A Boy Named Shel: The Life and Times of Shel Silverstein - Softcover

Lisa Rogak is the author of more than forty books. Her most recent biography was The Man Behind the Da Vinci Code: An Unauthorized Biography of Dan Brown. She lives in New Hampshire.

Chapter 1When he was five years old, Shel Silverstein taught himself to draw by tracing over the comic strips in the newspaper. His favorite was Li’l Abner by Al Capp.
He placed a sheet of paper over the strip and traced over the faces, the hands, the buildings, the scenery, everything. “The first thing I did was copy Al Capp,” he said. “He really influenced me. It was the most wondrous thing for me. Al Capp knew how to draw people, shapes, bodies, hands. He knew how to draw well, so I learned how to draw well.”
He also began to think up stories to go with the cartoons. “I didn’t have a lot of friends,” said Shel. “I just walked around a lot and made up stories in my head. Then I’d go home and write them down. That’s how I got started.”
Shel also loved books. Because he was lonely, he turned to books for companionship. “One of the things that made me happy was to go to old bookstores and look through the books,” he said. “I would hold them, smell them, and even hug them. They were my friends.”
But he didn’t have the money to buy the books he wanted. So he vowed that when he got older and had money, he’d spend it on books. He dreamed of a day when he would have so many books on his shelves that he couldn’t read all of them in a year if that was the only thing he did.
Drawing cartoons and reading books gave him something nothing else could: They gave him comfort.
“He was a lonely kid,” said songwriter Drew Reid, an old friend. “He was always aware that he was different from the other kids around him. Let’s face it, musicians, artists—anybody who’s creative—we’re all kind of wacky because we don’t look at stuff the way other people do. And Shel always knew that.”On March 3, 1891, twenty-nine-year-old Sigmund Balkany, a laborer from Bohemia, arrived at the port of New York aboard the Aller passenger ship along with thousands of other European immigrants who wanted a better life in America. He spent a few years in New York before moving to Chicago.
Rae Goldberg was born in Hungary in March of 1876 and immigrated to the United States at the age of twelve. She met Sigmund Balkany in Chicago, and they married in 1897 or 1898. Helen, their first child, was born on January 5,1899.
In 1900, Sigmund found work at a tannery, and the family of three rented a house at 911 Milwaukee Avenue near Wicker Park, in a section of Chicago known as West Town. Eastern European Jewish immigrants flocked to the neighborhood, known as a community rich with political radicalism. However, the Milwaukee Avenue corridor also had its share of gangs and violence, which author Nelson Algren described in his 1949 book, The Man with the Golden Arm, the story of a heroin addict released from jail who returns to his old neighborhood and fights to keep from succumbing to the drug again. “Louie was the one junkie in ten thousand who’d kicked it and kicked it for keeps,” wrote Algren. “He’d taken the sweat cure in a little Milwaukee Avenue hotel room, cutting himself down, as he put it, ‘from monkey to zero.’”
By 1910, the growing Balkany family had moved less than a mile west to 2235 West Potomac Avenue, still in West Town but closer to Humboldt Park and in a more residential area. It was a definite step up for the family, since the neighborhood had newer and more spacious housing stock and apartments.
Sigmund had left the tannery and opened a small grocery store, where Rae worked alongside him. Their family had expanded with two more daughters: five-year-old Esther, and Martha, who was three.
In 1916, seventeen-year-old Helen began clerking for her father at his grocery store located at 2659 Evergreen Avenue, a relatively new building built in 1912 about a mile from their Potomac Avenue home. That move didn’t last long, for Sigmund consolidated his family and grocery store and moved them both to 1458 North Washtenaw Avenue the following year, a few blocks away from the previous store. The two-story building was built in 1914 and had five apartments on the second floor and the store at street level. By 1923, Helen was in charge of running the grocery store, and she enjoyed the autonomy it gave her. At the age of twenty-four, an old maid by the standards of the day, she was in no hurry to get married.
On December 23,1924, everything changed when her father, Sigmund Balkany, died.Nathan Silverstein was born on July 1, 1890, in either Russia or Poland, the second of five children born to Abraham and Fannie Silverstein. Harry was born a year earlier, and Julius and Jack were born in 1899; a sister, Frieda, followed in 1902.
The Silverstein family’s journey to America took the form of a chain migration, where one child at a time traveled to the United States—typically, the sons went first—and once he earned enough funds to send back to the old country, another could afford to come over. Harry arrived in the United States in 1906, and Jack immigrated in 1911. Julius followed in 1913, and Nathan was the last son to immigrate, in 1915. The family initially settled in the Bronx before heading west to Chicago.
It was common for brand-new immigrants to enter the military as World War I was raging. Both Julius and Nathan signed up for the military in 1917 and were discharged in April 1918. However, the war interrupted the migration of the family, and Fannie and Frieda didn’t arrive in the United States until 1920.
By 1923, Jack and Nathan had started a bakery known as Silverstein Brothers and lived with their older brother Harry at 2601 Walton Street. Now established in their own business, they set out to find wives.
Nathan found his future wife living about a mile away.
There was little time to lose. When Nathan’s engagement to Helen Balkany was announced in the Chicago Tribune on June 6, 1926, he was thirty-six and Helen was twenty-seven; the couple was unusually advanced in years during an era where getting married at the age of nineteen meant you were over the hill. They were wed five months later on Halloween 1926, by Rabbi Julien Gusfield at the Hotel Windermere East in Hyde Park. The choice of wedding venue was unusual for a couple from the northwest side of Chicago. The Windermere, hotel residence of Pulitzer Prize–winning author Edna Ferber among others, was a pretty swanky location for a 1926 wedding.
They may have picked it because the brothers had grand ambitions for their business amidst the heady glamour and free-flowing money of the 1920s. They changed the name of their bakery from Silverstein Brothers to the Service Cake Company and began to plan for the construction of a 105,000-square-foot, one-story brick building at 834–38 North Western Avenue, which would be completed in 1930.
After they were wed, the new Mr. and Mrs. Nathan Silverstein moved in with Helen’s mother, her sisters, and a new brother-in-law at 1458 North Washtenaw. The widowed Rae Balkany was no longer running the grocery store, and instead, husband and wife Isadore and Eva Hershberg operated the store and lived with their family in one of the apartments on the second floor.
Sheldon Allan Silverstein, Nathan and Helen’s first child, was born on September 25, 1930. From the time he was an infant, Shel was surrounded by people and nonstop noise, from the families living in the other apartments to the chaos on the street below outside the store to people constantly clomping up and down the stairs and knocking on the Silversteins’ door to see if the young family needed anything.
Helen was thirty-one years old and Nathan had just turned forty when Shel was born, and his parents’ mature years—especially his father’s—profoundly influenced Shel’s childhood. The boy had to walk on eggshells around the house and tamp down the typical manic energy of a naturally curious young child whenever his father was home. He had a surplus of energy, and even as a kid he didn’t need much sleep, which would be true all his life.
The Silverstein brothers had the misfortune to open their new bakery during the first full year of the Great Depression, and the financial stress made Nathan tense and short-tempered during the few hours he spent at home each day.
With money so tight at the onset of the Depression, most days the Silverstein family ate whatever Nathan could bring home from the bakery, supplemented by Helen and Rae’s creativity. (Since they were no longer running the grocery store downstairs, they couldn’t scrounge off the shelves when things got tight anymore.) Wasting food was just about the biggest sin in the world. Nathan provided his family with day-old bread and pastries from the bakery, but of course, being a kid, Shel wanted what he couldn’t have: the rare treats.
Shel’s favorite food growing up was any creamy type of dessert, especially pudding and the custard known as junket. He was raised in a household filled with other people, where neighbors showed up unannounced for dinner because they had no food, and portion control was the rule.
“I never had enough junket,” he said. “When I was a kid, my mother used to make junket and put it into little glass dishes and put them in the refrigerator, and maybe there were six little glasses and I would get to eat one or two of them, but that was never really enough, and in my whole life I have never really had enough junket.”
Shel also wanted something more than the wax lips and bubble gum that were all most kids could afford to buy during the Depression at a penny apiece.
“When I was a kid and I had a box of that lousy stinking wax candy, I really wished I had enough money for a Hershey bar or a Mars bar instead,” he said. “That would really knock me out because I wanted that nickel candy, not the penny candy and baseball cards with bubble gum.”
Privacy and quiet grew even more scarce...