Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [32]
At the end of the 1919–20 school year, he had only ten credits toward the sixteen necessary for graduation. John pulled him out of Northwestern and brought him back to Milwaukee, where he arranged for him to do some work at St. Rose’s. What happened that summer is no longer a matter of record, but when Spencer entered Milwaukee’s West Division High School in September, scarcely three months later, he had acquired two additional credits. That fall, he began his senior year in English and Economics, took a Sales course, and excelled at Public Speaking.
By all accounts, Tracy emerged from Northwestern an adult, confident and disciplined. The academy’s geographical isolation and its twin emphases on personal responsibility and scholastic achievement hastened the maturing process. As with Bill O’Brien, he also responded to the influence of a close friend, in this case his roommate, a slender kid from Seattle named Ken Edgers. Two years younger than Spence, Kenny was a friendly sort, uncomplicated and funny, a good student whose interests and habits rubbed off on the more rough-hewn Tracy. The two went ice skating on the mirrorlike surface of the lake, played basketball, spent long hours in study hall. Kenny, a tenor, went out for glee club, while Spence played bass tuba in the school band. Neither was heavy enough for football, although Tracy managed some time in uniform as a substitute. John and Carrie met Ken for the first time when they came to campus on Thanksgiving and were so impressed they invited him to spend the Christmas holidays in Milwaukee.
Northwestern Military and Naval Academy, 1919. (SUSIE TRACY)
Since Seattle was five long days away by train, Carrie told Kenny she would like to be his Wisconsin mother. John was equally impressed, convinced Ken was one of the reasons Spencer got such good grades at Northwestern. He wanted the two boys to continue into college together, but Spencer was, by Dr. Rogers’ reckoning, a full year and a half behind when Kenny graduated in June 1920. So the elder Tracy went looking for schools that would grant war credits, generously and immediately. “During the summer,” Ken said, “Spence’s father wrote to my father suggesting a small college might be advantageous for our college education. It might, he felt, require us to pay more attention to the academic than to the extracurricular activities. He sent information about Ripon College. He felt that Spence would be more anxious to go if I did. So, after considerable investigation and correspondence, our fathers made arrangements for our entrance.”
Kenneth Barton Edgers entered Ripon in September 1920, and Tracy, with an allowance of nine quarter-hours for military service, followed in February 1921. Ripon wasn’t as small as Northwestern and lacked the dramatic lakeside setting, but it was similarly isolated, some ninety miles northwest of Milwaukee on the western edge of the Fox River Valley. The campus was dotted with intimate limestone residence halls, and Spence shared a room with Kenny (who gave him “a tremendous build-up”) on the third floor of West Hall—one of the buildings dating from the time of the school’s first commencement in 1867. He signed up for courses in English Language, History, and Zoology, declaring his major to be Medicine.
“The idea of doing something with my hands appealed to me,” he said, “and I think I might have gone into plastic surgery if something hadn’t happened to make me change my mind.”
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1 Daisy Spencer (1873–1963) and Carrie Brown attended Evansville Seminary and were subsequently roommates at Milwaukee College (later Milwaukee-Downer).
CHAPTER 3
A Sissy Sort of Thing
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Public Speaking was the course Tracy liked best at West Division, and he perfected a direct, almost conversational way of addressing an audience.