TRAMPING ON LIFE
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE
HARRY KEMP
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING COMPANY, Inc.
Copyright, 1922, by
BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC.
First Printing, September, 1922
Second Printing, November, 1922
Third Printing, January, 1923
Fourth Printing, April, 1923
Fifth Printing, July, 1923
Sixth Printing, September, 1923
Seventh Printing, November, 1923
Eighth Printing, May, 1924
Ninth Printing, November, 1924
Tenth Printing, July, 1925
Eleventh Printing, March, 1926
Twelfth Printing, February, 1927
Printed in the United States of America
All in this book that is good and enduring and worth while for humanity, Idedicate to the memory of my wife,
MARY PYNE
Waterbury, Connecticut,
May 20, 1922.
TRAMPING ON LIFE
Now I am writing these things just as I was told them by my grandmother.For I have utterly no remembrance of my mother. Consumption ran in herfamily. And bearing and giving birth to me woke the inherited weaknessin her. She was not even strong enough to suckle me.
I was born in the early eighties, in Mornington, Ohio, in a section ofthat great, steel-manufacturing city which was neither city, suburb, norcountry,—but a muddy, green-splashed, murky mixture of all three.
They told me, when I was old enough to understand, that my mother wasEnglish, that her folks lived in Cleveland and owned a millinery anddrygoods store there ... and that my father met my mother one day inMornington. She was visiting an uncle who ran a candy store on MainStreet, and, she girl-like, laughed and stood behind the counter, readyfor a flirtation....
My father was young, too. And he was employed there in the store,apprenticed to the candy-maker's trade. And, on this day, as he passedthrough, carrying a trayful of fresh-dipped chocolates, he winked at mymother and joked with her in an impudent way ... and she rebuffed him,not really meaning a rebuff, of course ... and he startled her bypulling off his hat and grotesquely showing himself to be entirely bald... for he had grown bald very young—at the age of sixteen ... bothbecause of scarlet fever, and because baldness for the men ran in hisfamily ... and he was tall, and dark, and walked with rather a militarycarriage.
I was four years old when my mother died.
When she fell sick, they tell me, my grandfather did one of the fewdecent acts of his life—he let my father have a farm he owned incentral Kansas, near Hutchinson. But my father did not try to work it.
He was possessed of neither the capital nor knowledge necessary forfarming.
He went to work as clerk in a local hotel, in the rapidly growing town.Crazy with grief, he watched my mother drop out of his life a littlemore each day.
My father and mother both had tempers that flared up and sank assuddenly.
I had lung fever when I was a baby. That was what