From Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County
Around 1890, a couple of boys ended up at the St. Joseph Orphan Asylum in Cumminsville. One was Jim Tully and the other Gabriel Sullivan. They soon became inseparable and everybody knew them as Tully and Sully.
Sully was born in New Orleans in 1885. His father died when the boy was barely one year old and his mother died five years later. Sully and two siblings were shipped off to Cincinnati under the care of an aunt, who abandoned them to the streets when she did not receive the pension she expected for her services. Sully was barefoot, selling newspapers in the snow, when a tender-hearted woman investigated his circumstances and managed to enroll him and his siblings at the orphanage.
Tully was born in St. Mary’s, Ohio, in 1886. His family were considered to be “shanty Irish.” Jim’s mother died when he was just six years old and his father, an alcoholic ditch digger, surrendered Jim to the orphan asylum.
The pair were leased out by the orphanage to a farmer, who treated them like slaves and so they ran away. Sully was about 14, Tully 13 or so. They lived the hobo life, riding the rails from one end of the country to the other. They slept where they could find a comfortable spot and they ate what they could get by begging, odd jobs and larceny.
(Today, we tend to use hobo, tramp and bum as synonyms, but in the late 1800s and early 1900s, each term had a distinct connotation. A hobo traveled around and was willing to work. A tramp traveled but avoided work. A bum neither traveled nor worked.)
Sully was known for his hot temper and occasionally had to fight his way out of situations that his smart mouth got him into. Tully was more analytical and realized he could make a quick $5 or $10 by taking his fights off the streets and into the boxing ring. Paul Bauer, who co-authored a 2011 biography of Tully, observed:
“He was an untrained boxer, to be sure, but he was fearless. He was willing to take punches, to take punishment, all to get inside and score hits. Despite having some success, he had seen men die in the ring. He had seen ’em blinded in the ring. And I think he realized that this was not a career he was going to carry into middle age.”
Tully was known as a “library bum,” the sort of hobo who knew every library in every little burg and hung out there when he wasn’t chasing a freight train out of town. The idea grew on him that maybe someday he could become a writer. Tully decided to leave the road behind and to give his literary endeavors some attention. He returned to Ohio and settled in Kent, landing a job at a chain factory. At 23, he married 18-year-old
Florence May Bushnell, daughter of a house painter. He began writing for the local papers, first occasional poetry, eventually freelance articles. His byline graced the Kent Tribune and the Akron Beacon-Journal.
Sully, too, grew weary of the hobo life. He found his way back to Cincinnati, got work as a painter and boarded with a widow named Anna Hand [no relation to your columnist]. In 1912, he married Anna’s adopted daughter Nellie, who worked in a cotton factory. Sully was 27, Nellie 22.
Sully was a union painter at a time when there were few protections for organized labor and his temper got him into some scrapes. He was arrested in 1914 on charges brought by advertising magnate Philip Morton, who claimed that Sully and an accomplice assaulted him because he hired non-union sign painters. The charges were eventually dropped, but Sully’s reputation as a union enforcer was secured.
A year later, Sully’s temper took him one step over the line. He was part of a gang that attacked non-union painters working on a new building at Christ Hospital. While most of the gang carried blackjacks, Sully brought a pistol. The Enquirer [December 10, 1915] reported:
“Revolver, knife, blackjack and gas pipe were used by a gang of five unidentified men yesterday afternoon when they attacked nonunion painters at the new $300,000 annex to Christ Hospital, Mt. Auburn. The police say strike trouble caused the assault. One man was shot and died half an hour later. Two others sustained multiple bruises and cuts about the head.”
From "Cincinnati Post," January 26, 1925
The dead man was James Shall, 26. His killer was Gabriel Sullivan. Sully made a full confession with no attempt to blame anyone else.
“I saw Shall on a step ladder. When he saw me with a gun he jumped down and attempted to pick something off the floor. I grabbed his wrists and in the tussle I fired twice. It was my own gun. I didn’t mean to shoot Shall, but was told that the men carried guns in the building.”
Sully confessed without benefit of counsel. He pleaded guilty to a charge of second-degree murder on the advice of a Cincinnati police officer. Judge William A. Geoghegan sentenced Sully to life in prison. For the next ten years, a number of people expressed sympathy for Sully and worked to get him pardoned.
Among his supporters was Tully, who by then had taken his writing career to the West Coast, where he built a reputation as a hard-hitting Hollywood reporter and the author of some best-selling novels based on his vagabond years with Sully. Sully told the Cincinnati Post [January 26, 1925]:
From "Los Angeles Times," March 12, 1922
“Jim wrote to me all the time when he found out where I was. The fellows in the State House used to save magazines for me when they had stories by Jim in them. He sent me his two books, too.”
In prison, the hot-headed Sully gained a reputation as a model prisoner. Those “fellows in the State House” were the aides and secretaries in the offices of the Governor and Secretary of State. As a prison trustee, Sully was assigned to duties in the State House. With personal access to Governor Alvin Victor “Honest Vic” Donahey and celebrity endorsements from Tully and his Hollywood pals, Sully was pardoned after just nine years in the Ohio penitentiary.
Tully went on to write nine novels, three volumes of autobiography, a travelogue, two plays and hundreds of articles, mostly unvarnished profiles of movie stars. Early in his career, he was Charlie Chaplin’s personal secretary. Among his friends were W. C. Fields, Jack Dempsey, Damon Runyon, Lon Chaney, Frank Capra, and Erich von Stroheim. So thoroughly had he immersed himself in Hollywood culture that, when he died, aged 61, all the newspaper obituaries claimed he was just 56 years old.
Sully went on to live a very long life, dying at the age of 90 in Cincinnati. He returned to his former career as a painter, retiring after many years as a member of the facilities crew at Dunham Hospital.
As shoeless orphans, as shiftless vagabonds, who could have predicted the divergent paths Tully’s and Sully’s lives would take?
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