Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [25]
He discovered the Comique, a storefront theater that showed split-reel movies on Kinnickinnic Avenue. “Spencer was always punished by depriving him of things he liked,” Carrie said. “Motion pictures formed a great type of discipline, because refusing to allow him to attend broke his heart.” It was impossible to keep his clothes clean, he rarely wiped his nose, and there were the usual schoolyard fights. “A tough kid,” said Joe Bearman, who lived down the street, “but a good one. Ran with the hard-boiled gang of the neighborhood.”
They tried sending him to Freeport, where he was put to work in the family feed store and enrolled for a short time at the Union Street School. Spencer was kept on a short leash, working at the store before and after class, and it was the structured life in Freeport that likely convinced John and Carrie he would benefit from a more disciplined educational environment. Sometime around 1909—the records no longer go back that far—they turned him over to the Dominican nuns at St. John’s Cathedral, where the consequences of a wayward disposition would carry considerably more weight. He had, by then, started going to Confession and fasting before receiving Holy Communion, and understanding what sin, repentance, and forgiveness were all about. He had also come to see his father’s disappearances as something to emulate, an old suitcase in hand, food, such as it was, filched from the ice box when nobody was looking. He’d get a few blocks out and get hungry, then go a few more blocks and suddenly realize he was out of food.
The school was directly behind the historic church near downtown Milwaukee, a no-nonsense structure of native brick with floor-to-ceiling windows facing east toward the lake. The commute from Bay View was three miles by streetcar, and missing opening prayers would have been unthinkable. Come, O Holy Ghost, enlighten the hearts of the faithful… the Lord’s Prayer, the Angelical Salutation, the Apostle’s Creed. Glory be to the Father. O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee. Two hundred minutes a week were devoted to the study of Christian doctrine and Bible history; only reading, as a subject, was accorded more time. Geography, arithmetic. Penmanship. Composition and recitation, phonics and hymns. There were prayers before and after meals, prayers at the end of the day. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but graciously hear and grant my prayer… “He remembered this nun,” said his cousin Frank. “He said, ‘If you did anything wrong, out with the ruler—bang!—across your hands. If you said anything, you’d get another one. You feared those nuns. They were tough.”
He made no secret of his love for the movies, but it was the church that gave him his first taste of performance. Serving Mass, the phonetic Latin and ritual movements of the altar boy, donning costume in the sacristy, starched collar and lace surplice. “I couldn’t keep an unlit taper in the house,” Carrie Tracy told an interviewer. “Directly after school, Spencer would race home and arrange the candles in every room. Then he would practice lighting and extinguishing them for hours.” He caught the five-cent show at the Union Theater, where the proprietor seated his patrons on ordinary chairs and the ticket girl sang and played the piano. At a capacity of 275, the Union, which offered “high class vaudeville” and a change of program every Monday and Friday, was intimate enough for card tricks and coin manipulations, and it may well have been at one of the Union’s hour-long shows that young