#jim tully

[ladailymirror]

June 23, 1947: Jim Tully, hobo author of "Shanty Irish" and "Beggars of Life" dies at 56.

June 23, 1947: Jim Tully, Hobo Novelist and Prizefighter, Dies at 56

[handeaux]

Two Cincinnati Orphans Bonded As Hoboes, But Chose Very Different Paths

Around 1890, a couple of boys ended up at the St. Joseph Orphan Asylum in Cumminsville. One was Jim Tully and the other Gabriel Sullivan. They soon became inseparable and everybody knew them as Tully and Sully.

Sully was born in New Orleans in 1885. His father died when the boy was barely one year old and his mother died five years later. Sully and two siblings were shipped off to Cincinnati under the care of an aunt, who abandoned them to the streets when she did not receive the pension she expected for her services. Sully was barefoot, selling newspapers in the snow, when a tender-hearted woman investigated his circumstances and managed to enroll him and his siblings at the orphanage.

Tully was born in St. Mary’s, Ohio, in 1886. His family were considered to be “shanty Irish.” Jim’s mother died when he was just six years old and his father, an alcoholic ditch digger, surrendered Jim to the orphan asylum.

The pair were leased out by the orphanage to a farmer, who treated them like slaves and so they ran away. Sully was about 14, Tully 13 or so. They lived the hobo life, riding the rails from one end of the country to the other. They slept where they could find a comfortable spot and they ate what they could get by begging, odd jobs and larceny.

(Today, we tend to use hobo, tramp and bum as synonyms, but in the late 1800s and early 1900s, each term had a distinct connotation. A hobo traveled around and was willing to work. A tramp traveled but avoided work. A bum neither traveled nor worked.)

Sully was known for his hot temper and occasionally had to fight his way out of situations that his smart mouth got him into. Tully was more analytical and realized he could make a quick $5 or $10 by taking his fights off the streets and into the boxing ring. Paul Bauer, who co-authored a 2011 biography of Tully, observed:

“He was an untrained boxer, to be sure, but he was fearless. He was willing to take punches, to take punishment, all to get inside and score hits. Despite having some success, he had seen men die in the ring. He had seen 'em blinded in the ring. And I think he realized that this was not a career he was going to carry into middle age.”

Tully was known as a “library bum,” the sort of hobo who knew every library in every little burg and hung out there when he wasn’t chasing a freight train out of town. The idea grew on him that maybe someday he could become a writer. Tully decided to leave the road behind and to give his literary endeavors some attention. He returned to Ohio and settled in Kent, landing a job at a chain factory. At 23, he married 18-year-old Florence May Bushnell, daughter of a house painter. He began writing for the local papers, first occasional poetry, eventually freelance articles. His byline graced the Kent Tribune and the Akron Beacon-Journal.

Sully, too, grew weary of the hobo life. He found his way back to Cincinnati, got work as a painter and boarded with a widow named Anna Hand [no relation to your columnist]. In 1912, he married Anna’s adopted daughter Nellie, who worked in a cotton factory. Sully was 27, Nellie 22.

Sully was a union painter at a time when there were few protections for organized labor and his temper got him into some scrapes. He was arrested in 1914 on charges brought by advertising magnate Philip Morton, who claimed that Sully and an accomplice assaulted him because he hired non-union sign painters. The charges were eventually dropped, but Sully’s reputation as a union enforcer was secured.

A year later, Sully’s temper took him one step over the line. He was part of a gang that attacked non-union painters working on a new building at Christ Hospital. While most of the gang carried blackjacks, Sully brought a pistol. The Enquirer [10 December 1915] reported:

“Revolver, knife, blackjack and gas pipe were used by a gang of five unidentified men yesterday afternoon when they attacked nonunion painters at the new $300,000 annex to Christ Hospital, Mt. Auburn. The police say strike trouble caused the assault. One man was shot and died half an hour later. Two others sustained multiple bruises and cuts about the head.”

The dead man was James Shall, 26. His killer was Gabriel Sullivan. Sully made a full confession with no attempt to blame anyone else.

“I saw Shall on a step ladder. When he saw me with a gun he jumped down and attempted to pick something off the floor. I grabbed his wrists and in the tussle I fired twice. It was my own gun. I didn’t mean to shoot Shall, but was told that the men carried guns in the building.”

Sully confessed without benefit of counsel. He pleaded guilty to a charge of second-degree murder on the advice of a Cincinnati police officer. Judge William A. Geoghegan sentenced Sully to life in prison. For the next ten years, a number of people expressed sympathy for Sully and worked to get him pardoned.

Among his supporters was Tully, who by then had taken his writing career to the West Coast, where he built a reputation as a hard-hitting Hollywood reporter and the author of some best-selling novels based on his vagabond years with Sully. Sully told the Cincinnati Post [26 January 1925]:

“Jim wrote to me all the time when he found out where I was. The fellows in the State House used to save magazines for me when they had stories by Jim in them. He sent me his two books, too.”

In prison, the hot-headed Sully gained a reputation as a model prisoner. Those “fellows in the State House” were the aides and secretaries in the offices of the Governor and Secretary of State. As a prison trusty, Sully was assigned to duties in the State House. With personal access to Governor Alvin Victor "Honest Vic" Donahey and celebrity endorsements from Tully and his Hollywood pals, Sully was pardoned after just nine years in the Ohio penitentiary.

Tully went on to write nine novels, three volumes of autobiography, a travelogue, two plays and hundreds of articles, mostly unvarnished profiles of movie stars. Early in his career, he was Charlie Chaplin’s personal secretary. Among his friends were W. C. Fields, Jack Dempsey, Damon Runyon, Lon Chaney, Frank Capra, and Erich von Stroheim. So thoroughly had he immersed himself in Hollywood culture that, when he died, aged 61, all the newspaper obituaries claimed he was just 56 years old.

Sully went on to live a very long life, dying at the age of 90 in Cincinnati. He returned to his former career as a painter, retiring after many years as a member of the facilities crew at Dunham Hospital.

As shoeless orphans, as shiftless vagabonds, who could have predicted the divergent paths Tully’s and Sully’s lives would take?

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Dugan turned to Cheyenne Shorty, an ex-sheepherder, now half-insane from long association with sheep. Shorty if sober. He was Often, at dusk he would crawl on his hands and knees and bleat at the sky like a sheep.

"Shorty, you defend One-Lung. You're about the type of lawyer a tramp would get in another court."

"Thank you," smiled Cheyenne.

"We will now open the court with prayer. 'Frisco Eddie, lead off. Bow your crummy heads, brothers."

Frisco Eddie's cracked voice began:

"O Lord, Our Heavenly Father of the first well-known hobo, Jesus, look down upon us who are about to com- mend an immortal soul to Thy great care! Thou great befriender of working-girls, Who showest them the way to spend their six dollars a week wisely, and to resist temptations of the flesh, we ask Thee for divine guidance for what we are about to do.

"If we unduly throw this soul in Your face, Lord, it is because we do not know what in the hell to do with it. We realize, dear Lord of us all, Your position in this most trying moment. Neither would we, as humble vagrants along the eternal shore, be guilty of sending one to You whom You could not easily make use of. A stool-pigeon of the first order, Lord, he would keep holy the dark places of heaven, and bring before Your divine officers the indiscretions of Your most beautiful angels. For beauty has ever been tempted, dear Lord, on earth as it is in heaven.

"Lucifer the proud, in all his glory, will not be arrayed in more of Thine eternal salvation than One-Lung. It is true that there may be those who go to Thy everlasting arms of resting need no mourners here below. Rather they should be joyful and sing hosannas in Thy great name.

"A brand snatched from the burning, Lord-a poor soul in Thy blessed image made weary from shooting his own kind. You have ever been on the side of the down-trodden, Lord. You make the spuds to grow near the jungle and the chicken to wander free from care into our willing hands. You help us in the gathering of food for our slum-gullions. You allow us to wander on the open road and give us the blessed benediction of Heaven.

"For is it not true, dear Lord,

"That beggars who walk And Queens who ride To the Valley of Skulls, Sleep side by side"?

"It is a beautiful night, Lord, upon which to die. The stars and the moon and the beautiful river shall sing his threnody. And Lord, if one of us should be shuffled off the gallows to dance with broken arches before Thy throne, it would not be amid such beauty. Rather would the knot be tied behind our left ears, Lord, and as we fell through the trap, dear Lord, the knot would jerk our heads forward and break our immortal necks, dear Lord. We would hang like a cracked scarecrow, All-merciful Lord, while a doctor listened to our hearts pounding their way on the road to Your blessed arms, dear Lord.

"But, Blessed Lord, we are not as those men who do such deeds. We profess no creed, dear Lord. We are but humble servants in Thy name. Ours is a gentler method, Lord. It comes suddenly, Lord. The soul of the departed flies suddenly before You from a hole which a bullet makes. It is more lenient, Lord. There is dignity in death by a bullet...."

"Shut up!" snapped Dugan. "Do you think you're the only one He's got to listen to?"

'Frisco Eddie resumed: "For they who taketh up the Smith and Wesson must die by a Colt, for so it is written, ever and anon, before dinner and after, from now on, Amen."

Weak, bearded, and grimy chins were lifted. Bodies moved. Feet scraped over the hard ground. A drunken derelict yelled,

"Amen - Hobo Ben Chased a pig an' caught a hen!"

"Choke that crummy noose-dodger, some one," commanded Nitro Dugan.

A scuffle followed. A body fell.

'Frisco Eddie chanted dolefully:

"It matters not, so I've been told, Where the body lies when the heart is cold."

"Come on, let's start the trial," cut in Dugan. He smiled urbanely at the detective and asked, "What have you to say before sentence is passed upon you?"

"Sentence? Good God, you're a gang of yeggs! Who the hell are you, to try an officer of the law? You can't do it. Even if you were honest men. I haven't been tried yet."

- the hobo's prayer, from Jim Tully, "Jungle Justice," in Joseph Lewis French, ed., Gray Shadows. New York: The Century Co., 1931. p. 52-54.

(Tully was himself a former hobo and writer of popular stories in the 1920s based upon his vagabond life in North America.)

[chaplinfortheages]

Charlie and publicist Jim Tully, during production of “The Gold Rush”, 1924.

I believe autograph reads: 

“To Garrett Graham the world’s greatest promoter from the King of Laughter and his Secy of War Jim Tully 1924”.

Jim Tully became one of the first reporters to cover Hollywood. As a free-lancer he was not constrained by the studios and wrote about Hollywood celebrities

He wrote a series of articles printed in “New Movie Magazine” aptly titled - The Unknown Charlie Chaplin.  Charlie tried to have them stopped to no avail.

Movie Magazine July  1930 (x)

Movie Magazine August 1930 (x)

[ladailymirror]

June 23, 1947: Jim Tully, Hobo Novelist and Prizefighter, Dies at 56

June 23, 1947: Jim Tully, Hobo Novelist and Prizefighter, Dies at 56

Note: This is an encore post from 2005 and originally appeared on the 1947project.

For me, stumbling across Jim Tully is one of those wonderful accidental discoveries that are a byproduct of research. He’s as obscure and forgotten today as he was famous in the 1920s. (His name has appeared exactly once in The Times in the last 20 years).

An Irishman with a natural gift for storytelling, Tully…

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[louisebrooks19061985]

Louise with Arlen and the writer Jim Tully on the set of ‘Beggars of Life’

[books0977]

A Dozen and One. Jim Tully. Hollywood: Murray & Gee, Inc. 1943. Advance proof, bound in dust jacket.

Tully’s last book, A Dozen and One (1943), includes an introduction by Damon Runyon. It features biographical portraits of 13 famous people he encountered during his life including Chaplin, H.L. Mencken, Jack Dempsey, Clark Gable, Diego Rivera and others.

[books0977]

Biddy Brogan's Boy. Jim Tully. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1942. First edition. Original dust jacket.

"Biddy Brogan, the son of Irish immigrant parents, grows up the hard way... Biddy takes to the road, doing migrant farm work in Wyoming; prize fighting in Arizona, Mexico, and California; and writing for a newspaper in Ohio. After each stint, he returns to his sister's comfortable world, until he finally settles down to a life of writing."