Read an Excerpt
Pendergast!
By Lawrence H. Larsen, Nancy J. Hulston University of Missouri Press
Copyright © 1997 The Curators of the University of Missouri
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8262-6099-4
CHAPTER 1
Early Years
1872–1894
Thomas Joseph Pendergast entered the world in St. Joseph, Missouri, on July 22, 1872, a typical hot and muggy summer day. On August 6, Father Thomas Walsh of St. Joseph Cathedral baptized him according to the rites of the Roman Catholic Church. A baby picture, probably taken in a St. Joseph studio, shows the future man with a pug nose, little bags under the eyes, a firmly set mouth, and fleshy cheeks and jowls, wearing a ruffled frock dress. In the 1930s, the photograph hung in a black frame, along with baby pictures of many other important Kansas Citians, in an informal gallery on the wall of a former speakeasy, the Cottage Inn, operated by legendary local character Lloyd W. "Speed" Mayhan. When a surprised Boss Pendergast saw the picture, he inscribed in the upper left-hand corner, "Speed, Where in the Hell did you get this?"
Pendergast was the ninth and last child in a family that was large even by the standards of the times. He had three brothers, James, John, and Michael, plus five sisters, Mary Anne, Josephine, Delia, Margaret, and Catherine. All except Delia and Catherine lived into adulthood. When Tom went to prison at age sixty-six he was the only surviving Pendergast sibling. After he became a national figure, writers sometimes confused family relationships, giving the wrong number of siblings or, as one writer did, even identifying Tom as James's son.
Tom's parents, Michael and Mary Reidy Pendergast, both hailed from County Tipperary in Ireland. Mike, born in 1826, immigrated to North America, as did his siblings, Patrick, Edward, Mary, and Margaret. Patrick settled in Illinois, and the family ultimately lost track of him. Edward and Margaret, after arriving in New Orleans, went directly to St. Joseph. Mary stayed in New Orleans, married Owen McCormick, raised three children, and then moved to St. Joseph in 1870.
Family records do not show the arrival dates of any Pendergast family member, or whether they came separately or together. Mike, according to a Pendergast in Florida who undertook a broadly based family history, first immigrated to Canada. Merchant ships that regularly transported lumber from Canada to ports in the United Kingdom frequently, rather than deadhead back, carried to Canada under notoriously bad conditions multitudes of Irish immigrants escaping the potato famine. Great numbers soon left Canada and went south to the United States. Whether Mike actually followed that course or even whether he soon linked up with any of his brothers or sisters is unknown, but he eventually reached Cincinnati. There, in 1855, he married Mary Reidy, who was born in 1834 and had entered the United States at New Orleans, probably with her parents.
The newly married couple, Mike, twenty-nine, and Mary, twenty-one, started their life together in Gallipolis, Ohio. About 150 miles up the Ohio River from Cincinnati, Gallipolis was a prime shipping center for the coal regions of Ohio and neighboring West Virginia. On January 27, 1856, the couple had their first child, James Francis Pendergast. Mike, a sturdy, well-built man, had little trouble finding work as a teamster, but prospects for advancement appeared limited at best. In addition, Gallipolis had only a few Irish residents. In 1857, the year a financial panic severely hurt the eastern economy, the Pendergasts moved eight hundred miles west, to St. Joseph. Doubtless, the presence of relatives in the Missouri River city influenced the choice. In all likelihood, the Pendergast family traveled west on one of the regularly scheduled steamboats from Gallipolis to the fabled "Middle Border" on the eastern edge of the Great Plains, the jumping-off place for the Far West.
More than 5,000 people lived in St. Joseph in the 1850s, a comparatively large number for a wilderness outpost. During the California gold rush, some 17,000 forty-niners had outfitted for their trek in St. Joseph. The city gained fame as the eastern terminal of the colorful, uneconomical, and short-lived Pony Express. The Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad that ran across northern Missouri reached St. Joseph in 1859. Unfortunately, the city lost a temporary advantage as a frontier railhead when the Civil War disrupted service. Following hostilities, a decision by the owners of the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad dashed hopes that St. Joseph would grow into a great railroad center. Rather than build tracks west from St. Joseph, they decided to divert the main line fifty miles to the south through Kansas City and on into the Southwest, planning to exploit the Texas cattle trade. Even though the leaders of St. Joseph scaled down their aspirations, the city remained a thriving and expanding place, albeit increasingly secondary to Kansas City.
Mike and Mary settled permanently and raised their rapidly growing family in St. Joseph. Mary gave birth to Mary Anne in 1858, followed by Josephine (Josie) in 1860, John in 1862, Delia (Bridget) in 1864, Margaret (Maggie) in 1865, Michael Joseph in 1867, Catherine (Katie) in 1869, and finally Thomas Joseph in 1872.
As employment was plentiful, Mike quickly found work as a drayman. He may have worked for Russell, Majors, and Waddell, a large western freighting firm that, prior to declaring bankruptcy during the Civil War, had a regional headquarters in St. Joseph. At times, Mike, as did many haulers, freelanced as an independent contractor. Usually, however, he labored for others, and not always as a teamster; in 1868 he worked as a farmer and in 1879 he worked at the W. H. Whitaker Starch Factory. In his prime, his oxlike strength enabled him to singlehandedly lift very heavy loads. A large dry goods store employed him as a teamster on a regular basis. Although he never became wealthy, he made a steady living, providing enough money to support his family in reasonably adequate circumstances. Mike drank only in moderation, which was highly unusual for someone engaged in an occupation that frequently attracted hard-living and unreliable transients.
Mike Pendergast, in the style of a typical Irish patriarch, ruled his children with stern yet good-natured discipline. Mary provided the home with loving stability. Tom, in later years, called his home life normal and family relations congenial. He characterized his father as "responsible" and his mother as "devoted."
The family residence, which Mike Pendergast owned, was a substantial two-story frame house at 1715 Frederick Avenue. That location, when the Pendergasts arrived, was on the east side of St. Joseph. As the city extended farther east, Frederick Avenue became the main thoroughfare into downtown. A horse railroad line ran down Frederick in the 1870s; it was electrified by 1887, with an electric power plant at 20th Street. Saloons, eating places, groceries, medical clinics, dental offices, and meat markets, plus residential dwellings, lined Frederick. Many shopkeepers lived in the rear or on the second floors of their businesses. The Pendergast neighborhood included an ethnically diverse mix of Irish, German, English, and some black people. In 1899, a coal, wood, and feedlot was on one side of the Pendergast residence, a barber shop on the other.
The Pendergast home had only seven rooms, so it was fairly cramped for such a large family. All the rooms were comfortably furnished and had rugs and curtains, a mark of prosperity. A small barnyard surrounded the property. In following years, after all the Pendergasts had died or moved away, the condition of the house, still in family hands in 1939, gradually deteriorated. Following World War II, a cemetery monument concern acquired the residence, tore it down, and used the lot for a display yard. Maurice Milligan, the United States Attorney who played a major role in sending Pendergast to prison, said that it was fitting that the house had not been turned into a shrine.
Questioned in prison about his school days, Pendergast recalled nothing out of the ordinary. He remembered playing hooky, but the rolls of the public Webster School, which he attended from first through sixth grades, indicate consistently excellent attendance records, so he must have started playing hooky after grade school. He avoided organized extracurricular activities, but played sandlot baseball. He got along well with his schoolmates, and he kept tabs on them through the years. A streetcar conductor remembered, "Tom often rode my trolley car. He was a friendly and good-natured boy. I liked him." At home, Tom joined in the family chores, tending the horses, milking the cow, shoveling coal, feeding the chickens, and chopping wood. His parents made him and his siblings attend mass regularly. With the usual exaggeration, he told his own children how hard it was growing up in "the good old days," working instead of playing and walking four miles to school each way, frequently through several feet of snow. In reality he lived within four blocks of Webster School, and such a snowfall would be extraordinary for Missouri.
THE RISE OF JAMES PENDERGAST
In 1876, Tom's oldest brother, James, left St. Joseph and moved to Kansas City. This was far from a final departure; several trains daily made the trip in under two hours. Jim, a solid, muscular man of over two hundred pounds, built along the same lines as his powerful father, rented a room in one of the hundreds of boarding houses in the commercial, entertainment, and industrial West Bottoms, sometimes called "West Kansas," as the district bordered the state of Kansas.
Following a short stint in a meatpacking plant, Jim toiled as a smelter at the A. J. Kelly Foundry. In 1879, he moved to the D. M. Jarboe Keystone Iron Foundry, accepting a well-paying position as a puddler. Puddling required pouring molten metal into various-sized molds; although it was not especially physically strenuous, it was a hot, demanding, and somewhat dangerous job. Molders ran the risk of being splashed with liquid metal or having sparks fly into their eyes. Work on the molding line, performed six days a week on ten- to twelve-hour shifts, generally paid by the number and kind of molds produced. Few people stayed in the occupation for many years. During his foundry days, Jim lived in a variety of different West Bottoms rooming houses, learning his way around and acquiring numerous friends, among them professional gamblers.
Steady employment at good wages in a foundry set Jim somewhat apart from thousands of other laborers in the West Bottoms, most of whom worked either for the packing plants, the stockyards, or the railroads. The city emerged from its frontier days as an important livestock shipper, a crucial link between the western cattle ranges and eastern packers. With the advent of refrigerated boxcars, large meatpacking companies moved into or expanded existing operations in Kansas City.
Kansas City was home to a large number of unskilled laborers, many without roots in a place with a large transient population. Great numbers of railroad passengers changed trains and laid over in the city; the cattle trade drew stockmen and cowboys from all across the western plains on business and for recreation. A polyglot mixture of native-born white and black people, plus German, Italian, and Irish immigrants, added a colorful and boisterous diversity to life in the entertainment districts of Kansas City in the West Bottoms and the adjacent North End. The North End included downtown and residential districts to the east and west. Wealthy Kansas Citians resided on stylish Quality Hill, with lavish mansions and fashionable hotels overlooking the West Bottoms. All this and more the ambitious Jim Pendergast observed with great interest, for he had no intention of remaining a foundry worker for very long.
In the early 1880s, Jim entered the tavern business in the West Bottoms. According to local and family legend, he named his first saloon after a horse, for he supposedly gained his start-up costs by betting and winning a large amount of money on a gelding named Climax. That story, repeated over the years to the point that it is accepted as gospel truth, has a certain poetic ring of authenticity about it, though no such establishment appears in the Kansas City business directories from that period. Records do indicate that Jim purchased the American House, located at 1328 St. Louis Avenue, from one John Porter in 1881.
The American House, which had a prime West Bottoms location near the Union Station, was a two-story combination saloon, boarding house, and hotel. With thousands of railroad passengers daily passing through and laying over waiting for connections to their destinations, the blocks around the station contained the heart of Kansas City's red-light "tenderloin" district. A mecca for vice, the blocks surrounding the bustling train station kept Kansas City's fledgling police department busy. One short stretch of a commercial street featured twenty saloons, and every morning Kansas City's finest routinely picked up drunks from the gutters for transport to the holding tank at police headquarters.
The West Bottoms, a Kansas City version of San Francisco's famous Barbary Coast and the Bowery in New York, contained large and prosperous vice interests. Cowboys, travelers, transients, and townspeople provided ready customers for numerous bawdy houses and gambling dens. Well-known madams with glamorous images achieved celebrity status. "Hell dances," which featured half- and totally naked women who mingled with male audiences, took place openly night and day in dance halls. Almost anything was available for a price. Gaming was a way of life. Flamboyant professional gamblers were local heroes, routinely fleecing country bumpkins. Bunco, floating crap tables, and even the old shell game flourished around the station. Saloons offered roulette and poker. Almost every evening a carnival atmosphere prevailed along the crowded streets, with barkers and shills tantalizing passersby with visions of all sorts of delights. Here was an environment that the ambitious Jim Pendergast found suitable to his needs.
That Jim won big enough on a horse race to buy the American House seems far-fetched. Probably he either saved the money to start his new business or received a loan from gamblers. Kansas City bankers, a conservative lot, would not likely have loaned money for the purchase of an established business to a young foundry worker who had little collateral and who openly gambled. In any event, Jim must have appreciated the dangers associated with owning a tavern in a rough part of town, for in 1884, at age twenty-eight, he purchased for forty dollars a lot in Mount St. Mary's Cemetery on Kansas City's east side.
From the beginning, Jim Pendergast's American House featured gambling devices and rooms upstairs available for short assignations. He soon enlarged the business, adding the address next door, 1326 St. Louis Avenue. In what was an early manifestation of Pendergastism, Jim's American House acted as an informal bank: a steady stream of packinghouse workers came to either cash their pay vouchers or borrow money.
The banking function proved a shrewd move, for it greatly enhanced the business and gradually yet significantly increased Jim's influence in the West Bottoms. In 1884, "Big Jim," as a growing number of friends and acquaintances affectionately called him, attended the Democratic City Convention and, primarily because he was there, found himself elected as one of eleven delegates chosen to represent the "Bloody Sixth" ward in the West Bottoms. Certainly not the real start of a political career, this represented a minor and temporary honor at best. Nonetheless, it allowed the Pendergast organization to trace its origins back to 1884.
Big Jim focused his immediate attention on pressing personal business and family matters. In 1886, he married Mary Kline Doerr, a woman ten years his senior with a young son, Frank, from a previous marriage. Business boomed, and Jim's younger siblings soon began coming down from St. Joseph to help out. As Jim continued to expand his saloon up the 1300 block of St. Louis Avenue, his brothers John and Michael and his sisters Mary Anne, Josephine, and Margaret all moved into rooms in the American House. Jim and his new family lived close by. John and Michael both tended bar at some point, but by 1889 Michael had obtained a job as a clerk in the Jackson County recorder's office, a post that began his long public career and his practice of law. Jim's sisters and his new wife helped with the restaurant and performed domestic duties in the hotel. Young Tom occasionally appeared on weekends to visit and to do odd jobs at the American House. He later traced the start of his Kansas City experiences to 1889, when he was seventeen.
Big Jim gradually increased his political activity. Kansas City had a cumbersome mayor-and-two-house city legislature system. The mayor appointed key department heads and had a veto. In the city legislature, commonly called the council, under the 1889 city charter, the upper house, elected at large, and the lower house, elected by ward, each had fourteen members. Population increases ultimately caused the addition of two more members to each house. Almost all the West Bottoms was in the reconstructed First Ward, and the business mix there made it the most important ward in the city Aldermen from the West Bottoms seized the opportunity to exercise influence far out of proportion to the number of permanent residents and registered voters in their ward.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Pendergast! by Lawrence H. Larsen, Nancy J. Hulston. Copyright © 1997 The Curators of the University of Missouri. Excerpted by permission of University of Missouri Press.
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