Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [22]
Bay View was full of young working-class families. Rowdy kids were everywhere, yet Spencer stood out. In an early picture he radiates energy, his deep-set eyes suggesting not so much a thoughtful, well-behaved child as a malevolent raccoon. “He was in dresses when I first saw him,” said Mrs. Henry Disch, an early neighbor. “He was bubbling with life. I don’t believe he ever sat still. I can’t remember him sitting down in a chair or reading a book. His brother Carroll was a quiet boy. He liked to stay inside and listen to the talk of his elders, but Spence was always outside with the boys.” When the kids were cleaned up and brought to dinner, Spencer sat restlessly as the adults talked, kicking the legs of the chairs on either side of him and methodically peeling the enamel dots off Mrs. Disch’s new salt and pepper shakers.
It was in Bay View that Spencer’s spiritual development began with his weekly attendance at Mass, his mother remaining at home while his father walked the boys to Immaculate Conception, the Catholic parish that served the neighborhood. The sacred rite was a pageant of spectacle and wonder to an impressionable three-year-old—the singing, praying, kneeling, the nourishment of the Divine Liturgy and Holy Communion. However close he was to his indulgent mother, Spencer grew closer still to his father in those early years, the shared experience of worship a powerful bond that would hold firm in the years to come. It became Carroll’s job to corral his kid brother like a gentle sheepdog, hovering over him before and after while greetings were exchanged between their father and the neighbors on the steps in front of the church. And when it came time to put Spencer in kindergarten in 1906, it too became Carroll’s job to lead him the eight blocks to District 17 School #2 on Trowbridge Street.
School widened Spencer’s social circle and encouraged a tendency to disappear. “I began to show signs of wanderlust at seven,” he later admitted. “I wandered completely out of the neighborhood and struck up an acquaintance with two delightful companions—‘Mousie’ and ‘Rattie.’ Their father owned a saloon in a very hard-boiled neighborhood. It was a lot more fun playing with them than it was going to school.” Mousie and Rattie were nine and eleven, respectively, and incorrigible truants. “Being sentimentally Irish,” Spencer said, “that common-enough episode in a kid’s life was to have a lasting effect on my future. For the first time I saw my mother cry over me. I resolved in an immature way never to make her cry again. I don’t mean to intimate that I became a model boy. I didn’t.”
The family’s pattern of movements during these years suggests they were as much a result of Spencer’s abysmal attendance record as they were for reasons of economics. In 1907 the Tracys moved closer to the school, cutting three blocks off the daily commute. In their next relocation, the family settled within sight of the building, where the route home was a short walk through a brick-paved alley. Just beyond the schoolyard was dairy pasture, forest, and, at a gravel road called Oklahoma Avenue, the Milwaukee city limits.
Spence seemed to prefer the rougher neighborhoods to Bay View proper, and frequently he would return home with a band of scruffy-looking kids who seemed as if they hadn’t eaten in a week. Invariably Mrs. Tracy would fix sandwiches—cheese on buttered bread—only to discover that Spencer had sent one or more of them home with clothes from his own closet. “I can honestly say that back of every one of Spencer’s exploits was something fine like sympathy, generosity, affection, pride, or ambition,” she said in 1937. “There was not a mean bone or thought in him. True, he broke windows with the same alarming and expensive regularity boys do today. And he would get embroiled in fights to help a friend—fights, incidentally, from which Carroll invariably would have to rescue him because he was so thin and sickly