Stymie Stonewrist and Ol' Stiffpants and The Bond

Dew, Leaf, Ballast - Point of Rocks, MD 1997 JMS

 

They didn't choose to be bonded, but bonds can have a way of imposing themselves on the unsuspecting. Sometimes the bond chooses you. Fifteen-year old Stephanie Steinquist was about a year from becoming Stymie Stonewrist when she began her seven-hour shift at the the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in Greenwich Village on Saturday, March 25th, 1911. A few blocks away, Albert Huffheinz, who would later be called Ol' Stiffpants, was struggling to obtain his father's death certificate from the coroner's office. His mother was working a sewing machine on the 8th floor at Triangle Shirtwaist, one row behind Stephanie.

There was a fire. The stairwell doors were locked. The lone fire escape was not up to the task of stewarding all of the factory workers - mostly women and girls - to safety. 146 of them died, including the recently-widowed Mrs. Huffheinz. Young Stephanie survived - rather miraculously - with a broken and subsequently improperly-set wrist, several lacerations, and an undiagnosed concussion. She also suffered profound survivor's remorse, and although she had barely known Mrs. Huffheinz, she went to sit Shiva with the woman's family for several days following her discharge from the hospital. That was where she met Albert.

There wasn't much said, sitting Shiva with the grieving family and friends, but after a couple of days, when the older Huffheinz women began to quietly converse, Albert sat next to Stephanie and gestured at her plaster-wrapped wrist. "You were there? You worked with Ma?"

She nodded sadly. "I didn't know her very well, but she seemed swell," she whispered. "She always had the older ladies in stitches."

"Ha!" Albert's laugh surprised him as much as it did his fellow mourners, some of whom regarded him with a mild, give-the-kid-a-break-he's-an-orphan-now disapproval. "'In stitches!' She was a seamstress! That's funny. You're funny."

She stared at the floor for a moment. "I'm... I didn't mean to be funny..."

"It's okay," he assured her. "Ma was a hoot, and I promise you, she woulda laughed and laughed at the stitches bit. "I'm Albert." He took her hand and shook it gently.

"Stephanie," she said softly. "I'm awful sorry about your mother - well, and your father, too. I'm just dreadfully sorry."

"My uncle says I'm getting all of my sad things out of the way early, so that the rest of my life can be peaceful and happy." 

"That would be nice. I'd say you've earned it," she offered tentatively.

"I don't know. My uncle drinks a lot. Say, how'd you get out of there - if you don't mind my asking? I know those bastards kept the doors locked - they all do."

She looked at the floor again, then looked up at him, then quickly looked away. "I don't think I'm ready to talk about it," she whispered. "I'm sorry."

"No need to apologize. I'm sorry to pry."

"When I'm ready to talk about it, you'll be the first to know."

Over the next six months, they became best friends. She found another job at a similar garment factory, doing her best to supplement the meager incomes her parents earned as line cook and bookkeeper at a Greene Street steak house. Albert, too old for the orphanage, went from one menial job to the next. When not working, they spent countless hours visiting and gossiping and commiserating and walking and people-watching. Their friendship even survived a brief ill-advised foray into romance, which they quickly and decisively declared was not to be. 

She was a sturdy girl, and had learned to fight in the sweatshops. He was short and slight, and not at all a fighter, and on more than one occasion she had helped him fend off bullies and would-be muggers. "Why'd you do that," he'd protest, "I coulda handled 'em." She always said, "I know, but it's the least I can do," which puzzled him. 

Then, Albert read a book about hoboes. He quickly became obsessed with their lifestyle, their culture, their oddly humanitarian code of conduct, and their freedom. With a promise to return and tell her all about it on the first anniversary of the Shirtwaist fire, he left New York City in a boxcar bound for Buffalo. "If you don't show up at that memorial, mister, I'm coming looking for you - and if anything happens to me, won't you be just the saddest!"

He did not show up at the ceremony commemorating the one-year anniversary of the fire. She scoured all of Washington Square Park. He was not there. She even saw his uncle, who could offer little more than to shrug a helpless "We haven't heard from him." Inside her, panic and resolve engaged in a rousing bout of fisticuffs, with resolve emerging victorious. "Swell. I suppose I'm a hobo now," she growled, stomping away.

"He goes by 'Ol' Stiffpants' now," the uncle shouted helpfully after her. "Something like that, anyway."

"Thanks. If you see him, tell him I'm heading to Buffalo, and I'm gonna call myself, um... Stymie. Yeah - Stymie Stonewrist."

She followed the New York Central back and forth across the state, and struggled terribly for the first few months. She was assaulted - mostly by non-hoboes like cops and railroad workers. She was bitten by police and other dogs, harassed in towns, robbed, and worse. She learned as she went. She developed calluses. A lot of calluses. And she asked every hobo she met if they knew Ol' Stiffpants. For months, the answer was no. Then, at a junction outside of Albany, the answer was yes. 

"I heard of that fella," an extra-dirty and profoundly stinky hobo named Jack Skunk told her. "New kid. Little guy. Jewish, from the city.

"That's him! Do you know where he might be - or where he might be headed?" she asked, with hope in her heart for the first time in ages.

Jack Skunk laughed hard. "He rides the Pennsy, not the New York Central. Sorry miss - you're on the wrong railroad."

"Well, shit."

It took several more months, but on November 1st, 1912, she found him. That is, he found her. She was sharing a camp just south of Buffalo with a few other hoboes, and had inadvertently looked at Ol' Barb Stab-You-Quick in just the wrong way, and was a half-second from getting good and stabbed - quick. A little blur of a man leapt from the darkness and kicked Ol' Barb's knife from her hand and sent it spinning off into the woods. 

"Come with me," he ordered, as Stymie's assailant raced after her wayward blade.

"Albert??" she shrieked as he nearly dragged her away from the camp.

"It's Ol' Stiffpants, ma'am," he started. "Wait. Stephanie? Is it you??"

"I go by Stymie Stonewrist now," she said breathlessly as they ran. "I can't believe I found you - sort of - I've been looking for you since March!"

"I know. I'm sorry. If it helps, I've been looking for you since March, too. I got to the anniversary ceremony a couple hours too late."

"I wish you hadn't saved me from that crazy stabby lady, though. Now I owe you TWO life debts."

"What?" 

They ran a mile or so, then found a suitable bridge, under which they lit a small fire and huddled together and cried and hugged and tried kissing again and this time it kind of worked. And they shared their respective stories of rookie hobo trial and error and more trial, and eventually slept.

In the cold light of morning, with Lake Erie lapping at the nearby shore, a southbound train of empty coal hoppers thundered through the woods and over the trestle that sheltered them. Albert Ol' Stiffpants Huffheinz snapped awake and reached for his soul mate. She wasn't there, but she hadn't gone far. She sat on a fallen tree near the lake's edge, watching the little waves. He approached her cautiously, making sure to snap a couple of twigs as he walked. He stopped. He reached for her shoulder.

"Morning," she said. "Mind if I walk with you a while, Ol' Stiffpants?" 

"I'd like that," he said without hesitation. "Stymie... Stonewrist, is it?"

"Yeah - on account of my wonky wrist. I kind of made it up on the spot." she turned to face him and smiled. "I'm ready to tell you."

"Tell me what?"

"How I survived the fire."

"Oh. You don't have to," he said softly, taking her hands.

She inhaled deeply. "No, I think I should. It's okay. So, I was on the fire escape with the others when it collapsed. Your mother was there. She had pulled me and another girl out with her - practically dragging us by our hair - and almost as soon as we got on the fire escape, it broke free and we were falling, falling. Everyone screamed and fell. I held onto a piece of metal that swung down a few floors against the building, then hit a window ledge, and then, well..." She took another deep breath as Albert squeezed her hands. "I landed on your mother. She saved my life, and I think I killed her. I'm so sorry."

Albert stifled an odd sort of laugh, and wrapped his arms around her. "I have no doubt that she saved you, my dear, but you must believe me when I tell you that it was the pavement that killed her, not you."

She looked up at him. "Are you sure?"

"Absolutely certain, and I will thank her every day for that, as long as I live."

"So will I," she whispered. They held each other for hours - or seconds, who could tell? Finally she said, "I assume the 'Ol'' is on account of your prematurely-greying temples, but what's the 'Stiffpants' part about?"

Ol' Stiffpants sighed, and shifted uncomfortably in her embrace. "I'm not ready to talk about that. But when I am, you'll be the first to know."

 

A Sort Of Homecoming

February 13, 1942

My Darling Buckingham,

     I hope this letter finds you well.  I hope this letter finds you, at all.  I heard that you were working the orange and grapefruit groves again, this winter, so I have employed the services of Juan The Southernmost Finder to locate you and deliver my message.  I am also counting on him to convince you to read it, or to read it to you, chasing after you, if necessary.

I am leaving New York City.  I could write for you a long list of reasons for my decision, but paper, as you may have heard, is scarce.  However, I have space enough to share with you three of my principal motivations.  

First, I cannot abide for a single additional day the overwhelming sensation of being a rat at the bottom of a labyrinth of trenches in France in either this war, or the first one.  Glimpses of sunshine - or even of sky - are few, far between, and tortuously brief.  I can't breathe.

Second, and I am well-prepared for - and deserving of - your "I told you so," but I have found that success as a designer of couture hats is as tenuous and short-lived as the rays of light that reach my face in these canyons of concrete.  I can still find buyers, but I can't ever count on when or where that happens.  It's a terrifically-exciting lifestyle for some, but it just makes me nervous.

Finally, I have realized that happiness for me has proven twice as elusive as sunbeams and success in the big city.  It peeks into my lonely soul just enough to remind me that I had once mastered it completely and set myself up for a lifetime of it.  The "once" of which I speak is, of course, the time I spent as your dusty drifter wife.

Happiness, it seems, can flit and fly and scurry away and hide, but what cannot do any of those is my unflagging love for you, my dear, destitute migrant laborer.  

So, there you have it, Buckingham.  I will find you.  I pray that your heart has not fully hardened to me by the time I do.

Walk safely, and remember to look both ways, my husband.

Yours Always,

Mildred The Mad (Former) Hatter

This post was prompted by the word "FLEETING" and my good and supportive friends at  STUDIO 30-PLUS, and is inspired by (although not a part of) my 2013 Camp NaNoWriMo novel.  Thanks for stopping by!

The Story Of Balloonpopper Chillingsworth, As Told By All-but-Dissertation Tucker Dummychuck

Since I started writing about the men and women on John Hodgman's list of 700 hoboes, I am constantly being asked by no one about my sources.  While I won't divulge all my secrets, I can share one.  

His name was All-but-Dissertation Tucker Dummychuck, and he completed all but his dissertation on the subject of American vagrancy in the 1930's.  In fact, he had signed a deal to write a series of articles for the New Yorker on the inner workings of Hobo Nation, but his subject so enveloped him that he failed to provide anything beyond his first submission, before disappearing forever.  

Here is what the magazine ran in July of 1938:

Balloonpopper Chillingsworth

       Never ask a cruel man his motivation, for you may not like his answer.  I first heard about Balloonpopper Chillingsworth in 1934, and three long years would pass before I would finally track the man down and meet him face to face.  He was the first drifter I had studied who had created a name for himself outside of the world of the dusty vagrant.  [Mr. Dummychuck refused to use the word "hobo" in any of his papers or articles.]

Simply put, the man was known for popping balloons.   

From Boston to Boca Raton to Burbank, he has spent years lurking in the shadows and springing upon unsuspecting passersby - mostly children - to burst their balloons without warning, and with, it seems, no shortage of mal intent. He often takes it a step further, pricking the owners of said balloons with pins, tacks, nails and bits of broken glass.  He bellows at his victims a short, profane speech, the upshot of which is that no one will ever enjoy a balloon again if he has anything to say about it.

I had heard the stories.  By last year, many of them had made it into the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times.  Chillingsworth has been described as a menace to society, a creeping night terror, a public health hazard, and a very mean bad man who ruins birthday parties and childhood visits to the city zoo and the circus.  Having lived with the wandering poor for several years already, I was not afraid of him; I was intrigued.

When I finally met him, it was a cold December morning in the CA&E rail yard outside of Elgin, Illinois.  He emerged from behind a cattle pen, his arm across his face, most of which was becloaked 'neath his ratty black cape.  He shot furtive glances this way and that, then fixed me in his steely gaze.

I knew better than to jump straight in and ask the only question to which I truly wanted an answer, so I ran through my customary script of queries.

• He wasn't certain, but he thought his given name had been Reginald Chillingsworth, of the Manhattan Chillingsworths.
• He had been riding and walking the rails since before The Great Crash, although he did not recall the year of his departure from civilized society.
• He had received training in the clown arts from P.T. Barnum's school, but had never performed.
• He could name and create 114 distinct balloon animals and other shapes, but he'd be damned if he ever would - at least, not for "some damn-fool reporter from New Holland."
• He was six foot, six inches and wore a size 9 3/8 hat. [That's a very large hat.]

I quickly grew bored of the same old stories of rail yard living, destitution and scrapes with the law.  I asked him the question.  The Question.  

"Why must you pop everyone's balloons?"  

First, he congratulated me on my restraint.  It seems other reporters, including one from the Trib and one from RKO Radio, had posed the same question, and then promptly fed him answers.  They posited that the balloons were symbols of life's joy, and that if he was to live a life devoid of joy, then so would everyone else.  They said the same of love.  No love for him, they said, no love for anyone else.  One interviewer suggested that his soul had been stolen by the devil and was last seen drifting off in a balloon, and that young Chillingsworth was on a mission to recover it.  

He rolled his eyes, sighed heavily, then told me what it was that compelled him to pop everyone's balloons.   It was heavy in its simplicity, like a child's conception of Love.

"Balloons killed my parents when I was nine, and since that day I have dedicated my life to ensuring that they never kill again."

Indeed.  

My research confirmed the strange circumstances that surrounded the deaths of his parents.  They had owned and operated an extremely lucrative business, supplying balloons and decorations to the most sought-after party planners and event operators in New York City throughout the 1920s.  The senior Chillingsworth was known as "The Balloon Man," and his wife was called "Mrs. Hydrogen."  On the night of September 4th, 1928, they were riding home along Park Avenue when a large and rather unruly costume party released some forty-five hundred of the Chillingsworth's balloons from the balcony of one of the new hi-rise apartment buildings on the upper east side.  The balloons were to have been filled with hydrogen, which would have lifted them playfully to the sky, but the Chillingworths' apprentice had mistakenly used plain oxygen.  The balloons sank en masse to the street below.  The couple's driver, momentarily blinded and terrified by the balloons, veered into a tree.  He and the Chillingsworths were ejected and promptly trampled by a pair of horses who had been spooked by the crash - and by the popping.

That apprentice was Billy "Balloonpopper" Chillingsworth, and he had watched in horror from the 21st floor as his parents died Lat the hands of the family balloons.

I can hardly blame him for his obsession.  As he turned to walk away, his last words to me were,

"Never again shall the death cries of innocents fill these ears.  At least, not at the whim of those wicked bags of air.  Not while I draw breath." 

Honest Amelia Dirt - Because She's a DANCER

Amelia Dunham stood near center stage and stared down at her choreographer.  George, the hated "boss" of the 1936 Rockettes had just given her an ultimatum:  If he saw her en pointe one more time, not only would she be fired, but she would "never work in this town again."  She was a Rockette, dammit, and there was no place in a Rockettes show for that "hoity-toity ballerina baloney."

She felt her face go red.  This was the first paid work she'd ever had, and although she hated it, she had found that it came naturally to her - and with the Great Depression dragging on, she desperately needed the money.  An argument erupted in her mind.  Income that comes with a creepy boss who was positively made of hands, or a return to homelessness.  She had been pretty good at homelessness, and her hobo life had only ended a year earlier, so the prospect was not as terrifying as it might have been to a nineteen-year old girl who lacked such experience.  She missed her trees and her freedom, but she had learned to love the hot water in her studio apartment, unreliable though it was, and would miss her afternoons spent getting lost in Macy's.  She let the internal debate play out for a moment, and inhaled deeply.

To say that Amelia was not fond of ultimatums was like saying that the stock market on October 29th, 1929 was "in the red."  She was once expelled from the second grade for defying her teacher's final warning, and wearing her handmade tutu of leaves instead of her school uniform one time too many.  A couple of schools later, in the seventh grade, she was expelled for her ongoing refusal to speak.   

Her most severe ultimatum had come from her mother.  By her fourteenth year, Amelia had long-since decided that she was a wood nymph, preferring to loiter and dance alone in the woods near her Corbin, Kentucky home, rather than study, or do her chores, or play with others, or even to talk.  Her mother had arranged a job for Amelia, working as an office clerk for the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, in town.

On her first day, when her mother sent one of the wood nymph's miserable little brothers to fetch her for breakfast, Amelia was nowhere to be found.  Later that day, she strolled back into the house, muddy, sweaty and tiredly happy from hours of dancing and cavorting with "her trees," in the thick woods that lined the railroad tracks near the Dunhams' home.  Her mother was too angry to look at Amelia, and her father was working a double shift at the locomotive shop that night, so it was left to the wretched little brothers to deliver the ultimatum.  Show up for work tomorrow - dressed as a normal person - or get out and never come back, they told her.

Before her father got home, that night, she packed some of her homemade skirts and halters and dresses - all of which exposed shocking amounts of skin, especially for the early 1930's - into a couple of pillowcases and danced out the front door without a word.

Dances With Trees

The four years she spent as the hobo Honest Amelia Dirt were the hardest and happiest of her young life.  She made her way south, carefully avoiding people as much as possible, until she found a climate warm enough for her scantily-clad wood nymph lifestyle.  She adopted a small pine forest along the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad near Jacksonville, and lived and danced among the trees, speaking only to them.  

Her hobo years were more difficult than they could have been, were it not for Amelia's strict adherence to a no-stealing policy.  Of the few fellow drifters she met, even fewer were kind-hearted enough to try to teach her anything useful, and whenever their lectures came around to theft, she would shake her head vigorously.  That, coupled with her unflinching penchant for answering truthfully (using head nods/shakes and pantomime, mostly), and an obvious affinity for having maximum earth on her skin, led rather directly to her hobo name.

Life on the road and in the adjoining woods was not easy.  Being a tall, slim, barely-clothed and long-legged dancing teenage human wood nymph in the early 30s was basically living, breathing pornography to most of her fellow hoboes.  She was assaulted more often than she could recall, by the end of it.  The first time, her naïveté had allowed her attacker to take her by surprise by first teaching her a couple of legitimate hobo lessons, and she barely escaped him.  After that, she was more cautious, and although she was thin and not particularly strong, she was light on her feet, and could kick a man in the nose before he knew her foot had left the ground.

In the 1930s, there were no "teenagers," or "'tweens."  If your age had two digits, you were basically an adult.  Amelia was given no special consideration.  At best, she was respected as a woman of the road, staunchly honest and not as easy to rape as she looked.  But beyond the assaults, she also endured a number of awkward proposals of marriage from men from eleven to eleventy. 

She quickly learned to accept this reality, and spent most of her time communing with her trees.  She taught herself to trap, kill, skin, cook and stomach small game, as well as to catch, gut, bone, cook and appreciate fish.  She learned to build her campfires in deep holes, to minimize the chances of rude middle-of-the-night awakenings to bandits or worse.  She made slightly more substantial patchwork clothing for the chilly northern Florida winter nights.  And her thin, muscled arms and legs became tanned, and her eventually hip-length auburn hair lightened, and she danced.  

She taught herself the few classical moves she knew, though she didn't know their names.  She found herself simply moving from her campsite to the stream en point - dancing everywhere she went, every waking minute.  She danced through her conversations with the trees.  She danced through her suitors' mesmerized propositions.  She could not imagine a state of being that didn't include dancing.  

Her leap from life among the trees by the tracks was not by her design.  She had been in the woods of northeast Florida for over three years when she developed pneumonia.  Frog-Eatin' Lou, her only true friend in Hobo Nation, found her unconscious and barely breathing when he came to check on her one January night.  He carried her to a hospital for the poor in Jacksonville.  She slept and absorbed intravenous saline and drugs for a week.  When she woke, she stretched and stripped and found her leafy skirt and started dancing.  She pirouetted through the front door without a word.

As she left the hospital late that night, a pudgy, creepily-imposing little man was dropping an opium-sickened hooker outside the emergency room doors.  He glimpsed Amelia's dancing, weakened though it was by her illness, and was entranced.  He offered her a job - not an audition, a job - with the Rockettes, who would be moving to Radio City Music Hall in New York, that spring.  Honest Amelia Dirt thought about it, and found that she had to admit that life as a dancer with a place to live sounded like something worth trying.  Within a month, she was living in the big city and doing that famous Rockettes leg-kick with two dozen strangers, in front of a theater packed with whooping and howling men.

The city excited her, and one of her biggest fears - having to talk to people - proved false, as it turned out that she could get through an average day without uttering a complete sentence aloud.  The dancing was routine and not nearly natural enough to give her any satisfaction, but it paid for a one-room apartment in the Bronx, and food, and that was enough.  For a while.  As her job became increasingly tedious, she began to add some of her own balletic flourishes.  The Rockettes were - and still are - all about precision in unison, so Amelia's extra-curricular activity was immediately problematic.

She had a choice.  Dance the steps exactly as choreographed, or go back to income-less drifting.  George's tiny face glared at her.  She glared at him.  She took a deep breath.  

She leapt over the orchestra pit and landed, still en pointe, in front of George.  She thought about kicking him in the nose, as she had so many men, including George, over the past five years, but opted instead for a dramatically-loud slap across his oily face.

"I quit."  She scampered to the dressing room to fetch her bag, then danced out the front door without another word.