Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [23]
The Tracy family, Bay View, circa 1908. (SUSIE TRACY)
With its hundreds of mill and factory workers, there was no shortage of saloons in Bay View, many of which, called “tied houses,” were exclusive (or “tied”) to the output of a particular brewery. The Globe Tavern on St. Clair Street was built of the same Cream City brick as the Romanesque school on Trowbridge, and it proudly displayed the belted globe of the Schlitz Brewing Company atop its turreted entryway. Vollmer’s Grocery Store and Saloon was due west of the Globe on Lenox. Kneisler’s White House Tavern stood boldly at the corner of Ellen and Kinnickinnic Avenue, and yet another Schlitz tavern was under construction just outside the walls of the rolling mill on South Superior. The walk to and, especially, from work became an obstacle course of temptations for a man of John Tracy’s cravings, and he didn’t always negotiate the route with complete success. An eminently convivial man, John honored the Irish tradition of the saloon as a center of the community, and he often found it impossible to pass one without stopping to pay his respects. At other times he walked a tortured path that purposely avoided all licensed establishments, a not altogether easy task, in that saloons, like stores and churches, were part of the fabric of a residential neighborhood and stood side by side with new homes, parks, and schools.
Despite the daily challenges he faced, John Tracy won favor with Louis Kuehn, the president of Milwaukee Corrugating, and found himself promoted to traffic manager within the space of a year. Even so, he would, on occasion, fall spectacularly off the wagon and disappear without a trace. The boys had no clear understanding of what was happening; their father worked long hours and it was only their mother’s tears that told them something was dreadfully wrong. Carroll did what he could to comfort their mother, but Spencer withdrew, possibly wondering, as the children of alcoholics often do, if his father had gone off because of something his younger boy had said or done.
What they couldn’t have known was that alcoholism ran in their grandmother’s side of the family, and that their Uncle Will Tracy was even more severely afflicted with “the creature” than was their own father. It was never discussed, a matter of unspoken shame, a sin against wife and family, a good man’s weakness. At times like these there was little Carrie could do, and a call would go out to Andrew Tracy, John’s genuinely abstentious brother, who would come to Milwaukee, find his elder sibling, clean him up, and bring him back. The process took its toll on John, whose genial nature hid a prematurely lined face and whose hair, in his mid-thirties, was already beginning to gray at the temples. It took a toll on his brother as well, for there was genuine terror in the fact that Guhin blood also ran through Andrew Tracy’s veins. “Uncle Andrew was paralyzed, afraid, of liquor,” said his niece, Jane Feely. “He just wouldn’t touch it. Not because he wouldn’t want it, but because he was so terribly afraid of it.”
Summers for the boys were spent in Freeport, where they divided their time between the Tracy house in Liberty Division and the Brown house on upper Stephenson. Grandfather Brown’s asthma was bad, aggravated by the summer dust, and the shades were always pulled. It was dark and hot inside, all stiff and lifeless with a horsehair sofa in the sitting room and a five-octave square piano that nobody ever played. Spencer escaped whenever he could—to the circus, to the moving pictures, to the Stebbins house on Walnut Street. Warren Stebbins was the younger brother of Abbie Brown, but the family never looked forward to Spencer’s visits. “He was terrible,” said Warren’s granddaughter, Bertha Calhoun. “He was just