keystone pictures but they are very funny, they also have some nice girls ect. Well that’s the whole strength of it, so now you know.… Just think Sid £35 per week is not to laugh at and I will only want to work for about five years at that and then we are independent for life. I shall save like a son of a gun.… And if you know of any little ideas in the way of synaros ect don’t forget to let me have them. Hoping you are in good health and Mother improving also I would love her and you to be over hear. Well we may some day when I get in right.
Love to Minnie
And yourself
Your loving Brother,
Charlie22