Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) (11 page)

‘The people have strayed, and God is put out and provoked, and He has plunged us into war as a test and a trial, a punishment. It’s time for the locusts and the plague of boils. Famine! Food rationing! Why, it’s all foretold. “The tongue of the sucking child cleaveth to the roof of his mouth for thirst. The young children
ask
for bread, and no man breaketh it unto them. They that did feed delicately are desolate in the street.” People eat too much, anyway. We need a famine or two. Personally, I’m a dead-set vegetarian. There’s nothing so fine in the eating line as a good green vegetable – root, stalk, and leaf. The pictures stuck up in front of these theatres along here are a scarlet shame and a purple disgrace. Grown women with their stomachs showing. Why, their very navels are showing. It’s a vexation to the men. It puts thoughts of a certain nature in their minds. Sodom and Gomorrah, that’s what it is. “Rock of ages, cleft for me; let me hide myself in Thee.” My name is Daddy Hall, and I love you one and all. If suicide is on your mind, give me a ring. I’ll tell you what to do. Write it down – Circle 6–6483. Look at that poor brother. He’s certainly under the influence; he’s trying to walk on both sides of the street at once. I reckon he was bit by the brewer’s dog. He looks like he had quite a tilt and a tussle with the brewer’s big hungry dog. At this hour of the night, all over town, the people are pouring it in – rivers of highballs, rivers of cocktails, whole train-loads of distilled damnation; they’re just about washing their faces in it, the boozy, bedaddled old buzzards.

‘A pickpocket I converted here the other day told me they have a school out in Chicago, a pocket-picking school, and the beginning rule they teach is “No stimulants!” Have to keep their heads clear. Why, friends, you set a bucket of beer in front of a pig and he’ll grunt and walk away. Highballs! Cocktails! Winston Churchill! I read in
Life
where it said he drinks a quart of champagne a day and nobody knows how much Scotch whiskey in between. Thinks nothing of it! Just like a Christian man drinks buttermilk. A pig won’t touch it, nor a pickpocket, but Mr Churchill, he’ll get right down and wallow in it. A fine example for the soldier boys! Oh, yes! Oh, yes! The city of New York is just about ready for a great religious upswelling. It’s a bud, getting bigger by the minute. Pretty soon now it’s going to bust wide open and blossom. People are slapping the dust off their Bibles, and regretting their misdeeds, and getting ready for the wrath to come. Back before Pearl Harbor there wasn’t much use passing out tracts on the street. People would throw them down and trample on them. Now they fold them up
and
put them in their pockets. That they do. It’s coming! It’s on the way! My name is Daddy Hall, and I love you one and all …’

Hall kept this up, even while crossing streets, all the way down to Broadway and Forty-second. There, hoarse but happy, he rolled up his banners and called it a night. ‘I warned them,’ he said to a policeman. ‘I put the fear of God into them. Now I’m going home, and I’m going to eat me a big Bermuda onion and drink me a glass of pure, God-given water. And I’m going to bed. And during the night, if there’s a doomsday rumbling in the earth and a flicker of fire in the sky, I’ll be ready.’

Hall has a sound reason for believing in the imminence of a religious upswelling in the city. Off and on, ever since he came here, he has been in the habit, in the course of his street sermons, of announcing his telephone number and inviting people in trouble to call him. ‘I’ll comfort you,’ he says. ‘I’ll preach you an old-time sermon on the telephone.’ For seventeen years there was no response. Finally, one morning in December, 1939, a stranger called. He was worried about his daughter. She was sixteen; she had gone out with a sailor without permission, she had drunk some beer, and so on. He asked Hall to pray for her soul. Hall did, then and there. Later in the day the man’s wife called and put the wayward daughter on the telephone. Hall gave her such a rampant description of hell that she began to sob and dropped the receiver. The wife picked it up and said, as well as Hall can remember, ‘Why, Reverend, you made her cry! Why, she’s crying like her little heart will break. Thank you! Oh, thank you so much! I’m
so
grateful.’ ‘Don’t mention it, sister,’ Hall told her. ‘If you have friends or neighbors with trouble on their mind, tell them to phone me. Pass the word around.’ The woman said she certainly would. Next day Hall got four calls from strangers, all wanting a telephone sermon. The third day, according to his records, he got seven. The fourth day he got sixteen. ‘All of a sudden, among the humble and the heavy-hearted,’ Hall says, ‘the fame of Daddy Hall began to spread like wildfire. One told another. Something like a chain letter. Wheels within wheels.’ One of his converts, a scrubwoman, got so interested that she commenced leaving anonymous notes – ‘There is a message
for
you at Circle 6-6483’ – on desks in the office building in which she worked at night. She got other scrubwomen to do the same. When the recipient of one of these notes called, Hall would begin, ‘Yes, siree-bob, friend, I do have a message for you. Are you prepared to die? Are you ready for the shroud and the box, are you ready for the Judgment Day?’ Then, if the caller did not snort and hang up, Hall would preach a brief, violent sermon.

Day by day, the number of calls increased. In a couple of years, Hall was getting around seventy-five a day. He was overjoyed. From 6
A.M.
until 7
P.M.,
he sat beside his telephone, going out to preach in the streets only at night. ‘Things went along real smooth,’ he says, ‘until the Monday after Pearl Harbor. That day I preached until my jaw got stiff. There wasn’t a moment’s letup. The instant I put the receiver down and caught my breath, the phone rang again. I preached I think it was eighty-three sermons in a row, some over five minutes long, and then my head began to swim. I took the receiver off the hook and went in and flopped down on the bed, all wore out.’ Presently an investigator from the telephone company knocked on the door, aroused him, and told him that scores of people had complained that they got only a busy signal when they dialled his number. Hall sighed, went to his telephone, and started in again. In the morning he summoned to his apartment six of his disciples, all elderly women who make a practice of handing out his tracts and all lay preachers; they agreed to come to his rescue and take turns on the telephone.

Nowadays, Hall seldom preaches on the telephone more than a couple of dozen times a day; he saves his energy for his saloon harangues and his nightly journey down Broadway. His disciples, who model their sermons on his, handle most of the calls. In return, he gives them carfare, an occasional grassy meal, and his blessing. The most zealous is an Englishwoman named Frances Woodcock. She comes in from Queens each day and preaches from around 8:30 until 11:55 in the morning. Then she hastens around the corner to the Gospel Tabernacle, a Fundamentalist, nondenominational mission on Eighth Avenue, in whose work Hall is a believer, and plays the organ at the noon meeting. Frequently she returns in the afternoon. The sole male helper is Joseph Serafin, an
elocutionary
Rumanian, who is renting agent for an Eighth Avenue loft building owned by the Tabernacle. He drops in whenever he has an hour or two to spare. Calls are answered constantly from 6
A.M.
until midnight, when the receiver is removed. Hall says that more than a hundred and fifty thousand sermons have been preached over his telephone since December, 1939. He estimates that around one-fourth of the callers are curiosity seekers, practical jokers, or the victims of practical jokers. Many of these victims are under the impression that horse-race bets are taken at Circle 6-6483. One practical joker spoke double-talk. After listening to him for a few moments, Hall exclaimed, ‘Speak out, man, speak out! What
are
you, anyhow, a Mohammedan?’ Finally he summoned Serafin, who was in the adjoining room, eating a head of cabbage. ‘Come here, Serafin,’ Hall said. ‘I think I’ve got a poor Mohammedan brother on the wire. He seems to be in sore distress.’ Serafin, who is more worldly, listened for a moment or two and then explained double-talk to Hall. ‘I fixed that brother,’ Hall says, cackling. ‘I interrupted him and shouted at him in Latin until he got mad and told me to go to you know where.’

Hall quizzes his callers, and has come to the conclusion that the majority are repentant backsliders. ‘They
had
the old-time religion,’ he says, ‘but somewhere along the line they lost it. The war makes them ache to find it again. ‘Turn over a new leaf,’ I tell them. ‘Repent. Pray. Read your Bible. Find an old-time church and go to it. Don’t go to one of those Fifth Avenue churches that all they have is weddings.’ The most of them are hungry to confess. Oh, my! Some confess to sins I never even heard of before. I hear things I wouldn’t discuss with
any
body, not even another preacher. Some call from saloons; while I’m exhorting I can hear the racket from one of those monstrous nickel phonographs a-coming over the wire. Some are lonely, some have sons fighting across the water, some have consciences that hurt and hurt, some are unwed girls that got in a family way after heeding a rascal’s promise, some are booze-fighters, some are studying suicide. Oh, I get
more
people now days that are studying suicide.’

Some of Hall’s more desperate callers insist on conferring with him face to face, and most mornings there are a few sitting in his
living
room, waiting to be admitted to his study. Hall lives in a cold-water tenement at 360 West Forty-fifth Street, paying $30 a month for five small rooms. He has been there for twelve years. He has one of those rear flats whose entrance is through the kitchen and whose windows overlook a blind court with a single, sooty ailanthus tree in it. His telephone has nine feet of cord; in winter it is kept on a stand near the coal range in the kitchen and in summer it is moved to a desk adjacent to a window in the living room. The telephone costs him only $3.54 a month; since he is a clergyman, he gets a reduction of twenty-five per cent below the basic rate. Hall’s study is cluttered. In it are an enamelled iron bed, a radio, a bureau, a couple of straight-back chairs, three tables, and a pigeonhole cabinet which holds bales of tracts. Leaning against the wall in one corner are three collapsible cots. Hall is acquainted with scores of itinerant colporteurs and evangelists, and when they are in New York they sleep in his flat. Sometimes he has so many guests that there are not enough cots to go around and he has to spread pallets on the floor. There is a typewriter on one table, and a great rat’s-nest of correspondence and manuscripts. Hall is editor of a tiny monthly magazine, the
Church Militant
, which sells for a quarter a year and has thirteen hundred subscribers. The policy of this paper is extraordinary – it favors prohibition, savings banks, osteopathy, and women preachers; it opposes church suppers, vaccination, bingo, and aspirin tablets.

Under the iron bed is a pile of newspapers, mostly tabloids. Hall rarely buys a newspaper; these were picked up by his disciples off subway seats. He says that when the pile gets large enough to bother with he goes through it and clips out stories proving that the wages of sin is death, such as stories about women suicides and electrocutions at Sing Sing; he has two bureau drawers full of clippings. One wall is covered with snapshots of Hall converts. On another wall are two oilcloth signs. One says,
‘LOST: A HUMAN SOUL OF UNTOLD VALUE. ANYONE BRINGING SAME TO CHRIST WILL BE RICHLY REWARDED.’
The other says,
‘CIGARETTE SMOKERS WILL PLEASE CRAWL INTO THE STOVE AND OPEN THE BACK DRAFT.’
Hall is an enemy of tobacco. ‘My daddy was murdered by the tobacco trust,’ he says. ‘He was a cigar smoker and he dropped dead long before his time.’
Hall
occasionally marries couples in his study, most of whom came to know him by way of the telephone. The study is cleaned for weddings, but not often otherwise. A disciple once pointed at one of the windowsills, on which grit and dust was half an inch thick, and said, ‘That’s a mess if ever I saw one. Why don’t you dust it off?’ ‘I don’t dust off windowsills,’ Hall said indignantly. ‘I dust off human souls.’

Hall’s outlook on life is a product of the grayness of the Reconstruction period in the South. He was born in 1864, during the winter of the fourth year of the Civil War, in Greenville, Alabama, a small county seat. His family has been in the South since pre-Revolutionary days. His father’s forebears came from Scotland, his mother’s from Holland. The family, once affluent, was impoverished by the war, in which Hall’s father, Dr James Woodward Hall, served as a Confederate Army physician. ‘I had a real stony childhood,’ Hall says. ‘I was one of eleven children, and there was never enough to go around, duds or vittles. I didn’t wear shoes until I was eighteen, except Sundays and cold spells. I went through the fifth grade, living on grits and greens, and then I had to stay home and plow cotton. I plowed with an ox. There weren’t any mules in that country when I was a young un; the Yankees had shot them all to entertain themselves. We had a hard, hard time.’ Hall was tutored at night by his mother, who had what he calls ‘a rock-bottom Latin and Shakespeare education.’ When he was twenty, he quit the cotton fields and became a schoolteacher.

In Anniston, Alabama, in 1888, he had his first memorable encounter with sin. ‘I was teaching in a boys’ school and rooming and boarding at a hotel, the finest in town,’ he says. ‘Some show people by the name of Graw’s Dixieland Grand Opera Company came to Anniston and put up at my hotel. I had never been to the theatre and I took a foolish notion to go. I don’t know what possessed me to do so. I’m not what you’d call narrow, but oh, my! I was shocked! And that night, back in the hotel, those strutty show women were up and about until fully 2
A.M.,
a-giggling and a-carrying on. I suspect they drank. I looked out my door and saw one a-tiptoeing down the hall in her nightshift. Her hair was down.
It
was long, yellow hair, more gold than yellow. I believe until this day that she was on her way to some man’s room. I still pray for her; I
do
hope she reformed. Next morning I got on my knees and asked God to forgive me for going to the theatre, and I asked Him to make me a preacher, so I could go forth and fight such wickedness.’ Hall says that he has never been in a theatre again. He takes great pride in this. Recently, on the Forty-second Street crosstown trolley, he heard one woman say to another, ‘I haven’t been to the theatre in months.’ Hall leaned across the aisle and said, ‘Sister,
I
haven’t been to the theatre since 1888.’