THE MAN WHO FIGHTS "THE BEAST"
[Judge Lindsey is known all the world over for his work in the Juvenile Court in Denver, Colorado. To his courtroom there come visitors from every State in this nation, investigators from Europe and officials from China and Japan to study his laws and observe his methods. But to himself, his famous Juvenile Court is side issue, a small detail in his career. For years he has been engaged in a fight of which the founding of his Juvenile Court was only a skirmish.
Without money, without powerful friends, without personal popularity, this one man has codified laws, instituted reforms, founded charities, and balked corruption.]
From "The Beast," by Ben B. Lindsey and Harvey J. O'Higgins. Doubleday, Page & Company, 1910.
FINDING THE CAT
I came to Denver in the spring of 1880, at the age of eleven, as mildly inoffensive a small boy as ever left a farm—undersized and weakly, so that at the age of seventeen I commonly passed as twelve, and so unaccustomed to the sight of buildings that I thought the five-story Windsor Hotel a miracle of height and magnificence. I had been living with my maternal grandfather and aunt on a farm in Jackson, Tennessee, where I had been born; and I had come with my younger brother to join my parents, who had finally decided that Denver was to be their permanent home. The conductors on the trains had taken care of us, because my father was a railroad man, at the head of the telegraph system; and we had been entertained on the way by the stories of an old forty-niner with a gray moustache, who told us how he had shot buffalo on those prairies where we now saw only antelope. I was not precocious; his stories interested me more than anything else on the journey; and I stared so hard at the old pioneer that I should recognize him now, I believe, if I saw him on the street.
My schooling was not peculiar; there was nothing "holier than thou" in my bringing up. My father, being a Roman Catholic convert from the Episcopalian Church, sent me to Notre Dame, Indiana, to be educated; and there, to be sure, I read the "Lives of the Saints," aspired to be a saint, and put pebbles in my small shoes to "mortify the flesh," because I was told that a good priest, Father Hudson—whom I all but worshipped—used to do so. But even at Notre Dame, and much more in Denver, I was homesick for the farm; and at last I was allowed to return to Jackson to be cared for by my Protestant relatives. They sent me to a Baptist school till I was seventeen. And when I was recalled to Denver, because of the failure of my father's health, I went to work to help earn for the household, with no strong attachment for any church and with no recognized membership in any.
I suppose there is no one who does not look back upon his past and wonder what he should have become in life if this or that crucial event had not occurred to set his destiny. It seems to me that if it had not been for the sudden death of my father I, too, might have found our jungle beast a domestic tabby, and have fed it its prey without realizing what I was about. I should have been a lawyer, I know; for I had had the ambition from my earliest boyhood, and I had been confirmed in it by my success in debating at school. (Once, at Notre Dame, I spoke for a full hour in successful defence of the proposition that Colorado was the "greatest state in the Union," and proved at least that I had a lawyer's "wind.") But I should probably have been a lawyer who has learned his pleasant theories of life in the colleges. And on the night that my father died, the crushing realities of poverty put out an awful and compelling hand on me, and my struggle with them began.
I was eighteen years old, the eldest of four children. I had been "writing proofs" in the Denver land office, for claimants who had filed on Government land; and I had saved $150 of my salary before my work there ceased. I found, after my father's death, that this $150 was all we had in the world, and $130 of it went for funeral expenses. His life had been insured for $15,000, and we believed that the premiums had all been paid, but we could not find the last receipt; the agent denied having received the payment; the policy had lapsed on the day before my father's death; and we got nothing. Our furniture had been mortgaged; we were allowed only enough of it to furnish a little house on Santa Fé Avenue; and later we moved to a cottage on lower West Colfax Avenue, in which Negroes have since lived.
I went to work at a salary of $10 a month, in a real estate office—as office boy—and carried a "route" of newspapers in the morning before the office opened, and did janitor work at night when it closed. After a month of that, I got a better place, as office boy, with a mining company, at a salary of $25 a month. And finally, my younger brother found work in a law office and I "swapped jobs" with him—because I wished to study law!