National Affairs: The Old Sport

“Nobody was good enough for him,” cried the landlady bitterly, after the cops labored up the stairs of her sleazy Queens, N.Y. rooming house to view the body of Rodger P. Stewart, 70, dead of natural causes. “Wouldn’t let me in his room. He was sitting in there tonight with the window open. I said, ‘You’re freezing out the house!’ He said, ‘Don’t you come in,’ and he started to push me out. Then he fell back in his chair with his eyes staring up.

“Nothing but misery,” said the landlady. The cops patiently examined the heavy figure on the chair. Rodger P. Stewart’s suit had holes in the knees. His shoes were run down. There were a few prunes in the room, some stale bread and some rice. The cops listened to a recital of the old man’s Spartan way of life: he had risen every day at 5, had gone to Mass, then to a public library to read. He had no visitors. He retired each night at 7. Some of the policemen recalled that he cadged dimes for food on the streets nearby.

But for all this, the landlady complained, Rodger P. Stewart had been “haughty.” He had told her, she said with a sniff, all sorts of tales: that he had been a handball champion between 1900 and 1910, that he had once run a sporting-goods business in Manhattan. Nevertheless, none of this had kept him from borrowing her radio, breaking it, and refusing to have it fixed.

After he was gone, the old man’s story continued to grow. The police pieced together something of his life. He was one of 16 children of a New York policeman, had indeed prospered as a businessman. In 1935 he married. His wife developed cancer, and he took her traveling—seven times around the world, he said later—in search of a cure. After she died in 1946, he became a recluse.

Normally policemen do not investigate the lives of ragged men who die in cheap rooming houses. But in Rodger P. Stewart’s case they had a sound reason. They discovered why he kept visitors out. Behind his padlocked closet door lay a Gladstone bag. The bag contained jewelry, $30,000 worth of Singer Sewing Machine stock and $200,000 in cash, including one $10,000 bill.

Why had Rodger P. Stewart endured the misery of poverty with this fortune at his hand? He had suffered, it seemed, for an ideal, and like many another martyr for his fellow man. Under the terms of his will, all the money is to go to St. John’s University in Brooklyn—with a request that the institution build double handball courts for its students’ well being.