'Nother of the "Bad Men" of the Great Lakes: Schooner Days CCCLXVII (367)

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--"To my weigh-heigh-heigh-ho

We'll pay Paddy Doyle for his boots."

—Old Chanty.

MICKEY FORD was a sure enough sailorman. A deep water packet rat who drifted up to the Lakes from New York. In his time he had been a patron of Paddy Doyle's flop-house and often regaled his lakewise pals with tales of the doings at that joint. Until making the acquaintance of Mickey we had always imagined that Mr. Doyle was a figment of the Chanty-man's imagination. But not so.

Paddy, it appears, was a disabled packet rat who had established a sailors' boarding house, where it didn't cost much for a sailor to live.

It was a rigidly observed rule of the place that no one could sleep on the floor, but anyone who chose to might slumber in a sitting posture. Midships of the wall of one end of Paddy's long boar-pen, or lounging room, there was a stout stanchion, with a ring bolt let into it about eighteen inches from the floor. A segment of old hawser was spliced to the ringbolt, and in the day time was coiled at the foot of the stanchion. At night it was broken out and stretched to the other end of the room, where there was a gun-tackle purchase bolt fastened to the wall. Every night Paddy hooked, in the gun-tackle to the eye of the hawser and hove taut. Any who chose to do so might then recline with their backs or shoulders against the taut line, and secure such rest as they could. Remarkably few men chose to, but lots of them did because they were broke.

Every morning at four bells of the second watch, Patrick cast off the running end of the purchase and the hawser flopped. So did all such as reclined against it. Hence the "flop house," universally recognized in hobo slang and dialect tales.

Mickey Ford was notable chiefly for his utter disregard of ethics and amenities of all kinds. His appetite for food was as near normal as any attribute of a man of his character may be. Not so his appetite and capacity for alcohol in any and all of its vinous, brewed and distilled forms.

He was pridefully tough and in no wise reticent about proving it. At Tonawanda he shipped, deckhand, in the Shenandoah, coal loaded for West Superior. She sailed short-handed. Only two deckhands where there ought to have been four. No second cook and no watchman.

In those days deckhands doubled as coal passers and did anything else that they were told to do, and sometimes got watches below.

Mickey and his mate had an awful time of it going up Lake Erie and didn't feel at all pleased about it.

Abreast of Detroit, Mickey swarmed to the bridge and accosted the Shenandoah's master. "Say, you this and that old so and so illegitimate, are you goin' to put in at Detroit and ship a couple more deckhands?"

The old man was thunderstruck. No such blasphemous effrontery ever had happened before.

"You—you—" he gasped.

"Yeah, I know," Mickey replied. "You gonna stop at Detroit?"'

The captain found his voice. "No," he roared, "You—" his repertoire of epithets and blasphemies war not as complete nor as highly practiced as Mickey's, but was fairly good withal. When he paused for breath Mickey said: "Sez you. Now I'm tellin' you this hooker's stoppin' at Detroit mid nothin' in the world can stop you from stoppin'."

He descended to the main deck, where his mate awaited him.

"Can you swim?" he asked the man.

"Nope, not a stroke."

"Yer gonna learn," Mickey assured him. He took a lifebelt from a rack and handed it to his mate. "Buckle this on or I'll numb you with a hatch bar," he ordered.

That deckhand did not wish to be numbed, so he made a fair job of donning the lifebelt. Mickey dove at him, seized him around the knees and dumped him overboard. Then, with a defiant yell at the Old Man, he dove over himself.

In the water he grabbed his floundering, sputtering watch mate. "Kick out with yer hind legs and get away from here," he advised. "If that propeller gets you it'll chop you into hamburger."

The crew of the out-coming post office launch proffered aid. "Nuts to you," Mickey jeered. "We don't want to be rescued and you better not try it if you want to stay in one piece."

When they arrived at the Smith coal dock the deserters had a full convoy of small craft attending them. Mickey helped his mate out on the dock, unfastened the lifebelt and hurled it at the unoffending owner of a small naphtha launch. "Take that back to the (blank dash) old mushrat on the Shenandoah," he yelled. Then he fled to the quietude and sanctuary of a riverfront dive.

When next he appeared in public, Mickey was outwardly dry. At that time, Detroit's street lighting system included clusters of arc lights mounted on steel lattice towers that in some instances reared 150 feet high. Mickey took careful survey of one of the tall lighting standards.

"Shay," he observed to a patrolman with whom he had some slight acquaintance. "I feel dopey, guessh I better take a sleep."

Knowing much of Mickey's eccentricities, the policeman gave the sleeping idea his enthusiastic support. "Just what you need, Mickey," he said. "Get in somewhere and sleep it off. It'll do you good."

"I'm convinch that you're right," Mickey replied solemnly, "an' here she goes." He leaped and caught the bottom rung of the light tower's cat ladder and swung himself lithely to the lower units of the framework.

"Hey! Mickey!" the startled cop shouted. "For gosh sake. What the—"

Mickey paused to wave his hand airily. "So long," he said, "I'm gonna take a flop." Then he swarmed aloft.

At the top of the tower there was metal platform five feet in diameter, with a manhole through the centre. Mickey crawled through the manhole, curled himself around the narrow platform and went to sleep.

Two hours later he descended. A considerable crowd watched his descent. He spotted his erstwhile friend the patrolman amongst the spectators and greeted him cheerfully. "I had a swell doss up there. Lots of fresh air. I feel fine now," he remarked.

And again he fled to a spot where nickels might be bartered for pint scoops of beer without let or hindrance of law.

Having entertained some friends and made himself obnoxious in an assembly hall of the Lake Carriers' Association at Buffalo, Mickey fared forth for other amusements. The hall was on the second floor of a store building and was reached by an outside stairway with a fairly commodious landing at the top.

When Mickey emerged from the hall, he collided with the guard rail of the landing. He stepped back and regarded the railing with unmistakable disfavor. "Diabolical," he declared. "That damn two-b'-four hit me square in the belly. I'll show'm."

He swayed back for momentum and hurled himself at the railing. It carried away en masse and Mickey plunged down to the awning of a fruit stand that nestled under the stairway. He rebounded, somersaulted in mid-air and lit on his feet on the street pavement, a foot clear of the curb.

Hands on hips, he took stock of the spot whence he had come. "Seems to me," he spoke reflectively, "a drink wouldn't hurt me a bit." He went and had several.

Even Mickey's copper reinforced constitution could not endure the strain of dissipation that he imposed on it. Too badly burnt out for the strenuous work of a deckhand, he found a job sweeping a Detroit saloon; from there he gravitated to the McGregor Mission and ultimately to the Wayne County pogey, where he ended his days.