The Brass Spittoon

                              The Brass Spittoon

          When we were younger, my father would sometimes gather up a handful of his Martin urchins, for a brief ride, to visit his parents, Emmanuel (Manny) and Mary Tevington Martin. They lived in a two-story, frame dwelling at 207 Amber Street, a few miles from our home on Seneca Park Side.

            We always enjoyed visiting “Pa” and “Ma” as we called them. They were near the end of a very long span of years and had all manner of interesting stories for us. They had been born in the early 1880’s, before automobiles, airplanes and a whole host of modern inventions arrived on the American scene. We would listen to them in rapt attention and remember.

             “Pa’s” grandparents had arrived on these shores in the late 1840’s, fleeing the famine in Ireland. His grandfather had been a Great Lakes sailor and his own father, a slate roofer in Buffalo’s First Ward.

            What fascinated us most though was the presence of a brass spittoon, alongside of Pa’s chair. Occasionally, he would lean over and expectorate a gob of tobacco juice into the shiny, brass container. We had never before seen anything like this, or knew anyone else who had. The spittoon had the dull sheen of burnished copper, with a wide-open mouth, like a vase for flowers. Chewing tobacco was a habit that Pa had picked up during a lifetime, working as a “scooper’ on Buffalo’s waterfront. Many of the immigrant Irish found work there. They were issued wooden shovels and daily descended into the bowels of the continuous array of grain ships then arriving from the mid-west. A spark from a steel shovel might have ignited the dusty grain boats, like a giant bomb. These were the days before the Welland Canal, connecting Lakes Erie and Ontario and then onto and the St. Lawrence seaway project, that opened up the Great Lakes and the vast interior of the United States to the Atlantic Ocean.

           The hardy lads would shovel the dusty grain into large buckets, that would be then hoisted by derricks and emptied into waiting train cars, for shipment all along the Eastern coast of the United States. During a long day of dusty, hard labor, the men needed something to keep their airways and mouths lubricated. The easy solution was to carry a hardened plug of tobacco in your back pocket. The occasional chaw, of this acrid substance, would keep the mouth full of tobacco juice.

           At Christmas time, we would offer up to “Pa,” a wrapped block of tobacco. It was about the size of a deck of cards. It only cost us $.20 cents then, so even we could afford the gift. I remember the name of the brand. “It was marked “Elephant,” with a small picture of that great beast on the package’s cover.

            “Ma” was a gentle soul and never complained at the mess or odor of the tobacco. She knew how hard Pa had worked all of his life and what small pleasures he had. One of them was sending cousin Jimmy Ryan to the corner saloon for a “growler” of beer. It was an open bucket, filled with draft beer. The men had developed a taste for it, alongside of the Tobacco, and for the very same reasons. It was a bit of ease after a long day of shoveling grain.

             We much treasured these last few years that these much-loved grandparents had to give us and long remembered the stories that they passed on to us. And I will always remember that Brass Spittoon and think of it and Ma and Pa, when I see some Western Movie where a similar vessel sits in a Saloon, waiting for cowboys to use it like Pa did.

                                                      -30-

                                                  (633 words)

                                           Joseph Xavier Martin