Real Lace (11 page)

This last figure sounds the saddest of all. After three months' suspension,
Time
took over the
Digest's
250,000 unexpired subscriptions.

Funk & Wagnalls—and the Cuddihys—at least still had Emily Post and
Etiquette
. And, as someone had commented at The Players Club on the day the news was released of the
Digest's
sale to the
Review of Reviews
, “All I know is that when R. J. Cuddihy lets go, you know that the cow has been milked dry.”

Chapter 7

THE ORIGINAL BUTTER-AND-EGG MAN

The Cuddihy family tree becomes a rather confusing one to contemplate, not only because of the profusion of children and grandchildren, but also because one is required to remember that Mr. R. J. Cuddihy's daughter, Mabel, married T. Burt McGuire, and one of his granddaughters, Mary Jane (Lester Cuddihy's daughter), married James Butler MacGuire—no kin, different spelling—which makes the tree sprout with a collection of both McGuires and MacGuires, and which union (the Cuddihy-MacGuire union, that is) brought the Butler family fortune into the wealthy Murray-McDonnell-Cuddihy family complex. One way to sort out the McGuires from the MacGuires is to remember that the MacGuires today are all descendants of both Grandpa Murray and Grandpa Cuddihy, while the McGuires are descendants of Grandpa Cuddihy only.

The MacGuires, meanwhile, would be nobodies if it had not been for Grandpa Butler. James Butler was born in County
Kilkenny in 1855, where the Butlers had been farmers for fifteen generations. The original Butler, it is said, was a Norman officer who came across with William the Conqueror. He was William the Conqueror's butler, and the French branch of the family is called Le Boutillier. In 1328 a Butler was created Duke of Ormond, and lived in Kilkenny Castle, and the American Butlers today use (for this somewhat tenuous reason) the royal Ormond family crest. James Butler's antecedents, however, were not royal, but the family must have had some small amount of property, and were not impoverished tenant farmers, because when James Butler emigrated to the United States in 1875 at the age of twenty he had inherited a hundred pounds (then about five hundred dollars) from an uncle, and had received some education at the parish schools near his family's farm outside the village of Russelltown. This small nest egg was sufficient, when he came ashore in Boston, to keep him in an inexpensive rooming house—and not force him into one of Boston's notorious cellars—while he looked for a job.

Because young James Butler had been a farm boy, he first went to work for a farmer named Dresser near Goshen Mountain, Massachusetts, where he started out tilling land with a hoe. One of his brothers, meanwhile, had also come out of Ireland and had gone to Urbana, Illinois, to work in a railroad hotel. After a year or so behind the plow, James Butler followed his brother there and got a job in the same hotel as a steward. From there he went to Chicago, where he joined the staff of the Sherman Hotel, working in the kitchen and learning a bit about the purchasing, preparation, and storage of food. Gaining confidence as a hotel man, he next went to New York, to work for the old Windsor Hotel, where he was given the job of preparing President Grover Cleveland's first inaugural banquet. “I was the busiest man in the United States that night,” he used to say of the experience. (Twenty-four years later, he would decline an engraved invitation to President Taft's inaugural, saying, “I don't even like to think about inaugurations!”)

From the Windsor, he moved on to the old Murray Hill Hotel, and he might well have remained a hotel man for the rest of his life had he not moved into a rooming house operated by the mother of a young ex-reporter named Patrick J. O'Connor. Patrick O'Connor was a melancholy fellow who had been told by his doctor that he must get into some business that was less “nerveracking” than newspaper work. O'Connor had opened a small grocery store, but in the evenings, around the boarding-house dinner table, he moaned and complained about how poor business was. “It's in a bad part of town,” he would say sadly, “and I can't afford to move to a good one.” Finally, James Butler had had enough of this, and said, “O'Connor, stop complaining. How much do you need to move to a good part of town?” O'Connor replied that he would need at least two thousand dollars. James Butler, who, even then, was exercising a trait for which he would become famous—a dislike of spending money, and a habit of squirreling away every penny he could in savings banks and mattresses—said, “All right, I'll stake you.”

Together, the two new partners scouted for a new location, and found one at 857 Second Avenue. Since both partners were Irish, Butler suggested that they paint the storefront green, and the little green-fronted grocery store called P. J. O'Connor & Company opened for business on September 2, 1882. For a while, James Butler wore two hats, buying food for the Murray Hill Hotel and groceries for the store, but as the store with the eye-catching front began to prosper and to consume more and more of his time, he quit the hotel business and gave his full energy to groceries. In 1883 the partners bought a second store and painted it green at Tenth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street, and a year later James Butler bought his partner out. He was twenty-nine years old, and his own man.

At the outset, his stores—now called James Butler, Inc—were designed to offer quality merchandise at more or less carriage-trade prices. Butler stores offered generous credit, and made deliveries.
But as he expanded—with a third green-fronted store, and then a fourth—he decided that credit and deliveries were “a lot of damned nonsense.” He cut out the nonsense, slashed prices, cut out deliveries except to a few housebound old ladies, and concentrated on quantity sales at a small margin of profit. To keep his overhead low, he staffed his stores with just two, or at the very most three, young clerks, and to keep his overhead even lower, he hired only young Irishmen—many of whom he would buttonhole as they came down the gangplank—who were eager and hungry and would work hard for small wages. As his profits increased, he bought more stores. By 1909 he owned or controlled two hundred stores, all painted green, doing $15 million worth of business a year. He had become not only the first, but the largest, grocery-chain-store operator in the United States and had acquired, in the process, a considerable amount of New York real estate. By 1929 James Butler was personally worth more than $30 million, an impressive gain on his original investment, and in the summer of that year he outwitted the stock market by selling $1 million of property at peak, pre-Crash prices. Before he was through, there would be eleven hundred stores.

In 1883, James Butler had married a sweet-faced Irish girl named Mary Rorke, who bore him, all told, eleven children, only four of whom survived birth or childhood diseases. All that child-bearing must have taken its toll, because Mary Butler died in her early forties. But the loss of his wife was the only thing that occurred to mar his dream, which, he often said, had from the outset been a fourfold affair: “To become rich, to raise a family, to own a stable of thoroughbreds, and to add to the glory of the Catholic Church—with a good room in Heaven waiting for me at the end.” James Butler's first horse had been a mare that he had ridden on the farm back home in Ireland, and it is said that a love of horses is in every Kilkenny man's blood. In 1894 he bought his first trotter, which he named Russell T. (after Russelltown), and he began
driving in amateur races. When, in the early 1900's, he bought 350 acres of rolling Westchester farmland, and built himself a huge Victorian country house, surrounded by porches, on the property which he christened “East View Farm,” he bought more trotting horses and began shipping them off to races at Belmont Park, on Long Island. Mr. Butler—who, now that he owned a big estate in Westchester, liked to be called “Squire Butler”—was not overly generous with his wife in terms of money, nor did he believe in betting on his own horses. But whenever his wife wanted money to buy something for the house, or for herself, or for the children, he would give her a tip on the horse likeliest to win, and see that her bets were placed properly. She usually won. In those days there was no parimutuel system, and bets were placed with bookmakers who skulked around and about the racetrack. At the family breakfast table, Mrs. Butler would inevitably ask, “Well, what shall we pray for today, dear?” “Pray for good weather and a fast track” was his usual reply.

Shipping horses all the way from Westchester to Long Island was, the Squire soon realized, a costly business. There must be a cheaper way. The cheaper way led him to acquire, in 1902, the land on which to build what he named the Empire City Racetrack, in nearby Yonkers. At first, Empire City offered only harness races, but Squire Butler decided that there was more money to be made in racing thoroughbreds, and so he switched to that. This immediately put Squire Butler at loggerheads with the New York Jockey Club, which, having supreme control over New York racing, refused to give him a license. The Jockey Club was also one of the strongholds of New York's Protestant Establishment, and James Butler was an Irishman, a Catholic, and an outsider to the little circle. Led by such New York bluebloods as John Sanford (of the Bigelow-Sanford carpet fortune) and Harry K. Knapp, the club went out to do battle with the doughty Squire, never suspecting that they might have met their match. Butler
complied with every legal requirement for operating a thoroughbred racetrack and, after a court battle that lasted from 1904 to 1907, he won. Needless to say, James Butler became the first figure in thoroughbred racing who was never asked to join the club. “To hell with them,” he used to say.

Empire Gty soon became known as a “homey” track, plain and comfortable as an old shoe, quite the opposite of the fancier and more social Belmont. It offered thoroughbred racing for the common folk, but it quickly became one of the most profitable tracks in the East. Some of its profitableness was directly due to its owner's now-famous economies. It became known as “The little track beside the water tower,” and it faced Yonkers's Central Avenue. When the buildings and the fence around the track needed painting, Mr. Butler directed that only the side that was visible from the avenue be painted; the sides that could not be seen received no paint. On dry days, the crowds from Empire City would emerge at the end of an afternoon of racing covered with dust, because Squire Butler would not buy a watering rig. When, at last, he decided that he would have to buy a rig or lose attendance, he bought one, but he personally supervised every watering operation, periodically shouting to the man in charge, “Don't waste my water! Don't waste my water!” In the early days of Empire City, a band would appear to play “The Wearing of the Green” whenever a Butler horse won. But when the band became too expensive, Squire Butler fired them all. When someone asked him, “Who'll play ‘The Wearing of the Green' now, Jim?” he replied, “The crowd can whistle it.” Though he was a millionaire, he always drove to the track in an ancient and dilapidated Ford car that terrified his passengers and that he refused to turn in for a new one.

With his Empire City Racetrack, the Squire began buying race horses in quantity, the way he bought groceries for his stores. He was out to prove, he said, that fine horses could be bred and raised
in the Northeast as successfully as they could in the traditional “bluegrass country” of Kentucky and Virginia, and he proved it. Among his more successful horses were Direct and Directum Kelly. Directum I, a pacer, and son of Directum Kelly, sold for $40,000 in 1915. The Squire had paid $8,250 for Direct, who went on to become the unbeaten champion of old-style sulky racing. Driving King Direct, one of Direct's descendants, Mr. Butler himself broke the world's amateur sulky racing mark by doing a mile in 2.0475 minutes. Other noted thoroughbreds were Pebbles, Spur, Sting, and Questionnaire, the last of which won both the Empire City and Brooklyn Handicaps, plus the Metropolitan in 1931, and the Paumonok at the opening of the 1932 racing season at Jamaica. Between the years 1914 and 1933, Butler horses won a total of $649,573. Squire Butler's favorite horse was Sting, and in 1925, after Sting had won a number of important races, Mr. A. C. Bostwick, through an intermediary, offered Mr. Butler $125,000 for him. Butler replied, “That's a nice offer, but you tell Mr. Bostwick that there are a lot of men in the world who have that much money but there is only one man who has Sting. I wouldn't take a million for him. I'm a sentimental Irishman, and Sting will stay here until his dying day.” Stay Sting did, and after his dying day a bronze statue of him was erected on the lawn at East View Farm.

Other horse breeders, jealous of the parvenu Mr. Butler's great success and noting his pronounced penuriousness, liked to circulate stories that he fed his horses short rations, and that he would rather see a crate of Butler eggs spilled on the sidewalk than see a race horse pampered or overfed. But no one who really knew him could say that his love of horses was not genuine, even though he was well aware of the value of each of them, and watched the performance of each with a hard eye on the ledger sheet. He once turned “white as a ghost” when handed the news that three of his prize horses had been killed simultaneously by a bolt of lightning. “All men are equal, on the turf or under it” was one of his favorite
sayings. No one could deny, either, that the Squire was tightfisted. One of his business tactics was to have periodic picnics for his grocery clerks at Empire City. After the picnic, the “boys” were instructed to “clean up the place,” which they did, enabling Mr. Butler to charge the cost of the outing as a business expense for “rubbish removal.”

At one point a rumor got around—circulated, no doubt by jealous rivals in the grocery business—that Mr. Butler was in the habit of “levying” a dollar a day on each one of his stores (the implication was that there was something evil and un-American in the practice). “Ridiculous!” said Mr. Butler indignantly. “If I had a store that didn't pay me more than a dollar a day, I'd close it.” He was, on the other hand, lavish in his spending when it came to horseflesh and racetracks, and he eventually acquired a large share of Laurel Park, in Maryland, and helped put up the track at Juarez, Mexico, where he once spent a pleasant afternoon chatting with Pancho Villa.