WHILE I was on the _Globe-Democrat_ there was a sort of race-track tout,
gambler, amateur detective and political and police hanger-on generally,
who was a purveyor of news not only to our police and political men but
to the sporting and other editors, a sort of Jack-of-all-news or
tipster. To me he was both ridiculous and disgusting, loud, bold,
uncouth, the kind of creature that begins as bootblack or newsboy and
winds up as the president of a racing association or ball team. He
claimed to be Irish, having a freckled face, red hair, gray eyes, and
rather large hands and feet. In reality he was one of those South
Russian Jews who looked so much like the Irish as to be frequently
mistaken for them. He had the wit to see that it would be of more
advantage to him to be thought Irish than Jewish, and so had changed his
name of Shapirowitz to Galvin—“Red” Galvin. One of the most offensive
things about him was that his clothes were loud, just such clothes as
touts and gamblers affect, hard, bright-checked suits, bright yellow
shoes, ties of the most radiant hues, hats of a clashing sonorousness,
and rings and pins and cuff-links glistening with diamonds or rubies—the
kind of man who is convinced that clothes and a little money make the
man, as they quite do in such instances.
Galvin had the social and moral point of view of both the hawk and the
buzzard. According to Wood, who early made friends with him quite as he
did with the Chinese and others for purposes of study, he was identified
with some houses of prostitution in which he had a small financial
interest, as well as various political schemes then being locally
fostered by one and another group of low politicians who were constantly
getting up one scheme and another to mulct the city in some underhanded
way. He was a species of political and social grafter, having all the
high ideals of a bagnio detective: he began to interest Mr. Tobias
Mitchell, who was a creature of an allied if slightly higher type, and
the pair became reasonably good friends. Mitchell used him as an
assistant to Hazard, Bellairs, Bennett, Hartung and myself: he supplied
the paper with stories which we would rewrite. I used to laugh at him,
more or less to his face, as being a freak, which of course generated
only the kindliest of feelings between us. He always suggested to me the
type of detective or plain-clothes man who would take money from
street-girls, prey on them, as indeed I suspected him of doing.
I wondered how he could make anything out of this newspaper connection
since, as Hartung and others told me, he could not write. It was
necessary to rewrite his stuff almost entirely. But his great
recommendation to Mitchell and others was that he could get news of
things where other reporters could not, among the police, detectives and
politicians, with whom he was evidently hand-in-hand. By reason of his
underworld connections many amazing details as to one form and another
of political and social jobbery came to light, which doubtless made him
invaluable to a city editor.
When some of his stories were given to me to rewrite we were thrown into
immediate and clashing contact. Because of his leers and bravado, when
he knew he could not write two good sentences in order, I frequently
wanted to brain him but took it out in smiles and dry cynical comments.
His favorite expressions were “See?” and “I sez tuh him” or “He sez tuh
me,” always accompanied by a contemptuous wave of a hand or a
pugnaciously protruded chin. One of the chief reasons why I hated him
was that Dick Wood told me he had once remarked that newspaper work was
a beggar’s game at best and that _writers grew on trees_, meaning that
they were so numerous as to be negligible and not worth considering.
I made the best of these trying situations when I had to do over a story
of his, extracting all the information I could and then writing it out,
which resulted in some of his stories receiving excellent space in the
day’s news and made him all the more pugnacious and sure of himself. And
at the same time these made him of more value to the paper. However, in
due time I left the _Globe-Democrat_, and one day, greatly to my
astonishment and irritation, he appeared at the North Seventh Street
station as a full-fledged reporter, having been given a regular position
by Mitchell and set to doing police work—out of which task at the Four
Courts, if I remember rightly, he finally ousted Jock Bellairs, who was
given to too much drinking.
To my surprise and chagrin I noticed at once that he was, as if by
reason of past intimacies of which I had not the slightest idea, far
more en rapport with the sergeants and the captain than I had ever
dreamed of being. It was “Charlie” here and “Cap” there. But what roiled
me most was that he gave himself all the airs of a newspaper man,
swaggering about and talking of this, that and the other story he had
written (I having done some of them myself!). The crowning blow was that
he was soon closeted with the captain in his room, strolling in and out
of that sanctum as if it were his private demesne and giving me the
impression of being in touch with realms and deeds of which I was never
to have the slightest knowledge. This made me apprehensive lest in these
intimacies tales and mysteries should be unfolded that would have their
first light in the pages of the _Globe-Democrat_ and so leave me to be
laughed at as one who could not get the news. I watched the
_Globe-Democrat_ more closely than ever before for evidence of such
treachery on the part of the police as would result in a “scoop” for
him, at the same time redoubling my interest in such items as might
appear. The consequence was that on more than one occasion I made good
stories out of things which Mr. Galvin had evidently dismissed as
worthless; and now and then a case into which I had inquired at the
stationhouse appeared in the _Globe-Democrat_ with details which I had
not been able to obtain and concerning which the police had insisted
they knew nothing.
For a long time, by dint of energy and a rather plain indication to all
concerned that I would not tolerate false dealing, I managed not only to
hold my own but occasionally to give my confrère a good beating—as when,
for one instance, a negro girl in one of those crowded alleys was cut
almost to shreds by an ex-lover armed with a razor, for reasons which,
as my investigation proved, were highly romantic. Some seven or eight
months before, this girl and her assailant had been living together in
Cairo, Illinois, and the lover, who was wildly fond of her, became
suspicious and finally satisfying himself that she was faithless set a
trap to catch her. He was a coal passer or stevedore, working now on one
boat and now on another plying the Mississippi between New Orleans and
St. Louis. And one day when she thought he was on a river steamer for a
week or two he burst in upon her and found her with another man. Death
would have been her portion, as well as that of her lover, had it not
been for the interference of friends which permitted the pair to escape.
The man returned to his task as stevedore, working his way from one
river city to another. When he came to Memphis, Natchez, New Orleans,
Vicksburg or St. Louis, he disguised himself as a peddler selling
trinkets and charms and in this capacity walked the crowded negro
sections of these cities calling his wares. One of these trips finally
brought him to St. Louis, and here on a late August afternoon, ambling
up this stifling little alley calling out his charms and trinkets, he
had finally encountered her. The girl put her head out of the doorway.
Dropping his tray he drew a razor and slashed her cheeks and lips, arms,
legs, back and sides, so that when I arrived at the City Hospital she
was unconscious and her life despaired of. The lover, abandoning his
tray of cheap jewelry, which was later brought to the stationhouse and
exhibited, had made good his escape and was not captured, during my stay
in St. Louis at least. Her present paramour had also gone his way,
leaving her to suffer alone.
Owing possibly to Galvin’s underestimate of its romance, this story
received only a scant stick as a low dive cutting affray in the
_Globe-Democrat_, while in the _Republic_ I had turned it into a negro
romance which filled all of a column. Into it I had tried to put the hot
river waterfronts of the different cities which the lover had visited,
the crowded negro quarters of Memphis, New Orleans, Cairo, the bold
negro life which two truants such as the false mistress and her lover
might enjoy. I had tried to suggest the sing-song sleepiness of the
levee boat-landings, the stevedores at their lazy labors, the idle,
dreamy character of the slow-moving boats. Even an old negro refrain
appropriate to a trinket peddler had been introduced:
“Eyah—Rings, Pins, Buckles, Ribbons!”
The barbaric character of the alley in which it occurred, lined with
rickety curtain-hung shacks and swarming with the idle, crooning,
shuffling negro life of the South, appealed to me. An old black mammy
with a yellow-dotted kerchief over her head, who kept talking of “disha
Gawge” and “disha Sam” and “disha Maquatia” (the girl), moved me to a
poetic frenzy. From a crowd of blacks that hung about the vacated shack
of the lovers after the girl had been taken away I picked up the main
thread of the story, the varying characteristics of the girl and her
lover, and then having visited the hospital and seen the victim I
hurried to the office and endeavored to convince Wandell that I had an
important story. At first he was not inclined to think so, negro life
being a little too low for local consumption, but after I had entered
upon some of the details he told me to go ahead. I wrote it out as well
as I could, and it went in on the second page. The next day, meeting
Galvin, having first examined the _Globe_ to see what had been done
there, I beamed on him cheerfully and was met with a snarl of rage.
“You think you’re a hell of a feller, dontcha, because yuh can sling a
little ink? Yuh think yuh’ve pulled off sompin swell. Well, say, yuh’re
not near as much as yuh think yuh are. Wait an’ see. I’ve been up
against wordy boys like yuh before, an’ I can work all around ’em. All
you guys do is to get a few facts an’ then pad ’em up. Yuh never get the
real stuff, never,” and he snapped his fingers under my nose. “Wait’ll
we get a real case sometime, you an’ me, an’ I’ll show yuh sompin.”
He glared at me with hard, revengeful eyes, and he then and there put a
fear into me from which I never recovered, although at the time I merely
smiled.
“Is that so? That’s easy enough to say, now that you’re trimmed, but I
guess I’ll be right there when the time comes.”
“Aw, go to hell!” he snarled, and I walked off smiling but beginning to
wonder nervously just what it was he was going to do to me, and how
soon.
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