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THE ORPHAN OF RICSE
25
It was early evening of an autumn day in 1888. The downtown business district had not yet closed up shop and gone home to dinner, but darkness had begun to fall; and all the windows glistened with that new metropolitan marvel, electric lights. In the foreground at Number One Broadway stood the pioneer twelve-story skyscraper, highest office building in the world; a tower of luminescence. Adolph Zukor carries to this day a memory of the exaltation which bathed his soul.
Let us look him over as he steps ashore. Not long afterward he had his photograph taken, and a print survives. It shows a comely, swarthy-skinned boy with bright, expressive eyes — hazel brown in the flesh — firm brows, a nose just slightly aquiline, a mouth which closed as tight as a trap, a round, compact head with a thatch of close-cropped, raven-black hair. This runs to a “widow’s peak” in front and seems formed to match a pointed depression at the middle of his upper lip. He had not yet reached his full growth; and he was never to reach five feet four inches in stature. But it was a finely formed little body, both wiry and rugged. His small feet, even now, point straight forward like an Indian’s; and he can walk forever.
Already, as this brief narrative proves, he had begun to show the courage with life, the judgment and the ambition which made his subsequent career. Whence first sprang the ambition — in the unaspiring atmosphere of Ricse — one would find it hard to say. Such traits,