• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Garrick, the circulation manager, hired his godson to work on the delivery truck, bundling the newspapers before they were dropped off for paper boys to distribute. “I think he got paid twelve dollars a week,” recalled Garrick, who soon regretted ever making the gesture.

“A few weeks after Frankie started work, one of the boys who was a sportswriter was killed in an auto crash and Dolly heard about it. You know Dolly. Push, push, push. She was always aiming to go higher and higher. She told Frankie to go see his godfather, that I’d get him that job. So he came in the day after the boy was killed, but I wasn’t in the office. Frank went on into Editorial anyway and sat down at the dead boy’s desk and acted as if he had the job. He filled the glue pots and sharpened pencils and started looking through the guy’s notebooks. When the editor asked him what he was doing in there, Frank said he was the new sportswriter who had come to take the dead boy’s place. He said that I had sent him in.

“When I got in later, the editor called me and said, ‘Did you send that young Italian kid in here?’ I didn’t know what he was talking about until I looked into Editorial and saw Frankie sitting at the guy’s desk all dressed up. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t send him in.’

“ ‘Well, he says you did,’ said the editor. ‘I think it’s pretty bold of him to just barge in here like this on the day of the guy’s funeral and try to take his job. You’d better let him go.’

“So, I had no choice,” said Frank Garrick. “I went over to Frankie and said, ‘Why’d you do this, Frankie? This isn’t right. If you’d come to me in the first place, I could have gotten you the job. Now my hands are tied. I have to let you go.’

“Oh, the temper and the words and the filthy names he called me,” said Frank Garrick. “You have no idea of what that temper was like in those days. Murderous. Like he was going to kill me. He flared up something terrible, cursing and swearing and so vulgar. The words he used were hateful, awful. He called me every terrible name in the book and then he stormed out. He never said another word to me until fifty years later, after his mother died. She wrote me off, too, and even though we lived in the same town, she never said another word to me for the rest of her life.”

When Frank ran home to tell Dolly what his godfather had done to him, his mother took his side because she saw no impropriety in what he had done. After all, he was simply trying to get ahead, which is what one is supposed to do in life. Instead of asking Frank to apologize to his godfather, she took up the cudgel herself and sustained the feud for a lifetime. As she said many years later, “My son is like me. You cross him and he never forgets.”

4

The 1930s were hungry years for most of America; the Great Depression crippled the country and the people. Cities and towns alike became bloated with the luckless, the jobless, the homeless. Men sold apples on street corners while women holding babies with swollen bellies waited in long lines for dry bread and watery soup.

In 1932 desperate voters swept the Republicans out of office and made Franklin D. Roosevelt president in hopes that he would do something to get the country moving again. But they had to wait until the new year and the inauguration to find out about the New Deal. In the meantime, there was a sad Christmas for the more than forty million people who had fallen into poverty.

Insulated by a father with a steady job and a mother with several, Frank Sinatra escaped the ravages of the worst economic disaster the country had ever known. His Christmas in Hoboken that year was merry indeed. To the amazement of their poor friends and neighbors, the Sinatras were moving into their first home at 841 Garden Street, a four-story wooden house that cost $13,400—an astronomical sum in the middle of the Depression, when the price of a modern six-room bungalow in Detroit with a two-car garage was only $2,800, and a Spanish stucco with seven rooms in Beverly Hills cost $5,000. The