• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3483 0

” he said. O’Brien, on the other hand, thought they had met as students at Marquette Academy, and that they stacked wood only on Saturdays. “One of the clearest recollections I have of Spence is of the two of us in dirty overalls and jumpers sitting in the dining room of what was, in those days, Milwaukee’s swankiest apartment hotel. We were stowing away a modest breakfast of grapefruit, ham and eggs, toast, jelly, and milk. At the end of the meal, Spence airily scrawled his signature across the bill and we left.” The Tracys, back from Kansas City, were stopping at the Stratford Arms Hotel, adjacent to the campus of Marquette University. “We worked in a lumber yard to pick up a couple of iron men so we could roister around on Saturday nights. Our breakfasts usually cost more than we made during the day, but Spence’s father paid for them.”

The academy stood on a hill at Tenth and State Streets. It was a block over from the massive Pabst brewing complex, and the smell of hops hung in the air. The location led to the students being referred to as “hilltoppers,” a name that has stuck ever since. “All of us Catholics wanted to enter Marquette Academy,” O’Brien wrote in his autobiography, “but the cost made our parents sigh.” Bill, on a scholarship, was five months older than Spence, taller, darker, rounder, more of a match for Carroll Tracy than for his younger brother. But O’Brien, like Tracy, was “infected” with a love of the stage, and they found time to see such beloved figures as Jane Cowl, David Warfield, Otis Skinner, Lenore Ulric, James O’Neill, and Maude Adams—usually from high in peanut heaven. The great vaudeville attractions of the day came through Milwaukee by way of Chicago—McIntyre and Heath, Harry Houdini, Bert Williams, whose expressive pantomimes were models of economy. A particular thrill came in May 1918 when Madame Sarah Bernhardt headlined at the Majestic and necessitated multiple visits by playing Du théâtre au champ d’honneur during the week and La dame aux camélias on the weekend.

Spence held on to the things that comforted and excited him, and although he was fascinated by vaudeville, his interest in the stage wasn’t reawakened until he and Bill met and they started seeing plays together. The boys may even have arranged their own performances, for E. R. Moak, then city editor on the Milwaukee Free Press (and later a Variety staffer) remembered the first time he met Tracy was when the two of them came to enlist the paper’s support for an “amateur dramatic enterprise” they were promoting. Though Spencer’s grades weren’t as stellar as they had been at Rockhurst, O’Brien was unquestionably a good influence. “Spence and I were a combination,” he said. “He was an introvert and I was an extrovert.” O’Brien went out for sports—baseball, football, basketball—and carried a full load of classes. Tracy worked, played some casual baseball, and eventually took on a class load equal to what Bill himself was tackling. O’Brien went to Mass each Sunday, an acolyte when Spence had long since given it up. Both were restless young men with a war going on, and however much the academy meant to their parents, they had a hard time keeping their minds on their studies.

“I was itching for a chance to go and see some excitement,” Tracy said, and he tried enlisting when the school year was scarcely half over. “I knew very well where there was a U.S. Marines recruiting station, for I’d seen it lots of times before.” He walked up and down Wells Street a dozen times, then went inside. “I want to join the Marines,” he told the gray-haired officer behind the desk, his voice cracking. The man took down his name, address, the answers to a few questions, then asked his age. “I’d been all ready to say, ‘Twenty, sir.’ But he was looking me right in the eye. I stammered out, ‘Seventeen years and eight months, sir.’ The recruiting officer put the form aside, stood, and held out his hand. “Thanks for trying, youngster,” he said.

Spence left the office, as he later put it, “feeling like a chump,” and he said nothing to his family about it.