Al Capp Read online

  In his memoir, Al Capp Remembered, Elliott Caplin recalled his older brother attempting to demonstrate the device. Alfred slipped and cursed; he was held on his feet by Butcher. He shook off Butcher’s support and promptly fell to the floor. Tillie Caplin screamed. “Shut up, Momma,” Alfred said.

  “My brother never mastered the art of walking with a wooden leg,” Elliott Caplin wrote. “He would sway precariously with every step like a damaged airplane making an emergency landing.”

  Later in his life, when he was a wealthy comic strip artist with a face instantly recognizable from magazine covers and television appearances, Al Capp would speak of a recurring nightmare in which he fathered a son born with one leg. One might escape the immediate effects of an accident such as his, but its residual effects were never distant.

  In the first years following the accident, Alfred grew intimately acquainted with just how much he’d lost. He could make light of the fact that, as a marginally gifted athlete, he would no longer embarrass himself on the playing field. But there was no joking about what the loss of a leg meant to his choices in career or even his relationships with others. His limitations were spelled out every time he took a step or tried to negotiate stairs.

  Bitter realities and lessons hit him in unexpected ways. For instance, he was always aware that his parents had very little money. It was a reality he accepted without much thought—until, that is, he lost his leg. When something went wrong with his prosthesis, and it often did, he couldn’t simply consult with the company that sold him the leg. That would have eaten more money than the Caplins could afford. Of course, the fact that Otto Caplin hadn’t been making timely payments on the leg didn’t help, either. So, instead of having the leg repaired by a specialist, Alfred would take it to a garage where an automotive mechanic would put it back together properly.

  Then there was the issue of growth. Alfred’s right leg was growing at the normal rate; his left leg, fashioned out of wood, was going nowhere. By the time Alfred was reaching his teen years, one leg was substantially shorter than the other. His walking, awkward to begin with, became almost grotesque.

  There was also the problem of shoes. Alfred wore out the sole and heel of his right shoe at a very quick pace, due to the exertion placed on his “good” leg, whereas the left shoe wasn’t nearly as worn. As an adult, he’d buy three pairs of shoes at a time, storing or tossing out a couple of the left shoes while wearing out the right ones, but this wasn’t an option when Alfred was a boy.

  The physical problems compounded the psychological suffering that Alfred did his damnedest to deny. He would be able to shrug off a lot of it in later years, but he felt isolated at the time, removed from his friends and schoolmates, with no hope of ever really belonging. He addressed this feeling in a brief autobiographical fragment, written in 1922 and 1923, and published posthumously in the collection My Well-Balanced Life on a Wooden Leg. In the fragment, “The Autobiography of a Freshman,” Alfred wrote about living an Eden-like existence for his first ten years, when he had companions and an uncluttered life in the garden. That changed dramatically when he lost his leg and suddenly found himself outside the garden gate:

  To this day, I sit at the gate, vainly waiting for the day when I may enter. Sometimes the children come to the edge of the gate and speak a few words of pity to me—but not for long. They hear the call of health and, hastening back, resume their play.

  By the time he began attending Central High School in Bridgewater, Connecticut, Alfred was aware that he would never be regarded the same as his male classmates, especially when it came to dating. He was as rowdy and obsessed with girls as the next guy, but as he later complained, “My rooster toughness and rowdiness was forgiven with sweet understanding [by the girls] when all I wanted was the same thrilled contempt that was accorded two-legged rowdies for the same behavior.”

  To be successful, he decided, he would have to trick girls into seeing him as normal. But since he gave himself away as soon as he took a step or two, he had to come up with a way to be noticed while he was standing stock-still.

  He began staking out street corners. A favorite was on the corner of the city’s busiest intersection, at D. M. Read’s Main Street storefront. He’d lean against the building, looking as cavalier as any other smart-ass high schooler, and call out to girls in passing cars or to those going by him on the sidewalk. Alfred considered it a victory if someone turned back and gave him a withering look. It would be a great day if he received several of these.

  It was a technique that, by its very nature, was bound for failure. A time would come when he’d have to move, and later in life, Capp would recount one of these failures in a story whose tragic irony is almost too perfect to believe. The question of accuracy doesn’t lessen its impact, though.

  One day, while he was holding down his preferred spot, the boy’s ritual took a new and intriguing turn. Three teenage girls pulled up in a car nearby and, waiting in traffic, presented Alfred with an opportunity. Alfred shot them a look—a leer, as he would describe it. Two of the girls would have nothing to do with him, but one, to Alfred’s delight, smiled back. Then she did the unthinkable: she dropped her school pad out of the car window and into the street. It was a ruse; the girl wanted him to retrieve the pad and hand it back to her. Alfred froze, unwilling to hobble out to the street. The car moved on. The pad stayed in the street.

  When it was safe to move, Alfred limped away from the building and picked up the pad. The girl’s name and address were written inside, which, under other circumstances, would have been nothing less than a triumph. For Alfred, there were logistics to consider. The young woman hailed from the wealthy section of town, where all the houses had porches or verandas, with steps leading up to them. On flat ground, Alfred could at least make a noble effort to walk like the average Joe; steps required his reaching back and physically pulling his left leg to the next step. If she were to witness this … well, it wouldn’t be good. But could he really pass up this rare opportunity?

  Alfred, in the end, concluded that the rewards might be worth the risks, especially if he could minimize the chances of her seeing him negotiate the steps. The plan he hatched was simply to call the girl, arrange the meeting, show up before the agreed-upon time, and try to make it up the stairs and onto the porch before he was noticed. He’d wait until the appointed time, they’d meet, and, if all went well, they’d spent the evening on the veranda.

  The early portion of the arrangement went without a hitch. Alfred called and explained that he wanted to return her pad, preferably tonight, and she invited him to drop by at seven o’clock for a glass of lemonade. Alfred arrived at the girl’s house fifteen minutes early. He made it up the stairs without attracting any attention, and shortly before seven he was sitting on the veranda, waiting for her to come out.

  His perfect plan blew up on him when she opened the door a few minutes before their scheduled meeting time, started outside, saw him, and stopped abruptly. She said nothing for a few moments. She finally told him that she couldn’t see him that evening; she had somewhere else she had to be. She thanked him for his trouble and asked him to leave the pad on the chair. That said, she turned and walked back into the house.

  Alfred didn’t try to call her back.

  “It would have been too much for both of us to bear,” he wrote in his account of the incident,

  for we both had been playing the same game. I had arrived early so she would not see me walk. She had planned to be waiting on the porch so I would not see her walk. For in the instant of her turning away at the door, I had seen the stiffening of her shoulder, the outthrust movement of her hip—the sure signs that she, too, of all sad, shy girls on earth, had an artificial limb.

  Alfred tried to compensate for the loss of his leg in a variety of ways, in his youth and throughout his life. To build upper-body strength, Alfred, too poor to own barbells or dumbbells, developed a workout program that involved hoisting a piano bench high above his head, over and over,
until, in time, his arms, shoulders, and upper back developed enough muscle tone to help with his self-image.

  Not that he would ever be considered small or frail. He had a thick but not especially overweight physique, with broad shoulders, a barrel chest, and meaty arms; his waist, though far from tapered or undersized, seemed to fit the rest of his frame. It was his head that you noticed: it appeared to be a size too large for the rest of him—leonine, as writers would describe it on more than one occasion later in his life—and it was made to look even larger by his coarse black hair. Alfred took special pride in his hair, even if its grooming seemed to be a challenge a bit out of his range. Years later, in a magazine interview, he’d tell an interviewer that he had nightmares about losing his hair, that he’d actually drawn self-portraits of what he might look like if he went bald. Toward the end of his life, when his health was fleeing and he found it difficult to take a normal breath, he would mutter impatiently about how his hair was thinning.

  Ultimately, though, it was the strength of his intellect and formidable wit that would carry him through. He could lurch down the street, his artificial limb squeaking and, at the worst of times, locking up or falling apart, but he could rely on his wits to bail him out of awkward situations.

  It all came down to attitude. There was no point in pretending that he wasn’t different. What he needed to do, he decided, was to have a sense of humor about it.

  In time, he would use his situation to help others. As an adult, he worked as a volunteer for organizations devoted to people with similar challenges. He acted as the honorary national chairman of the Sister Elizabeth Kenny Foundation, an organization dedicated to assisting people with disabled or missing limbs. He created an autobiographical comic book and poster addressing the way he lost his leg and how he moved on from it, for the Red Cross, both distributed to World War II amputees. He tirelessly visited army and navy hospitals, giving pep talks and personalized drawings to GIs.

  Over the years, whenever he learned that a young person had lost a limb, Capp would send a letter, typically in care of the patient’s hospital, working in conjunction with the Sister Elizabeth Kenny Foundation. Receiving a personal letter from such a luminary, especially one with a similar handicap, was no doubt a significant morale booster to distressed young patients and their distraught parents. In a typical example, from 1964, Capp wrote, in part:

  Dear Chip,

  I understand you have lost a leg and of course you are not exactly happy about it. I was about your age when I lost mine, and I have learned a few things since then which you probably have not yet had time to find out for yourself.

  The main trick is not to keep remembering what you’ve lost, but all the rest you have left. When you can do that, other people will too, not just because they are afraid of hurting you, but because it just won’t be important … I will not tell you that your artificial leg will do the job of a real one, any more than glasses are better than eyes, but it does a pretty darn good job … Of all the major misfortunes that can happen to the human body, the loss of a leg is perhaps the least. I don’t expect you to know that now, but you will know it.

  One of his favorite anecdotes, repeated many times over the years and preserved in a cartoon in the Saturday Evening Post, as well as an entry in My Well-Balanced Life on a Wooden Leg, involved a stay at the posh Savoy Hotel in London. A room-service waiter had visited his room to take his breakfast order, and as Capp gave it from his bed, the waiter looked down and saw Capp’s artificial leg, wearing a shoe and sock, sticking out from under the bed. When he realized that Capp had caught him staring, he made as good a recovery as anyone could have expected.

  “Very good, sir,” he said to Capp when he had completed his order. “And what will the other gentleman have?”

  2 Young Dreams and Schemes

  The marriage of Al Capp’s parents, Otto Caplin and Tillie Davidson, was arranged in the Lithuanian shtetl of Yanishok, a tiny hamlet a stone’s throw from the Latvian border.

  For thirty years, Capp tried to learn something about “Yaneshek,” as he spelled it, which had disappeared from the map. Whenever he was in New York and had a Russian-sounding cabdriver, he’d ask the cabbie if he knew of the town. His persistence eventually paid off. A driver knew of the village, which he described in a single line: “If you walked to the center of the town and bought a lemonade, that was a big day in Yanishok.”

  Yanishok, Capp decided, was probably like the hamlet depicted in Fiddler on the Roof—groupings of huts and a synagogue. The Jews there lived meager existences based largely on survival. In a village such as this, the only hope was to escape to America.

  Capp envisioned the day that his grandfather Sam Cowper, a young peddler of some education, heard from three cousins living in New Haven, Connecticut. The cousins had moved to the United States, established themselves, and, over time, pooled together more than enough money to bring Sam, his wife, and their two-year-old son, Otto, to New Haven. The money he needed—and more—was enclosed in the letter.

  Overjoyed, Sam repaired to the local tavern, where he hoped to share the news of his good fortune with friends. No one was around. The only people in the bar were a half-deaf bartender and a customer so ancient that some villagers already figured him to be dead. Sam ordered a drink and waited. After a while, Rabbi Fivel (Philip) Davidson entered, aiming to enjoy his customary beer, compliments of the house. Sam asked the bartender to pour him a vodka.

  The rabbi sipped on his drink and listened as Sam told his story. He, too, had relatives in the United States, in New Jersey, but they didn’t have the money to bring him over.

  The conversation turned to their children. Sam spoke of his little boy, Otto, while the rabbi talked glowingly of his daughter, Matilda, who was the same age.

  “Any Jewish father would be proud to have his son marry your daughter,” Sam told Rabbi Davidson. “That father would never have to worry about his boy growing up in such a strange place as America, knowing that, at 21, that boy would marry the daughter of Rabbi Fivel.”

  The ritual played out to its desired conclusion. Sam offered to lend the rabbi the money he needed to move his daughter to America. It was only right and proper: after all, his family had sent him more money than he needed. The rabbi was a man of God.

  After a token rejection of Sam’s offer, the rabbi tearfully accepted it, but only under two conditions. First, he would repay the loan, with 6 percent interest, within five years. Second, Sam’s son and his daughter would marry on Matilda’s eighteenth birthday.

  The two shook hands, completing the transaction. Sam gave the rabbi the addresses of his cousins in New Haven.

  The two men’s lives took very different paths after they moved to their new country. Rabbi Davidson settled in New Jersey, and over the years he worked his way to the highly respected position of chief rabbi of Newark. As Al Capp would remember, his maternal grandfather’s word was law. No one of the faith in that community was married, got divorced, or began a business partnership without his prior approval.

  Sam Cowper changed his name to “Caplan” (which would later be changed again to “Caplin”). He, too, continued the career he’d had in the old country. He pushed a cart through the streets of New Haven, selling dry goods, working every day from dawn to dusk until he had saved enough to buy his own store. As Capp would remember, his paternal grandfather’s early years in the store were characterized by success and expansion—until, that is, he discovered the works of Alexandre Dumas. To that point, he’d read virtually nothing but the Talmud, but he quickly determined that the swashbuckling adventures described in The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, and other Dumas novels were much more exciting. He was hooked. Capp recalled seeing a photograph of his grandfather, cutting quite the figure with his long, Russian-style hair and beard, seated outside his store, reading Dumas rather than waiting on customers. He went out of business, his store purchased by creditors. Even then, he had the chance for a new beginning. He had eno
ugh left from the sale of his store to open a small apron-manufacturing plant, but he took little interest in it. He stayed home more and more, and his wife, who knew nothing of aprons, took over. This place, too, was taken over by creditors. With the money left over from the sale of the plant, Sam bought a two-family house in a middle-class neighborhood in New Haven.

  Al Capp revered his paternal grandmother—“my favorite creature,” he’d call her—and the way she endured the foibles of her husband reminded him of the way his own mother dealt with the shortcomings of his father. Like Capp’s own parents’, his grandparents’ marriage had been arranged when both were children. The relationships of both couples would later be essentially reflected in their “Li’l Abner” counterparts, Mammy and Pappy Yokum. If his grandmother was unhappy, Capp didn’t notice. She might not have been a good enough cook to tempt a starving man, and she might not have known the first thing about how to balance a ledger or run a business, but she showered her grandchildren with unconditional love.

  And that, to little Alfred Caplin, was more than sufficient.

  Otto was his parents’ great hope: bright, witty, good-looking, and seemingly ambitious. When he enrolled at Yale to study law, they were certain they had the family’s first American success story on their hands. By the time he began attending Yale in the fall of 1908, Otto was courting Matilda Davidson. As far as Al Capp knew, neither of his parents ever dated anyone else. Otto and Tillie Caplin married before the end of Otto’s freshman year, and Tillie soon became pregnant.

  Alfred Gerald Caplin arrived on September 28, 1909, just a few weeks after fall classes at Yale began for Otto’s second year. Otto hadn’t registered. Instead, saying that he needed more money to support his family, he took a job as a traveling salesman, hawking industrial oils. His son would never believe his father’s version of that story. Instead, he preferred to think that his father took the job as a means of escaping a new family, a wife who was becoming increasingly addled with every new addition, and responsibilities that weighed heavily on his carefree nature.