One day, during a gym class, I slipped, hurt my spine, and tore something loose. The pain was excruciating. I lay on the floor, unable to move. They carried me to the school doctor’s office.
When he was through examining me, I asked, “Am I going to be crippled?”
“No,” he assured me. “One of your discs has torn loose and it’s pressing against your spinal cord. That’s what’s causing the pain. The treatment is very simple. All you have to do is lie still in bed for two or three days with hot packs to relax the muscles, and the disc will slip back into place. You’ll be as good as new.”
An ambulance took me home and the paramedics put me to bed. I lay there in pain, but just as the doctor had said, in three days the pain was gone.
I had no idea how deeply this incident was going to affect the rest of my life.
One day I had an out-of-this-world experience. There was an advertisement for a county fair in Denver, where one of the attractions was a ride in an airplane.
“I’d like to go up,” I told Otto.
He thought about it. “All right.”
The plane was a beautiful Lincoln Commander and it was a thrill just to get in it.
The pilot looked at me and said, “First time?”
“First time.”
“Fasten your seatbelt,” he said. “You’re in for a thrill.”
He was right. Flying was a surreal experience. I watched the earth swoop up and down and disappear, and I had never felt anything so exhilarating in my life.
When we landed, I said to Otto, “I want to go up again.”
And I did. I was determined that someday I was going to be a pilot.
Early one morning in the spring of 1933, Otto came into my bedroom. His face was grim. “Pack your things. We’re leaving.”
I was puzzled. “Where are we going?”
“We’re going back to Chicago.”
I could not believe it. “We’re leaving Denver?”
“That’s right.”
“But—”
He was gone.
I got dressed and went to see Natalie. “What happened?”
“Your father and Harry had a—a misunderstanding.”
I looked around at the home that I thought I was going to live in for the rest of my life. “What about this house?”
“We’re not buying it.”
Our return to Chicago was joyless. Neither Otto nor Natalie wanted to talk about what had happened. After Denver, Chicago seemed even more unfriendly and uncaring. We moved into a small apartment and I was back to reality, a grim reminder that we had no money, and that a decent job was impossible to get. Otto was on the road again and Natalie was working as a salesclerk at a department store. My dream of going to college died. There was no money for my tuition. The apartment walls were closing in on me. Everything smelled gray.
I can’t spend the rest of my life living this way, I thought. The poverty we lived in now seemed even worse after the brief, heady taste of affluence in Denver, and we were desperately short of money. Working as a delivery boy for a pharmacy was not my future.
That was when I had decided I would commit suicide, and Otto had talked me out of it by telling me I had to keep turning the pages. But the pages were not turning and I had nothing to look forward to. Otto’s promise had been empty words.
When September came around, I enrolled at Senn High School. Otto was on the road again, trying to make mega-deals. Natalie was working full-time at a dress shop, but not enough money was coming in. I had to find a way to help . . .
I thought about Natalie’s older brother, Sam, and the checkroom concessions he owned at several hotels in the Loop. The checkrooms were staffed with attractive, scantily-dressed young women, and hang boys. The customers were generous with their tips to the women. They had no idea that the money went to the management.
I took the elevated train downtown to the Loop to see my Uncle Sam. He was in his office at the Sherman Hotel.