Page 124
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A noisy, fragmentary continuation turns toward Saint Bernard's, new anti-gambling laws, the collapse of the father's slot-machine business into a smaller warehouse in the ghetto, mounting pressure, visible Parkinson's disease, and the hard demand to look at the business clearly for what it is.
OCR damage breaks the flow, but the surviving lines still show a shift from barroom legend to family economics and bodily decline. The insistence on objectivity and discovery lands harshly beside the image of machines piled up and a father losing ground.
A heavily handwritten-over page where Michael names Papa Joe dead, reports the six-month anti-gambling-machine cut of his father's business from a block-long structure to a lower Fifth Avenue warehouse, and the big boys' pressure — handwritten marginalia crowds the bottom margin.