The
best tippers ("fish") and the worst ("snakes") were well
known to porters, by occupation and name. Grooms were fish, to impress their
blushing brides. Musicians were skinflints, actors marginally more
philanthropic, journalists sugar daddies. Baseball players - especially Babe
Ruth and Jackie Robinson - were cheapskates. They let off steam by punching the
stuffing out of their pillows or lathering windows with shaving cream - and
left the porter not a penny. Ditto for boarding school brats. Valets held on to
money their masters intended for tips. Drunks and hookers were almost as
generous as mobsters. So were salesmen, moms with kids, Jack Dempsey, and
nearly everyone who rode the Twentieth Century Limited. Sammy Davis Jr. would
hand over twenty dollars "as soon as he looked at you," agreed
porters who waited on him, but pals Peter Lawford and Jack Benny were snakes
who snuck out the back door. George M. Cohan, Morton Downey, "Diamond
Jim" Brady, and Humphrey Bogart were grand, Jay Gould miserable. Old man
Rockefeller would hand over a mere penny; his wife discreetly added a dollar.
Japanese were the most generous foreign businessmen, followed by Englishmen,
Frenchmen, Italians, and Russians. Adhering to the adage "watch what I do,
not what I say," porters themselves tipped big after eating in the dining
car.
?
No
one tipped bigger than Mrs. H. J. Heinz, heiress to the ketchup kingdom. Soon
after boarding she laid out her demands: wrap my coat in cloth before hanging
it in the closet, apply my silk bedding, find four bottles of Poland Spring
water, and bring me twenty towels. That sounded simple enough to Garrard Wilson
"Babe" Smock, George's youngest brother. He suspected his ward was
special when a fellow porter offered twenty dollars to switch assignments. But
he was crushed when, after a weekend of special service, she left him tipless.
A month later Smock's wife, Bertha, called with the explanation. "She said
there was a man at the house with a truckload of groceries from the Heinz
Company," Babe recalled. "There were six cases of Heinz ketchup,
along with cases of peas, corn, baby food, and the rest of the 57 varieties
Heinz had. I gave food away to neighbors up and down the street."
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That
was one in a series of unusual rewards Smock got during twenty-seven years with
the Pullman Company. A washer and dryer came courtesy of the vice president of
Bell Telephone in Chicago, who was grateful that Babe tried to help his son
stop stuttering. A horse was the tip from a TRW executive, while a furniture
store owner in Kansas City told him to pick out anything he wanted for his
living room. It was a thank you, Babe said, for "having me do certain
things for him. He had diarrhea and he poo pooed all over everyplace. I had to
clean it up."
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A
different sort of cleaning up was required with American presidents who rode
Pullman cars, and not all showed their gratitude. Ulysses S. Grant and Calvin
Coolidge were renowned tightwads. Rutherford B. Hayes would give a dime or, if
the porter persisted, a quarter. Chester Arthur, by contrast, was "one of
the freest tippers in the East." As a senator, John F. Kennedy commuted by
rail between Washington and Boston and was known as a half-dollar guy,
especially if the porter remembered to put a board under his bed to ease his
aching back. Ronald Reagan was "the cheapest of them all," even after
his shoes were shined to a spit, but his traveling companion, the actor Robert
Young, compensated by being doubly generous. In the fashion of Boston politics,
U.S. House Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill and Mayor James Michael Curley tipped
liberally to garner votes of porters, along with their families and friends.
Tops in the political set was First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who in 1939 was
crowned "most generous" by the Dining Car Employees Union.
Larry
Tye "Rising from the Rails" (2004)
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