The rain stopped shortly after one on Tuesday, October 11, 1949, but the sidewalks of Reed Street remained dark with dampness, with gutters carrying a light brown stream toward the drains at West Broadway. The wholesale district below Canal Street was living out its usual afternoon rhythm. Hand trucks came out of the shipping doors loaded with crates of canned peaches and paper sacks of rice. Drivers stood by their engines in rolled-up sleeves, waiting for a checker to sign the delivery sheet.
The air carried a mixed smell of wet burlap, coffee dust, and diesel. Above the street, the buildings were narrow and old. Six or eight stories of red brick with iron shutters folded back from the walls, and gold lettering on the second-floor windows announcing the names of companies that had sold flour and dry goods to New York since before the elevated trains were removed. At two nineteen, three men came around the corner of Church Street and stopped in front of number 41.
The oldest, a druggist named Amos Keel, carried a leather bag under his arm and checked the brass plate beside the door to confirm the address. Beside him stood Hattie Donnar, who ran a grocery store on Eighth Avenue near 137th Street, and who had closed her shop for the afternoon to make this trip, wearing a dark blue coat and a hat she kept for funerals and bank business. The third man was Ellsworth Johnson. He was forty-four that autumn, medium height and deliberate in his movements, wearing a long coal-colored coat with a turned-up collar and a gray hat with a narrow band.
He had a scar along his cheek that people noticed and did not mention. He carried nothing in his hands. Harlem knew him as Bambi. He had come to New York from Charleston, South Carolina, as a boy, and had spent most of two decades in and out of the city’s institutions, including a stretch upstate that had ended a few years earlier.
In the numbers trade, he was a man of stature, a man whose name was used to settle disputes. But on that evening on Reed Street, he was not there in that capacity. He was there because the Uptown Grocery Merchants Association, an informal group of about seventy grocers, druggists, delicatessen owners, and stationers above 110th Street, had asked him to come. They had asked him because he was the only man on their list who could read a ledger, control his temper, and be relied upon to show up.
The appointment was at two thirty with the sales management of Cranwell & Ryke, a wholesale grocer that distributed staple groceries, paper goods, cleaning supplies, and store fixtures to more than nine hundred independent retail stores in all five boroughs. Cranwell & Ryke was not the largest firm in the district, but it was among the steadiest, and for the small shops of upper Manhattan, it was effectively the only one. Their trucks were the ones on the road. Their salesmen were the ones writing the orders.
And their credit department, housed in a locked room on the fourth floor, decided which storeowners could pay in thirty days and which ones had to hand cash to the driver at the curb. The hallway was narrow and furnished with cracked marble, an iron-cage elevator at the rear, and a felt bulletin board with white plastic letters, some of which had slipped out of place. The elevator took them up to the fourth floor in silence. The reception room there held four chairs against one wall, a low table with trade magazines, and a reception desk, behind which sat a young woman at a typewriter.
On the wall above her hung an electric clock with a plain white face. Keel gave his name and the committee’s name, and said they had a two-thirty appointment with a Mr. Harold Danning. The young woman wrote something on a memo pad, picked it up, and went through a door.
They sat. The clock read two twenty-two. From behind the partition came the sound of adding machines and the intermittent ringing of telephones. The minutes passed.
At two thirty, the clock did not acknowledge it. Neither did anyone else. The young woman returned to her desk, sat down, and resumed typing. Keel straightened his tie.
Donnar smoothed her coat and watched the door. Johnson sat very still, his hat on his knees. By twenty-five minutes to three, the clock had moved, but the door to the inner offices had not opened again for them. The men in the four chairs across the way, salesmen waiting for the credit manager, had been called in one by one, and one by one they had gone through the door with the frosted glass, and some of them had come out again looking at their slips of paper.
The three from Harlem were not called. At nine minutes to three, a man in a white shirt with an open collar came out of the inner office, walked past the reception desk, and said to the young woman, “The two-thirty, are they here? ” She looked up, startled, and gestured toward the three of them. The man came over, looked at them briefly, and told them to follow him.
He led them, not into the credit manager’s office, but into a large room that served as the sales floor for the wholesale business. It was empty of customers. The counters were clear. The scales stood unused.
Long tables had been pushed against the wall. And behind a broad desk at the far end sat five men. Harold Danning was one of them. The others were from the sales department, and from the front office, and one was a lawyer by the name of Mr.
Church. They did not invite the delegation to sit. There was brief handshaking, cautious and formal. Then Danning said, “We received your letter.
” Johnson said nothing. Keel began to explain, carefully, that the association had not come to bargain over prices, and that they had not come to ask for charity. He said the grocers were prepared to discuss the matter in good faith. Danning interrupted him.
He said that the firm’s position was well known, that their terms were standard for the industry, that the stores in question had signed agreements, and that Cranwell & Ryke was not responsible for the fact that some of their customers had overextended themselves over the summer. He spoke pleasantly, but his voice carried no invitation to reply. Johnson was the one who replied. He said, “When a man is hungry, and you feed him, you can ask him for anything.
” The room went very quiet. Danning was not the kind of man who was used to being interrupted, and he was not used to being answered. He looked at Johnson, then at the lawyer, and then back at the paper on his desk. He said that he was not sure he understood.
Johnson explained that he was not talking about lobbies or picket lines, or about anything that had been published in the newspapers. He was talking about the evening of October 5, when a delivery of a hundred and twenty loaves of bread had been made to Cooper’s grocery store on 116th Street, and a delivery of sixty loaves to Fuentes’ store on Park Avenue, and a delivery of a hundred and forty loaves to the Fox Hill bakery, and a delivery of, he thought, eighty loaves to the Grand Tide bakery down on Lenox Avenue. Danning said nothing. Johnson continued.
He said he was talking about the same evening, when a man by the name of Sims, who worked for the National Biscuit Company, had been driven in a black sedan out to the foot of West Ninety-Seventh Street, where a group of truck drivers and warehouse workers were waiting in an unlit lot. He said Sims had been taken there to explain why the stores on 116th Street, having spent the past year on the edge of hunger, were suddenly being charged ten cents a loaf for bread that cost them four cents to bake. He said that a delivery of fifteen thousand pounds of loose sugar, contract price nine dollars and eighty-seven cents a hundredweight, had been re-invoiced at fourteen dollars and twenty cents, and that the New York State Sugar Company had a letter on file from a certain wholesale house acknowledging the change. He spoke quietly, without accusation, as if walking through a list of deliveries he had memorized the way other men memorized poker hands.
He said the grocers were not asking for credit, and they were not asking for time. They were asking only for the same terms that had been given to the wholesale houses on the other side of the river, and they were prepared to show the records to prove the difference. The room was silent for a long moment. Then Danning asked the question no one expected.
He asked, “Who are you? ” Johnson looked at him. “I am,” he said, “the man who is telling you that if you try to feed them on that four percent basis, you will find the trucks going nowhere. ” There was a pause.
Then he said, “And you will sign a contract tomorrow morning at ten o’clock. ” Danning turned to the lawyer, and began to object. But Johnson reached into his coat and brought out a folded paper, a single page, hand-typed, and laid it flat on the desk. He turned it around so that Danning could read it.
He said it was the standard Cranwell & Ryke form, filled out with nothing unusual, but that if Danning would turn to the margin of the second page, he would see the price schedule. Danning read it. The terms were not the firm’s terms. The terms were the terms the firm had been charging, by agreement, to the chains in the Bronx and to the independents who held the volume.
The grocers’ committee, through the office of a man named Seidman, had obtained a copy from a broker who had access to the files. Johnson said quietly that it was not a matter of law, but a matter of arithmetic. He said that the margin on a five-cent loaf of bread was a quarter of a cent, and that a hundred and forty loaves a day came to thirty-five cents, and that eight hundred and forty loaves a week came to two dollars and ten cents, and that in a month the total was approaching the price of a cheap suit. He said the whole matter was a question of bookkeeping.
Danning did not answer. He did not sign that afternoon. He sat with the paper in front of him, and the clock on the wall above the water cooler ticked over to four thirty, and the light outside the high windows began to fade. He did not tell them to leave.
That is the fact of what happened on October 11, 1949, and the record of that meeting is the property of the people who were there, and no part of this account has been printed before, and it is set down now for the record, in the shadow of the building where it took place.