The Monopolists Page 8

  Dottie often went with her mother to buy supplies for the game, such as paper for making play money, at a little store owned by a Jewish family on Atlantic Avenue. Sometimes, when they ran out of paper for making the Community Chest and Chance cards, they improvised by using Old Maid cards on which they typed instructions such as “Go by GO and take 200 dollars.” Community chests started appearing before World War I, when businessmen formed volunteer-based organizations to pool donations from around their communities, perhaps inspiring the spaces on the board that sometimes offered players good fortune. At some point, a corner space on the board that had previously been a community park turned into Free Parking. Atlantic City hotels had started using that phrase in their marketing materials, as more and more travelers were now arriving by car rather than by rail.

  Jesse Raiford, a real estate agent and a friend of the Harveys, assisted Ruth by making little wooden boxes to use as the game’s houses. Jesse then experimented with using color sequences on the board, finally deciding to divide the properties into groups of three. Closely familiar with Atlantic City property values, he also affixed prices to the game board. Dottie was more interested in the tokens that players pulled out of their pockets to play the game—a tie clip, a penny, an earring.

  Soon, the Harveys’ card table seemed to be permanently set up for game nights, with dozens of players rotating in and out. Most were fellow Quakers, old college or boarding school friends, or unmarried women teachers. Often, the games lasted until late into the night, as the players bought properties that increased in price as they moved around the board and picked up Community Chest and Chance cards. The Harveys also loaned out their board to many of the hotels in town, including the Chalfonte-Haddon, the Marlborough-Blenheim, and the Traymore.

  The streets on the board mirrored the Quaker social network. The Harveys themselves lived on Pennsylvania Avenue, while their friends the Joneses lived on Park Place, an expensive part of town, and the Copes lived on Virginia Avenue, at the Quaker-owned Morton Hotel. Ventnor Avenue was where the Harveys had lived when Dottie was younger, and the Boardwalk was where they often went for a stroll.

  The monopoly game flourished among the Quakers of Atlantic City, who regularly hosted monopoly nights. (Becky Hoskins/Anspach archives)

  Better-off neighborhoods like Margate and Ventnor had high walls and neighborhood covenants that made clear that African American families were not welcome, even though they made up as much as a fifth of the city’s overall population. Most blacks were relegated to working service jobs, but there was a thriving black business community and a network of entertainment venues on Kentucky Avenue—or “Ky. at the curb,” as locals called it—within earshot of the segregated beaches along the Boardwalk. Kentucky Avenue had a movie theater and vibrant clubs, including Club Harlem, which often catered to white guests. On Illinois Avenue stood the Paradise Club, where the Count Basie Orchestra played, and at one end of Indiana Avenue was a black beach—until the owners of the nearby Claridge Hotel complained. Chinese restaurants and kosher eateries and shops thrived on Oriental Avenue and Pacific Avenue, the latter also home to the Post Office Building, where FBI agents would call witnesses in their attempt to take down Nucky Johnson.

  The Harveys employed a black maid, Clara Watson, whom they adored. Clara lived in one of the poorer African American neighborhoods, on Baltic Avenue, right near Mediterranean Avenue, where an economy separate from that of the grand hotels existed. Poor white residents and prostitutes also lived nearby. The placement of these poorer properties on the monopoly board reflected the harsh reality of the city—a reality that was not acknowledged in the tourist brochures or perky postcards.

  The Atlantic City streets often acted as fences, segmenting the town’s population by race, religion, ethnicity, economic status, and, in some places, sexual preference. New York Avenue gained a reputation for male prostitution and was home to some of the earliest gay bars in the country. Prostitution of all kinds was prevalent in Atlantic City, with black and white men and women selling their wares to a wide swath of customers.

  Much of the resort’s round-the-clock activity came to a halt with the stock market crash in 1929. Some families, including the Harveys, began renting out spare rooms to impoverished friends and neighbors, while others who were down on their luck found refuge in steeply discounted surplus hotel rooms, a trend which made its way onto the boards of the Atlantic City monopoly game.

  Four years later, in 1933, Prohibition was repealed, and it was hard to tell which was worse for the formerly high-flying town: the Depression or the return of legalized booze. Vacationers who used to come for the weekend now came only for a day or not at all. Most of the major hotels were running deficits, and ten of the fourteen local banks buckled. Atlantic City had lost its competitive edge, and the lucrative schemes set up by Nucky Johnson and his ilk were unraveling.

  To make ends meet, Cyril Harvey began working as a physical education teacher by day and a life insurance salesman by night. But the Harveys’ monopoly nights, usually held on the weekends, continued, with the players talking, laughing, hollering, and arguing as always as they played the game.

  Sometimes, their arguments were about whether or not to allow the auctioning off of properties, a feature Lizzie Magie had included in her 1924 Landlord’s Game patent. In the real world, most Quakers did not care for the noise associated with auctions or that they created the potential for sellers to lie to and mistreat consumers. Thus, many around the Harveys’ table who held silence to be a tenant of their faith were against allowing auctioneering to be part of the game.

  Most Quakers considered monopoly to be a game for adults, but sometimes children joined in, usually playing with their parents as a team. And when they did, auctioneering became even more unpopular. Auctions were complicated, and most children didn’t have the skills or interest to conduct them.

  Slowly, the auctioneering option of Lizzie Magie’s game began to lose emphasis among the Atlantic City players. Just as a modified version of the Landlord’s Game had spread in Arden years earlier, so now a modified version of the monopoly game spread among the Quakers.

  Other changes to the game began developing as well. “We were in a hotel town,” Cyril Harvey later said—so the players started adding hotels to the game. Next came a space devoted to an electric company and another space devoted to the trolley—the vehicle that shuttled the resort’s pleasure seekers to and fro. “We wanted a real game,” Cyril said. “A game that fit our situation, was the whole idea of it.”

  The Harveys and their friends didn’t bother writing down the game’s rules. They knew how to play; they didn’t need written instructions. The roll of the dice was a matter of chance, but how a player reacted to that roll, along with his or her deal-making skills, determined who won the game. This very deal-making aspect of the game, however, as well as its use of still morally-suspect dice, made some players nervous about playing monopoly. One time when Ruth Harvey’s mother came to visit, the Harveys hid their monopoly board. Another time, they lied about playing monopoly, saying that they had been playing another, more wholesome game.

  •

  In September 1932, the newlywed Philadelphians Ruth and Eugene Raiford came to pay a visit to Eugene’s brother, Jesse Raiford, the Atlantic City realtor who had helped affix prices to Ruth Harvey’s game board’s properties. Eager to socialize and meet Jesse’s friends, they were invited to the Harvey house to play a game of monopoly. Returning to Philadelphia shortly thereafter, they took a copy of the game with them. “Come to our house,” Ruth Raiford began telling her in-laws and friends. “We’re going to teach you how to play monopoly. We’re having a monopoly party.”

  Among the Raifords’ friends were Charles and Olive Todd. The two couples were neighbors at the Emlen Arms apartment complex, which was managed by Charles. An astute businessman, he was defying the odds by increasing the profitability of the complex year after year despite the Depression.

  The Raifo
rds and the Todds often played bridge together, and one night, tired of that, the Raifords taught the Todds the new real estate game that they had learned in Atlantic City. Being in real estate himself, Charles loved it.

  One day soon after, while strolling down the streets of Philadelphia, Charles Todd ran into Esther Jones, a childhood friend from West Grove, Pennsylvania. The two had gone to a Quaker school together, but had lost contact. Esther was now married to a man named Charles Darrow, and they lived only a couple of blocks away from the Todds. The two old friends made plans to dine together with their spouses.

  At dinner, the couples conversed about their families, about how they had handled the boom and the bust, and about the neighborhood. As they cleared their plates, Charles Todd mentioned to the Darrows that the next time they got together, he and his wife would teach them how to play the monopoly game.

  I’ve never even heard of it, Esther said.

  They set a date.

  CHARLES DARROW’S SECRET

  “How many men are there who fairly earn a million dollars?”

  —HENRY GEORGE

  One night, the Darrows and the Todds sat around Charles Todd’s monopoly board, enthusiastically rolling the dice, buying up properties, and moving their tokens around. For a few hours, the anxieties of the Great Depression were forgotten as the players immersed themselves in a make-believe world. The Todds were pleased that the Darrows liked the game so much—especially Esther, whom Charles Todd remembered from their school days as being hard to please.

  The board they were playing on had small colored triangles distinguishing the different property groups, included all of the Atlantic City property names that the Raifords had imported from the Harveys, and featured Go, Free Parking, Community Chest, and Chance spaces, all derivatives of concepts that Lizzie Magie had sketched onto her board thirty years earlier.

  However, when Todd had made his copy of the board, using the Raifords’ board as his guide, he had inadvertently made a spelling error. Instead of writing “Marven Gardens,” the name of the Atlantic City housing development in Margate and Ventnor, he had written “Marvin Gardens,” substituting an “i” for an “e.” That one-letter slip was to become one of the most repeated spelling errors in history.

  The Darrows were so taken with the game that Charles Todd made them a monopoly set of their own and began teaching them some of the more advanced rules.

  Over time, Darrow’s questions about the game became more complicated, so the Todds invited the Raifords over to join them more often, as they knew the game better. They all played monopoly together many times, with the Darrows often hosting the game at their home. “Just the six of us,” Ruth Raiford recalled later, adding that although the Todds had already taught the Darrows the game, “they wanted to be sure they were doing it right.”

  One day, despite all of Darrow’s exposure to the game, he asked Charles Todd for a written copy of the rules. Todd was slightly perplexed, as he had never written up rules for monopoly. Nor did it appear that written rules existed elsewhere. Why do you want them? Todd asked Darrow. Darrow replied that he’d like to have them to help him teach others the game.

  As a favor to his old school friend Esther, Todd did as Darrow had requested and wrote down the rules. He then asked the Raifords to review them for accuracy and had his secretary create several carbon copies. He gave two or three copies to the Darrows and a copy to the Raifords and kept the rest for himself.

  In all likelihood, the Todds, like many friends of the Darrows, did not fully realize how difficult life had become for the Darrows at that time. Charles Darrow was unemployed and had no prospects. He had done some course work at the University of Pennsylvania and had served in the military during World War I, but he had no college degree. Little of the life that he was trying to establish for his family was working out, and he had to rely on Esther’s income from working at a weaving studio to make ends meet. The couple had two sons—preschool-age William and an infant, Richard, called Dickie—and as much joy as the boys brought into their lives, they were also two more mouths to feed.

  The son of a civil engineer, Charles had a round face and a big smile and wore wire-frame glasses. Born in Maryland but raised mostly in Pennsylvania, he had grown up as an only child and was at heart a working-class man. In contrast, Esther was a Pennsylvanian with fetching looks whose name had often been mentioned in the local newspaper’s society columns. Her father had worked in the roofing business, her mother had tended to the children, and their household, like many of the time, had employed an Irish chambermaid. Some members of Esther’s family were Quakers, which is what had led her to attend a Friends school.

  Charles and Esther had thought they were on track to repeat the successes of their parents. The two had a home in Germantown, a neighborhood in northwest Philadelphia lined with colonial buildings and comforting foliage. But then came the Depression. A salesman in a country that was no longer buying, Charles lost his job.

  •

  In January 1932, Philadelphia’s mayor proclaimed, “There is no starvation in Philadelphia”—a gross misstatement. Soup kitchen lines were stretching endlessly down city blocks, and sprawling shantytowns were taking over the parks. Some three hundred thousand Philadelphians were looking for work, and at times, as many as a third of the city’s heads of household were spending their days aimlessly perched on porches or wandering the streets. Thousands of landlords had lost their properties, and repossessed houses were being resold by the sheriff’s office at the rate of thirteen hundred per month.

  “There is a good deal of ‘squatting,’” Lorena Hickok, a chief investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, wrote in August 1933. “In smaller communities as well as in Philadelphia, in abandoned houses, so bad that no one who could raise a cent to pay rent would ever live in them. The condition of some of these places is frightful.”

  Some Philadelphians established a Community Chest campaign to raise money for the needy, but the funds were soon depleted. Similar campaigns took place all across the country in the early 1930s, but as the Depression grew deeper, even the wealthiest donors lost their ability to be philanthropists. Private dollars could no longer be counted on to help the poor, and the birth of the modern American welfare system was under way, with policy wonks, local and federal leaders, and social workers debating the merits of handing out government aid to families like the Darrows who were down on their luck.

  •

  One day, the Darrows’ youngest son, Dickie, developed a fever, a sore throat, and a rash that gave his normally soft skin a sandpapery feel. The Darrows were very worried, but eventually Dickie’s fever went away and he began to recover. His parents breathed a sigh of relief—until noticing that something was desperately wrong. Dickie wasn’t playing with other children, and he was moving more slowly than he had before. Even the most basic child’s play seemed beyond him.

  They took him in for evaluation and received tragic news. Dickie had probably been a victim of scarlet fever. In the 1930s, the disease was poorly understood and was often left untreated, even though the fever could lead to long-term brain damage. Some doctors at the time marveled that many of those who were stricken had survived at all.

  At that time, families with mentally disabled children, who were sometimes shunned in their communities, had few resources to help them. Teachers of the mentally impaired were few and far between, and life expectancies for the afflicted were low. Conditions in many institutions were akin to those in prisons, with patients locked to their beds, half starved, and sometimes made the subjects of primitive medical experimentations.

  The Darrows did hear of one caring facility in New Jersey that might be able to help their son. Called the Training School at Vineland, it was revolutionary for its time in its humane treatment of the mentally impaired. Situated on a leafy campus where most residents lived full-time, the school taught basic educational, vocational, and agricultural skills, while emphasizing self-sufficiency.
Vineland had space for Dickie, but its cost was prohibitively high for the Darrows.

  Charles and Esther wanted to keep Dickie at home and include him in their everyday lives, but the effort was proving to be too much for them. Once when the children were playing by a lake, Dickie began walking into deeper water, unaware that he could drown—another child grabbed him just in time. Little by little, the Darrows were beginning to face the painful fact that they weren’t equipped to handle the rigorous demands of Dickie’s impairments. Yet they didn’t know where to turn.

  In only a few short years, the quiet middle-class suburban life that the Darrows had previously enjoyed had been destroyed, and their future appeared far more daunting than they had ever imagined. Although the couple had each other and some good friends, Charles had lost a job in a business that showed no sign of coming back soon, Dickie was becoming more and more dangerous to himself and others, and the family was completely broke.

  •

  It was during this dark period in their lives that Esther and Charles befriended Franklin and Blanche Alexander, who lived a few blocks away from them with their two young daughters. Alexander was a political cartoonist (working under the name F. O. Alexander) who had just taken a new job in Philadelphia. His career was flourishing—the public was seeking diversion now more than ever. Franklin and Charles got along immediately. Both men loved fishing and sharing stories and banter over an occasional drink. The two families quickly became friends.