The Father of Our Country looks out from the top of Baltimore’s Washington Monument — the first in the nation dedicated to honor George Washington — as if to survey the city and its environs. The monument is currently undergoing a two-year renovation.  On Armistice Day 1918 the fictitious founder of “Rooby Tawr” climbed up to the monument’s top and sat on Washington’s arm.   (Ya gotta read the story. —Ed.)

A Voice of Baltimore Feature, an excerpt from

ROOBY TAWR, a novel in progress
set in mid-20th Century Charm City

By Joel Foreman

In the months before the U.S. entry into WWI, Reuben Michael’s old man decided the teenager had enough schooling and apprenticed him to a German-American plumber named Max Rudiger.

It didn’t take long for Rudiger to be pleased with the boy’s work and to fully expect him to be admitted at the end of his training to the noble ranks of those who serve to protect mankind from pinholed pipes, corroded valves, rust, leaks, and the many other pernicious rebellions of water.

Despite the worrisome surge in anti-German propaganda and a rising tide of anti-German feeling, Rudiger was damn proud to be one of Baltimore’s 90,000 German-Americans.

Proud that the minutes of the City Council were published in both English and German. Proud his Baltimore gefährten included the home-run-hitting Babe Ruth and the famous H.L. Mencken, whose Baltimore Evening Sun “Free Lance” columns Rudiger read regularly until they were suspended in 1915.

Too many readers didn’t like the journalist‘s pro-German sympathies.

“Thank God for Mencken!” Rudiger told his apprentice as he fed a snake into one of the clogged lavatory pipes at the Bromo Seltzer factory. Mencken had spoken the past weekend at Rudiger’s church, the Otterbein United Methodist.

“That man knows what he’s talking about!“ Rudiger continued. “He’s got the facts,” which Rudiger then summarized:

1) The Brits started the war because they feared losing their empire to the more industrious German nation.

2) President Woodrow Wilson, an Anglo-Saxon, was obviously biased toward England.

3) The ships German U-boats were torpedoing in the Atlantic, including the Lusitania, were fair game as they were all carrying munitions to the Allies.

“Mark my words,” Rudiger told Ruby, “Wilson will renege on his promise to keep us out of Europe.”

But that seemed to the 17-year-old like something happening on another planet. He believed it had nothing to do with him until Rudiger told him that if Woodrow Wilson and the arms manufacturers had their way, “Boys like you will be food for powder.”

‘THEY’LL MAKE YOU FRONTSCHWEIN’

“They’ll draft you, you betcha! Give you a rifle and make you frontschwein.”

“What’s that?” Ruby wanted to know.

“Pigs to the slaughter,” was Rudiger’s reply.

And he filled the boy’s head with images of infantry ripped open by machine gun fire, bodies of the dead draped over barbed wire, and the muddy lice and rat-infested conditions of the trenches.

All of which deprived the young Ruby of any desire to sacrifice himself in a gallant act of martial heroism.

No matter! He was destined to fight heroically — he would later say — in the “Battle of the Great Lakes.”

The Selective Service System summoned him in 1918 to defend liberty, and provided free transport to the Great Lakes Naval Training Station north of Chicago where he would be molded into a battle-ready sea warrior.

An “old salt.”

On the way to becoming old salts, Ruby and 30,000 other trainees learned how to sleep in a hammock, stuff a seabag, splice ropes, hoist a small boat out of the water, fire a machine gun, conduct a water rescue, and perform numerous other tasks which he would never have to perform anywhere else.

A thousand white-uniformed U.S. Navy trainees spell out the words “God and the Right” on the Naval Training Station parade grounds at Great Lakes, Ill. If you look closely you might spot the protagonist of Rooby Tawr at the bottom of the “O” in “God.”

Years later he retained one souvenir of the experience: an aerial photograph of a thousand white-uniformed swabbies whose massed bodies on the open expanse of the Training Station parade ground spell out the words, “God and the Right.”

Ruby claimed he was one of the white figures in the bottom of the “O” in “God” and said that the photographic exercise was typical of the important military actions in which he participated.

The best part of the training experience was the honorable discharge that followed the news of the war’s imminent end. Instead of “shoving off” for Europe, Ruby was high ballin’ it out of Chicago on the Rock Island Line, with the pop hit playing in his head: “How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?”

On a long haul like that you read a little, play some poker with some other swabbies, catch a bite in the dining car, and when you’re tired enough you sleep deeply enough to find you‘re suddenly in New Yawk City.

Suddenly in the great cavern of 34th Street’s Penn Station.  I didn’t know this train was stopping here!

Time to “All Aboard!” the Royal Blue bound for Newark, Philadelphia, Wilmington and, before long, the conductor singing those four sweet drawn-out syllables, Ball-Tee-Mo-ore, as the train passes like a smoking meteor through the Howard Street tunnel underneath Baltimore’s main shopping drag and slows to a stop at Mt. Royal Station, where Ruby sees through the Pullman window a reception party waiting to welcome him “home from the war.”

There was his old man Louis holding hands with Ma, both decked out in their dress ups. His twin brothers Mitchell and Millard looking so much alike that trying to figure out which was which could be hard. The girls Elsa and Ella jumping around like a pair of cockeyed kangaroos.

And the Mayor, James H. Preston, with an oversized key to the city in his hand. What was he doing there?

DOWN TO THE WASHINGTON MONUMENT

But there’s no time to say hello. Got to get down to the Washington Monument.

But you just got home. What you goin’ there for?

No time to explain. It’s Armistice Day. There’s gonna be a parade.

Somehow Ruby was making his way through the thick traffic on Charles Street, past the imposing 11 floors of the posh Belvedere Hotel and down to Madison where Charles splits to flow around the sides of the memorial colossus.

Two-hundred-twenty-eight stone stairs wind their way through the Washington Monument’s central core to the platform near the top. Ruby had been up there before but this was the first time he’d actually been able to sit — Can you believe it? — on the outstretched arm of the 16-foot statue at the pinnacle.

Why in the world did I bring my seabag with me? he thought, before it was whisked off by a gust of wind.

Looking down past the dome on which the sculpted Washington stands, Ruby waved to the massed battalions of uniformed doughboys, their shouldered Springfield Rifles at “‘ten-hut,” snaking around the monument’s rectangular base and heading south toward Pratt Street and the Inner Harbor.

Lillian Gish, right, starred in D. W. Griffith’s seminal silent film “Birth of a Nation” in 1915.  A later, post-Silent-era star of early filmdom was Fay Wray, made fa- mous in 1933 in the clutches of King Kong, of whom this World War I U.S. Army enlistment poster, featuring an ape wearing a German Army helmet, is prescient.

The air was filled with confetti drifting down to the shoulders of the soldiers and the bonneted heads of the matrons selling lemons and peppermint sticks from their striped stalls.

Ruby couldn’t understand how he had managed to traverse the 10 smooth feet up from the monument dome to Washington’s arm. No matter! Up there it felt like the world was a great sailing ship.

It felt like he was standing in a crow’s nest on the ship’s main mast, facing into a stiff wind, and scanning the horizon of a promising future.

And there was a girl with him. Right in front and close up against him. She pulled his arms around her waist and leaned forward, giving herself to the wind and arching her back, her arms outstretched, her head lifted to the sky, her long tresses swept back by the wind, a great smile on her face.

Like a come-to-life winged Venus with the face of the silent movie star Lillian Gish, she pointed excitedly and urged Ruby to “Look!” as her finger guided his eyes: down Charles and east to Light Street where steam paddlewheelers were nuzzled up to the long dock; through Otterbein and past the long smoky train sheds of Camden Yards; along Key Highway, through Locust Point and all the way out to Fort McHenry, where British gunboats launched fireworks into the sky.

The sound of four mellow syllables cut through the din of the explosions as the vision began to fade. “Ball-Tee-Mo-ore!” And once again, “Ball-Tee-Mo-ore!”

The conductor retrieving ticket stubs from the overhead luggage rack looked down at the groggy sailor and nudged him into wakefulness as the train eased to a stop.

The “conquering hero” was home!
 
joelforeman@voiceofbaltimore.org
 
CHECK OUT EXCERPTS 1-3 OF ROOBY TAWR  (ROGERS ROOBY — Waiting for a streetcar in 1930s Baltimore; PAGET’S DISEASE — Deuteronomy’s grave vision of a vortex, while trimming tawr teats; and ‘ANY BONDS TODAY?’ — Bugs Bunny and the Good Jew)   by clicking here  AND  here  AND  here.
 
EDITOR’S NOTE:

The working title of Joel Foreman’s book, Rooby Tawr, references the main character Reuben Michael and the Baltimorese pronunciation of the word “tire.”

Frontschwein refers to a front-line soldier, i.e., a grunt.  Gefährten may be translated as “kinsmen” or “companions.”

The novel in progress Rooby Tawr is Foreman’s initial foray into fiction. (For his complete thumbnail biography, click “Staff” under the Main Menu at left.)