Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [18]
1 Actually, Crosman was fifty when Louise met her, but must have seemed older.
CHAPTER 2
A Born Actor
* * *
It was an enclave, insular and, in a city known for brewing and bratwurst, predominantly Irish; a company town in some respects, working-class but by no means poor. The Catholic parish, St. Rose of Lima, counted nineteen millionaires, including the Millers of brewing fame, among its congregants, and its charismatic pastor, Father Patrick H. Durnin, was one of the city’s best-connected and most effective fund-raisers. Along West Clybourn Street were dentists, barbers, a cobbler, a druggist, four grocery stores, a plumber, hardware, and a men’s shop. The names on the businesses spoke for themselves: Corrigan, Curley, O’Leary.
Merrill Park didn’t start out that way. The original plat fell south of the estates along Grand Avenue at the west end of Milwaukee. Sherburn S. Merrill, general manager of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, built his Victorian mansion on Grand at Thirty-third Street, then gathered up the land along three sides, from Thirtieth to Thirty-fifth Streets and back to the edge of the Menomonee Valley. Merrill’s company, meanwhile, acquired nearly half a square mile of marshland in the valley itself, and in 1879 began work on the Shops of West Milwaukee, where the rolling stock of the state’s largest railroad would be manufactured and maintained.
By 1900 the railroad was the city’s largest employer, and many of the men who worked there—blacksmiths, woodworkers, painters, machinists—found a vibrant neighborhood of cottages, single-family frame houses, and spacious duplexes just up the steps in Merrill Park. Mostly they were Germans and Poles, first- and second-generation Americans who brought their skills with them from Europe. The Irish influx started in 1892, after a disastrous fire in the Third Ward left many of them homeless. The Irish were the men on the trains—the engineers, firemen, brakemen, switchmen—and soon they came to dominate. Merrill Park wasn’t entirely Irish, but by the turn of the century it sure seemed that way.
So it was to Merrill Park that John Tracy naturally came in 1899, installing his young family on the first floor of a modest duplex at 3003 St. Paul Avenue, just a block from the Clybourn business district and two from St. Rose’s. Like a lot of other people in the neighborhood, he worked for the St. Paul, but he wasn’t in the shops nor on the trains either. Rather, he clerked in offices contained in a nondescript brick building around the corner from Union Depot, where he could gaze out the window at almost any hour of the day or night and watch freight and passenger stock roll gracefully across Second Street, arcing to the west toward Fourth. It was a factory district, the heart of the original village, where boots and soap and stoves got made, and where ironworks and hardware companies sat alongside packing plants and warehouses.
John Edward Tracy was born into railroading. His father, John D. Tracy, emigrated from Galway during the Great Famine and went to work for the Vermont Central at the age of fifteen. In 1854 he moved to Wisconsin and joined the Milwaukee & St. Paul as a section foreman. He made roadmaster in Savanna, Illinois, then settled in Freeport, in 1870, where he was in charge of the track to Rock Island. He had four sons, three of whom worked for the line. John, born in 1873, had a head for numbers and became a bookkeeper. His brother Andrew, born in 1883, held a similar position with the Illinois Central.
The Tracys were unusually prominent for a railroad family. J.D. was treasurer of the building committee for St. Mary’s Catholic Church, which anchored a section of town that became known as Piety Hill. He contributed a pillared altar of marble and onyx, and for years was one of the directors of St. Mary’s School. He was also one of the organizers of the State Bank of Freeport, and one of its directors from the very beginning. It could be said the Tracys lived on the right side of the tracks, if only just barely. Liberty