“Horse-shoes are much luckier than rabbit’s paws,” stated thirteen-year-old Joseph Acunis, graduate of Public School 65 and recently chosen winner of the Rebecca Elsberg Memorial prize of $20. He is the only boy in all New York “who has best maintained scholarship and integrity of character in the face of economic privations.” That is how the cerfificate reads.
The old horse-shoe hung over Joseph’s bedroom door for four years before it performed any function, besides falling down and almost breaking his brother’s head one day. But now, at last, it has accomplished its purpose. You can’t tell Joseph different. He wore a rabbit’s paw for close to five years, but all he got out of it was a nasty itch.
“You can bet your life that horse-shoe will stay,” said Joseph. His mother has secured it more firmly on the wall, with a thicker and longer nall. It has an almost diabolical tendency to fall down.
CREDITS HORSE-SHOE AND “MOM”
Joseph is a blond, gray-eyed youngster, intelligent, shy of manner and rather cynical. He wears his newly acquired fame modestly. The horse-shoe and “mom” get most of the credit.
A dog and a cat, who wage perpetual war, two sisters and a bother and “mom” share Joseph’s abode on the top floor of a Broome steet tenement. “Pop” has been dead now for eight years, “and we live off a pension of forty-five dollars a month,” Joseph announced.
It was here that he was found, doing his lessons. His eighteen-year-old sisters, out of work for six months, was mixiing a stew, little sister and brother were enjoying a row and the cat and teh dog, not to be outdone, were mixing it up, too.
Ouside the elevated clattered and rumbled. People in the trains stared idly into the room. There was about as much privacy here as in the proverbial fishbowl.
VERY, VERY AMBITIOUS
Joseph is an undernourished child, rather wan-looking, but frired by great ambitions. First of all, he aims to be a lawyer, and next best, he would prefer to be a cartoonist. Samples of the spotiess little kitchen. He belings to two clubs, the Boy Scouts and an art club. He loves to read books about sports and his favorite author is Ralph Barbour.
He has never seen a “regular show,” as he calls it, in his whole life. An occasional movie is his
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
