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Show BROADWAY AND MAIN STREET An Old St. Christopher Medal And a Bashed-in Pullman Car I By BILLY ROSE Ordinarily, knowing what editors expect of me, I don't devote much space in this column to stories of faith, devotion and other such unhep subjects. However, I bumped into a yarn the other night that did nice things to my spine, and here 'tis, even though it's as corny as a chorus of "Hearts and Flowers. . . ." Some years ago, a dancer named Jean Armstrong (note to Ed. that's her square monicker and she's given me permission to use it) came down with a ruptured appendix, and by the time they got her to the hospital, peritonitis had set in and the doctors didn't eive her much rhanro The following day, the nurse handed her a string ot rosary beads. A little girl tried to get in to see you this morning," she said. "Her name was Sylvia, and she said her mother moth-er was a friend ot yours. When I told her you couldn't be disturbed, she luggage the case was gone. She notified the desk and, when that didn't produce results, reported the loss to the police. But when the unit pulled out of Baltimore , on Saturday night, neither case nor beads had been found. , In Pittsburgh the next week, the show got bad notices and folded, and as if that weren't enough, the manager skipped with the salaries. A few days later, down to her last three bucks, Jean considered herself her-self plenty lucky when a local agent offered her a job in a Miami nightclub. night-club. She was given a ticket car 16, berth No. 1 on the 7.22 out of Pittsburgh. At 7 o'clock the dancer left the hotel, but a couple of blocks from the depot she noticed something on the sidewalk and picked it. up. It was a string of rosary beads and, attached to it, a medallion of St. Christopher. JEAN DIDN'T KNOW then, and she doesn't know now, whether it was the same rosary. She did know, however, that it looked exactly like the one the little girl had sent her, except for one thing the chain had been broken. As she continued on to the station, she got to thinking of the beads how sick she had been when she first got them, and how her troupe had been stranded when she had referred re-ferred to the medallion as a piece of old junk. And suddenly it seemed asked me to give Billy Kose you this. It has a St. Christopher medal on it, and the kid thought it might bring you luck." The dancer wasn't a Catholic, but she was touched by the present anyhow. And six weeks later, thanks to faith or the new sulfa drugs, she was out of the hospital. FROM THEN ON, she kept the rosary in her make-up box, but a couple of years later, after a succession suc-cession of cheap variety houses and even cheaper hotels, the beads no longer seemed very important. And one day, when one of the girls in her vaudeville unit asked about the St. Christopher medal, Jean said, "It's nothing at all. Just a piece of old junk. I don't know why I keep on carrying it." That Sunday, when the troupe checked into a Baltimore hotel, Jean put the make-up case on top of her valise and signed the regis- ter, but when she reached for her important to get the chain fixed. Up the street there was a combination com-bination hock shop-jewelry store and, forgetting the 7:22, she walked in. The jeweler worked as fast as he could, but when he handed the rosary back to her the clock said 7:30, and the dancer knew she was out of a job again. With less than a dollar in. her purse, she went back to the hotel, and a few minutes later the phone rang. It was the stage manager of "The Student Prince" which, for the umpteenth time, was playing the Nixon theater. "Heard your troupe was stranded," he said. "One of our dancers is getting married tomorrow, and if you want to fill in for a few weeks" And now for as corny a finish as ever found its way into a so-called hep column. When Jean picked up a newspaper the next morning, she read that the 7:22 out nf Pittshuroh had been side-swiped by a freight car. It wasn't much of a wreck nobpdy had been hurt because the two berths which were bashed in happened to be empty. One of them, of course, was berth No. 1, car 16. |
