Sweet Fanny Adams

You’re wondering which of those two dames is our Sweet Fanny Adams? Well, It’s the little one on the left (as you’re looking at it). The one who looks like she knows too much (or perhaps she’s seen too much). None of her stories or history were accidental – no sir, and as Fanny used to say:

 “…you gotta make memories while you can, ones that will keep you warm at the end of your days. Memories, that you can take out and polish and admire - maybes.”

Leastways I think that is what she said. You could never be too certain of Sweet Fanny Adams and her thinking. She knew how to win a man’s heart. That was for sure. Guess she learned that point real early in her life. Maybe her Mama taught her – ‘cause she’d been a gal in her day, too – or maybe it was in her blood. Something that she was destined to do. Either ways, she was the queen of all she surveyed. 

She wasn’t short of money either. Her Mama had danced her way through Prohibition, and had made a bank full of greenbacks with all the barrels she shipped into New Jersey. She wasn’t in it with the Italian boys either, she just worked alone and kept the profits. 

Her Mama made sure that Sweet Fanny Adams had been educated real good. She went to a private school, on the East Side of Manhattan. Guess it never really taught her too much, except how to fool the cops when she needed to. 

Yet this story concerns Fanny when she was in the best years of her life. When things were easy, when love was so easy to come by that you could throw a lot of it away. It was at that time when she looked the best she ever would, although perhaps folks look great their whole lives – just in different ways. 

I’m thinking it was in the Fall of 1943, that this story is concerned. Fanny was working in a munitions factory out by the southern turnpike – five day shifts, twenty four hours off and then another five days of night shifts. 

Yet in all the times in between, she not only managed to wash/eat and pray – but she still found time to run her other business – selling booze to the Jersey mob of bad boys.

She was her mother’s daughter all right. She greased the palms of those that needed it and saw that obstacles were dealt with. She didn’t need a gun – her looks and her smile got her to every place she would ever need.

One night, just before Christmas ’43, she hit a problem. She had promised the bad boys that she could supply an extra-large delivery to take them through the holidays. However she found out at the last minute that the ship she was waiting on, had been torpedoed in the mid-Atlantic – she tried to get another supply through from Canada but it was too late and too problematic to do so at that time.

A bigger concern was that she had taken the money for the next three deliveries and more than that, the money had all been spent. Her ‘friends’ didn’t take too kindly to a situation like this, not too kindly at all. Her smile and her looks would only get her so far.

When the guys from Atlantic City eventually knocked on the door of her apartment, she was able to think on her feet. Perhaps that’s what had kept her going, or more importantly, alive all these years.

“Holy, Sweet Jeezus, when will you men stop worrying, I said I’d deliver and I will.”

Heck, she knew she was in trouble. She thought about borrowing the cash, but from whom? The world was at war, and no one was giving any of it away. Who knew when you’d need to escape.

She asked the foreman at the munitions factory, if maybe she could get an advance on her wages. The poor guy chuckled, then spat on the floor, and then chuckled some more.

“You gotta be kidding me, Fanny. You know we can’t give out greenbacks.”

She thought about taking up her old profession, that thing she did when times were hard, and the men were harder. She could still get the guys, but the shame of it, it wasn’t her anymore.

She either had to return the money (which would still have consequences) or get another supply of booze.

She even prayed that night, asking if God could just fix all this then she’d be a-God- fearing from then on. But she and God, both knew better.

The guy in this photo – the one in the middle - was Eddie,  who ran into her a day or two later and get this, he asked her to look after some money that he was holding for a card game. It turned out there was about two hundred and twenty three dollars.

Now she knew that it was wrong, but as far as she was concerned her prayers had been answered. She hired a truck and landed some real stinking booze, stuff that was destined for the Hudson river, and drove it to her usual place.

By the time the guys opened the truck door, all there was left, was a few barrels of crap and a note.

It said: “Sweet Fanny Adams”.

She smiled to herself on the train to Savannah, Georgia. Somewhere down here she would start again, using what was left of the money.

But the mob, well, they used the phrase ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’ for years to come when they ended up empty handed – which wasn’t that often. 

bobby stevenson 2019