In 1910 you could hop on board the East Ankeny and Rose City Park car as it stopped in front
of the St. Charles Hotel on 2nd and Morrison. That was the last stop before the
car rattled over the Morrison Bridge and off into the eastern wilds. The
conductor, Harry Franks, would call out the stops, "East Watta, East
Second, Grand Avenoo!" Then the car turned north on Grand and east again
on Ankeny where the numbered streets began. It was the conductor's habit to
call out the street numbers using the form, "nineteen," "twenty,"
"twenty-one," "twenty-two"—but when the car reached East
23rd, Franks would cry out, "We just passed twenty-two!" When a
reporter questioned Franks about this little quirk, he replied:
It's an unimportant
street, and I never like to announce it because some of my women passengers
might think the number offensive.
This might seem an almost unfathonable line
of reasoning to an observer from the present century, but I suggest that,
reading between the lines, what the women passengers would find offensive would
be the cat calls and cries of, "Skidoo!" from impudent young boys
following the announced number. This number, 23, along with its fellow ominous
interger, 13, combined with the words "hoodoo" and "skidoo"
were quite the thing in the late 19th and early 20th century. Nearly everyone
has heard the phrase, "23 skidoo," but very few 21st centuryites can
fathom the meaning thereof. As a kid I had seen the phrase in old comic books
and heard it in old movies. In later years I even looked it up and found some
implausable story about the wind blowing up skirts on 23rd street in New York.
The answer, however, like many things in this world, is not simple—and it is
multi-faceted.
Hoodoo and skidoo, for instance, were sometimes
used interchangeably in that blissful period before the Great War, when Bertie
Wooster tossed rolls at the waiters in the Drones Club on the Pall Mall, and
Tom Word busted opium smoking, West Hills dandies down in Chinatown, in
Portland. These were overly used slang words of the period. Hoodoo, when
refering to a sports team meant the same as the word mojo (or, magic) today,
and it was usually good hoodoo, but sometimes it was bad. A headline might
declare: "The Beavers Hoodo Broken," which meant that the Beavers had
finally lost, blowing a winning streak. Skidoo, on the other hand, refered to
the end, and was never a good thing. Skidoo often had some connection with the
slang term, skedaddle, and many puns were penned by hack newsmen playing on the
two meanings.
An example of this would be when, on August
23, 1906, some Columbia University (now University of Portland) students
organized an unofficial and macabre "skidoo party" on the bluff of
Mock's Crest. It was later declared by the Oregonian to
have been the "very first on the Pacific coast, perhaps the whole
world." (This was most likely cynical humor since skidoo parties were a
nationwide craze.) They charged 23 cents admission and large crowds of young people
arrived by streetcar. The puns in the news report were nonstop:
But the "skidoo" part of the programme came
when the party undertook to "skidoo" into the Columbia University
building, where there is a fine, large hall. They wanted to dance in that hall,
but those in charge of the building said "skidoo." The young people
insisted, but still the authorities remarked to them "23" and
"skidoo."
And so the article continues, groaner after groaner.
There is a lot of hoodoo connected to the number 23, not the
least being the "23 enigma" attributed in later years to William S.
Burroughs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_enigma). In the late 19th century
superstition about the number was rampant. The expression, "Twenty-three
for you!" carried with it something of the meaning of today's, "Sucks
to be you!" But it could also mean something akin to, "Buzz off
sucker!" When a gambler threw down a losing card an onlooker might
comment, "23 for you!" Then again, a spurned suitor might hear these
same words from his would-be-beloved. Suicides would sometimes leave no note,
other than the number 23 scrawled onto a page that lay on the floor, next to
the kicked over chair, beneath where they hung.
From the viewpoint of the roulette tables the number was seen
as a constant loser. A gambler who had a bad string of sour bets would put his
last money on the number 23 as a way of signaling his defeat Someone whose luck
had run dry would murmur, "23 for me." Someone who had passed out
drunk would have been described as having "23ed," and the mentally
disturbed were called "23s." It was said to have originated with
telegraph operators who used the number as a means of clearing the line for an
important call.
Another, less plausible story, has to do with Sing Sing
prison's 23 steps from the main corridor to the workshops. Whether or not this
is true, the expression did enter into the lexicon of rogues and criminals as a
spiced up version of "Cheese it, the cops!" "Twenty-three
skidoo!" was shouted by miscreants in the Bowery in New York City to alert
their co-conspirators to the presence of the gendarmes. The expression then
passed into common usage in much the same way that words from gangsta rap, such
as "bling" and "dis" have entered common usage today.
For reasons not known to me (or anyone else this side of
omniscience), the whole 23 skidoo mojo took off and became a nationwide rage.
The entrepreneurs hopped on the skidoo wagon and sold every conceivable manner
of gadget and garment emblazoned with the phrase. Like so many other overly hyped
fads, it soon disappeared, becoming an archaic symbol of the "good old
days," like raccoon coats, chicken inspector badges, and straw boater
hats. When Americans found themselves in the great and terrible First World War,
they lay aside many frivolous things. The term was over-hyped, and yesterday's
news, which may explain why the superstition towards the number 23 is gone, but
13 remains.
Oh, how strongly that hoodoo of mysterious and powerful numbers
held some folks in its grasp! In October 1911 the Oregonian
reported how a man named J. A. Crawley was to be released from the state pen in
Salem, but balked at the gate. It was Friday the 13th and he had 23 dollars in
his pocket. He pleaded with the guards not to force him out on that ominous day
with that ominous number in his pocket. (He could have just given one of the
guards one of his dollars.) The story tells how prison officials found an uncle
in New Orleans who would take the boy in. New Orleans being the very epicenter
of hoodoo, I fear that he passed from the prison built of stones into a new
prison of superstition built with bricks of ignorance.
