Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [21]
“I don’t know,” said John. “What do you think?”
“Why don’t we honor Bonnie?” Catherine Tracy, the younger daughter of John and Letitia Tracy, had become Bonaventure, Mother General of the Sinsinawa Dominicans.
John smiled and nodded his agreement. “That’s all right with me,” he said.
When they brought the baby, swaddled in white, up to the font, Father Durnin said, “What is the name?”
Jenny said, “Spencer Bonaventure.”
And the priest asked, “Boy or girl?”
When Carrie Tracy learned her new son had been given “Bonaventure” as a middle name, she was unhappy, as much for the baby’s sake as her own. (She may have learned that Bonaventure was the patron saint of those afflicted with bowel disorders.) When the certificate of birth was filed on June 4, 1900, the boy’s name was given as “Spencer Bernard Tracy” and it remained that way for the rest of his mother’s life.
The only industrial enterprise to rival the West Milwaukee Shops in terms of size and employment was a rolling mill that occupied nearly thirty acres at the southeastern corner of the city where the Kinnickinnic River flowed into Lake Michigan. As the shops had given birth to Merrill Park, the iron and steel mill founded in 1867 by the Milwaukee Iron Company begat the similarly self-contained village of Bay View.
Initially, the neighborhood was populated with iron and steel workers imported from Great Britain, but as factories sprang up to the west of the mill complex and the need for support services grew, the ethnic makeup of the area became considerably more diverse. By the time John Tracy moved his family to Bay View in 1903, there were Irish mill hands, a sizable Italian colony, and significant numbers of Poles and Germans. The architecture was a pleasing mix of Queen Anne, Italianate, and Greek Revival, with a few Civil War–era farmhouses remaining. New single-family frame houses were built alongside duplexes, and the dense woods on the lakeshore were only a short walk from the compact business district along Kinnickinnic Avenue.
The mill itself employed 1,600 men, transforming ore from Dodge County and the Lake Superior region into steel and iron bars, tracks, billets, rails, and the square-cut nails that held much of Bay View together. Then there were the companies that sprang up around the mill, producing products for the building and transportation industries.
One such enterprise was the Milwaukee Corrugating Company, which took its first orders for galvanized roofing shingles in 1902. Over time, the line expanded to include pressed-tin ceilings, wall tiles, skylights, and ventilators for barns and creameries. Milwaukee Corrugating was a prosperous, growing concern when John Tracy joined the company. Exactly why he left the St. Paul isn’t clear, but his promotion to general foreman in late 1901 would likely have put him in closer proximity to the numerous saloons that served the men of the shops, and a stop on the way home would not only have led to calamity but a clash with the abstentious culture so carefully shaped by Sherburn Merrill. In little more than a year, John was out at the railroad and glad to land yet another clerk’s position in the factory district north of Lincoln Avenue.
The move to Bay View coincided with Carroll Tracy’s start in school and Spencer’s emergence as a hyperactive terror. Not long after the family’s relocation to a roomy duplex on Bishop Avenue, the younger boy took a firm grip on a cast iron fire engine and brained his older brother with it. He watched calmly as his mother ministered to the screaming seven-year-old, then settled into a soothing and sympathetic chant: “Poor Ca’l, poor Ca’l …” Carroll Tracy was a good son, his mother’s favorite, but Spencer was something else again, and his aunt Emma predicted John and Carrie would have