The Story of Sinatra and Hoboken and What Went Wrong By Anthony De Palma, Jr. A Slow Start, Then a Meteoric Rise Young Frankie never really knew hard times. Other boys in the neighborhood wore hand-me-down clothes and fought for their share of food at the family table with six, seven, or eight brothers and sisters. Frankie always had new clothes. And he had a bicycle when no one else did. Later on, his parents opened an account for him at Geismar's, a local clothing store. Frankie graduated from David E. Rue Junior High School in 1931, and then, like many sons of immigrants, spent half a year at Demarest High before leaving school. He tried one more academic endeavor, enrolling in the Casey Jones School of Aeronautics on Broad Street in Newark to become an aviation technician, a dream he had harbored since winning a model airline competition. In a short time, he left school forever. A young boy in Hoboken didn't learn how to become a longshoreman, a truck driver, or a racketeer in school. So most kids quit as soon as the law allowed. Frankie, who never liked the big Italian meals his mother or father prepared and instead preferred to grab a sandwich, was too thin and frail for that kind of work, although he was tough enough and wouldn't let anyone push him around. When two copyboys for the Hudson Observer in Hoboken died in a car accident over one weekend, Frankie showed up at the newspaper offices on the following Monday morning asking for their job. His godfather, Frank Garrick, was the paper's circulation manager, but he did not pull any strings; by the time Garrick walked in that morning, Frank was already filling glue pots in the city room. Garrick remembers that Frank thought about going into the sportswriting field, but never really tried. He lasted at the paper only a few weeks. Then he left the job to his cousin Buddy. Frank was living to sing, although by all accounts he didn't sing with the glee club during the short time he was at Demarest. He sang in the shower. He sang at dances run by the social clubs he belong to - the Azovs and the Cat's Meow. He sang at Cockeyed Henny's. He sang at weddings. He sang as he walked along Washington Street. He sang. And people listened. They listened to him as they listened to Dolly. She had become ward leader, delivering votes to the Democratic machine in return for favors. She doled out her own favors using the exchange system she had observed in her mother's grocery store. People paid Rosa Garaventi and she gave them food. Dolly gave people a bag of coal, or a basket of fruit, advice for taking care of a sick child, and they gave her their vote. People in Hoboken paid attention to her, and she was too busy to pay attention to Frank. But when he sang, people listened. The rest of the Sinatra legend is familiar - and sticks a little closer to the facts than the hyped stories of Frank's impoverished youth. He won a local talent contest and then got a shot on the popular Major Bowes Amateur Hour radio show with the Hoboken Four, a group of guys from the neighborhood. Then there was a coast-to-coast tour, a return home, a job as a singing water and emcee at the Rustic cabin in Englewood Cliffs, opening first with Harry James and then Tommy Dorsey, the Paramount in New York, and then -- he was a star. It all happened in less than five years. When "The Kid from Hoboken" played the Paramount, he was only 27. He had made it to the top, and, except, for a few short-lived dips, he has been there since. 
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