Al Smith left school at thirteen to support his widowed mother and sister

Evidence

At the age of thirteen, he didn’t have to worry about school any more. Moses’ father retired young, but Smith’s, a large, powerful Civil War veteran of thundering voice, an inexhaustible supply of funny stories and many friends, had to work too hard. Driving his own truck, loading and unloading heavy cargoes, he would come home no matter how cold the day so wet with sweat that his first move would be to peel off his shirt and undershirt and plunge his face and arms into a tub of cold water to cool off. He worked six or seven days a week and often he got home so late that there would be days and nights on end when Al would not see the father who liked to put his little boy on his knee during family excursions to the beer gardens along the Bowery, regale him with stories and let him sneak sips of his beer. In 1885, the father’s health broke, and, unable any longer to do manual work, uneducated and with no skills, he was forced to take work as a night watchman. One by one, he had to sell his horses and finally his truck, but the proceeds of the sales were soon eaten up by doctors’ bills and medicine. In November 1886, he died. All he left his son was his self-assurance; it was only through the charity of his friends that funeral expenses were paid. Al’s mother was left almost penniless. Walking back from the funeral to the small flat, alone except for Al and his ten-year-old sister, Mary, she muttered, half to herself, “I don’t know where to turn.” Mary heard her brother say, “I’m here. I can take care of you.” … Rising before dawn to get breakfast for her children and prepare their lunches, Al’s mother would work until dark at the factory, and then come home to make supper and clean the flat. Since the salary she earned at the factory wasn’t enough to support three persons, she asked for piecework that she could do at home and, when Al closed the door to his bedroom to go to sleep at night, he would see her bending over the work. A frail woman, within months her own health was affected, and she had to leave the factory. With the help of friends, she opened a tiny grocery and candy store in the basement of the building in which the Smiths lived, but it quickly became obvious that the store would never provide enough to support the family. She could get charity, she knew, but widows who were unable to support their children had the children taken away and placed in institutions. She had heard about the institutions. Anything was better than that. A few months after his thirteenth birthday, a month before he would have graduated from St. James, which had only eight grades, Al Smith left school and went to work. … First he was a newsboy, then a “chaser” for a trucking firm, spending his days on the run, taking assignments for the firm’s drivers from the main office and trying to find the drivers in the streets of the Lower East Side so that they would not have to waste time returning to the office. The job paid three dollars a week. In the evenings, he tended counter at the little store while his mother rested. After two years, with income from the store dwindling and the family desperate, he became a shipping clerk—for eight dollars a week. Two years later, with the intake from the store down to almost nothing, he looked for another job and finally found one that would pay him four dollars more. The job was at the Fulton Fish Market. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 499

Categorization

• XREF: Biographical origins chapter contrasts Smith’s poverty-driven start with Moses’ privileged one — sets up a class contrast Caro will sustain.