In Part I of this series of stories about people I knew after coming to New York City, I told you about my friend Bob Creasey who never saw a steak that he could resist. You may recall that lots of those nearly raw pieces of steer meat were consumed at the old time saloon on 8th Avenue called Roths.
Now, with your permission, I’d like you to meet Sam, last name unknown to me after 50 years. The year was the spring and early summer of 1951. For many years, Sam had operated a theater ticket agency in the lobby of the Piccadilly Hotel on West 45th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. For years, union people stayed at the Piccadilly because the union’s office was only a half block away. On this occasion, we stayed at the Piccadilly for about seven weeks. During that time, I got to know Sam the theater ticket man pretty well. In spite of the differences in ages, I believe that we became friends that year.
In the spring of 1951, there was a contract termination between the AT&T Company and the CWA. This meant that it would be necessary to renegotiate the whole contract, wages, working conditions and everything else. Much later when Richard Nixon was president, this came to be known as the whole enchilada. I disliked Nixon so enchiladas and tortillas were off the menu.
With Creasey being enthroned as an Assistant Secretary of Labor in Washington, the new head of the Long Lines part of the union was Carl Peters. Carl came from Chicago where we had been union allies for years. When he ran for the top job, I made the nominating speech. Carl was a mighty fine man who was cut down by cancer only a couple of years after the 1951 bargaining.
Carl Peters was a different sort of man from what we had known under Bob Creasey’s leadership. He was home folks. He suffered no pretensions about his station in life. He did not play golf and he drank very sparingly. And when evening came, Carl Peters caught a train and went home to his family in New Jersey. Joe Darling and I suspected that Carl did not like eating at Roths any more then we did.
Union people called me in Chicago two or three years later to tell me that Carl was not going to make it. Cancer was winning. He had asked that visitors be told that he was in no condition to see them. I wrote him a letter about old times. I hope that he was pleased to read it.
In 1951, the union was completely under the control of its International President Joseph Beirne. At best, most of us in the Long Lines part of the union were lukewarm about Beirne. Our thoughts were influenced I suppose, by Beirne’s Secretary-Treasurer Slim Werkau who failed to honor our expense reports promptly. Joe Darling and I rebelled at Werkau’s directive that we were to get receipts from taxi drivers – in New York City. We told Slim that we would go home rather than submit our expense reports complete with New York cab receipts. Werkau backed down.
The reason I was back in New York to negotiate the new contract had to do with my election to the five person bargaining committee. Joe Darling was also elected so we resumed our long friendship. While we were always short of money because of Werkau’s sitting on our expense reports, we got by pretty well. We didn’t have to eat at Roths anymore. Quite to the contrary, one of the favorites of the 1951 bargaining committee was a Stouffer’s restaurant on Madison Avenue in the low 50’s. The food was good. It was well served. The portions were of lady like size, which was just my speed. The prices were favorable. So who cared if anyone said we had invaded an old ladies’ tearoom. We didn’t know about cholesterol back then, but as it turned out, we were eating the right things. So Joe Darling and I didn’t even bother to tell Roths goodbye.
The people from out of town on the bargaining committee returned to the old familiar Piccadilly Hotel. It was not a luxury hotel, by any means. But all the required services were provided at reasonable cost to the tenants. Lots of people connected to the theater business stayed at the Piccadilly because it was right in the heart of the theater district. When a new play opened, searchlights were brought in and reporters showed up. As soon as the curtain went down, people would descend on newsstands to read the reviews. All things considered, it was an exciting time to be in the theater district in New York City.
In those days, I don’t know of any hotel that was air-conditioned. When May and June and July rolled around, it could get very warm in the small bedrooms of the Piccadilly Hotel. Joe Darling and I kept our shades all the way up in an effort to get a little more breeze. The scenery late at night was not at all bad. A block away, sat the Edison Hotel, another home for show people. Jackie Gleason kept rooms or a suite there for many years. Looking over the short block from 45th Street to 46th Street, it was amazing what could be seen in the Edison Hotel. This is a high-flown essay so I won’t go into details, but the scenery in the Edison Hotel provided great entertainment for guys like Joe Darling and me. Joe said it was appropriate to look because the patrons at the Edison were looking back at the conduct or misconduct going on at the Piccadilly. I suppose that is fair enough.
Without a lot of money to spend we tended to spend quite a bit of time in the lobby of our hotel. Aside from all the theater people that came and went in the lobby, there was one fellow who operated a thriving business in the lobby of the Piccadilly. And he is the man with a comb that I want you to meet. His name is Sam. His last name was probably never known to me, but 50 years later, it is completely beyond my recollection.
If someone were to wander around New York City and had a desire to see a show – say on short notice or a hit show – and if that person was willing to pay a premium over the price shown on the ticket stub, Sam was the man to see. Sam saved a lot of potential marriages. He also saved quite a few jobs. If a person said to his intended that, “Of course, I will take you to see the Music Man”, only to find our that the box office was offering seats six months ahead, he had to see Sam to preserve his image of clout. If an employee were to utter that same sort of boast to his boss, and the box office said come back in February, he had to see Sam. Sam had tickets to just about every show. The closer it got to the date of the performance, Sam’s price would go up and up.
Sam had to be a good judge of the pulling power of new shows so that he could order the right number of tickets. If he ran short, Sam would be on the phone begging other ticket agents to give him some ducats. I hung around Sam long enough to know that running a theater ticket agency was a high pressure operation – but man, it was fun from what I could see.
I got to know Sam pretty well. He was probably in his early sixties. I was 27 or 28 years old but Sam seemed to welcome my interest in his operation. On more than one occasion, Sam would say at about six or seven minutes to eight PM, “Hey kid, you want to see a show?” The tickets were either free or at very little cost to me. So in the six or seven weeks in 1951, it was my good fortune to see all kinds of theater performances. I thought this New York City was some kind of place. In fact, it was.
Well after all this introduction, I need to tell you about the comb. Next door to the hotel was a large barbershop. I suppose it had six or seven barbers. In those days, barbers would work you over and trim your eyebrows and the hair in your nose and ears. A manicurist always stood ready to do her thing. The shoeshine man would tend to your shoes and he would carefully brush your felt hat before it was returned to you. A trip to the barbershop in those days was a complete experience. When you walked out of the barbershop, you felt like a new man.
The barbershop could be entered from the street or from the lobby of the Piccadilly Hotel. It closed promptly at 7PM. While Sam was largely bald, he did have some carefully tended hairs growing out the side of his head which he would pull across the top of his scalp. Some people would say he was probably vain about his appearance, but I always thought Sam had class and sophistication.
At 6:45PM, Sam would quit doing what ever he was working on and he would retreat to the barbershop to have a barber comb his hair. If he needed a quick trim, that would be taken care of. The barber would spray Sam’s head with cologne and would put a skin bracer on his face. When Sam came back from the barbershop, he was a new man.
I had never heard of having a barber comb a man’s hair before. And I haven’t heard of it happening in the last 51 years since I left the Piccadilly Hotel. Personally, I would probably never ask someone to comb my hair even when I had some hair. As I said, I was 27 or 28 years of age at the time and more than anything else, I aspired to be a man of class and sophistication just like Sam.
I am glad to say that Sam may have been my first long-term friend in New York City. He was a good, decent man. That’s about the ultimate in praise for a new found friend.
A few years later, I went by to look in on Sam. But he was gone and the man behind the counter wasn’t really interested in what had happened to my old friend. New York City can be a tough and uncaring town. I suspect illness or age had overtaken Sam and he had been forced to sell his business. Well, you can’t win all the time. I hope that Sam knew that a man – as he would say, “Hey Kid” – thought that he was a first class piece of work. Where ever he is – if he is still around – I hope he is the same happy man I knew back in 1951.
E. E. CARR
JUNE 1, 2002
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Daw. Ed was never one to discriminate when it came to making friends, and this is a great example that seemed like it definitely paid off! This essay reads like a Humans of New York post from yesteryear. Funny though, that Pop describes Sam’s business as a ticket agency, whereas I read it as more of a professional scalping operation — but maybe those two things aren’t so different.