Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [26]
“He was a great magician as a child,” his cousin Jane said. “Whenever anyone went to Milwaukee, Spencer did his magic act. Always in the family you did your number, and then you went to your bedroom. He was very good, according to my mother.” He began staging shows in the cramped basement of the family’s rented duplex on Estes, admitting audience members through the cellar door and seating them among the coal bins, the furnace, and the laundry. “Admission was a few pins,” said Forrest McNicol, whose mother ran a grocery store at the corner of Ellen and East Russell. “I guess you’d have to say that was the beginning of the little theater movement in Bay View.” Over time, Spence learned how to manage an audience’s expectations, usually by downplaying the impact of a particular illusion. One safety pin, Carrie Tracy remembered, had the same value as two straight pins, and ofttimes Spencer was accused of overcharging.
Spencer, age twelve. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
Soon the wonders of downtown Milwaukee no longer seemed so distant. The grandest of the new movie emporiums was the Princess on North Third Street, which boasted private boxes, a $5,000 pipe organ, and seating for nine hundred patrons. Ads offered a variegated program of comedies and dramas, accompanied by travel talks, scenic views, illustrated songs, and a five-piece pit band billed as “the famous Princess orchestra.” Movies were going uptown and so were the admission prices: the Princess was the first of the Milwaukee movie theaters to charge ten cents’ admission. The following year, the Butterfly—so known because of the huge terra cotta butterfly that loomed over Grand Avenue—went the Princess one better, installing a $10,000 pipe organ and a ten-piece house orchestra. Fortunately, most of Milwaukee’s picture parlors were still nickelodeons, dark and primitive, and it wasn’t hard to find a chase picture or some crude knockabout at half the price the fancy places were charging.
Carroll would soon be starting high school, and John’s bouts with the bottle were growing less frequent. Obsessed with kicking the habit for the good of the marriage as well as his own health, John Tracy moved the family to a duplex on Kenesaw, scarcely two blocks from work, where the floorplan offered no more room than any of their previous locations—two bedrooms, front sitting room, dining area, commodious kitchen—but where the stroll to Bay Street was mercifully unimpeded by the presence of a saloon. Just to the north were wetlands where kids would hang out, marshlands that surrounded an old European-style fishing village at Jones Island. The mill whistles blew at seven and nine-thirty in the morning, noon, twelve-thirty, and five in the evening, and the entire sky lit up when the furnaces were charged.
Over the summer of 1910, Spencer was sent to Aberdeen, South Dakota, where his Aunt Jenny had married a gentle Irishman named Patrick Feely. “He went and played with the wrong kids,” said his cousin Jane, who was Pat and Jenny’s daughter. “He got on the wrong side of the tracks, so it was good to get him away.” Spencer was a spindly kid, delicate and undersized from not eating well. Stepping down from the train, he was greeted by his aunt and her son Bernard, not quite three, who was wrapped around a lamppost and intently staring up at him. “Oh, Mama,” he exclaimed, “he ain’t so homely!”
Over the summer, he also spent time in Ipswich, a one-street town roughly thirty miles due west of Aberdeen, where Frank J. Tracy was editor of the Edmunds County Democrat. Not long after Spencer’s return from Aberdeen, the Tracys moved yet again, this time to lower Bay View. Immaculate Conception was just a block north, at the intersection of Russell and Kinnickinnic, and Humbolt Park, with its playground and clay tennis courts and pond for boating, was four blocks to the west.
The years on Logan Avenue were among the most memorable of Spencer’s childhood, and practically the only ones of which he spoke in later years. He joined the Boy Scouts (“I