OUT around 71st and Cottage Grove around this time of year, just before Mr. Volstead took over, we used to sell something called the Saturday Evening Blade. In front of the saloon on the southwest corner of that intersection that was, right across the street from the north gate of Wood-land cemetery. We’d worked up any number of swindles there.
When a customer handed over a nickel for a copy and would wait for his change, with one palm extended while his eyes were preoccupied with the Blade’s screaming headlines, the swindle would be to lay a penny in the palm, click a second penny on top of that—and then to click the third without letting it loose at all. The mark would shove his pennies in his pocket and never even know he’d been hyped.
Sometimes, if the chump didn’t have anything smaller than a two-bit piece we’d duck into the saloon for change—and duck out the Ladies’ Entrance. Merry Christmas, Mr. Mark.
We called the old red-and-yellow wooden four-wheeler that came to the end of the line there the Toonerville Trolley. There was almost always some fool on the rear platform waiting for the Blade to see who’d gotten killed today. We’d time it so as to hand him those blood-red headlines just as the trolley began its creaking jaunt west toward Halsted—the hustle then was to stumble alongside the car trying to reach the fool’s change hand but never quite reaching it. That was no small stunt, the shape that trolley was in, even for a 10-year-old. Sometimes you’d have to have a coughing spell to slow you up.
Once one kid pulled that coughing routine and the mark got off the car and came back for his change, cough or no cough. He didn’t care if the kid had TB. Some mark.
Around Christmastime the big paper guys had cards printed and sold them to us little paper guys for a nickel apiece. They read something like this:
Christmas comes but once a year
When it comes it brings good cheer
So open your heart without a tear
And remember the newsie standing here.
That got them, every time. Especially if there was a light fall of snow. And the swindle in the card routine was this: After he’d paid for the verse and would be thinking he owned it, you’d have to tell him no, it was your only card, you just wanted him to see the sentiment on it, it had cost you a nickel, so please mister could you have it back?
That was thirty Chicago Christmases and Lord-Knows-How-Many-Swindles ago. That saloon is long gone, whole populations have been buried in that cemetery, and the Toonerville Trolley is now a street-car bus. But that big mark of a Santa still keeps coming around, year after year.
It begins to look to me like he must be in on some fast hustle himself. Maybe it’s a kickback on those toys he pushes. Maybe he got something on somebody.
Maybe he knows something we don’t know.