Jerome’s parents had sought safety in America, far from old world conflicts and hatred. They had little but themselves and their community of Lithuanian Jews to rely upon in the burgeoning industrial city, but they got by. Jerome’s father worked as a sign painter; his shop at the back of their crowded apartment was stocked with brushes, cans of brightly-colored paint and whitewashed boards. He would paint signs every week for the little grocery stores around the town: Bread 5 cents, fresh daily. Sausage 12 cents a pound. Lake Erie Whitefish – today’s catch. They got by.
As Jerome’s parents saved every dollar and dime they could, after the war ended and America’s postwar economy boomed in the 1920s, they were able to open a haberdashery, a shop where dashing gentlemen could purchase hats, cufflinks, gloves, and all the accessories deemed so essential to one’s public persona in those days . . . secondhand. The business did well. Jerome entered the local public grammar school in 1921 and, perhaps as he had grown up among paints and brushes, developed an artistic talent. He loved to draw, and in middle school his illustrated stories gained him quite a following.
At age 15 Jerome entered Glenville High School, where he worked on the student newspaper and circulated among his friends a parody of the popular Tarzan stories called ‘Goober the Mighty.’ He made friends, began to collaborate with the shy but talented artist Joe Shuster on producing a hand-drawn science fiction magazine. Jerome would make up the stories, and Joe would draw. The year was 1930.
Jerome was finishing up his sophomore year exams on June 2, 1932. It was a Thursday, and only one more day of exams remained . . . the art class exam, a cinch. School was out at noon, so he rode his bicycle home and asked his mother as he hurried in the door of their apartment, “What’s for lunch mom?” She had it ready in the kitchen, and as he sat at the table nearby he took out his drawing materials and began to sketch out a story for his next issue. He was thinking they could get it printed, if it was good enough, and they might sell hundreds at the newsstands around town. Maybe, someday, he might be able to publish his adventure stories in color . . . someday.
The dinner hour came. Dad was working late at the shop. It was the month for weddings, and despite the immense number of men out of work in those early years of the Great Depression, the demand for men’s formal wear remained high. Jerome’s mother put dinner on the table—thick sausages from the butcher shop, potatoes from the vegetable market, and carrots from a neighbor’s garden—for him and his younger brothers and sisters. The shop would close at eight, and then Dad would be home to collapse into his chair, eating his dinner late, drinking a bottle of beer brewed illegally by a friend of a friend, and reading the late edition of the Plain Dealer full of denunciations of President Franklin Roosevelt and his big government schemes.
Eight o’clock came. Younger siblings had cleared the table and were now playing kickball in the street as the last daylight allowed. Jerome continued at his drawings. From outside the window, down in the street, he heard the game stop and hurried footsteps on the sidewalk. Hanrihan, the local beat cop, was approaching. He entered the apartment building and, a moment later, the front door opened with his brothers and Officer Hanrihan entering in a single commotion. “Mrs. Siegel?” he called.
After many years, Jerome’s mother still struggled with the English language, but she could sense that something was wrong. Jerome quickly stepped in beside his mother.
“Mrs. Siegel,” the policeman continued, “there’s been an accident at the shop. Your husband . . . .” He couldn’t finish. He didn’t need to.
As the details emerged on that June night, it seems that three men had come into the store just before closing. One had attempted to leave without paying for the suit he was trying on, and the other two, while Mr. Siegel was distracted, robbed the cash register. According to the police report, Mr. Siegel died of a heart attack on the sidewalk outside his store, but witnesses testified that they had heard a shot fired, and in those days and in that impoverished neighborhood, it didn’t much matter how Jerome’s father had died. It was easier to list the cause of death as “heart attack,” but Jerome and others believed his father had been shot on the safe streets of an American city, far from the turmoil of his native Lithuania.
It is a testimony to the family and the community that Jerome was able to finish high school and publish his illustrated adventure stories. It’s just that he never seemed to have the kind of action hero that would capture the public’s imagination . . . not until, after several failed publications, he somehow, from the depths of his imagination, came up with an idea for a new kind of hero, who would uphold the American values his family had come across the seas to find, who would stand by the cause of the fatherless and the widowed . . . and who was invulnerable to bullets.
That’s right. Jerome Siegel, with his friend Joe Shuster, created Superman.
The first issue of Action Comics appeared in June 1938 and featured the “man of steel” in his first published form. But years later, in Jerome’s closet with hundreds of other drawings, they found the original black and white drawing of Superman . . . dated 1933, one year after Mr. Siegel’s death. It had been singed at the corners because, in despair at not finding a publisher, Joe and Jerome had burned the original stories, and Jerome had pulled it out of the fire at the last minute, thinking that there might still be a way to create an action hero from the tragedy and meaninglessness that threatened to engulf a high school junior still reeling from the untimely death of his father.
Jerome persisted. A character birthed in tragedy gave rise, six years later, to the familiar American hero recognized all over the world today.
