Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [31]
“When I got into the Navy,” Tracy said, “the least I expected was to see the world through a porthole. As it was, I wound up in a training station at Norfolk, Virginia, looking eastward to the sea and considering myself lucky if they let me go cruising in a whaleboat.” He once made a veiled reference to wild liberties in Norfolk, but remembered the people there with considerable fondness. “They turned that city over to a group of young men who had traveled thousands of miles from home. They made us feel that it was our home. It got us into a couple of rows with authorities, but they understood that it was all in good spirit and never complained. The difficulties weren’t serious, but they would have meant demerits if the Naval authorities had heard of them. They never did.”
Having achieved the rank of seaman second class, Tracy was released from active duty on February 19, 1919, given a sixty-dollar discharge bonus, and sent home to Milwaukee. He later remembered going to work for his father, who was still with Sterling Truck at the time, and it is known that he drove in truck convoys before and probably after the war. “He was a handful when he was a teenager and a little bit older,” his cousin Jane said,
and that was when he was driving these caravans of trucks across the country … He came to Aberdeen the summer I was born, 1917. He said this on many occasions: “If it wasn’t for me she wouldn’t be alive.” Because my mother couldn’t feed me and [when] it was found that I couldn’t tolerate formula, I was sent to the wet nurse. My father had bought a Mitchell car in celebration [of my birth]—because we had all this money from the farms that later collapsed—but nobody could drive the car and he refused to learn. (Eventually, I guess, he figured my mother would learn to drive.) Somehow, they got ahold of Spencer and he came. Of course, he was the car driver and the truck driver in the family. Spencer would drive me to the wet nurse every four hours to be fed.
Neither Tracy nor Bill O’Brien would return to Marquette in the fall of 1919. O’Brien tried law school, but found football more engaging. Spence seemed perfectly happy ferrying trucks across the country, and could have done so indefinitely had his father not wanted a college degree for at least one of his boys. Carroll’s career had ended abruptly in 1917 when he dropped out of Dartmouth, but Spencer, who had excelled in radio school at Great Lakes, still had to get through high school before he could even think of college. He applied to Northwestern Military and Naval Academy with the intention of completing his senior year, and the fact that Dr. Henry H. Rogers, the school’s principal, was willing to take on such an indifferent student was a testament to the academy’s declining enrollment.
Spencer made the connection between Milwaukee and Springfield by rail, traveling on to the city of Lake Geneva via stage. The first look he got of Davidson Hall, the neoclassical edifice which fronted the lake, was from the steamer that connected the city to the academy’s wooded grounds on the opposite shore.
The academic year began on the afternoon of September 24, 1919, as Dr. Rogers began the hellish task of gathering credits from the other schools Tracy had attended. The returns were not heartening. And Rogers was getting conflicting accounts of what exactly the plan was to be after high school. Spencer told him his father had left the “college question” entirely up to him, while John told him he wanted Spencer to go to the University of Wisconsin “at least for the first year.” John, Carrie, and Carroll came for Thanksgiving dinner, but the topic of college was scrupulously avoided. The Christmas furlough was similarly harmonious. Still, Spencer’s grades, while not exemplary, were the best of his life, and after the first of the year, his father was encouraged to aim higher than Madison. He applied to Marquette for war credits to cover the semester left incomplete when his son enlisted in the navy, then wrote Colonel Royal Page Davidson,