Radio mirror (Nov 1936-Apr 1937)

RADIO M IRROR Told at Last! How Wayne King Found Romance (Continued from page 31) one night not long ago when I sat talking with him and his wife. "Sometimes," he said, "I_ look at my son asleep in his crib and hope with all my heart that he'll never have to undergo any of the bitterness and struggle I knew as a child. And then sometimes, almost with my next breath, 1 think, 'Fellow, I hope life does kick you around. You'll learn something no happiness or love or money can buy you. You'll learn what the really good things in life are.' " At seven Wayne King was partially supporting himself. At seven, when he should have been playing outdoors after school to strengthen his slight-framed body, he was spending his afternoons in the drudgery of sweeping and mopping a suite of doctors' offices, a daily job that took him until well after dark. He worked because he had to. His mother had died four years after his birth in Savannah, Illinois, in 1901. His father, an itinerant boomer railroad switchman, found it impossible to keep his family together so he sent the two older boys to live with relatives and took little Wayne along with him on his trips from town to town to seek temporary employment. IT was a half-a-loaf life for a child, changing schools and boarding houses and jobs and acquaintances every few months and being alone most of the time. Wayne learned early how to look out for himself. It was a good thing. For at nine years — nine, mind you, when most kids that age are entering the fourth grade — he was left entirely on his own in El Paso, Texas. The youngster quit school to earn his bread and butter and shelter. He sold newspapers, worked in a laundry, washed dishes in a Chinese restaurant until daybreak every morning, did a host of odd jobs to pay for his food and the two dollars weekly that entitled him to a pallet in the stuffy low-ceilinged attic of an El Paso rooming house. "The bitterest recollection I have," he said to me, "is the period between the time I was twelve and fifteen. For three years I never had enough to eat. I was slinging a pickaxe all day trying to be a big fellow and do a big fellow's work, and in the evening I'd come home so ravenously hungry, so famished I could have eaten half a dozen dinners. I needed food those years not only because I was doing hard physical labor but because I was growing, shooting up like a weed from a boy into a man. "Sometimes I'd be so tired I couldn't walk all the way home; I'd lie down in a park or vacant lot to sleep a while. And of all the things that can make you feel unwanted in this world I think having a cop bang you across the soles of your shoes with a night-stick and say 'Get up, kid, go on!' is the worst. I was used to rough treatment but to be regarded as a common bum was something that cut me to the quick. It happened several times and it would strangely depress me for days afterward. That's a horrible thing for a youngster to experience." After four years away from books and lessons Wayne went back to grammar school at fifteen, worked his way through high school. His chief diversion when he had time for diversion was practicing on an old clarinet his father had once given him. He'd never studied music but he had a knack for picking out tunes that seemed to grow by leaps and bounds on SAVE at Faddy PkicU Oven that "Floats in Flame" Prize Winnersat Expositions and Fairs the country over praise Kalamazoo Quality, and "the oven that floats in flame." Read about this amazing oven in NEW catalog. Mail Coupon Today tor NEW, FREE Wood Ranges CATALOG Write your name in the coupon below for the bigger, more colorful Kalamazoo FREE Catalog — just out. Nearly 200 Styles and Sizes Get FACTORY PRICES for New Coal and Wood Heaters, Oil Ranges, New Porcelain Enamel Coal and Wood Ranges, New Combination Gas, Coal and Wood Ranges, New Gas Stoves, Furnaces. 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