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By Root 3640 0

made a good one”) and kept to his studies. Winters were spent skating, summers playing marbles and baseball. John’s work at Milwaukee Corrugating was secure and valued, and the binges came to a complete halt with the brutal realization that he could never drink moderately. The need never openly manifested itself, but John was always waging the battle, cut off as he was from the society of the tavern. He tried limiting himself to a pint, nursing it as one would a highball, but it was never enough, and all too easy to fall for another. So he cut himself off entirely, strictly limiting himself to work and family and indulging an accelerated taste for sweets. It was a restrictive yet necessary way to live. At times a furious pacing of the floor betrayed the struggle within, and not even Carrie could find a way to comfort him.

Performance, by now, had become routine for Spencer, something absorbing and fun and as natural as breathing. He was involved with the Christmas show at St. John’s in 1911, and at home in Bay View the magic act gave way to more elaborate entertainments “enacting scenes I’d seen in movies.” He staged his first play—a murder mystery—before an audience of neighbors in the living room of the house on Logan in 1912. Having lost himself at the movies, watching the same subjects over and over, he now put himself in the hero’s shoes and imagined himself in the middle of the action. In his own childish way, he was becoming the character he had seen on the screen, and the representation came forth without effort or artifice. “How many times we have told people of that show,” one of Carrie’s friends enthused in a 1931 letter, “proving Spencer was a born actor starting as a child.”

Tracy rarely spoke of these early performances, and although he freely admitted to being fascinated by moving pictures, it is impossible to say just how much live drama he consumed as a kid. Neither of his parents was a dedicated theatregoer, and the legitimate playhouses—the Shubert and the Davidson—charged as much as $1.50 a ticket to see the likes of Ethel Barrymore and Otis Skinner in weeklong stands. The Pabst Theatre, designed on the order of a European opera house, offered German-language programming almost exclusively. The Crystal, Empress, and Majestic were all vaudeville houses, although it was possible to see someone like Mme. Bertha Kalich headlining in a one-act play. The Gaiety was given over to burlesque, leaving the Saxe, Juneau, and Columbia to the ten-twenty-thirty tradition of stock. The plays were things like The Little Homestead and Mrs. Temple’s Telegram and Caught with the Goods, blood-and-thunder melodramas where a seat in the balcony could be had for a dime.

Spencer welcomed his twelfth birthday with particular enthusiasm because it made him eligible for a permit to engage in street trades. Most kids distributed handbills or sold newspapers—the Milwaukee Journal, the Evening Wisconsin, the Leader—but sensing, perhaps, too much competition in the hustling of papers, he managed instead to snag a lamplighter’s route when he was, as his brother put it, “scarcely tall enough to reach the lamps with a burning taper.” Using the tip of a five-foot pole to open the valve on a light, he would hold a match aloft to ignite the gas. “He had about 50 lamps to light each night and to extinguish each morning,” Carroll said. “He also had to see to it that the wicks were in good order, and on Saturdays he had to clean the globes with old newspapers. For this job he received around $3.50 a week, if I remember correctly.”

After ten years of service, John Tracy left Milwaukee Corrugating sometime over the summer of 1913, and the family departed Bay View for Milwaukee proper. The move must have been for the better, for the family relocated to a fashionable stretch of Grand Avenue, almost directly across from the Pabst Mansion and within blocks of the old parish at St. Rose’s, where Spencer would now return for his last two years of grade school. He had to relinquish the lamplighting job, but found work as a towel boy at the Milwaukee