QUEEN CITY OF THE ADIRONDACKS
31
and paper-bottomed shoes to the
goyim,
and brought back skunk-furs
which they sent down to Albany at a neat profit.
When their sons
graduated from high school, the fathers sent them to Union College in
Schenectady-or,
as one of the more prosperous skunk-dealers did-even
to Harvard.
Later the boys came home for vacation, and stood in front
of the Y.M.C.A.
on Glen Street, wearing their letters on their athletic
sweaters, and eyeing, with a superior air, the high school seniors as they
passed.
The junk peddlers couldn't make very much buying and selling
waste paper, rubber and tin.
Many of them were former sweatshop
workers who had come to town with the consumptive flush already on
their cheeks. They became junk peddlers even though they didn't have
a cent to their name.
The richer Jews who owned the junk shops ad-
vanced the sixty or seventy dollars needed to buy a spavined horse, a
wagon and a set of harness; the newly-established junk peddler was, in
turn, obliged to sell all the junk he collected to the junk dealer who had
provided the horse and wagon.
Through a sort of a share-cropping system, the junk dealer got a
fancy rate of compound interest on his investment.
He never pressed the
peddler for the original outlay.
In this way he had a permanent claim
on him.
\Vhen I was about 14, just about the time I became active in the
Glendale Soci3.1ist local-and about the time the Socialists elected George
R.
Lunn as mayor of Schenectady, the General Electric town about
43
Illiles distance-just
about this time I developed a hankering to be a fire-
man. Not that I yearned to get up out of a warm bed in zero weather
to put out fin's, but because I felt that if I were a fireman I'd have lots
of time to read all those books and pamphlets which the fellows in the
local were always talking about; those exciting books by Upton Sinclair;
Kirkpatrick's
TVar, What
For?;
Buchanan's
The
.Story of a Labor
Agi-
tator;
Debs'
Life, Letters
alld
Speeches,
and all the vibrant copies
of the
Appeal To
Reason.
the
Rip-Saw,
and the illustrated
I
ntenll/tional
Sorialist
Review.
There were many fires in Glendale during the winter months.
The
tires always broke out shortly after midnight.
One Friday night, my
father took the whde family to the Empire Palace to see a movie about
the murder trial of Police Lieut. Charles Becker, Lefty Louie, Dago
Frank, and the other gangsters who were mixed up in the murder of the
gambler, Rosenthal.
A few minutes after we got home we heard two
