Part 2 (1/2)

”Now the watch was mine forever. I wound it faithfully each morning and carried it with me at all times. When I wanted to know what time it was I looked at the Ehret Brewery clock and held my watch to my ear. It ran like a charm, and its ticking was a constant reminder that I had, for once, outsmarted Chico.”31

The Little Mothers.

We have, to this point, spoken less of girls than of boys-and for good reason. Though girls hawked papers and peddled fruit on the street and went junking in the dumps and alleyways, they were never as numerous as the boys at these work locations. Unfortunately and unfairly, the conditions that made street trading so attractive for the boys made it off-limits for the girls. Young girls were not supposed to be brash, aggressive, and loud. They were not supposed to chase customers they did not know up and down the city's most congested avenues.

Street trading was not only unladylike, it was considered positively dangerous for the young girls of the city. On this, there was as near a consensus as one could get on most subjects in early twentieth-century urban America. From Melvin, a Covington, Kentucky, newsie (”It ain't right for girls to sell papers.... They get tough and heaps o' things”1), to the middle-cla.s.s reformers and the parents themselves, it was agreed that girls did not belong on the streets.

The child labor reformers were the most adamant on the subject. Even Elbridge Gerry, President of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, who supported the boys' right to peddle their papers without state interference, argued vociferously against ”the employment of girls selling newspapers.” Hawking papers, a wholesome and salutary occupation for boys, was, he proclaimed, ”one of the most iniquitous practices” city girls could engage in.2 Wilmington, Delaware, May 1910. Two girl newsies and their customer. Girl newsies, though not nearly as numerous as the boys, were not as rare as the reformers would have wished. (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC) Newspaper publishers and editors, usually uncompromising champions of the children's right to work, surrendered when it came to girls. In what appears to be the draft of a reb.u.t.tal to a 1905 Juvenile Protective a.s.sociation pamphlet, an employee of the Chicago Daily News, though disagreeing with everything else the a.s.sociation had to say, agreed that neither the public nor the newspapers were well served by newsgirls. ”We [the Chicago Daily News] do everything we can to discourage them. I see no good reason why the girl should not be prohibited by law from selling on the streets.”3 With opposition to their street trading almost unanimous, the child labor reformers had an easy time convincing state legislators to draft special measures to ”protect” the girls. In twenty of the thirty states with minimum age requirements for street traders, the ages set for girls were significantly higher than for boys. In six states, boys ten and over could work on the streets, while girls under sixteen were barred. In fourteen other states, the girls had to be from two to nine years older than the boys to trade on the streets.4 The laws did not, of course, clear all the girls off the streets. A 1905 Chicago study of one thousand newsies reported that investigators had ”seen” twenty newsgirls-though, it added, ”a moderate estimate puts them at three times that number.” Mary McDowell told a gathering at the 1909 National Child Labor Committee convention that she had, on a recent visit to St. Louis, seen several young girls hawking papers in the vicinity of her hotel and near the railroad station. At the same meeting, a Mrs. E. g.a.y.l.o.r.d Hunt of Grand Rapids, Michigan, admitted that in her home town there were ”a few little newsgirls, perhaps a dozen,” loose on the streets.5 Though girls could be found trading on the streets of most cities, in only a few could they do so with the protection of the law. The Connecticut legislature, to the consternation of reformers everywhere, expressly forbade the city of Hartford to deny licenses to children ”solely on the ground of s.e.x.” The lawmakers, reported Survey magazine, had found no evidence at all that the newsgirls were ”demoralized by the work.... The evidence gathered [on the contrary] has shown that 'the Hartford newsgirls are a pretty good sort of girl after all.' ”6 In Bennington, Vermont, the editor of the Banner was also pleased with the work of his newsgirls. As he told Lewis Hine-at the time a field investigator for the National Child Labor Committee-he would have liked to have had more girls on the street, as he thought ”they [were] more honest than the boys generally.”7 These reports from Bennington and Hartford show us that girl street traders were every bit as competent as boys. But competence was not the issue. Propriety and decency were. The only females who had any business being on the streets were ”street walkers.” Girls under the age of ten might, if properly supervised, hustle flowers or baskets in front of their parents' stands. But those a bit older could not do so without projecting an image of indecency.

Hartford, Connecticut, March 1909. A Lewis Hine photograph of newsgirls in one of the cities that permitted girls to trade on the streets. From the way these children are dressed it is clear that they were from homes that were able to provide for their necessities. These children's earnings were probably put towards the family's savings or luxuries like a piano in the parlor or a new icebox for the kitchen. (Lewis Hine Collection, LC) The streets bred tough, self-reliant, self-confident young adults. Their lessons were appropriately learned by boys who would grow up to join the world of work and wages. Working-cla.s.s girls were destined for different futures. Though many would, before marriage or between marriage and motherhood, work for wages in factories, offices, or retail stores, these were considered but temporary detours on the road to motherhood and housekeeping. There was little the girls could learn on the streets that would prepare them to be mothers and wives. On the contrary, it was feared that the streets-with their excitement and adventure-could cause irreparable harm to young girls who, as adults, would have to content themselves with spending the greater portion of every day inside their own homes.

Children who grow up in a society with strictly defined gender roles learn early what will be expected of them. The girls of the early twentieth-century city were no exception. They watched as their brothers were sent out to play while they did their ch.o.r.es. Because the boys were basically useless at home (aside, that is, from fetching the wood and filling the coal bin) and, until they approached ten or eleven, unable to earn much elsewhere, they were free to play in the afternoons. The girls were too useful to be given the same kind of freedom. Six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds were big enough to watch the babies and help their mothers with the lighter household tasks. Ten- and eleven-year-olds could be entrusted with enough responsibilities to fill their afternoons.

Had their mothers had other resources, they might have allowed the girls to stay out at play until they were a bit older. But lacking the money for servants or labor-saving devices, they had to look to their daughters for a.s.sistance. It took considerable labor to care for a household and earn money on the side. Household ch.o.r.es required hours of preparation and involved dozens of separate steps. The laundry had to be done by hand from beginning to end: sorted, soaked, rubbed against the washboard, rinsed, boiled, rinsed again, wrung out, starched, hung to dry, ironed with irons heated on the stove, folded, and put away. Cooking involved not only preparing the food and cooking it but hauling coal for the fire, dumping the ashes afterwards, and keeping the cast-iron stove cleaned, blacked, and rust-free. Housecleaning was complicated by the soot, grime, and ashes released by coal-burning stoves and kerosene and gas lamps. Shopping had to be done daily and in several different shops: there were no refrigerators to store food purchased earlier in the week and no supermarkets for one-stop marketing.8 Little girls, lacking their mothers' experience, strength, and skills, could not do the cooking, the laundry, or the heavy cleaning by themselves. But they could ”help out.” Adelia Marsik, who grew up in an Italian immigrant household in Chicago, recalled in her oral history that she began helping with the dishes at five or six years of age. ”I started out very early.... They would put a chair by the sink and I would kneel there on the chair to do the dishes.” Other little girls helped out by sorting and folding the laundry or, like eight-year-old Elizabeth Stern, chopping the ”farfel.” (According to Stern, farfel was made by ”chopping stiff dough into little bits [which were then] cooked with meat as a vegetable.”) In families that celebrated the Sabbath, the girls were put to work immediately after school on Friday sweeping the front rooms, dusting the furniture, and preparing the kitchen for the Sabbath meal and celebration. Many young girls did the daily marketing for mothers who had so much to do at home they could not spare the time to shop. They learned how to pick over produce, buy day-old bread (if it were still soft), and bargain with the butcher for a fatter piece of meat and an extra soup bone or two. Investigators in a Polish neighborhood in Chicago found that the children there did ”practically all the buying of groceries and staples.” From butcher to baker to grocer for canned goods and crackers to the vegetable wagons parked in the street, they traveled each afternoon, their baskets slung over their arms.9 The girls' help with the shopping, cooking, and cleaning was important to the proper running of the household, but secondary in comparison with their major responsibility as ”little mothers.” Elizabeth Stern recalled in her autobiography that she had been put to work rocking the babies and ”taking them out for the 'fresh air' ” when she was still too young to go to school. Girls old enough to attend school took over caring for the babies when they returned home in the afternoon. Catharine Brody, who grew up in what she called a lower middle-cla.s.s family in Manhattan, recalled in an article for The American Mercury that all the girls on her block minded babies after school. ”The babies came in baby carriages. We parked the carriages, generally at the edge of the sidewalk and placed kitchen chairs or footstools together.” For Catharine and her friends, baby-tending was not a ch.o.r.e, but something that little girls did in the afternoon, like embroidering or jumping rope.10 New York City. ”Syrian children playing in street.” The ”little mother,” baby in tow, watches a group of smaller boys playing marbles or shooting c.r.a.ps. (Bain Collection, LC) In many working-cla.s.s families, the babies and small children were effectively raised by their older sisters. It was not that the mothers were uninterested or irresponsible. They were, rather, overworked and forced to delegate responsibility to their helpers. Because it was easier to watch the little ones than do the laundry or the cooking or the housecleaning, the girls were given this task. They accepted as a matter of course.

The little mothers were more than baby sitters. They were fully responsible for their charges, often from the time they got home from school until the moment the babies fell asleep. They fed them when they weren't nursing, clothed them, bathed them, diapered them, and put them to bed. The little ones became, in point of fact, their babies.

In Chicago, an unpublished report on preadolescent girls in a Polish neighborhood noted that the girls there had ”the 'little mother' spirit well developed.” They not only watched over the smaller children but ”took considerable pride in the appearance of the one who [was], at the moment, the baby.”11 New York City. ”A little mother.” A Jacob Riis photograph and caption. The children were sitting on the stoop because there was no place inside for them to play, sit, or rest. (Jacob Riis Collection, LC) The eleven-year-old girl who told her story in the Thirteenth Annual Report of Greenwich House claimed that, during the summer, she minded ”Danny, my baby brother, all the time.... Sometimes I go to play a little while at night with the other children but I must mind Danny there because he does not like to go to bed until we do. Then he gets so tired he goes right to sleep on my lap and I carry him up. I think my brother is very nice but I get tired minding him sometimes.”12 The little mothers and ”their” babies were as much a part of the life of the city as their ”little merchant” brothers. Settlement-house workers referred to the ”little mother” problem by name; newspaper reporters described their activities in mocking detail. On the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the Board of Health even organized its own ”Little Mothers League” to instruct the girls in the proper care of ”their” babies. As Dr. Walter Benzel of the Board explained to the New York Times, ”much of the time in the summer the babies of the tenements [are] entrusted to the keeping of their older sisters, and it would be almost useless to teach the real mothers unless the 'little Mothers' were also taught.”13 The girls worked at home and for their mothers. Every increase in their mothers' workload meant an increase in their own. When their mothers took in homework, the girls joined them at the kitchen table hemming skirts, embroidering pincus.h.i.+ons, stemming artificial flowers, or sorting nuts. When the mothers took in boarders, the girls helped with the extra laundry, shopping, cleaning, and cooking.

Boarding single men (and an occasional woman or family) was the most common income-producing activity engaged in by married women and their daughters. The American city, so blessed with abundance in other areas, did not have sufficient private housing units for all who needed them. Apartment houses were, as yet, available only for the more prosperous. There were no affordable hotels and few respectable rooming houses.14 Boarding out provided immigrants from the old world and migrants from the countryside with the cheapest and most comfortable way to survive in a strange, new urban world. It simultaneously brought the boarding families additional income to close their household budget gaps and save money for land of their own. According to the Immigration Commission Report (190810), up to one third of urban immigrant families received some part of their income from boarding fees. In areas with a high percentage of recently arrived immigrants, like the Stockyards district of Chicago, the proportion was even higher. A 1910 study of ”back of the Yards” Lithuanian and Polish families found that more than half took in an average of three boarders each. In New York City, 48 percent of the Russian-Jewish households took in an average of two boarders each.15 Caring for boarders was a working-cla.s.s and not an exclusively immigrant means of supplementing the family income.16 Families with children too young to earn regular wages had to choose between mother going out to work or bringing work home. Most decided on the latter course, though not without some thought. Boarders meant less s.p.a.ce and less privacy for the entire family. They were also a sign that the man of the house was not able to support his family on his own wages.17 Caring for boarders was women's work. It was the mothers' and daughters' task to clear out the front room for the newcomers and find mattresses, beds, or other places for them to sleep. Once the boarder or boarders were settled, it was the women's responsibility to buy, cook to order, and serve their food, make their beds, clean their rooms, and launder their bedclothes, workclothes, and Sunday suits. Though some men did not consider this ”work,” probably because it was done by women at home, the evidence suggests otherwise.18 Taking in boarders was not the only way that mothers and daughters supplemented the family income. Some women brought in money by cooking for single men. Others took in laundry or did sewing. Still more took in industrial homework.

Next to boarders, doing ”homework” for small jobbers, middlemen, and contractors was the most common source of income for women who worked at home. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to estimate the number of households where homework was done-or the number of children working in these households.19 According to the Immigration Commission, six in one hundred households did some sort of homework, though the percentages varied greatly by city and by ethnic group: from 11.2 percent of all households in Chicago to 1.6 percent for Buffalo, from 25 percent of New York City Italians to 5.3 percent of Chicago Italians.20 Like caring for boarders, homework was women's work. Unemployed husbands might, in a pinch, join in, but more often they were employed outside the home or, if unemployed, too embarra.s.sed to join their wives at the kitchen table. Their sons, following their lead, stayed as far away as possible. The kitchen and whatever went on in it was not for them.

A photograph taken by Lewis Hine in East Harlem at five in the afternoon on December 19, 1911, shows what was probably a typical scene in a household with plenty of seasonal homework to do. Mary Mauro, the mother, Angelina, a ten-year-old neighbor, Fiorandi, Maggie, and Victoria, ranging in age from eight to eleven, are sitting at the kitchen table sorting feathers by size. Against the back wall of the tiny, cramped kitchen sit two boys, a little one on his big brother's lap. The boys watch from a distance as mother and girls work intently. A second Hine photo tells the same story. Mother and three children sit at the table sorting nuts. Behind them, taking up the rest of the s.p.a.ce in the tiny tenement kitchen, is the father, pipe in hand, sitting in his rocking chair. In a third photo, we see only mother and daughters. Hine tells us that the father had been sorting nuts with the women, but retreated into the bedroom as soon as the visitors arrived, ashamed at being seen or photographed doing ”women's work.”21 The women and girls worked well together. With all they had to do to keep the household in order, mothers had to make expert and efficient use of their helpers. Girls too young to decorate pillboxes or embroider pillowcases could, at least, keep the babies out of the way. Girls a bit older could pull bastings or sort materials. Ten- and eleven-year-olds were old enough to sit down at the kitchen table and do the work of adults.

New York City, December 1911. ”Mrs. Mary Mauro, 309 East 110th Street, 2nd floor. Family work on feathers, make $2.25 a week. In vacation, two or three times as much. Victoria, 8, Angelina 10 (a neighbor), Fiorandi 10, Maggie 11. All work except two boys against the wall. Father is street cleaner and has steady job.” (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC) Because most working-cla.s.s mothers were ”too busy” to leave the house, the job of picking up raw materials and delivering finished goods often fell to the girls. Marie Ganz began her day with a trip to the factory loft to pick up a bundle of unfinished skirts for her mother. ”The bundle was always twice as big as I was. Just the bundle and a pair of legs were all the neighbors could see as I pa.s.sed their windows. 'The bundle with legs' was the way they described it, for the legs seemed to belong to the pack rather than to a human being.”22 Probably New York City. A young girl probably bringing home ”work” for her mother to sew. (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC) Girls who helped out at home-especially those who a.s.sisted their mothers with the homework at the kitchen table-grew up fast, perhaps too fast.

Catharine Brody remembered that the Italian barber's daughters who lived on her block and went to her school never played with the other girls in the afternoon. There was an aura of mystery about these girls, with their long black hair flecked with bits of feathers. What did they do every afternoon? And where did they get the feathers to put in their hair? Only by accident did Catharine discover that the girls spent their afternoons sorting and arranging feathers at the kitchen table.23 The eleven-year-old girl who told her story in the Greenwich House Annual Report minded her brother Danny all day during the summer. Her activities during the school year were more varied.

”Every morning before school, I sweep out three rooms and help get breakfast. Then I wash the dishes.

”In the mornings, on the way to school, I leave finished flowers at the shop and stop for more work on my way home.

”After school I do my homework for an hour, then I make flowers. All of us, my sisters, my cousins, my aunts, my mother work on flowers. We put the yellow centers into forget-me-nots. It takes me over an hour to finish one gross and I make three cents for that. If we all work all our spare time after school, we can make as much as two dollars between us.”24 New York City, 1912. ”Making artificial leaves in tenement attic.... The five year old helps. Her sister, aged 10, works until 9 P.M. some nights, although she is nearsighted.” (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC) Not all city girls worked as hard as this child. Girls fortunate enough to have been born into smaller families or families able to survive without having to take in boarders or industrial homework had less to do. Because Kate Simon's father made good money as an ”expert shoe worker, a maker of samples,” and her mother kept the family small (by having thirteen abortions, as Kate would later discover), Kate's ch.o.r.es were minimal. She was required to wheel the baby a turn or two around the block and help with the cleaning and dishes.25 Marietta Interlandi grew up in a working-cla.s.s Italian family in Chicago with fewer resources at its disposal. Her good fortune came in the shape of an older sister who was enlisted as mother's chief a.s.sistant. While Marietta was ”always out,” skating or playing jacks and ball, her sister ”stayed at home with my mother. She helped her out a lot. I was younger, you know. Three years makes a difference.”26 The little mothers who helped out at home were part-time workers and, like their brothers, were suspended between childhood and adult life. At home and in the cla.s.sroom, they were expected to follow orders. But out at work-hawking their papers, if they were boys, or shopping for the family's food and minding the baby, if they were girls-they were expected to act like adults. Girls and boys accepted their ambiguous status without much complaint. It was all part of growing up.

Though most working-cla.s.s city kids were, by their tenth birthday, doing some sort of work in the afternoons, there were enormous differences between the work a.s.signed to boys and to girls. Like their fathers, the boys earned money outside the homes and were responsible for bringing it home to support their families. Like their fathers as well, they took liberties with their pay checks, holding back a little as a reward for their labor. The girls, on the other hand, like their mothers, earned nothing at their labor. Household ch.o.r.es and baby-tending were entirely unpaid. Caring for boarders brought in income, but it was not considered ”work.” Industrial homework was, but in this case the income producer was the family of women, not the individuals who comprised it. The girls who joined their mothers at the kitchen table were not earning anything by themselves. They were ”helping out.”

This situation put the girls at a disadvantage. Aside from the pennies they might earn at junking and the nickel or two they might collect on their birthdays, they were for the most part marooned at home without funds of their own. Every time they wanted to go to the movies or buy a piece of lace to decorate their hand-me-down s.h.i.+rtwaists, they had to go begging to their mothers.

The boys experienced a sort of harmony between their work and the pleasures it bought. The more they worked, the more they could eat, see, and do. The girls' unpaid labor carried with it no such tangible rewards. While the boys' capacity for paid fun and entertainment was bounded only by their earning power, the girls had to pet.i.tion for every penny. Unlike their brothers, they had to learn to postpone their gratifications and be circ.u.mspect in their pursuit of pleasure. They had to find satisfaction instead in the ”grown-up” feelings they enjoyed in accomplis.h.i.+ng adult tasks, in their neighbors' compliments on their well-behaved babies, and their mothers' congratulations on their outwitting and outbargaining the butcher. When such rewards were not forthcoming, as was often the case, they had to be satisfied, as their mothers ”appeared” to be, with the comfort they received from doing their duty without complaint.

The young girls learned early what would be expected of them as adults. They also learned that no matter how difficult or tedious the task, it could be lightened if accomplished in the company of others. Housework in the early twentieth century was fortunately not yet the isolated, anonymous task it would become. The young girls chopped their ”farfel” alongside their mothers, watched the baby from the front stoop with their friends, and joined the other girls and women at the kitchen table to hem the new batch of s.h.i.+rtwaists. While, in comparison to their brothers, they remained isolated from the life of the city, they were able to construct their own community of family, friends, and neighbors and draw from it the companions.h.i.+p and comfort they required and deserved.

All That Money Could Buy.

The children who worked downtown crossed the invisible bridge that separated and linked the two parts of the city. Like their customers, the eleven- and twelve-year-old refugees from the slums, the ghettoes, the ”Jewtowns” and ”Poletowns” and ”Little Sicilies” were commuters working in the heart of the city, where money was most plentiful. With eyes and ears wide open, the newsies, peddlers, and s.h.i.+neboys observed first-hand how life was lived by the other half. They watched and listened as the new middle cla.s.s and the older elites shopped, were entertained, and spent their money. They studied the habits, dress, and style of secretaries and bookkeepers, real estate promoters and railroad magnates, gentlemen and fas.h.i.+onable ladies. They peered through plate-gla.s.s windows into lobster palaces and hotel lobbies, window-shopped with department store customers; perused the billboards, marquees, and gaudy, colored posters outside the movie palaces; and read in the newspapers about the life of the city: the fads, fas.h.i.+ons, amus.e.m.e.nts, and personalities. The more they saw, the more difficult it was to return to their home blocks and take up again their childish games. Ring-around-the-rosy, prisoner's base, and building forts in vacant lots quickly lost their attraction.

The children were swept up in the whirlwind of urban life. They, too, wanted to join in the fun and the games and, as they rapidly learned, this was not impossible. The children could not and did not expect to eat oysters in the lobster palaces, shop in the department stores, or see the latest show at the first-cla.s.s theaters, but they could-for pennies-buy themselves a very good time. There were amus.e.m.e.nts, entertainments, and fas.h.i.+ons to fit every pocketbook, different variations of the same basic model for different cla.s.ses of urban customers. While fas.h.i.+onable ladies got their shoes and hats custom-made or at the department stores, the girls could-for a fraction of the price-purchase imitations from pushcart peddlers and bargain stores. While society people ate their dinners at the Waldorf-Astoria and Delmonico's and the newly enriched middle cla.s.ses patronized the lobster palaces, the children could-for a nickel-sit at the counter of a ”dairy lunch” and enjoy a big slice of apple pie with ice cream on top. While the upper crust attended the opera and the middle cla.s.ses the vaudeville palaces and music halls, the children could-for a nickel-see the flickers at the nickelodeon, and-for a dime-watch a cheap vaudeville show from the gallery.

Denver, 191020. Denver newsies smiling for the camera. Every day, these boys left their neighborhoods to travel downtown to sell their papers to the city's businessmen and shoppers. (Mrs. Ben Lindsey Collection, LC) The children had been sent downtown to earn money for their families-and this they intended to do. But the more time they spent away from the block, the more uses they found for the money they earned.

Money bought pleasure and a place in the city. The children required both. As the settlement-house workers were the first to understand, reforms in child labor and compulsory schooling laws had, ironically, created a new problem for the children (and for the reformers who looked after their welfare). Boys and girls between the ages of eleven and fifteen were now able to attend school for a few more years. But school, unlike work, let out at three o'clock, leaving the new working-cla.s.s students with free time in the afternoon-time, the reformers were convinced, that they did not know how to fill constructively.1 The reformers, as we saw in Chapter 2, had tried to provide the children with after-school clubs and playgrounds, but had not succeeded. It was difficult to interest the children in regularly scheduled, supervised activities, and even more difficult to raise the funds needed to build the playgrounds, staff the clubs, and supervise the daily activities.

While the reformers watched from the sidelines, frustrated by their inability to solve the leisure-time problem they had helped to create, an army of small businessmen alert to the jingle of coins in the children's pockets proceeded to give them something to do with their free time. Shopkeepers, penny arcade operators, luncheonette and coffee shop proprietors, nickelodeon, vaudeville, and amus.e.m.e.nt park owners, and the thousands of ”Cheap Charlies” who owned corner candy stores opened their doors to let the children in. They provided them-for a price-with amus.e.m.e.nt, recreation, and a place to gather with the gang. The older children would never again enjoy the kind of compact ”playground” they had once had on the block. But, as they soon discovered, they no longer needed it. With money in their pockets, they could buy their way into dozens and dozens of different play areas.

The candy shops were the first and foremost of the small businesses to strike a bargain with the children. Though penny candy shops were not new to city or town, they multiplied in the first years of the century until they were more numerous than even the saloons in the working-cla.s.s neighborhoods. The children were drawn to the shops like bees to blossoms, lured by the sweets for a penny and, as a Russell Sage Foundation study put it, by ”something still more attractive-a place to meet friends, to chat, sometimes to play games-always to talk and skylark a little amid light and warmth, protected alike from the distractions of the tenement home and the inconveniences of the street corner.” If the saloon was the workingman's club, the candy shop was the youngster's.2 The shop owners, as sensitive and alert to the needs of their customers as the department stores were to theirs, did their best to make the children comfortable. There was a tacit understanding between proprietor and customers: children without money to spend had to stay outside, but those with only a penny were welcome to take all day if they wanted, picking out their treat, savoring every morsel, and hanging around afterward. Some kids stayed inside to play the kiddie slot machines. They deposited their pennies and got, in return, a tiny piece of gum and a chance at the jackpot: five, ten, or twenty more tiny pieces of gum. Others played the weekly lottery, with the prize a huge box of candy. In Chicago, the Juvenile Protective Agency claimed that the gambling games in the candy shops had become so popular that children in one school ”were p.a.w.ning their school books in order to get money with which to play.”3 Whether or not this was true (on its face, the claim appears a bit exaggerated), kids were spending their time and their money in the candy stores. And for good reason.