A college graduate and former schoolteacher, Edmund G. Love was driven by personal problems to spend more than three years leading the life of a vagrant bum, largely in New York City. During this period he gained an unusual insight into the little-known world of human derelicts. This article, which is adapted from Mr. Love's book Subways Are for Sleeping, deals with one of these derelicts. Although a true story, names and certain details are masked. --Editor, LIFE
George Spoker was a medium-sized man with thin lips and rimless spectacles. He always wore a blue workingman's shirt and a dark red bow tie to set off a somewhat crumpled old herringbone tweed suit. He claimed that he was a bum and he lived like one for seven years. He sat on a bench in New York City's Madison Square and consorted with other bums. He slept in flophouses and doorways and spent as little as possible for food. But in certain respects, Spoker was different from most derelicts. He was always asking questions about the way the others lived and, although he rarely found fault with the answers he received, he always left the impression that he did not necessarily believe them. He acted like a small-town banker who knew exactly how much money all his customers had.
The comparison of George Spoker with a banker is not at all inappropriate. He had been one for a good many years in a city near San Francisco. One day the examiners had found a shortage in his books, and shortly thereafter he had been sent to San Quentin prison for two and a half years.
Spoker never went home after serving his sentence. During his prison term his wife had divorced him and his possessions had been liquidated. None of his friends had visited him. He once told someone why he went to New York: "I was a bum to everybody and I made up my mind if that's what people were going to think of me, I might just as well be one. I wanted to be the dirtiest, raggedest, most foulmouthed specimen of manhood that ever lived."
As authorities on such matters know, the one hallmark of a bum is aimlessness. From the start a lack of aimlessness differentiated Spoker from his chosen colleagues. There was another big difference between George Spoker and the mine run of bums. He had money. While he had been in prison his grandmother died, leaving him a monthly income of $78. Just as this comparative affluence set him off from the usual derelict, so did his fastidious approach to the bum's life.
When he first arrived in New York, Spoker felt that as a bum he must live in a flop-house. He tried a few on the Bowery but could not stand the bugs, so eventually he established himself farther uptown on Third Avenue, where lodgings cost 50¢ a night instead of 25¢. He tried eating at restaurants like Beefsteak John's, but he could not stand the sight of three or four kinds of food all heaped together in one pile. He transferred to Nedick's and the Automat. Since one of the keystones of his bumdom involved being a drunken stiff, he very carefully budgeted his money that he would have enough to get good and drunk every Saturday night.
The getting drunk part of it was the thing that made George Spoker aware of his shortcomings as a bum. He fell into the habit of patronizing one bar all the time. It was a place called Beanie's Tavern on 14th Street. It was a stand-up bar, and the mirror was covered by signs that were faintly reminiscent of a supermarket. About the only thing that Beanie's never ran was a one-cent sale. There were weekly specials on brands of whisky that the Internal Revenue Service had never heard of, and the inside of the place was filled with disreputable looking men lapping up the bargains. Outside on the sidewalk there were invariably ten or twenty homeless men gazing hungrily through the windows. It was easy to see that Beanie's Tavern was populated by real bums. Among them, George soon came to feel like a National Guard recruit in a group of battle-scarred veterans just back from Korea.
The realization that he was a failure in the thing that he had set out to do made Spoker more determined than ever and this purposefulness set him even further from his goal. He made up his mind to try living like these models with whom he had become acquainted. He began to carry a notebook and each time he heard of a new place to sleep he wrote it down. Then he set out to try every one of them. But he soon discovered that sleeping on a park bench is hard work. and after a while he found himself gravitating back to the flophouses. Each time this happened he became more disgusted with himself anc eventually reached the astonishing conclusion that he did not havc the guts to be a bum. There was only one way he could be sure of no: giving up. That was to give away his money. He began by having it changed into quarters which he handed out at random.
It was at this point in his life that George Spoker's true nature reasserted itself. As a banker, orderliness and system had been ingrained into him. And he could not bear to give away something for nothing. In order to satisfy both of these inclinations, he decided that he would trade his quarters for information. Each time he gave one away to a fellow bum, he asked the recipient to tell him where he had slept lately. This information was carefully entered in the little notebook. When one notebook was filled up, Spoker got a bigger one. It was not long before he discovered that his informants would talk just as much for a dime as they would for a quarter, so he reduced his unit of charity.
The information that went into George Spoker's notebooks comprised a curious marginal note on life in New York. Vacant buildings listed, as were tunnel excavations, used-car lots and encampments of Jehovah's Witnesses. For over a year George Spoker slept in a different place every night. Those he did not sleep in, he investigated. Pertinent information included the habits of guards or police, means of ingress and egress, and the best times of night for use of the premises. One day George met a bearded old character who insisted that he had been sleeping in a Roman sarcophagus in the Metropolitan Museum for ten years, off and on. George checked this claim found it plausible but never quite got up the nerve to spend the night there.
One afternoon George was accosted by a vagrant who had once added something to the notebook. The man said he had been trying to find Spoker because he had been evicted from his customary sleeping place and needed a new one. He was willing to pay 25¢ for a look at the places George must have available. George did well by the petitioner. He told him about a spot he guaranteed for two weeks of undisturbed slumber.
This encounter revolutionized Spoker's life. The thought that he could sell back for a quarter the same information he had received for a dime had not occurred to him before. In order to take full advantage of the possibilities he began telling the men he interviewed that if they ever wanted to find him, he would be in a certain place every day one o'clock in the afternoon. At first this place was Union Square, but Spoker later moved to Madison Square, where things were less hectic. Soon he was selling information on sleeping arrangements to seven or eight vagrants a day. By then he had a list of between two thousand and three thousand hideaways.
Spoker also received a lot of information that had nothing whatsoever to do with shelter. Bums often mentioned that they had eaten free at some mission or other, or that a certain charitable institution in town was a phony enterprise, no use at all to a bum. Spoker knew of dishwashing jobs in restaurants, of bowling alleys that needed pin boys, and who was hiring men to carry sandwich boards in any given week. He put it all in his notebook. With all this information in his possession, George soon became something of a one-man sociological movement. There is a spirit of helpfulness among vagrants in New York, and word soon got around that anybody who wanted a little money in his pocket should go see Spoker. Spoker would not furnish any money himself, but he could furnish tips as to where it could
be found. He himself could be found, as everyone now knew, on the bench in Madison Square.
One hot evening as he strolled leisurely around the square, Spoker stopped to talk to a man he found sitting on a chair outside the en trance to one of the office buildings. It turned out that he was a night watchman who had worked in the vicinity in one capacity or another since he was a young man. Spoker began asking about some of the events he had come across in his reading and the old man was only too happy to recall the past. It soon became George's habit to drop by and chat with his new friend every night.
On one particularly rainy evening the old man suggested that his visitor stay in the subbasement all night. He even rounded up some burlap bags to make a comfortable bed. From that time on Spoker lived in Madison Square. His friend soon introduced him to other night watchmen and night engineers, and by winter George was as much a fixture in the neighborhood as the statues in the park. He even bought a sleeping bag and blankets which he moved from one basement to another.
In the fall of 1948 George Spoker stumbled onto something good. While going over his notebooks in the park one September day, he was suddenly assailed by a thundershower. As was his practice during such forced curtailments of activity, Spoker spent his time loitering in the lobby of one of the buildings, chatting idly with the elevator starter, who was an acquaintance. When the shower had passed and he was about to leave the building, Spoker casually guessed he would saunter over to 23rd Street for a cup of coffee. The starter wondered if George would mind bringing back a cup for him.
"I thought about it all the way across the park," Spoker remembers. "The man had given me a quarter to pay for his coffee and had intimated that I could keep the change. This looked like it might be a good business. I bought six cups of coffee instead of one and saw to it that each of the elevator operators got one of them. They all paid me, and they all tipped me."
When he had pocketed his tips, Spoker began asking questions. He found out that no one was bringing coffee into the building. Within a week he had received permission from the building superintendent to bring snacks to all the building employees at regular intervals. He
had also asked to be allowed to solicit a similar privilege from all the in the firms in the building, where more than 600 people were employed.
Mathematically speaking, Spoker was no slouch. He estimated that there were 25,000 to 30,000 workers employed within a one-block radius of Madison Square. They would drink 12,000 cups of coffee or partake of that many snacks on an average day. At a nickel a snack, somebody who took advantage of the possibilities could make $600 a day in tips. George Spoker made up his mind to be the somebody.
By this time, bums seeking lodgings or employment were coming to him in great numbers. The Spoker Aid Society, as he used to call it, became the key to George's new business, and the business became the key to the Aid Society. Beginning in the winter of I948-49, Spoker carefully organized a catering service in the buildings around Madison Square. In each building he would talk to the heads of the various businesses and lay out a route that would keep a man occupied for a full eight-hour day and pay between $10 and $15 in tips. Then he turned the route over to one of the bums who came to him for help, taking $3 of the tips for himself. Eventually Spoker had about twenty men working for him.
It took George almost three years to reach the apex of his career. By that time he had branched out considerably. Initially, he and his men had filled the coffee orders at one or another of the numerous lunch counters in the area. But after the business became bigger, he rented the cheapest basement he could find and set up his own kitchen to take care of the orders. His profits soon reached about $600 a week.
In 1952 ex-convict George Spoker, now a carefully honest citizen, filed a federal income tax return for $31,000. At that time he was still sitting on his park bench in Madison Square and sleeping every night in any one of about twenty subbasements in the neighborhood. He was still wearing his blue shirt, red bow tie and the crumpled old suit he had brought to New York. And he was still keeping most of his records in one of ten or eleven notebooks he kept beside him on his bench.
Spoker was careful to let most of his men go after ten or twelve weeks. So long as he did not pay any one man more than $600 a year, George felt that he did not have to bother with withholding taxes. No one found fault with any of these arrangements. The employees were all bums to begin with and they recognized George as a benefactor who had given them a little time to get on their feet.
It was a woman who caused George Spoker to give up his career. After fencing his way through two newspaper interviews without saying anything important, he was suddenly faced one morning with a good-looking, red-haired woman of about thirty who told him a simple and rather commonplace New York story. Her name was Sarah Haddon and she had come to town to be an actress. She had not found enough work, and that morning when she came back to her room from breakfast, she found that she had been locked out. A friend of hers had told her that he had gone to Spoker in a similar emergency, so here she was. Sarah Haddon was actually a newspaperwoman who intended to write down everything that George Spolcer said and did, then put it in the Sunday magazine section.
"I'd been in Madison Square for five years," Spoker once said in discussing Sarah, "and she was the first woman who ever came to me for help. I can usually spot a bum a mile away, but I suddenly realized while she was talking that I'd never even seen a woman bum. It was quite a challenge."
WThat he did was go out and rent an apartment for Miss Haddon. He knew of a small flat on East 27th Street that was vacant, so he paid a month's rent and even stocked it with $20 worth of groceries. Spoker's motivation in renting this apartment was strictly charitable. Miss Haddon was simply the ‘X’ in an equation that had to be solved at once and George took great pride in solving problems. When Miss Haddon returned to the bench in Madison Square that afternoon, he took her by the arm and led her triumphantly to her new place of residence, showed her inside, demonstrated how the stove worked and left her alone.
Miss Haddon, as might have been expected, already possessed a perfectly good apartment of her own, and the presentation of this new set of living quarters put her in a difficult position. She was slightly aghast at what she had done. For the moment she decided that she had better accept the charity to keep George's feelings from being hurt.
There ensued a period of several weeks in which she spent a good part of every evening at the 27th Street place talking with Spoker, who got into the habit of dropping around every night after dinner to see how she was making out. Each time he came he brought some little things in the way of flowers or food to make her drab world a pleasanter place in which to live. Miss Haddon stayed around the apartment until he left for one of his subbasements, and then she went home to her roommate with a new supply of groceries. Toward the end of the third month Miss Haddon seems to have decided that she had better live in the apartment that was being furnished for her. She moved in, bag and baggage.
By the time Sarah Haddon decided to accept George Spoker's full hospitality, romance had begun to show through the charity. Despite his own appraisal of himself, Spoker was not entirely without charm and Sarah Haddon was certainly attractive. They fell in love. When George and Sarah were married, the secret of Spoker's true life could be hidden no longer. When she found it out, his wife moved her new husband to a home in Connecticut. She never wrote the story the paper had assigned her to do.
Every day now Spoker took a train to Manhattan. He continued to o his park bench in Madison Square, running his catering service and maintainig the fiction that he was a bum. No one will ever know how much money he was worth by that time, but it was a lot. One rumor had it that he had built up an income of around $10,000 or $12,000 a year from investments alone. By now it must have been hard for George to keep from admitting, even to himself, that he was not a bum.
Finally, in January, 1954, he gave up. He sold out his business to a large catering company at a huge profit and retired to the country. It was a combination of Sarah Haddon and weariness that made him leave his park bench.
"There is nothing the matter with being a bum," he told one of his friends, "but when you have to commute fifty miles every day to do it, there's just no percentage in it."
