AFTER WORLD WAR I, Americans enjoyed good times. Along with world peace, people had jobs and money. They began to invest in the stock market, a place where individuals invest in businesses by purchasing shares of a company. On October 24, 1929, otherwise known as “Black Thursday,” the value of the stocks began to fall and kept falling at record rates. The single worst day for the United States economy occurred a few days later on Tuesday, October 29. The stock market collapsed, leaving most of the businesses the people had invested in worthless.
The stock market crash had a domino effect. People who invested in stocks lost their money. Bank customers’ hard-earned money disappeared when investments failed and the banks went out of business—about eleven thousand of them by 1933. Shop owners closed their doors. Over twelve million people lost their jobs. Some lost their homes. The homeless either moved in with relatives or built shacks out of scraps in vacant lots. These makeshift villages became known as shantytowns or “Hoovervilles,” mocking President Hoover, who kept promising good times ahead. Life was hard for the people living in these temporary villages. People sewed their own clothes or wore hand-me-downs. They saved used paper and string and added it to food as cheap fillers to feed more family members. Eating beans seven days a week became common. Homes had no electricity or water. Disease spread quickly. And when Christmas finally came, some kids were happy to get a piece of fruit for Christmas and possibly one toy. It’s estimated that about 250,000 teenagers left home so there would be one less mouth to feed. Some became hobos and traveled around the country looking for jobs. Nearly everyone suffered. The Great Depression lasted for ten years.
When Christmas season rolled around, the boys were told to pick one item from a department store catalog. As Billy thumbed through the thick book, it seemed impossible to pick just one Christmas gift. Sister Rose Frances looked at Billy, slumped over and biting his lower lip. She walked across the room and sat alongside him. As they flipped through the pages, she said, “I think a dice game would be a great choice.”6 Not wanting to argue with the kind Sister or hurt her feelings, Billy chose the dice game. When Christmas day finally came, children squealed with delight as they unwrapped bicycles, skates, and sleds. Billy looked down at his dice game and tried to hold back his tears.
Soon after Christmas, Billy contracted scarlet fever. He went to City Hospital in Cleveland on December 27, 1929. As he waited to get checked in, he watched the electric train circle the tracks around the Christmas tree in the lobby.
The sick little boy spent the rest of the holiday season in the contagious ward, along with all of the other infectious patients. With so many diseases in one room, the patients caught each other’s illnesses—everything from the mumps to measles to whooping cough. Billy swapped one disease for another and remained in the hospital room from December until the Fourth of July. He became so dizzy from being bedridden that he needed to crawl to get to the bathroom. While fireworks and bottle rockets exploded over the Cleveland Flats, an industrial area near the Cuyahoga River, Billy was finally discharged from the hospital and sent back to the orphanage in Parma, Ohio.
One month later, in August 1930, while the country still battled the Great Depression, Billy’s mom and his uncle Bill showed up at Parmadale in a Model T Ford. On the drive home, Billy couldn’t take his eyes off his mother as she moved a lever back and forth inside the car, manually operating the windshield wipers. The pouring rain did nothing to dampen the eight-year-old’s spirits. He was going home! Much to his surprise, Billy learned that Jimmy had been home for a year already. Due to complications from spina bifada, the orphanage couldn’t care for him. Billy didn’t mind at all. He couldn’t wait to see his little brother again.
Billy with Mary outside their home on 119th Street.
© William A. Wynne
Billy burst through the front door. Although Jimmy and Mary were not home, the house was far from empty. Billy’s family had grown, but not in the usual way. His grandmother, aunts, and uncles had moved in. Due to the depression, most families could no longer afford to live in a home of their own, so they flocked together to make it through the hard times. Billy didn’t care. After all, he had been sleeping in a room with twenty beds lined up on each side. Being back home with nine family members would be just fine. And when a white German shepherd greeted him with a lick on the face, Billy felt right at home. After their brief introduction, Billy petted Skippy, untied the dog, and took him out to play. Although the rain kept falling, they romped around the yard, and when Skippy crawled into the large cedar doghouse, Billy followed right behind him.
That evening, Billy knelt beside his bed and proudly showed his mom how he had learned to say his nightly prayers at the orphanage. He thanked God for all of the members of his family, and for Skippy, and ended the prayer by saying “Hammer shonus.” His mom raised her eyebrows for a moment until she realized what Billy had meant to say was “Have mercy on us.”
When summer ended, Billy would start second grade. Since he had spent most of first grade in the hospital, he worried. Will I be able to keep up with the other kids? 7
DID YOU KNOW?
Billy left the orphanage on a rainy day in a Model T Ford. In the early days, not only were the windshield wipers manual, so were the engines. Some engines needed to be cranked manually in the front of the car to get it to run. You had to be certain the key was turned off so the car didn’t run you over.
2
LIFE IN THE STREETS
Common sense is better than intelligence, but if you are blessed with both, you are unstoppable.
—Bill Wynne1
BILLY SAT LOW in his chair in the second-grade classroom at Saint Vincent de Paul School, hoping and praying that Miss Margaret would not call on him in search of an answer. Or even worse—what if she asked him to read aloud? He struggled through second grade and third grade, but in fourth grade he was held back. He overheard his relatives say, “I wonder what’s to become of Billy?”2
When the relatives moved out in 1932, Beatrice needed to move to a small apartment with her three children. Dogs were not allowed. Billy cried into Skippy’s white fur and hugged his dog tightly. On moving day, his mom took the dog to live with a family on a farm outside Cleveland. To soften the blow, she crammed Skippy’s cedar doghouse into the back porch of the apartment for Billy and the boys in the neighborhood to use as a clubhouse.
A couple of years later, when Billy turned eleven, thirteen-year-old Mary became his babysitter. Jimmy moved to a boarding school. Billy took advantage of the situation, running the streets with the neighbor boys. Mary couldn’t control her little brother. One day, he climbed a billboard and tossed a tomato at an unsuspecting young man who was on a date with a young lady. Billy scurried down the pole and ran. The man chased after him and grabbed him by the neck. As Billy dangled, the man said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you!”3 Red-faced, the man gave Billy a swift kick in the pants and sent him on his way. The other boys watched the scene unfold, and in the eyes of his friends, Billy became an instant hero.
Billy’s family moved into this small apartment on West 120th Street in 1931. The building had a strict rule: No dogs allowed!
Photo by Nancy Roe Pimm
But the boys didn’t always cause trouble. They fished, rode bikes, and played sports. They crushed a can for a puck and used brooms for sticks in street hockey games. They played baseball in a sandlot with flat stones as bases. The boys shared baseball mitts because so few had a mitt of their own. They also played tag, kick-the-can, and hide-and-go-seek. Bill later said, “I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anything in the world.4
Unfortunately,