CHAPTER 1
Window shoppers tentatively ventured out onto Times Square a few days after Christmas on Thursday, December 28, 1922. They turned up their collars and instinctively grabbed for their hats as a wintry mix of rain and snow pelted New York City. The dark gray clouds matched the city’s mood as pedestrians bundled up against the dismal weather. A sudden gust could almost knock a woman off the sidewalk or send a man scurrying out into the street to retrieve his errant cap. All across the East Coast a broad, punishing storm pummeled the region, dumping rain and snow on people in the midst of the national intermission between the Christmas holiday season and the New Year.
In a tiny Manhattan apartment on Ninety-Eighth Street and West End Avenue, Jack and Celia Lieber barely noticed the dreary weather. On this day they welcomed their first child—a son. They named the little tike Stanley Martin.
The newborn entered the world at a peculiar time in American history. Still recovering from the global upheaval and bedlam of World War I, the nation lumbered ahead. With the war over, leaders from across the globe searched for ways to secure a more peaceful future for Europe. At home, the American economy had slipped and sputtered in the wake of war, falling off as companies recalibrated after the frenzy necessitated with war production. Industry was just starting to chug back to life in 1922. Manufacturing picked up as consumer goods companies produced everything from sleek automobiles to new clothing styles and electric kitchen gadgets.
What neither Celia nor Jack could have known on the day of their son’s birth was that the gloomy weather outside would be a kind of foreshadowing. The vestiges of the Great War would spiral into the Great Depression and leave the nation reeling. The resulting economic chaos would sweep the Lieber family into near destitution and virtually suck the life out of the parents.
To their credit, however, Celia and Jack raised the boy to believe that he could expect a bright future despite the hardships he experienced firsthand and the countless harsh arguments his parents had about money. Stanley Lieber emerged an optimist, bedeviling the clouds that filled the sky the day he was born and the dark times brought on by the Depression and its aftermath for his little family.
This is how superheroes are born.
Young Stanley Lieber’s parents were among the millions of immigrants to enter America in the early years of the twentieth century. Born in Romania in 1886, Stanley’s father docked in the New York City harbor in 1905. Hyman, who later went by Jacob or the Americanized “Jack,” was a mere nineteen years old. His relative (possibly brother) Abraham, then just fourteen, accompanied him on the voyage. The teens joined the wave of Jewish immigrants from Eastern European countries flooding into the United States at the beginning of the new century. After decades of pogroms (terror campaigns against Jews) across Europe and Russia that left countless thousands of Jews murdered, immigration to the United States skyrocketed from 5,000 in 1880 to 258,000 in 1907. In total, some 2.7 million from all over Europe migrated to America between 1875 and 1924.
Hyman left behind life in gritty Romania, a country in southeastern Europe, at that time sandwiched between Austria-Hungary to the north, Serbia to the west, Bulgaria to the south, and Russia and the Black Sea to the east. Young Hyman Lieber set off during the reign of monarch Carol I, who took control of the nation in 1881 and ruled until his death in 1914. It would have cost Hyman and Abraham about 179 rubles each—about $90, an enormous sum at the time—to make the trip to the United States. Of that sum, 50 rubles were shown to the Ellis Island immigration staff to demonstrate that they could subsist and make a fresh start in the new country.1
Hyman and Abraham were among the first large surge of Romanians to leave for America, a wave of one hundred forty-five thousand that left between the mid-1890s and 1920. For most Romanians considering the move, the United States promised economic stability and religious freedom. Like so many Eastern Europeans, the first groups went to America in search of steady wages and the ability to save money, which would enable them to return to their homelands and buy land. The total number of Romanian immigrants paled in comparison to other nationalities. In contrast, some three million Poles immigrated to America between 1870 and 1920.
For Jewish Romanians, the immigration tale is dramatically different, and more typical of the European Jewish immigration that took place during that era. Widespread discrimination meant that Romanian Jews usually stayed in America. Young Jewish men in Romania had few opportunities for meaningful careers. The monarchy forbade Jews to become lawyers, outlawed rabbinical seminaries, and made entrance into medicine almost impossible. The state considered Romanian Jews “aliens” or “foreigners” regardless of how long one’s ancestors had lived in the country. According to others who left Romania at that time for the United States, being a minority meant permanent subservience and subsequent discrimination based on religion and ethnicity.2
The abuses of power were frequent and pervasive. According to one writer, “Romanians used veiled anti-Jewish legislation while avoiding outward use of barbarous acts and brutality that would draw the attention and disapproval of the civilized world.”3 Yet the psychological terror had significant consequences. Several laws passed in the 1890s outlawed education for Jews, while anti-Semitism was openly taught in Romanian high schools.
The semi-secret pogroms in Romania led to countless anti-Jewish riots and widespread pillaging, which the police and army either did not stop or actively participated in as the rampaging continued. Violence became a constant way of life for Romanian Jews. As one historian explains, “The economic depression that became dire in Romania towards the close of the nineteenth century was accompanied by an increased level of violence, starting with the anti-Jewish riots from Bârlad (1867), Buzău (1871), Botoşani (1890), Bucharest (1897) and Iaşi (1898).”4 With so few Romanians in the United States, much of this news never reached the states, and thus did not face media scrutiny.
While the teenaged Hyman stayed in New York City, some sixty thousand of the first groups eventually returned to Romania. Other Eastern Europeans moved somewhat fluidly back and forth between America and their native countries. The hardships they endured in getting to the United States and the potential dangers in the manufacturing economy were deemed worthwhile, since the money they earned had transformative consequences for themselves and their families back home. After the initial burst that ended at the dawn of the Jazz Age, however, few Romanians would immigrate to the United States for the next twenty-five years. The numbers remained small and did not really pick up again until the nation faced the threat of Nazi occupation during World War II.
Once they arrived in the United States, the earliest Romanian immigrants faced hardships that transformed the traditional strong family values that they carried with them from their homeland. Most were unskilled laborers, so life in the mills and factories in American industrial cities proved dangerous and difficult. Workplace injuries and deaths occurred frequently among immigrant workers of all ethnicities. For Jewish immigrants from Romania, however, the hardships of life in New York City paled in comparison with what they potentially faced. The American Dream offered them a chance at a better life, despite the challenges of poverty and finding adequate housing. If nothing else, these new Americans gained religious freedom and safety from the wanton violence that took place against Jews in Romania.
Many single men, like the teenage Hyman, left home and the core of their family nucleus behind to scrape out a meager existence. Frequently, these single laborers grouped together in boarding homes or lived with other Romanian immigrant families. For such young men, cultural life, as it existed at the time, meant a revolving set of meeting places, including local restaurants and saloons and church services.
Jewish immigrants also faced potential anti-Semitism, so grouping together with their countrymen provided some insulation from these prejudices. Relatively few of the new immigrants could speak or read English, adding to the kinship ties among countrymen and solidarity when they faced the English-speaking world. Remembering a Romanian-Jewish restaurant on the Lower East Side, Maurice Samuel recalled that people gathered there “to eat karnatzlech, beigalech, mămăligă, and kashkaval, to drink . . . and to play six-six and tablanette,” all while speaking in Romanian Yiddish and telling nostalgic stories about Jewish locales in Bucharest. Yet, the stories were also tinged with regret as the storytellers mentioned the anti-Semitic pogroms designed to drive them from the nation.5
Hyman Lieber and Abraham both entered the clothing industry in turn-of-the-century New York at a time when the garment district clamored for workers. Many Jewish immigrants were skilled craftsmen (about 65 percent of the total), but there is no way to determine if Hyman had worked in the industry or received any kind of advanced training in Romania. The anti-Semitic education legislation and unfair business practices make this possibility seem improbable. One historian notes, “Upon arrival in the United States, the immigrants became tailors, even if they had not been tailors before, because this trade was in demand in Manhattan.”6
Like many first-generation families who lived during that era, the Liebers did not talk much about their own pasts or the paths they took to get to America. Although many immigrants brought aspects of their culture with them and continued to hold to those norms as much as possible, often immigrant families focused on adapting to American culture and creating new lives and opportunities for their families. Discussions centered on what the future might hold, not the years of hardships or struggles that it took to get to the United States.7
A clearer picture emerges about Lee’s parents and his extended family if they are examined within the broader wave of Jewish and European immigrants who moved to New York City in the early twentieth century. The struggles his immediate family faced and the consequences on the youngster were similar to the countless other Jewish families and individuals attempting to assimilate.8
In 1910, both Jacob and Abraham lived with Gershen Moshkowitz, a fifty-two-year-old Russian, and his Romanian wife Meintz, on Avenue A in Manhattan. The family had two children, Rosie and Joseph. Both Joseph and Abraham are listed in the census as operators in pocket books, suggesting that the two teens worked together in the same shop. Jacob had already begun his career as a cutter in a coat shop. Like the Moshkowitz children, the census worker listed that both Liebers attended school and could read and write English, but supplied no further details. They almost certainly spoke Romanian Yiddish at home and in the neighborhood.9
Ten years later, in 1920, the thirty-four-year old Jacob was still living as a boarder, at this time with the family of David and Beckie Schwartz and their three young children, in an apartment on 114th Street in Manhattan. The Schwartzes immigrated to America in 1914 from Romania. Unlike Jacob, they could not speak, read, or write in English. The connection for immigrants at this time always seemed to center on work lives intermingling with private lives. Both Jacob and David worked in the dressmaking industry. The 114th Street apartment building and surrounding neighborhood was predominantly Jewish immigrants from Russia and Romania, so Yiddish was much more common than English. Both Schwartzes were also considerably younger than Jacob (David at 26 and Beckie 25).
Events would change quickly for Jacob over the next two years. In 1920, he was living with the Schwartz family, but by the end of 1922 he had married Celia Solomon, and newborn Stanley Martin arrived just before the New Year.10
As sparse as the Lieber line seems, the family tree does not really straighten out on the Solomon side either. We do know that the Solomon clan consisted of a large family and that they immigrated to America in 1901. The Solomons represent a more typical Jewish immigrant experience at the turn of the twentieth century: they immigrated as a family, a costly endeavor for Jews struggling to save enough money to escape Romania, but important in keeping the family together.
Nine years later, by 1910, the family occupied an apartment building on Fourth Street along with many other Romanian families. Various documents list Celia’s father and mother with different first names, his either “Sanfir” or “Zanfer,” while her mother’s is the more common “Sophia” or “Sophie.” Sanfir, born in 1865, and Sophia, born a year later, had eight children. In 1903, Robbie, their youngest child, was the first born in the United States.
Celia’s birth year is alternately listed as either 1892 or 1894. In 1910, she worked as a salesperson in a five and dime store. She and her older brother Louis, employed as a salesman at a trimming store, did not attend school, but her four younger siblings living with the family—Frieda, Isidor, Minnie, and Robbie—all did. With the older children working to help support the family and the young members going to school, the Solomon children embodied the typical path to success for immigrants. Similarly to many of their Romanian kinsmen, the family settled into life in the United States, aspiring for a higher standard of living, taking advantage of educational opportunities, and many more readily embracing American popular culture. While Sanfir and Sophia spoke Yiddish, their children gained fluency in English, a significant step toward adapting to their new home. The Solomon family later moved to West 152nd Street.11
Lee remembers that the family moved from the apartment on West Ninety-Eighth and West End Avenue to Washington Heights around this time, when his younger brother Larry was born (October 26, 1931).12 The move definitely signaled a downsizing in the family’s fortunes and neighborhood. Like so many others, the Great Depression cut the heart out of the Lieber family and its progress toward fulfilling the American Dream.
Standing outside an Episcopal church on Twenty-Ninth Street in Manhattan, some two thousand men turned up their collars and burrowed their hands deep in their coat pockets against a bone-chilling wind whipping through the city. In the early days of the Great Depression, such lines were commonplace, snaking and twisting up Fifth Avenue. These men heard that the church dispensed food to the poor and assembled in hopes that they might get enough to feed their families. A quarter of them were turned away when the rations ran out. Desperation mixed with fear and many people would go hungry that night.
The sight of these needy New Yorkers and the countless others just like them unnerved the city’s residents. Many of those waiting for food were clearly in anguish over accepting charity to survive. Those filling bread lines and taking handouts carried a deep psychological burden as unwilling participants in the country’s economic ruin. They did not want to take aid. Americans prided themselves on a strong work ethic and believed that they would be rewarded for this attitude. Most who received welfare, from clothing and rent money to food and medical supplies, did so reluctantly.
The collapse of the national economy at the hands of Wall Street corruption left the country angry and despondent. Money resided at the heart of American culture in the 1920s. The era’s brokers and investment bankers rose up and reigned as society’s new heroes and celebrities—the kind of men that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby might have become if the fictional character were real. Wall Street fluctuations, hot stocks, and trading exploits served as juicy gossip. The overheated economy put the kindling in place; Wall Street greed provided the spark.
The soup line of broken men weaving through Manhattan creates a riveting picture of national despair. Yet, each one of those individuals also represented a defeated family left crippled by the financial collapse. After decades in the United States, falling in love, and starting a family, the Depression devastated the Liebers. Stanley, still too young to comprehend the magnitude of what had happened, did hear the fallout, the anger, and the anguish in his parents’ voices. “My earliest recollections were of my parents talking about what they would do if they didn’t have the rent money,” he said. “Luckily we were never evicted.”13 The struggle for day-to-day essentials forced families into constant alert mode.
When the stock market crashed in late 1929, Jacob had been in the United States for more than two decades. However, nothing could insulate him or his coworkers during such disorder. His work in the garment district simply dried up and went away. According to Lee, his father also attempted to run a diner, but the operation failed, which cost the older Lieber his life’s savings.14
The chronic unemployment took a toll on Jacob and Celia’s marriage. As the daily struggles compounded, the pressure was too much to stand. Stanley, not yet seven, witnessed his parents “arguing, quarreling incessantly.” Like a bad record doomed to play over and over again, “it was over money, or the lack of it.”15
Historically, Romanian families were known for possessing incredibly close ties. Even during the Depression, some patriarchs refused to let their children work, realizing that education still created the path to achievement, regardless of the money woes they faced. For the Liebers, Stanley was too young to contribute. He spent the most difficult years of the Great Depression watching and listening to his parents fight to keep the family afloat.
The constant bickering between Jacob and Celia only halted on Sunday nights, when the boy and his parents gathered around the radio.16 Young Stanley liked listening to the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen on NBC’s The Chase and Sanborn Hour, which aired from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Sunday nights for decades. Bergen’s wooden sidekick was Charlie McCarthy, a wisecracking, often slyly suggestive mouthpiece for the comedian’s humorous skits. Since radio listeners could not actually see that Charlie was a dummy, the real joy was in Bergen’s comedic patter and skill in creating compelling characters.
While Celia cleaned the apartment or cooked in the cramped space, Jacob scoured the want ads, but could not mask his increasing desolation. As a young boy, Stanley watched his father venture out into the city each day to look for work. Exhausted and mentally beaten, the man then returned each evening, more despondent and desperate than before. Jacob, according to his son, just sat at the kitchen table, staring out at nothing, growing ever more depressed as the family balanced on the edge of collapse.17 Sometimes, Jacob would try to goad his wife into going out to the park for a walk with him and their son. She “hated it,” Lee recalled. “They never got along.”18
Cash-strapped, Celia often had to turn to her sisters for money. In an attempt to save their meager funds, the Liebers moved into a smaller apartment in the Bronx after Stanley’s younger brother Larry came into the family. The older boy slept on the couch in the living room, situated—like so many low-rent apartments in the city—in the back of the building. The window looked directly into another building beside it. The cramped confines and additional mouth to feed merely amped up the despair the Liebers faced.19 Stanley remembered, “All we could see was the brick wall of the building across the alley. I could never look and see if the other kids were out in the street playing stickball or doing anything that I might join in.”20
Dressed in a dark replica of a sailor outfit, complete with a felt Tam O’Shanter hat perched at an angle atop his head, young Stanley Lieber sits on an antique desk, leaning on his tiny right arm. This is the kind of popular posed photograph that parents forced their kids to endure in the 1920s. Although only a youngster, the boy reveals dark, mesmerizing eyes and a faraway look that seems to hide the key to some distant mystery.
Too young to fully understand his family’s plight, Stanley bounced along, relying on his mother’s love to overcome his father’s anxiety and demanding rules. Celia’s sister Jean recalled that Jack was “exacting with his boys.” He watched over them and demanded that they do daily routines as he outlined: “brush your teeth a certain way, wash your tongue, and so on.”21 Celia, though, was different. She filled young Stanley with her own hopes and dreams. She bolstered the child at every turn. When he learned to read, his mother realized the importance of education in overcoming their dire straits. “She often asked me to read aloud to her,” Stanley remembered. “I enjoyed doing that, imagining I was on some Broadway stage reading for a vast, entranced audience.”22 Celia and Jack might struggle through the harsh realities brought on by the Depression, but Celia attempted to isolate Stanley from its severity.
For a poor kid unable to afford fancy sleep-away summer camps and without many friends, reading helped Stanley cope with his family difficulties, “It was my escape from the dreariness and sadness of my home life.”23 More importantly, reading enabled the boy to hone his sense of adventure and creativity. “Used to scribble my own comics, as far back as I can remember,” Lee said. “Used to draw horizon line and add stick-figure people, telling myself little stories all the while.”24
Celia pushed the boy to excel at school. As a result, “I was always something of an outsider,” Stanley said. “My mother wanted me to finish school as soon as possible so I could get a job and help support the family.”25 Hoping to please Celia, Stanley worked hard enough to skip grades and advanced quickly, despite the teasing from older kids and getting picked on. He developed a precocious intellect, but his youth and brightness did not help him socially. He found it difficult to establish friendships with older classmates who had gone to school together for years.
Like many bright students, the boy found a mentor in a young Jewish teacher named Leon B. Ginsberg. Each day, Ginsberg started class by telling the students a baseball story featuring the imaginary slugger Swat Mulligan, always “funny and exciting,” according to the boy. Mulligan’s heroics created an atmosphere that made learning fun. For a classroom in Lee’s elementary school days, this was a rarity. For Stanley Lieber, however, the life lesson drawn from Ginsberg’s daily tale was clear: “Whenever I want to communicate to others, I always try to do it in a lighter-hearted way and make it as entertaining as possible.”26
Telling amusing stories that created a vivid scene and a great deal of excitement also appealed to Stanley’s other passion—watching movies. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the boy thought about a bigger-than-life future, his idea of heaven was embodied in film icon Errol Flynn. The actor burst onto the scene in 1935’s Captain Blood, which showcased his good looks, flamboyant charm, and athletic grace. Flynn became the top action film star and drew in young viewers like Lieber with detailed and finely choreographed fight scenes and swordplay, as in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Flynn’s first color film. For a boy creating his own comic stories and devouring books and magazines, the movies demonstrated how the marriage of visual elements and dialogue drove the action. “There on the screen were worlds that dazzled my mind, worlds of magic and wonder, worlds which I longed to inhabit, if only in imagination,” he remembered.27
Lee went to the movies at Loew’s 175th Street Theatre, one of New York’s “Wonder Theatres” built between 1925 and 1930. Originally built for vaudeville, the increasing popularity of motion pictures led to Loew’s being transformed for films. An enormous seven-story-high Robert Morton Wonder organ entertained viewers in the ornate setting. Not just interested in action adventures, Lee also loved the early comedic films of the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy. Within a three-block radius of 181st Street, the youngster could pick from five movie theaters. On Saturdays, they showed serials. Lee eagerly anticipated Tarzan and his other favorite, The Jungle Mystery, the adventures of a man-ape. After the films ended, he met up with his cousin Morty Feldman on Seventy-Second Street, where the boys ate pancakes and talked about the movies.28
Stanley grew into a self-described “voracious reader.” In later years, he often cited Shakespeare as his most important influence, because of the commitment to drama and comedy, which shaped the young Lee’s ideas about creativity and storytelling. Lee enjoyed Shakespeare’s “rhythm of words,” explaining, “I’ve always been in love with the way words sound.”29 The boy’s desire to read had no real boundaries. He took a book or magazine with him everywhere, even the breakfast table, using a little wooden contraption his mother found for him that held the pages open while it propped up the book.
Although he loved reading and film and dabbled with drawing, young Stanley had no illusions about working in comic books. Comic books during Stanley’s boyhood years were primarily reprints from newspaper strips and looked more like books or magazines. In the 1920s, black and white strips were popular, particularly the slapstick humor of Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff, which were reprinted as oversized comic books. He read them, like other children his age, but they did not capture his imagination the way film and novels did. “Creating comic books was never part of my childhood dream,” he explained. “I never thought of that at all.”30 He did, however, read Famous Funnies, widely considered the first modern American comic book, which Dell published in 1934 and distributed through Woolworth’s department stores. He specifically remembered enjoying Hairbreadth Harry, a strip created by C. W. Kahles that featured the hero in various melodramatic adventures to keep his rival Rudolph Ruddigore Rassendale from the heroine Belinda Blinks.31
As debilitating as the stock market crash was on the nation’s economy, the truly crushing blow came from the way it demoralized the American people. The shocking speed of the collapse shook the public’s faith in the national economic system. Millions of workers lost their jobs as businesses desperately cut their operations to the bare essentials. Construction in New York City, for example, came to a near halt as 64 percent of workers were laid off soon after the stock market collapsed.
Desperation reigned, and its epicenter was New York City. By October 1933, it counted some 1.25 million people on relief. Even more telling is that another million were eligible for relief, but did not accept it. Some 6,000 New Yorkers attempted to make ends meet by selling apples on the streets. But by the end of 1931, most street vendors were gone. Grocery store sales dropped by 50 percent. Many urban dwellers scoured garbage cans and dumps looking for food. Studies estimated that 65 percent of the African American children in Harlem were plagued by malnutrition during the era.
Tens of thousands of people in New York City were forced to live on the streets or in shantytowns located along the banks of the East River and the Hudson River. These clusters of makeshift abodes were dubbed “Hoovervilles”—a backhanded tribute to President Herbert Hoover. The city’s largest camp was in Central Park. Ironically, the Central Park shantytown became a tourist attraction and featured daily performances by an unemployed tightrope walker and other outof-work artists.
Unemployment in 1929 was about 3 percent, but by 1932 the figure had reached 24 percent. Millions more involuntarily worked in part-time roles. Two years after the crash, some two hundred thousand New Yorkers faced eviction for failure to pay rent. Many who were not evicted sold off their valuables so they could raise the money. Others—like the Liebers—trekked from apartment to apartment. If their furniture had been purchased on credit, many owners left it behind when they could no longer make payments.
For the Lieber family, the crash had lasting and prolonged consequences, yet somehow they managed to keep a roof over their heads and the rocky marriage afloat. On the surface the obvious impact was that Jacob’s career virtually disappeared in a complicated game of supply and demand. The number of dress cutters shrank as manufacturing companies struggled to stay solvent. The years after the stock market tanked, Jacob searched for work, but to no avail.
The arguments about money took a toll on the Lieber marriage and created animosity that Stanley could avoid to some degree as he got older. Unfortunately, his little brother, Lawrence (Larry), born nine years after his older brother, suffered more directly and spent his formative years under the stress and strain of a troubled marriage and little hope for better days ahead.
Jacob’s unemployment meant that Stanley had to find work as soon as possible; any little bit of extra income might help the family avoid destitution. Consequently, as he reached his mid-teen years, the boy (along with millions of other teenagers) either worked or constantly searched for jobs. Celia’s mix of fawning support and pushing him to work through school quickly paid off. The enterprising teen, smart and already a budding storyteller and wordsmith, found a variety of odd jobs, including as an usher at a movie theater, an office boy at a factory that manufactured jeans, and even writing obituaries of living celebrities that would be filed whenever they passed away. Balancing high school and part-time jobs became a constant way of life.
Lieber went to DeWitt Clinton High School, a twenty-one-acre campus at 100 West Mosholu Parkway South and East 205th Street in the Bronx. Described as the “castle on the parkway,” the all-boys school stood as one of the largest high schools in the world, enrolling ten to twelve thousand students from across the city and comprising a diverse ethnic population, heavily tilted toward immigrants and the children of immigrants.
In a high school like Clinton, which seemed more like a factory than a school, making a name among the throngs would be difficult, if not impossible. Yet, Lieber’s high school years were filled with school clubs and other opportunities that demonstrated his budding showmanship traits. The boy who had whiled away time reading and being alone grew into a handsome, tall young man, though rail thin. He joined the public-speaking club and the law society, where he dreamed of becoming a famous courtroom attorney.
Earning the nickname “Gabby” for his charm and ability to chat up a storm, Lieber predicted big things for himself in the future, a notion echoed by his peers. High school friend Bob Wendlinger remembers thinking that his classmate was headed toward greatness. “You always knew that he was going to be successful,” Wendlinger says. “It was a given.”32
Lieber experimented with a variety of personas as a student, like many good-looking and popular students do while in high school. He gravitated toward publicity and held a position on the business staff of the Clinton literary magazine, the Magpie. Despite his own budding writing talents and years of intense reading, he confined himself to “publicity director” for the magazine. Part of the Lieber youthful lore is that before a meeting in the tower, the high-ceilinged part of the school where the Magpie staff went to work, he found a ladder left there by a worker on his lunch break. Jumping at the chance to show off and leave his mark, the youngster scurried up the ladder and wrote, “Stan Lee is God” on the ceiling. Perhaps unwilling to risk getting in trouble with the maintenance worker or other high school administrators for defacing the building by using his real name—or just playing around with a stage name—this was his first recorded use of the moniker that would later travel the globe.33
The Magpie publicity job wasn’t a throwaway position in a high school club for the teen. While he dreamed of a variety of careers—including actor—advertising seemed like his true calling. The years of reading magazines created an aura of fascination about advertisements for him. Several of the jobs he held during high school centered on words or selling, including writing publicity materials for a Jewish hospital in Denver, the obituary job, and selling New York Times subscriptions to his classmates. Even as a teen, the boy realized that he had a dramatic flair and could be a persuasive public speaker, a skill he had been honing since his mother asked him to read aloud to her as a boy. In high school, he also adopted a magician’s persona—calling himself the great “Thimbilini”—and performed sleight-of-hand tricks with small thimbles that drew crowds of curious classmates to his miniroutines. From an early age, Stanley craved attention and a spotlight.
As a fifteen-year-old, Lieber had entered a high school essay competition sponsored by the New York Herald Tribune, called “The Biggest News of the Week Contest.” The paper, owned by Ogden Reid and his wife Helen, although conservative, pursued local issues in a stylized fashion, emphasizing realism and the city’s changing atmosphere. Lieber claims to have won the prize for three straight weeks, goading the newspaper to write the boy and ask him to let someone else win. According to Stanley, the paper suggested he look into writing professionally, which the boy claims, “probably changed my life.”34
However, the story is apocryphal. The likelier story is that the young Lieber won a seventh-place prize of $2.50 and two honorable mention awards—hardly the rags-to-riches tale that he would identify as the moment he wanted to become a writer. “After all,” as one assessment puts it, “Lee is a storyteller, and his account of the Herald Tribune essay contest certainly made for a good story, even if it’s untrue.”35 While the story veers from the truth, the prize money made an impression on a poor Jewish kid. A year later, in 1939, the teen worked a total of twelve weeks, pulling in $150 via part-time jobs and whatever work he could muster.36
Leaving the hallowed halls of the monolithic all-boys DeWitt Clinton High School in early summer 1939, Stanley Lieber entered the job market feeling anxious and under more than a little duress. His high school years coincided with some of the worst years of the Great Depression. Graduating did not mean launching a career but just finding a job. His family needed the money.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to wrench the United States out of its financial turmoil, only to see gross national product fall 4.5 percent in 1938 and unemployment hit 19 percent. The economic downturn triggered by FDR’s misfires did not make the transition easy for Lieber, a young man attempting to make the move from high school student to actually earning a living.
Ironically, Hitler’s invasion of Poland several months after Lieber’s graduation would spark the nation into war planning and production, thereby reviving the economy. For several years prior to the attacks on Pearl Harbor, the United States shipped products to allies around the globe and simultaneously prepped for its seemingly inevitable entry into the global fight. The economic rebound, however, did not kick in soon enough to aid Lieber.
Duty-bound to help support his family, college would not be an option. As a boy and then teenager, he may have daydreamed about becoming an actor or enjoying a career as a courtroom attorney, but his immediate future meant getting work. He needed a permanent position, not another in a series of humiliating and somewhat menial part-time jobs like the ones he had during high school. The Lieber family suffered during the financial crisis, so Stanley’s graduation and subsequent salary might offer his family some financial stability, which it lacked for most of his young life.
For so many families of the 1920s and 1930s, the economic collapse and daily struggle to claw back to normality defined American life. Growing up in New York City during the Great Depression had profound consequences for young Stanley Lieber. He could cling to vague memories of his short life prior to the Wall Street crash, but his worldview would be shaped by his father’s inability to find consistent work. The resulting turmoil that unemployment rained down on the Lieber family shook the boy to his core and would remain central to how he approached his own work life.
Lieber’s most fundamental thinking was “a feeling that the most important thing for a man is to have work to do, to be busy, to be needed.”37 This notion shaped Lieber as an adult—the desire not only to work, but to feel needed. “Even when I made a good living, my dad didn’t think of me as a success,” he remembered. “He was pretty wrapped up in himself most of the time. Some of that rubbed off on me. I was always looking at people who were doing better than I was and wishing I could do what they were doing. . . . Part of me always felt I hadn’t quite made it yet.”38
What Lieber would call the “specter of poverty” cast a dark cloud over his parents’ marriage, essentially sapping the joy and love they once shared.39 The fear of unemployment pushed the youngster to value work and earning a living above all else. Lieber had this shared experience with other contemporaries, including fellow comic book veterans, many of whom were first-generation immigrants and Jewish. They knew each other’s neighborhoods, and they had similar experiences navigating life in Depression-era America and New York City, including serving as eyewitnesses to the despair of bread lines or watching people around them get booted out of apartments or jobs.
The tumultuous life at near-poverty and his parents’ constant battling had lasting effects, despite Celia’s frequent doting on him and reiterating how successful he would someday become. One writer describes the consequences these competing factors had on the boy, producing a young man “agonizingly sensitive, desperate for approval and easily influenced by others.” Highly intelligent, the youngster yearned for something larger than life that would fulfill his mother’s predictions about his future fame and wealth.40