Orphan Trains by Stephen O'Connor

Author:Stephen O'Connor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

John Brady’s early life could hardly be more typical of the stories commonly featured in the Children’s Aid Society annual reports. He was born on May 25, 1848, in a tenement east of Five Points. His parents, James and Catherine, were Irish Catholics who had fled the famine. James was a stevedore and a drunk. Catherine died when John was so young that all he remembered of her were her attempts to keep him from scratching at his smallpox blisters—a futile effort, it would seem, since inflamed blisters would leave him scarred for life.

John’s father beat him. At first the beatings had a semirational justification. He was once punished because he ran off to play on the streets when he had been left to care for his infant stepsister. But after James Brady lost his job, the beatings were motivated mainly by alcoholic rage. When John was eight, he ran away from home, staying for a while with his father’s sister. But he was, in his own words, “a very bad boy, having an abundance of self-will.”1 When his aunt married and moved to Boston, she did not want to take him with her, and so he had no place to live but the streets.

John may have been homeless for as long as a year. Like most street kids, he survived by a mix of begging, thieving, and doing odd jobs. Some days he got his food by pilfering from the Fulton Market. Other times he would go down by the docks early in the morning when the steamboats jettisoned their refuse. He got his best meals when he could pay for them and earned the money by ripping the lead out from around chimneys and selling it at junk shops, or by running errands for the patrons of taverns and saloons. He also garnered pennies by singing Irish ballads on Broadway, Park Row, and other streets heavily trafficked by affluent New Yorkers. And sometimes he would simply hold out a filthy hand.

One night shortly after Christmas in 1857, when John was nine years old, he was standing in front of the Chatham Street Theater hoping to make a meal out of the half-eaten cobs of hot corn that playgoers were apt to cast onto the sidewalk before taking their seats. After a while he grew tired and cold and sat down on a window grate warmed by an updraft from the theater’s basement. The next thing he knew a man was shaking his shoulder and asking whether he wouldn’t like to have three solid meals a day.

In his unpublished autobiography, “Zigzags of a New York Street-boy,” John identified this man as Theodore Roosevelt Sr., the father of the president. But in a letter to Charles Loring Brace, John described him only as “some kind person from your Society.”2

Later in life Brady may well have had an ulterior motive for claiming to have been rescued from the gutter by a president’s father, but Roosevelt did indeed have a long history with the Children’s Aid Society.

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