Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [6]
Ever an observer of the city, Eisner took note of the desperation around him, amazed by how the fight for survival could destroy the old sense of order and dignity and replace it with something else, something more modest.
Later, he described it: “Seeing people in chesterfield coats with velvet collars and a nice bowler hat, good shoes, standing in Wall Street with an orange box selling apples at five cents each. These were weird, almost theatrical scenes. People who had a car in the yard, a very good car, which they couldn’t drive because they didn’t have the money for gasoline. They couldn’t sell it. And anyway they didn’t want to give it up. Some kind of times. They helped shape your outlook.”
A new work ethic took shape in America during the Depression years, forged by the loss of faith that the economy was strong enough to adapt; by the necessity of forced sacrifice; by the belief that in the years ahead, one could never take one’s status, however modest, for granted. Boys watched their fathers, out of work and on the prowl for any means of earning money, and they vowed that when they were grown and supporting a family, they would never take work for granted; if they had to be workaholics to eke out peace of mind, so be it.
Stan Lee, a comics creator, writer, editor, and figurehead at Marvel Comics, and a contemporary of Eisner’s who worked well into his eighties, maintaining a schedule that would have exhausted people half his age, traced his attitudes and work ethic back to the Depression years and his family’s grim circumstances.
“He had been a dress-cutter, and it was almost impossible for him to find work,” Lee said of his father. “My earliest memories were of him sitting in our tiny apartment, reading the want ads with great frustration, running out and trying to get something, and then coming back empty-handed. I felt that it must be the most awful thing in the world to be a man and not have a job, and not feel that you’re needed. I think it was the Depression and seeing my father that made me want to have a job and keep it. If I had a steady job, I was the success that I always wanted to be. My only thought, my only objective, was to have a steady job.”
Billy saw the same thing in his own household—the way the lack of work, coupled with his mother’s criticism, had become that “most awful thing in the world” for his father. It was an awkward position for someone like Billy, as he grew into his high school years, only a handful of years away from manhood himself. He needed the strength that a son hopes to gain from his father’s example; but to gain his own strength, he had to move beyond the pity felt for the man.
Whatever Billy’s conflicted feelings, all were set aside when he was approached by his mother and told that he had to find a way to contribute to the family’s income.
“Your father isn’t making a living,” she told him. “You’re the man of the house.”
It was 1930. Billy Eisner was all of thirteen years old.
To earn money, Billy sold newspapers in lower Manhattan, his favorite spot being a place in front of a building at 37 Wall Street. Years later, he would occupy an office in that very same building.
“I got there at three in the afternoon, every day, winter and summer,” he said. “I could then see daily the fire hydrant, which stuck out of the side of the building where I’d sit in cold weather. On those days, I hugged that hydrant so tight you could almost read its embossed lettering on the seat of my pants. Those little things are always an influence on you. I’d recall The Little Match Girl at times like that.”
The newspaper job gave Eisner his first lessons in business. There was an all-out competition for the prime selling locations, and the person who won a good spot was usually the biggest and strongest competitor. Billy would set up his stand, only