A phenomenon of the early twenties that has passed into the folklore of great American frauds was the sale of underwater real estate in Florida. The men who sold those lots were made out to be the slickest con artists in the country. The stories of how they took gullible tourists into the swamps and separated them from their money in exchange for deeds to property that only an alligator could love made lively reading in New York and Chicago newspapers. But the whole business was blown way out of proportion, and many honest salesmen were maligned in the process. I ought to know, because I was one of the best of them.
I went to Florida because the paper cup business was a bear—it went into hibernation in the winter—and a salesman had to live off whatever layers of fat he’d managed to build up in the summer. Of course, in those first years, that wasn’t much for me. Paper cups were not an easy sale when I hit the streets with my Lily Cup sample case in 1922. The immigrant restaurant owners I approached with my sales pitch shook their heads and said, “Naw, I hev glasses, dey costs me chipper.” My main sales were to soda fountains. Washing glasses was a real pain in the elbow for them. If they had water hot enough to sterilize the glasses, it would create a cloud of steam coming out of their soda fountain. Paper cups got around that problem. They were more hygienic, and they eliminated breakage and losses through unreturned takeout orders. Those elements became the principal points in my sales story. I was green as grass, but I sensed that the potential for paper cups was great and that I would do well if I could overcome the inertia of tradition. It wasn’t easy. I pounded the pavement in my territory from early morning until 5:00 or 5:30 in the afternoon. I would have worked longer, I suppose, but I had another job waiting for me at 6 o’clock—playing piano at radio station WGES in Oak Park. The studio was in the Oak Park Arms Hotel, just a couple of blocks away from the building where Ethel and I had moved into a second-floor flat.
I teamed up with Harry Sosnik, the regular staff pianist, and we became known as “The Piano Twins” to listeners who tuned in to hear us through their earphones. We were gaining in popularity, with our pictures beginning to appear on the covers of sheet music, when Harry left to become the pianist with the well-known Zez Confrey orchestra. He was featured in a highly successful Confrey composition “Kitten on the Keys.” Later Harry formed his own orchestra and did well; he became a fixture on the Hit Parade show on radio. I was promoted to staff pianist at WGES, and this made my double workday complete. I had to arrive at the station promptly at 6 P.M. and play for two hours. I was off from 8 to 10 P.M., and then I returned to work until 2 o’clock in the morning. A few hours later—7 or 7:15 A.M.—I’d be off with my sample case in pursuit of paper cup orders. The only break in this routine was on Sunday, my day off from Lily Cup. But we had afternoon hours at the radio station then. There was no programming on Monday nights—silent nights, they were called. But on Mondays I usually played theater dates with Hugh Marshall, our announcer. Sometimes in the winter months I would be held up by traffic, and I’d arrive at the station a couple of minutes late to find Hugh Marshall stalling for time by chattering brightly into the microphone as he glowered and shook his fist at me. I’d slip out of my coat and muffler and, still wearing my galoshes, launch into some preliminary rambling on the piano, sight-reading the music.
Sometimes a female vocalist I’d never seen before would be there, and I’d have to accompany her on songs I’d never heard, much less practiced. Often I knew nothing about the singer, her timing or style, and I’d have to fake and flounder. But it usually came out pretty well. At newsbreak, I would run to the washroom, kick off my galoshes, splash some cold water on my face, and wash my hands. That spruced me up enough to play with gusto until 8 o’clock, when I could hurry home to dinner and relax for an hour or so. The second shift, from ten at night until two in the morning, was usually a lively session. I enjoyed it, but I was beginning to run out of gas by the time we went off the air. When I reached home, I would start undressing as I climbed up the stairs, and I’d already be asleep when my head hit the pillow.
One of my incidental tasks at the radio station was to hire talent to build up the programs. One evening a couple of fellows who called themselves Sam and Henry came in to audition. They gave me their routine, a few songs and vaudevillian patter. Their singing was lousy but the jokes weren’t too bad, so I hired them for five dollars apiece. They kept working on their characters and developed a Southern Negro dialogue that was a huge success. That team went on to make show business history, later changing the name of their act to Amos and Andy. Another pair of entertainers I worked with at WGES, also hired for a pittance, were Little Jack Little and Tommy Malie. Jack’s distinctive piano style caught on, and he formed a popular dance band. Tommy, who really had a way with a song, composed danceable tunes with tender lyrics. He wrote, among others, “Jealous” and “Looking at the World Through Rose-Colored Glasses.” There was something especially poignant in those songs coming from Tommy, because he was born with both arms stunted, ending at the elbows. The royalties from his music would have allowed him to live in comfort for life, but Tommy ended up a penniless alcoholic.
Ethel used to complain once in a while about the amount of time I spent away from home working. Looking back on it now, I guess it was kind of unfair. But I was driven by ambition. I hated to be idle for a minute. I was determined to live well and have nice things, too, and we could do so with the income from my two jobs. I used to comb through the advertisements in the local newspaper for notices of house sales in the wealthier suburbs—River Forest, Hinsdale, and Wheaton. I haunted these sales and picked up pieces of elegant furniture at bargain basement prices.
Eventually, I was able to get Saturday nights off at the radio station, and this became the big night of the week for Ethel and me. I had to work half a day Saturday at the Lily Cup office in the Loop, and they would pass out the paychecks as we left. I’d stop at the bank on my way home and cash my check, putting most of it in savings and keeping enough for the week’s groceries and incidental expenses. Then Ethel would fix an early supper. Later we would put on our best clothes and take the elevated into Chicago to see whatever shows were playing—the “Ziegfeld Follies,” “George White’s Scandals,” and many legitimate plays; we saw them all from our dollar seats up in have-not heaven. After the show we would go to Henrici’s for coffee and pick up the Sunday papers on our way home.
Those were the good old days in many ways. A lot of financiers and business moguls seemed to be looking at the world through the rose-colored glasses that Tommy Malie sang about, and if great men like Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover believed we had reached the point of perpetual prosperity, who was to disagree? My cup sales kept growing as I learned how to plan my work and work my plan. My confidence grew at the same rate. I found that my customers appreciated a straightforward approach. They would buy if I made my pitch and asked for their order without a lot of beating around the bush. Too many salesmen, I found, would make a good presentation and convince the client, but they couldn’t recognize that critical moment when they should have stopped talking. If I ever noticed my prospect starting to fidget, glancing at his watch or looking out the window or shuffling the papers on his desk, I would stop talking right then and ask for his order. In the summertime when the Cubs were in town, I planned my work so I would arrive at the ball park just before game time. I sold paper cups to a brash youngster named Bill Veeck, who ran concessions in the park for his father. I liked him, but I was afraid that his impertinence would get him in a lot of trouble. Over the years, I’ve never seen any reason to alter that assessment. Bill was a go-getter, but more than once I found him sleeping on a bag of peanuts. I’d tell him he was supposed to be out selling those things, not using them for a mattress. Baseball was a much faster game in those days. I could sun myself in a bleacher seat for nine innings and still get in a couple of hours of selling after the game. Nowadays you’re lucky if the game is finished before sundown. And they played great baseball back there in the twenties, too. Of course, Roger Kahn was right when he said in The Boys of Summer that “… baseball skill relates inversely to age. The older a man gets, the better a ball player he was when he was young, according to the watery eye of memory.” And the same holds true for the ball players one watched with the zestful involvement of youth. I can still picture Hack Wilson’s stance at the plate, and the sight of Babe Ruth calling that home run off Charley Root in Wrigley Field. I drove to the park for that game in my old Model A Ford to get in line for tickets at two o’clock in the morning. It was cold as hell, and guys had built fires in the gutter and were swigging gin to keep warm. I declined at first when they passed the bottle around, but I finally had a belt or two. After daybreak it warmed up, but those fellows kept hitting that gin. I saw them later during the game. I looked down between the bleacher seats and there they were sprawled on the ground dead drunk; I guess they never saw a single play. When I mention Ruth calling his home run, I saw the motion, but I don’t think he really called it. That was all in the minds of the sportswriters.
My daughter, Marilyn, was born in October 1924, and having this additional responsibility made me work even harder. That winter was a particularly tough one for the paper cup business. Everything slowed down except for the hospital and medical clinic sales, and I didn’t have any of those places for customers. I didn’t do very well, because I thought of the customer first. I didn’t try to force an order on a soda fountain operator when I could see that his business had fallen off because of cold weather and he didn’t need the damn cups. My philosophy was one of helping my customer, and if I couldn’t sell him by helping him improve his own sales, I felt I wasn’t doing my job. I collected my salary of thirty-five dollars a week just the same. But my company was losing money on me by paying it, and I hated that. I vowed that I wouldn’t allow it to happen again the next winter.
In the spring of 1925 I began to hit my stride as a salesman. There was a German restaurant called Walter Powers on the south side of Chicago. The manager was a Prussian martinet named Bittner. He always listened politely to my sales pitch, but he always, just as politely, said “Nein, danke,” and dismissed me. One day when I called on the place I saw a gleaming Marmon automobile parked at the rear entrance. I was looking it over admiringly when a man came out of the restaurant and approached me.
“Do you like that car?” he asked.
“Yes sir!” I replied. “Say, you’re Mr. Powers, aren’t you?”
He said he was and I told him, “Mr. Powers, if I could aspire to own a car like this, you could have the Rock Island and heaven, too.”
We chatted for some time about automobiles. I told him that I had ridden in the rumble seat on the outside of a Stutz Bearcat, and he agreed that had to be one of life’s finer experiences. After thirty minutes or so of shooting the breeze, he asked me who I represented and I told him.
“Are we giving you any business?” he asked. I shook my head and he added, “Well, you hang in there and keep trying. Herr Bittner’s a hard man, but he’s fair and square, and if you deserve it he’ll give you a chance.”
A few weeks later, I got my first order from Bittner, and it was a substantial one. He gave me all his business after that. Other accounts were shaping up, too, and my efforts paid off in a salary increase. With this and my piano playing income, I was able to go to a Ford dealership that August and buy a brand new Model T on a Bohemian charge account—cold cash. I had been reading about the business boom down in Florida. Newspaper cartoons compared the rush down there to the gold rush of 1849, and I managed to talk Ethel into going down with me for the winter. She agreed to go if her sister, Maybelle, would come along. That was fine with me. The more the merrier, thought I.
Needless to say, my superiors at Lily Cup were more than happy to grant me a five months leave of absence. I went around to all my customers and told them nobody would be calling on them for five months, but I promised to be back in time to stock them up for the next summer season. Ethel and I stored our furniture, cranked up the Model T, and headed south on the old Dixie Highway. It was a memorable trip. I had five new tires when we left Chicago. When we arrived in Miami, not one of those originals was left on the car. It seemed like we averaged a blowout every fifteen or twenty miles. I’d jack up the car and pull off the wheel to patch the traitorous inner tube, and sometimes while I was applying the glue or manning the air pump, another tire would go bang! and expire. The roads were pretty primitive, of course, especially those red clay tracks through Georgia. At one point we came to a washout where the road disappeared and was replaced by a hog wallow. Ethel held the baby in her lap and steered the car while her sister and I pushed, sinking knee deep in the red muck. Our struggles were vastly entertaining to a barefoot band of ragged children who gathered to watch. When we finally got through that one, I knew nothing could stop us.
Miami was packed to the rafters with fortune seekers like us, and we began to despair of ever finding a place to rest our weary heads. Finally, in a big old house smack in the middle of town, we found a kitchen and butler’s pantry that had been furnished with a double bed, a single bed, a table, and a set of chairs. The rest of the house was filled with cots occupied by an assortment of male roomers, and the solitary bathroom in the place had to be shared with them. It was a place to stay, at least, and Ethel, bless her soul, didn’t complain. Not at first. But it became increasingly difficult for her when her sister got an apartment of her own, a job as a secretary, and went her own way. I got a job with W. F. Morang & Son selling real estate for a development in Fort Lauderdale along Las Olas Boulevard. It was amazing. Everything I had been hearing about the real estate boom was true. The company had twenty seven-passenger Hudson automobiles. If you got into the top twenty bracket in sales with them, you were given a Hudson and a driver for business use. That was for me, of course, and I made it quickly. I went to the Miami Chamber of Commerce and looked up the names of tourists who came from the Chicago area. I’d call them and fill them in—as one Chicagoan to another—on an exciting development I’d found in this palmy land of crazed speculation. They were all intrigued. I would take them by car up route AlA to Fort Lauderdale so they could see for themselves what was going on there along the “new river,” the intercoastal waterway. The property was underwater, but there was a solid bed of coral rock beneath, and the dredging for the intercoastal raised all the lots high and dry, with permanent abutments. People who purchased those lots really got a bargain, even though the prices were astronomical for those times, because the area is now one of the most beautiful in all of Florida, and lots there are worth many times what they sold for then.
My job was to line up the prospects and get them to the property. There they would be taken on a tour of the development by a man we called the “spieler.” We would follow along with them, and if we saw a couple begin to get glassy-eyed and ripe for the collar, we would signal another specialist who tagged along—the “closer.” This gentleman would move in, and we would separate the marked couple from the rest of the herd and go to work on them. All it took to purchase one of these pieces of paradise was a $500 deposit. I got a number of deposits each trip. The people I was dealing with were mostly older folks. I felt that my twenty-three-year-old face was too callow to be credible for a real estate wheeler-dealer, so I decided to grow a mustache. It was a disaster. Most men have a margin around their lips, a demarcation where hair doesn’t grow. I lack this feature, with the result that my mustache grew right down into my mouth. Moreover, it was a horrible brownish-red color. Ethel despised it, and I didn’t like it much either. I didn’t have to wear it long. The muckraking stories in northern newspapers soon pulled the plug on our big real estate boom, and there were no longer any prospects to worry about. What a colossal blow! Just when I was getting into the swing of selling these lots, the whole business vanished.
One morning I was sitting in the living room we all shared in our rooming house, noodling around on the decrepit old upright piano, and wondering what in the hell I was going to do next. I was seriously considering going back to Chicago and asking to get back on at the radio station and at the Lily Cup Company. My thoughts were so far away that at first I didn’t notice the chap calling to me through the screen door. Finally I let him in, and he wanted to know if I’d like a job playing the piano.
“Is the Pope Catholic?” I replied.
He wanted to know if I had a tuxedo. I didn’t, of course, but he allowed that a dark blue suit would do. That I had; and I could pick up a black bow tie on the way home from the union hall if they accepted my Chicago Musician’s Union card and gave me a permit to play in Miami. I had to do some sight-reading for the union tester, and then he asked me to play a tune I didn’t know and transpose it into another key as I read it. My heart sank. I thought he was aiming to shoot me down and not give me a permit.
“Look, I can transpose a piece that I know,” I said. “But if I have to sight-read and transpose it at the same time I can’t keep a tempo.”
“That’s all right,” he said. “I just want to see if you know how.”
“O.K., Mac. But this is going to be the groping method.”
After a couple of tortured bars, he told me to stop and waved me back to the rear of the hall. I shot a despairing glance at my erstwhile employer and followed after the union man. To my immense relief, he wrote out a permit and handed it to me.
“That’ll be five bucks,” he said. Then he noticed my greenish pallor and said, “Hey, cheer up. You did fine. Your transposition was accurate, and that’s all I ask.”
The Florida sky looked bright again when we got outside, and I felt fine.
The job was with the Willard Robinson Orchestra in a plush nightclub on Palm Island called The Silent Night. Willard Robinson was a fine pianist himself, but he had a lot of personal problems at the time and was drinking heavily. After he fell off the piano stool a couple of times, the management told him he could keep leading the group, but he’d have to hire another piano player. His divorce and selling his house on Long Island (which he memorialized in his hit song of the day, “A Cottage for Sale”) and his resultant drinking problem were to my benefit, of course. One man’s famine makes another man’s feast, and it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good and all that. But subconsciously I felt a bit guilty about my good fortune at Willard’s expense. I was happy to see him come back strong in New York a few years later. His Deep River Orchestra was featured on the original Maxwell House Showboat on radio, bringing his music the national audience it deserved.
The music we made at The Silent Night wasn’t so bad either. Soon I was averaging $110 a week—good money in those days. At last we were able to move out of the rooming house into a three-and-a-half-room furnished apartment in a terrific new building.
My first night of playing at The Silent Night made quite an impression on me. The place itself was fabulous—gorgeous, glamorous, and illegal. The owner was a rum runner who brought the illicit booze he served from the Bahamas. A great hedge surrounded the place, and a doorman was posted at the entrance gate to screen guests as they arrived. Before opening the gate, I was told, the doorman would push one of two buttons. One would ring a bell that would bring the maître d’ bustling out to meet the patrons. The other button would sound an alarm that meant revenue agents. The doorman would delay the federal agents as long as he could. By the time they got inside there was no evidence of liquor in the place, except for a few drinks sitting in front of individual customers. If they tried to confiscate those, an angry argument would ensue about whether the prohibition law meant it was illegal to drink liquor or simply precluded its sale.
The bandstand was in an elaborate, rococo pavilion. The dance floor was of marble, surrounded by Grecian columns. One of the other guys in the orchestra pointed out a huge yacht tied to the dock and told me that it had once belonged to the Emperor of Japan. In inclement weather, the dining and dancing shifted to the yacht. I was astonished by the place and a bit cowed by the suave urbanity of the patrons. The drinks were a dollar each for anything you wished, champagne, brandy, bourbon, scotch, whatever. I didn’t drink at all back then but the fixed-price drink menu and the stylish simplicity of the food service made a lasting impression on me. They had no printed menu because there were just three entrees: Maine lobster, steak, and roast duckling. Years later I recalled that spare bill of fare in my first motto for McDonald’s—KISS—which meant, “Keep it simple, stupid.”
Another thing that captivated me was the deft service of the Swiss waiters. They would bring out a roast duckling on a big wooden platter and filet it right at the customer’s table, slicing it up with the flair of a magician producing rabbits from a hat. I admired their professionalism.
But I didn’t have a lot of time to observe what was going on that first night. I played the piano continuously. When it came time to take a break, the rest of the players left the bandstand, but Robinson placed a silk top hat on the piano and told me I had to keep playing requests for people who wanted to sing. The customers tossed tips into the hat, and I felt good about that until I discovered that I was expected to share the tips with all the other players. That was grossly unfair, and I was steaming mad. But it was the custom, apparently, and there wasn’t much I could do about it if I wanted to keep the job. I hammered away, my fingers getting painful from such unaccustomed exercise, and I vowed that I would figure out a way to keep this piano player from being the goat for the whole orchestra.
The solution didn’t come to me that first night, or even the first week. I was too busy worrying about whether I would last the entire evening. When I’d get home my fingers would be puffed and almost bleeding, and I had to soak them in a bucket of warm water. I tried the direct approach to Willard Robinson once more on a night when he seemed relatively mellow and more sober than usual.
“Mr. Robinson, I think I am getting a dirty deal,” I said. “When you played piano through all the breaks, it was different. You were the star folks had come to see, and they paid handsome tips. You could afford to share them, because you were getting your pay as leader, too. I’m just one of the boys, yet I have to play much more than the others and get nothing extra for it at all!”
He looked at me vacantly and then squinted until he got me in focus. “That’s too bad, Joe,” he responded. “Maybe you’ll get smart and learn to play the flute or somethin’.”
I got smart, all right, but no thanks to Robinson. I was doing my solo routine for requests one night, and an old geezer who’d won a bundle at the racetrack that day came in with a doll who could have been his granddaughter but obviously was not. They danced over to the piano in a spastic flutter, cheek-to-cheek, and the old boy waved a dollar bill at me and asked if I could play “I Love You Truly.” I just stared at him and shook my head negatively. He was startled and the young girl slapped his hand with the dollar, knocking it into the top hat, and she shouted, “How dare you insult him with a dollar, you cheapskate!” Then she grabbed a twenty-dollar bill out of the bundle that protruded from his breast pocket and dropped it in my lap. “Hey, wait a minute,” I called. “Did you say ‘I Love You Truly’?” and I played the first few bars haltingly, as though striving to recall them. He nodded vigorously, and I went ahead with the tune and played the hell out of it. If my associates in the orchestra noticed the extra tip, they didn’t say anything about it. Special requests for a little bit extra to the piano player became a common thing after that.
I got even smarter. I talked the violinist into playing the breaks with me and strolling through the audience, serenading each table individually. That doubled our tips immediately and was a big addition to our pay every week.
One night the revenue agents outmaneuvered the Palm Island security men and we all wound up in jail. I was mortified. My parents would disown me if they found out I had been put in jail with a bunch of common violators of the prohibition law. We were only there three hours, but it was one of the most uncomfortable 180-minute periods of my life.
That incident didn’t cheer Ethel up at all either. We were doing well financially, and she even liked the apartment. But she was growing exceedingly homesick. At least when I was working all the time in Chicago, she’d had her family and friends to keep her from being too lonely. Here, she had no one at all. Her sister was dating, leading her own life, and they seldom saw each other. So the warm weather was cold comfort for Ethel. Finally we agreed to go back to Chicago. Our lease on the apartment ran until March 1, but Ethel couldn’t wait that long. I put her and the baby on the train about the middle of February and stayed alone to play out my two weeks’ notice so the orchestra could get a replacement for me.
That long drive home alone in my Model T was an unforgettable experience. I caught snatches of sleep along the road from time to time, but aside from that, I drove straight through. I had no top coat, and the weather got increasingly colder as I drove north. When I reached Chicago’s southern limits, the streets were covered with ice. At Sixty-third and Western, the car went into a skid, and I ended up on the curb on the wrong side of the street. A big policeman came rushing over swearing at me, sitting there shivering in my light suitcoat, “What’s the matter,” he yelled. “Are you drunk?” I was afraid I was due for another few hours in jail, but I explained my plight and he let me go. Like most Chicagoans, he figured anyone who’d been taken in the Florida real estate scandal was a damned fool, but more to be pitied than scorned.
My parents’ home never looked more welcome than it did that day. Ethel fed me hot soup and got me into a warm bed, and I slept for fifteen hours straight.
I had left Florida in the nick of time, it turned out. The business decline that began when the real estate boom collapsed caught up with the nightclubs soon after I left. The Silent Night closed its gates for good. Palm Island popped into the news once in a while as time went by. Al Capone built a home there. Then Lou Walters, father of TV’s Barbara Walters, opened the Latin Quarter. But it was to be a long time before I saw Florida again.