Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [28]
By 1916 the family was renting a Colonial Revival on a tree-lined street in the Story Hill section of Wauwatosa, a bedroom community just west of the Menomonee River. John Tracy had gone into sales as a representative for the Sterling Motor Truck Company, whose plant and offices were nearby in West Allis. The house on Woodlawn Court had three bedrooms, cherrywood floors, and a formal dining room where the Tracys did a lot of entertaining. Spence saw little of Carroll, who had finished high school and was doing clerical work for the Milwaukee Road. He entered Wauwatosa High in the fall of 1915, where, freed from the strict discipline of the Dominican nuns, he failed spectacularly. His only arguments with his father, he later confirmed, were over school. “I might have enjoyed school if I had been doing the thing I wanted to do. My trouble was not having a definite ambition or goal on which to concentrate. I wanted to be doing something that would hold my interest, but I had no idea what it would be.”
He displayed an entrepreneurial streak, and at one point hatched a scheme with a neighbor boy to sell the water they got from a spring under the Grand Avenue viaduct at a nickel a bottle. Significantly, he was returned to St. John’s in the fall, and when his father was asked to take over the Sterling Truck office in Kansas City, Missouri, his only hesitation was over what to do about Spencer. After some inquiries, John enrolled the boy at St. Mary’s Academy, a Jesuit boarding school twenty-five miles west of Topeka, where there would be no distractions from a regimen of study, sports, and the sacraments. Life on the tall-grass prairie must have come as a shock after the comparative excitement of downtown Milwaukee. Separated from his family and friends and limited to just one movie a month, he may well have been tempted to join the boys caught gambling or flagging down cars at the edge of campus, hoping for a ride into town. He lasted just five weeks at St. Mary’s, and no credits accrued as a result of the experiment.
In Kansas City, Spencer was placed at the Rockhurst Academy, another Jesuit institution, where he could go home to his parents at night and where, as he later acknowledged, they took the “badness” out of him “almost immediately.” The Rev. Michael P. Dowling, the school’s founder, named it Rockhurst because the grounds were stony and there was a grove of forest nearby. “I remember Rockhurst as a big building,” Tracy later told the Kansas City Star, “and I remember pursuing to the best of my capabilities the study of Latin and geometry … I also remember that there were some boys at Rockhurst and in Kansas City who were mighty good fighters.”
Official transcripts show he passed first-year Latin, as he did English, Algebra, and Ancient History, and that he did B-level work in Religion and Bookkeeping. The Jesuits were admirable men, spiritual and rigorously educated, and there were few boys who came under their influence who weren’t inspired at some point to consider the priesthood. There was also the bustle of Union Station, fairly new at the time, and Electric Park, with its primitive thrill rides. Most important, he was “almost positive” he saw Lionel Barrymore for the first time onstage, truly a signal event, for Barrymore impressed him as no other actor ever had. He seemed, in fact, to be adapting well to Kansas City when the decision was made to close the Sterling office in the spring of 1917. The semester ended in June and the Tracys eventually returned to Story Park, where they took another house on the same block as before.
The way he remembered it, Tracy first met Bill O’Brien when the two were employed at a Milwaukee lumber yard. “I started for two bucks and a half a week, piling lumber after school,