The Stowaway Page 7

  The City of New York left Hoboken’s Pier 1 with two hundred tons of material aboard and thirty-three people (not including three thrill-thirsty stowaways) shortly before one o’clock. Barges had been set up under spitting skies for hundreds of cheering spectators, and there was a band aboard New York City’s official municipal welcoming tug, the Macom (its name an abbreviation of “Mayor’s Committee”), an iconic boat built in 1894 and still in regular use for greeting visiting dignitaries, from foreign leaders to triumphant sports stars. The band’s playlist included “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Auld Lang Syne,” “Till We Meet Again,” “While,” and “Laugh! Clown! Laugh!”

  Fireworks thrilled.

  After a final speech, a Junkers monoplane manned by the expedition’s much-lauded pilots dipped and capered across the voyaging ship’s bows, and banked at vertiginous angles over her stem, the most forward part of a ship’s bow. (Although some 1928 reporters thought aviatrix sensation Amelia Earhart was also circling overhead in tribute, others got it right: she had merely come aboard for the send-off.) Ships docked at piers and on the river whistled good-bye. Harold Cunningham, the captain of the largest working American ship, the Leviathan, swung his gargantuan liner to pay respect before heading to Rio de Janeiro. Well-heeled passengers in nautical sweaters and vested suits came to the rails, and—seeing the gold-and-blue banner for the “Byrd Antarctica Expedition” on the ship passing by—waved wildly. Next to the Leviathan, the forty-three-year-old square-rigger looked like a bathtub toy.

  Up on deck of the New York stood the assigned Times reporter, Russell Owen, already a well-respected veteran of exploration coverage but not yet nearly the household name he would become by expedition’s end. He’d later describe leaning against the railing and taking his first notes as an unofficial crew member while each swash of wave hit. Owen’s dozens of articles over the next two years would earn him a Pulitzer Prize.

  Just before the trip, Curtis D. Wilbur, the US secretary of the navy, had authorized a promotion as a favor for Byrd’s PR team. Now, for the first time, Captain Frederick Melville wore a lieutenant commander of the Naval Reserves uniform. Amazed by the fuss, Melville gave an exclusive to Boston Evening Transcript reporter W. A. MacDonald, who, even before Russell Owen, had broken the story that Boston-based Byrd would head to the South Pole. MacDonald also received the go-ahead to stay on board as far as the lightship Ambrose—a floating lighthouse—at the nearby convergence of New York and New Jersey shipping lanes. “This is what I have always been used to, the sea,” Herman Melville’s second cousin said. “I have never had notoriety before. I like this. I am happy now.”

  Still down below and having missed all the revelries—and panicking a few times at the sound of nearby footsteps—the three hidden youths felt real motion now. Their bona fide adventure began as the City of New York slowly navigated the tricky waters of New York Harbor, heading toward the Atlantic Ocean and a quick first stop in Virginia to top up her coal briquettes before sailing for the Panama Canal.

  Shirtless men in overalls scampered on deck, working to square the yards (adjust the sails) before hitting the Atlantic. Below deck a radio was turned on. Love songs were popular then as always—tunes such as Marion Harris’s bluesy “The Man I Love,” and “I Wanna Be Loved by You,” sung in a high soprano by Helen Kane, the woman whose voice and appearance inspired the animated Betty Boop.

  Did the boys discuss a plan to emerge? Did they even have one? Byrd would disembark soon, yes—but even if they were found before he left after sailing a few miles with reporters for show, they’d have plenty of opportunity to meet their hero in Dunedin, after all, in two months’ time.

  The City of New York passed the forty-two-year-old Statue of Liberty, a landmark willed into being by a man after Billy’s own heart: tenacious French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, who had been rejected by the brass over at the Suez Canal, where he originally envisioned the mammoth monument to stand. Following that, he refocused on placing the statue in Central Park, but those plans fell apart, too. Near the Narrows, the ship passed Brooklyn’s historic Fort Hamilton, where soldiers of the newly formed United States of America fired at British troopships on July, 4, 1776, the day the Declaration of Independence was signed into law. Next, the New York reached the tidal strait separating Staten Island and Brooklyn (now spanned by the vast Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, for many years the longest suspension bridge in the world). Byrd was pleased: his flagship had made it without a hitch almost to Ambrose Channel, where the last reporters would depart by pilot boat back to New Jersey. Mrs. Byrd and their son, Dickie (and assorted dignitaries), had just been taken away by tugboat; the City of New York had been officially released.

  Nerves frayed, sloppy with exhaustion, Billy and Jack were at it again, not even in hiding anymore. Why wouldn’t a young fellow like Billy be thinking of getting a start in the world instead of traveling around? He’d have to work awfully hard if they caught him, and he wouldn’t be paid for it.

  Footsteps! Someone above had heard Jack and Billy arguing: that someone being sharp-eyed Sverre Strom, the six-foot-two, two-hundred-pound Norwegian second mate and ice pilot—one of the very few foreigners invited to join the Americans. Everyone wanted Norwegians. Strom had been hired as a veteran of the Samson when it sailed under his country’s flag. He had ten years’ experience at sea, and, unlike most of the newbie volunteer passengers, he knew how things were supposed to run.

  Hearing Strom’s voice, Billy dashed to the bunker in a desperate attempt to hide again. But no luck. He was caught, pinned down by Strom’s strong tattooed arms until backup could come.

  Delaying his own inevitable fate, the yet-undetected Jack ducked down until the opportune moment when he could tear for the stern, breathing hard as he entered and latched the washroom behind him.

  “I’m sure there were two boys, not just one,” Strom told Captain Melville, who came down to see what the ruckus was. But Billy wasn’t talking.

  Melville was a stern man, and he knew what to do with a truant ferreted out from his hidey-hole—even this unimposing kid shivering and dizzy and stripped to his underwear. But Byrd wanted to speak to the boy. The ship was stopped not far from the Statue of Liberty, and Billy, not at all as he had envisioned it, was brought above deck to come face-to-face with the commander. With the strong scent of the sea scud still upon him, Billy trembled.

  Byrd greeted him in a sharp tenor voice and the distinct twang of a well-bred Shenandoah Valley Virginian. He asked for the boy’s clothes to be brought on deck so that the near-naked kid could have some dignity. “What’s your name, young man?” Byrd probed gently, but Billy was too ashamed to speak. He was so upset that he would not tell who he was even when Byrd said he liked his spirit. By all accounts, Byrd was a gentle interrogator. He said he understood the tearful kid was an adventurer like him and told him not to be scared. They only needed his name so they could contact his parents, who must be worried. But Billy sobbed. Humiliated, seething, he put on his wet, crumpled suit and was told to sit until the Macom tug could be recalled to take him away.

  At Sandy Hook, New Jersey, a nose past New York City, the miserable truant was placed in the hands of a customs inspector and sent back toward Hoboken, an unusual catch plucked from the sea. Far away on the horizon, back in the direction from which he came, sparkled the lights of the Coney Island amusement park and the Far Rockaway beaches where Billy had joined the Polish Falcons on swims. Was a lifetime spent practicing for this moment supposed to have better prepared him than this?

  STOWAWAY FOUND IN HOLD!

  Deep in the archives of the New York Public Library, filed under New York Times accounting, is the receipt for the $5 that Byrd’s secretary-turned-yeoman, Charley Lofgren, received for letting a Times reporter know he had a good story for him in this kid. The Boston Evening Transcript reporter on board might have mentioned an angry stowaway, but Lofgren had a photo for the Times of him scowling, and more details.

  The following
day, August 26, the editors of the New York Times splashed Billy’s face on the front cover: the poor mite with rumpled dreams and hair, photographed shortly after his discovery. Charitably, someone had lent him a tie to wear with his wet, bedraggled high school graduation suit. Under the sensational headline, a taunting caption: “Boy so angry at being found that he refused to give his name.”

  The New York Daily News quipped, “Of course there had to be a stowaway. He was a small boy, who wept with disappointment, and refused to give his name.” If Billy sought significance, the pitiful photo, though it attracted front-page coverage, made him seem very insignificant indeed.

  A different, glorious photo ran side by side with Billy’s on the front page of the New York Times, this one of Paul Siple, the clean-cut Eagle Scout from the Pennsylvania boonies, photographed kissing his mother. It was captioned “The Luckiest Boy of All.”

  But what of the other stowaways?

  It was the good old chief engineer, Thomas “Mac” Mulroy, a Scottish fellow who had been the ground officer for Byrd’s transatlantic flight in 1927, who, as the radio blared from the poop deck, caught “the Jewish stowaway” in the locked washroom after noticing a rag in the ventilator. The ruddy-faced Mulroy tried the door and heard, as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle put it, “the stealthy movement of feet.”

  “Got him!” he yelled; the scared kid was hiding between the wall and the bathtub.

  Bony, curly haired Jack lied to Mulroy that his name was Jack Solomon and he lived in Manhattan, even coming up with a fake address of 98 East Seventh Street.

  Mulroy brought the second malingerer to Commander Byrd, who laughed loudly and said, “Hello, son!” He introduced him to Mrs. Byrd, who had rejoined her husband on board when the Macom returned to take away Billy, as “our latest stowaway!”

  Jack Solomon was actually Jack Solowitz of 336 Dumont Avenue in Brownsville, Brooklyn, the second-oldest of eleven siblings, who hadn’t learned English until the first grade. He’d been a runner delivering market orders to a broker’s floor trader on Wall Street but had been unemployed for several months, making money off of craps games, whenever he heard the familiar tinkle of dice. (He would later tell his sons that by sixteen, he had saved a nest egg of $1,000 in stocks, buying on margin. Craps was a game of skill, not chance, he said. If you were good at math, you could make money. You could make money with loaded dice, too.)

  Byrd told Jack that he was “undersized” to be on the crew even as a lowly seaman. But he assured the kid, in words similar to those he said to Billy, “You’ve got good spirit.” In a burst of altruism, Byrd asked an officer to lend him $10 so that he might offer it to the young man. This was not the climactic moment Jack had envisioned, either, and he refused to take it. But he did accept Byrd’s calling card with a scribbled note that he’d met the boy and liked him. Maybe that would help him get a job—perhaps on the supply ship that would join the expedition later, if he formally applied. Byrd was startled to hear the kid ask for his valise, packed with enough clothes to take him around the globe.

  Off the northeastern shore of Staten Island, with the flagship still within New York City’s boundaries, Jack was removed to a tug called the Scout and, like Billy, sent back to Hoboken.

  Just as the youngest Polish Catholics would soon have an antihero in Billy Gawronski, the Jews had their own stowaway to cheer for after Jack’s story was picked up in Yiddish and English in the burgeoning Jewish press, and then in the national press.

  JEWISH BOY TRIES TO GO WITH BYRD IN NEW YORK!

  Macy’s would even run an underwear ad for Kait Union Suits (selling for $1.88), inspired by Jack’s foresight.

  ANTARCTIC STOWAWAY TOOK HIS “HEAVIES” ALONG

  Practical stowaway found clutching his “winter undies” and a coat under the forecastle deck. But alas, for romance, adventure and travel, the ambitious stowaway was discovered. Even if your boy isn’t an antarctic stowaway, stow away some winter “Heavies” for him. Have him ready for the South Pole-ish weather that is sure to come!

  Jack told one newspaper that he had been among the two thousand tourists inspecting the City of New York back on August 15. Had he crossed paths with Billy that day? (The sixteen-year-old continued his shenanigans back on land: two months later, he tried another escape out of Brooklyn as an aerial stowaway on the Graf Zeppelin, sister airship to the Hindenburg. He was found in the engine nacelle, a stand-alone compartment on the dirigible. Kicked off, he then boarded the gondola, the lower part of the great ship, only to be caught again.)

  Jack and Billy were together in detention in Hoboken as they awaited their parents. Did they speak? If they wondered whether the black stowaway had been found, they did not rat him out. What kind of fink would do that?

  Sverre Strom, the brawny second mate, finally uncovered the third stowaway less than an hour later. Bob Lanier was found during a routine check by flashlight in the head of the lower forecastle, wedged between a spare propeller blade and the side of the ship. The timing! Byrd was just about to leave the ship. Upon being discovered, Bob staggered to his feet and said, “I’m all right. Just a little stiff.” He clutched a silver pencil and the notebook he meant to write his memoirs in; on his back, he had an old army knapsack. Bob admitted to Strom that he’d been in hiding without food or water for three days—even during cyanide gas fumigation to clear pests off the ship—and that he had been secreted for four days before that on the beams beneath the pier, waiting for the opportune moment to climb onto the ship. He’d planned to come out only when it was too far for him to be sent home.

  Lanier’s blackness was bothering to a bigoted country. Newspaper reports of his discovery smack of prevailing racism in the early twentieth century, starting with this alternate version of events from an uncredited Times reporter, which was likely written by the esteemed Russell Owen: “The odor of watermelon wafted down from the ship’s galley . . . proved too much for him on the third day, and he crawled out, went to the captain and begged to be forgiven and taken along.”

  Coverage was even crueler in small-town America, where headlines out of New York were rewritten to “Watermelon Trips Byrd Ship Stowaway” and “Melon Lures Hiding Negro.”

  In Paul Siple’s journal, which he kept dutifully to help his ghostwriter with his book promised to George Putnam, he admitted being the one to feed Lanier the watermelon. On the same page, he jotted down a note revealing his own provincial upbringing: “He sure showed his nationality.” Fifty-nine merit badges, but none for lack of prejudice.

  Bob Lanier was the last truant brought before the commander, who marveled at the scourge of stowaways of every ethnicity. A Pole and a Jew and a black man stowed away . . . It was the start of a bad joke. Bob told Byrd he was a twenty-year-old orphan who lived with his sister, a Mrs. Helen Gant of 29 Orient Avenue, Jersey City, and was employed as a messenger in a Jersey City factory. He brazenly claimed to have walked across America in 1925. In stowing away, he had been inspired by the first black man to reach the North Pole, Matthew Henson, who’d sledged over snow with Admiral Robert Peary and his husky dogs in 1909.

  “I have read all about your Boy Scout Paul Siple,” Bob said, “and I too had also been a Boy Scout since I was eleven, but I know I would have barely had a chance as a colored kid unless I could show you how exceptional I was.”

  “By Jove, I admire that Negro!” Byrd said in front of W. A. MacDonald, the newsie from Boston. “What am I going to do with a man like that?”

  Luckily for Bob, Byrd had just learned that the City of New York was one man short. The young bride of one the crew members had her husband kidnapped that morning so he couldn’t join the expedition.

  A few minutes later, the new dishwasher on the New York was determined: Robert “Bob” Lanier.

  His selection irked many Americans who could not understand why he would have been given the job over a white man. Up popped Bob Lanier’s supposed factory bosses, described by wire services as “welfare workers and prominent Negroes,” who
claimed he was once arrested for disorderly conduct. Even so, he was on his way to Antarctica—for now.

  Black Americans who followed the Byrd stowaway story were horrified by what they were reading in much of the press. Appreciating Robert White Lanier’s historical significance, a particularly exulting editorial was published in the Pittsburgh Courier, the largest black paper in circulation. Two pages long, it offered a timeline of the greatest accomplishments by black men and women in American history, from a black man piloting one of Christopher Columbus’s ships, to blacks in Jamestown, Virginia—the first permanent English settlement in America—in the sixteen hundreds, to Matthew Henson, among the first to reach the geographic North Pole, and ending with pride: “The promoter of the first trip to the moon had better examine the rocket carefully if they would make sure that no adventurous Negro is aboard.”

  The three stowaways quickly became part of the nation’s psyche, their adventures ripe for parody. A bogus stowaway named “J. Hermann Seidlitz” was birthed by nationally syndicated New York Evening World humorist Neal O’Hara: “yet another” Byrd scalawag discovered between a crate of playing cards and a hogshead of phonograph needles. The fake stowaway’s semiregular reports were dispatched for the next two years through O’Hara’s Telling the World column, sent in by dogsled and homing pigeon. Millions chuckled reading Seidlitz’s “true accounts.” That a Jew, a Pole, and a black man were hiding in the forecastle was not just the beginning of a joke; their stories struck a chord with readers because they represented a microcosm of American barriers and dreams.