Jim Steinmeyer (5 page)

Once he joined the races, the stable duties were too hard and too humiliating. Instead, he found another newsboy partner in Cincinnati, a redheaded adventurer who introduced himself as Reddy Cadger. Cadger was a fearless and seemingly invincible companion, “the shiftiest youngster on his feet I have ever known,” Thurston later recalled, “a wonder at jumping freights. I have seen him swing on passenger trains under circumstances that would make the most expert hobo think twice before risking his bones.” They were both fourteen. Cadger taught him the finer points of “beating the rattlers,” which suddenly made every midwestern city available for adventure, free of charge. They jumped “blind baggage,” the space between the engine and baggage car, sometimes rode the cowcatcher, just beneath the sight of the engineer, or “hit the decks,” clinging to the top of the passenger cars. The most dangerous procedure was to ride the “ticket,” a long board under the car, where they could lie just above the track. Climbing beneath the train, the boys endured the roar of the rails and the squeal of the trucks; they were pelted with dust, pebbles, ashes, and cinders; they clung perilously to the boards until their knuckles became numb, because with a sudden lurch they could be thrown beneath the wheels. “Boring through the night on a teetering, racketing, plunging locomotive is very much what I imagine riding a cannon ball might be like,” Thurston wrote.

The boys bounced from Chicago, to Cleveland, and then back to Cincinnati. Howard thought about returning home, feared that his father would confine him to a house of corrections, and instead followed Cadger to St. Louis for the summer. They effortlessly earned money by selling papers, slept with the hoboes, stole food when necessary, or took advantage of the big-city newsboy charities. Reddy bought a copy of
Modern Magic
for his friend, who carried it with him everywhere as the pages became dog-eared.

One night the two boys jumped “blind baggage” on a train out of Chicago, but the brakeman chased them off. They dashed back as the train lurched from the train yard. Thurston scrambled up to the second baggage car. He thought he saw Cadger swinging onto the “ticket” underneath, but he couldn’t find him when the train reached Kansas City, Missouri. It was nearly a year later, in St. Louis, when Thurston heard from their friends that Reddy Cadger had been thrown to the tracks that night and killed.

He returned to the races, moving on to Iowa. In Oskaloosa, he was humiliated by a popular hazing ritual, “an old stable trick,” inflicted by the wise-guys at the track. At eighty pounds, Thurston was told that he would have to lose some weight, so he was confined, up to his neck, inside a tall barrel of manure for a full day. When he was pulled out and scrubbed clean, he was too weak to stand, let alone sit upright on a horse. The trainer gave him twenty cents and told him to “beat it.”

Thurston returned to the life of a tramp, riding freights and living in “hobo jungles” near rail yards. He scoured the newspapers to watch for the latest magicians and traveled to Louisville, Peoria, and Indianapolis just to see conjuring shows. He saw Herrmann again, studying his new tricks, as well as Harry Kellar, America’s own homegrown wizard. Hoffmann’s
Modern Magic
was the efficiently written textbook on magic that also whispered of impossible dreams; the chapters seamlessly transitioned from coin and card tricks to the costly, stage-sized marvels—appearing assistants, floating ladies—that were staples of Herrmann’s performances. The boy carried a dirty deck of cards with him everywhere, practicing the palm, the pass, and the force: the rudiments of a secretive art.

As winter came, Thurston moved south, settling back in the fairgrounds and longingly visiting the racetracks. In Denison, Texas, he met an old horseracing friend and they decided to go into the program business—part salesmen, part newsboys. They followed the racing circuit across the East Coast, buying the program concession in each city and earning real money. Thurston bought a gold watch, a new suit, and some magic equipment. He easily learned to gamble, and naturally learned to cheat. His friends were amused by his magic but valued his skills at palming or false shuffling—it only took one or two good, fearless moves executed at the right moment to turn the fortunes of a game.

Now fifteen years old and flush with money, Thurston circled back through Ohio. He was safely too successful and too large to endure his father’s threats. His mother was delighted to watch his magic and told him that she had a dream that he would one day be the world’s greatest magician. Thurston remembered the prediction with pride and some embarrassment, perhaps because he realized that he felt no such commitment to an honest life of hard work.

He left Ohio to return to the races, but he quickly returned to his worst habits. Gradually his circle of friends had descended to a group of newsboys, derelicts, and thieves. His skills at magic seemed a natural complement to their world. He was taught to pick pockets in New York’s Bowery and joined a gang. The associates identified the victims, signaled to Thurston, and then jostled the mark as Thurston worked his magic, dipping his fingers deftly into pockets or purses, pinching watches and stealing wallets. It was the same type of misdirection and bold deception that he had been studying in
Modern Magic
. When he was picked up in New York and turned over to William Round, he realized that he had reached the very bottom. He had been lucky that he could still make a good impression, and be scrubbed clean to impress as a handsome, sincere young man. “My hard, early life had left no imprint on my features, and actually I don’t think it marked my personality very much,” he later admitted. “I always had a sort of inner conflict over right and wrong, especially when I was working with the criminals.” When William Round finally questioned “Willie Ryan,” asking if he were ready to behave and go to church, Thurston broke down, realizing that his life had been helplessly out of his control, and nodded his assent.

ROUND TESTED HIM
with menial jobs around the office. One afternoon he gave Howard a $5 bill and a package for the American Express office, telling him to deliver the package and return with the change. Thurston returned quickly, offering the change plus an extra nickel, because he had only taken the streetcar in one direction and walked for the rest of the journey. Round admitted that he had the boy followed, but now he was ready to offer his full trust. Thurston was made a janitor at the Prison Association building, and taken to the Rounds’ personal church, the Berean Baptist Church. Howard had told them that his mother, Margaret, was a Baptist but, anxious to find some blame for all his problems, explained that his father was not a Christian. For the first time in months, he corresponded with his mother. Fearing the worst, Margaret Thurston was now pleased to hear that her son had found important friends in the city and been led to religion.

Through the Broome Street Tabernacle, Howard performed various missionary duties, preaching on street corners, quoting the Bible, and inviting other indigents back to the church. “He has lost no opportunity to lead his old comrades to Christ,” Round reported. After a hard day on the streets, he arrived one night with a ticket for the Mission Home, entitling him to a cot and coffee in the morning. He trudged up to the large sleeping room, filled with hundreds of beds and a collection of outcasts and criminals. Thurston began to undress, but suddenly remembered his new ritual, a nightly prayer. He realized how these toughs would react to his show of piety—just weeks before, he had been one of them. But he reasoned that the experience was some sort of test of faith. He knelt down and audibly mumbled a long, sincere prayer. The room grew quiet. The men watched the boy at prayer, and then quietly went to their own beds. This public prayer made a lasting impression on Thurston and convinced him that he’d changed his life for the better—he remembered it as a demonstration of the marvelous, mysterious effect of faith.

If his conversion had been less than sincere, less an act of passion, it was becoming an act of logic: Thurston was sincerely humbled by his change of fortunes. “Possibly I would have soon tired of this, and looked for another fast train,” he confessed years later, “but [then] I received a telegram that my mother had died.” Margaret died on his eighteenth birthday, July 20, 1887. Howard was thrown into a deep depression. “His condition seemed to me such a forlorn one that I felt as if I would like to be a friend to him in some way,” Round wrote to an associate. He suggested that Thurston be sent to Mount Hermon Academy, Dwight Moody’s Christian school for boys in Northfield, Massachusetts.

Round was not a philanthropist and couldn’t offer the funds to send Howard to school. But Round’s mother-in-law, Ellen E. Thomas, had come to know the boy and offered to pay the $53 for each half-year term, board and tuition, for “three or four years.”

On August 10, 1887, Thurston sent a letter filled with misspellings:

“He needs the school,” Round admitted. “This letter is a vast improvement on those previously written.... He is not advanced in studies, but has been studying hard all summer. He is about as far along as boys of ten or twelve normally are.” In the application, Round confessed that the boy “lacked push,” and now had a certain shyness that seemed to put him at a disadvantage.

Mount Hermon rejected Thurston’s admission, complaining that the information on his parents and background was unclear. Round responded with a letter-writing campaign, forwarding messages from ministers attesting to Thurston’s miraculous conversion and strength of character. When he heard that the school was already filled for the next term, he wrote directly to Reverend Dwight Moody. “Can’t we send him to live in the village where he can have the advantages of the school and enter regularly when there is a vacancy? I think the boy would be glad to sleep on the bare floor and would think it a privilege to do so, for the sake of the advantages of the school.” He hoped that Moody could meet him, “see his face,” and know that “he is born in Christ.”

Moody relented and Howard Thurston was sent to Mount Hermon on September 15, 1887. He was student number 507. Considering that Thurston had been feeling the itch to run from New York, his admission to Moody’s school was an astonishing second chance for a boy who had been holding on tightly but, much like poor Reddy Cadger, was ready to tumble onto the tracks.

 

 

“THERE IS SOME MISAPPREHENSION
abroad for the plan of the school,” Professor Henry Sawyer, Thurston’s first headmaster, explained at a Mount Hermon building dedication in 1885. “It is not a reformatory; the fact that a boy is bad is no reason he should be sent to Mt. Hermon. It is not an orphan asylum. It is a school for earnest Christian young men who want to round out their education so that they can become of use in the world.... If we are going out into the world, the head, heart and hands need training.”

Reverend Dwight Lyman Moody was a nineteenth-century celebrity in the world of evangelism. He was born in 1837 in Northfield, Massachusetts, founded the Northfield Seminary for girls there in 1879, and in 1881 he opened Mount Hermon Academy for boys, on a separate campus across town. Mount Hermon offered classes at high school level. Unlike the Moody Bible Institute (opened as the Chicago Evangelization Society in 1901), it was not intended to produce ministers, but to give a well-rounded education. In fact, in the 1890s, Mount Hermon dropped the Bible course study, as the school felt it was attracting an inferior grade of student. Moody felt that society needed “gap-men,” good Christians who testified, worked in the world, and served between the laity and ministers. The application form to the school asked about signs of piety and pointedly inquired if the student wished to attend. “He has made it a daily prayer for months,” Round explained in Thurston’s application. Although the school was never intended as a reform school, it often accommodated hard-luck cases. Moody himself impulsively wrote on some applications, “Take this boy before the devil does.”