What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [22]
In 1930, he lost his job and decided to finally go to college. With help from a foundation grant, Harry began taking courses at Columbia University and got a job working in the library, at first as a page who fetched books from the stacks. “Then I got a nice, cushy job for a while. All I had to do was check cards of people who wanted to go into the stacks. That lasted until I got in an altercation with a professor over a girl he was dating. I was beginning to horn in on him,” he recalled. One day, the professor accosted Harry and told him to stay away from the girl, that she did not want anything to do with him. “I knew otherwise, and I threw a punch. That did it. I got canned. Good thing, too. Otherwise, I’d probably still be there,” Harry said.
Actually, it was not such a good thing. By then, the Depression was in full swing, and Harry joined the legions of job seekers, desperate for work, marching past the employment agencies on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. It took weeks, but he was elated when a cigar-smoking character at the West Side Garage Association hired him to stake out a garage on West Forty-ninth Street. The job was simple. For four hours during the middle of the night and four during the day, he jotted down the license-plate numbers of every car that went in or out of two midtown garages. He never asked why. Getting paid seventeen dollars a week was all that mattered. That is, until one summer night when he was concentrating on taking down the license plate of a big black Packard and someone snatched his pencil and pad. He looked up to find four or five goons surrounding him. One told Harry they were going to give him something to help him remember his very last license number. They proceeded to beat and kick him, breaking his nose, jaw, ribs, and one leg and nearly knocking out an eyeball. “To this day, I don’t know what it was all about,” he said.
He had time to wonder as he spent months recuperating in a hospital on Wards Island. It was then, at twenty-two, that Harry began writing short stories and sketches in earnest.
To Harry’s dismay, while he was recovering in the hospital, his father found his way to New York, and Ada, who had once pledged to Yankel that she would never abandon him the way his mother had, took him back. During the years that followed, the family moved from one apartment to the next, ever in search of something cheaper. Soon, the Bernsteins were living in a musty basement apartment in the Bronx and surviving on a few dollars that Yankel contributed and what little Harry occasionally earned writing magazine articles. Harry even wrote some scripts for comics for ten dollars apiece, but the publisher went out of business owing him fifty. Daily, the family’s fear of eviction grew along with the prospect that they would find themselves huddled with their belongings on a street corner like so many others.
It wasn’t long before Harry cooked up an article about being a bodyguard for a mobster. He made it up based on photographs of gangland figures, and submitted it to Popular Mechanics. A month later, the landlady knocked on the door. Instead of proffering a scowl and an eviction notice, she was full of apologies for opening his mail by “accident” and quickly handed Harry an envelope and the check it contained. Knowing the family was from Chicago and seeing the title of Harry’s article—The Profession of Bodyguarding—printed on the check, she assumed Harry worked for the Mob. To her, Harry must have seemed delighted that the “boys” back in Chicago had paid him for some protection work. She never suspected that he was floating on air because he had just risen a rung as a professional writer.
The series of stories he started writing during his months in the hospital were published in the early 1930s and marked him as a promising young writer. That several of his stories were selected for publication in The