A little something for the holidays from the "Daphneverse."

Justice Society: Caped Christmas

In the following excerpt from The Justice Society of America: Our Own Story author Carter “Hawkman” Hall describes an incident from early in the JSA’s history.

Christmas 1941 was a somber time. It was only a couple of weeks after Pearl Harbor. The nation was still in shock after attack—still trying to grasp the full import of the fact that our nation was now at war. We “mystery men” were still wondering what to do next. Individually we were each doing some serious soul-searching about whether to join the armed forces, or find some other way of aiding the war effort. Collectively we wondered whether to continue our activities as the Justice Society.

A few days before Christmas, we got word from our FBI liaison that J. Edgar Hoover himself wanted to meet with us to discuss, on the President’s behalf, ways we could use our high public profile to support the war effort. Jay and I arranged to meet with him on December 30. In the meantime we all decided to celebrate Christmas quietly with our several families and friends. Except for Al—being Jewish he didn’t celebrate Christmas, but, thoughtful guy that he was, he sent the rest of us some nice cards.

The day after Christmas I got a call from Al. I was at Marshall College, visiting with my old mentor, Hank Jones. Al’s call naturally startled me. What he told me had me cutting my visit short and running back to New York.

It seems that we had had a security breech. The reader may recall that we had rented a low-profile meeting space in the city. We were careful to keep it a secret, of course. In our first year as the JSA we had made some rather nasty enemies in the underworld, and wanted to take no chances on their discovering our whereabouts. We had made the place as secure as we could against break-ins. Nothing fancy, I might add—just good-quality locks and alarms of a sort that would stump or deter the average criminal. Our biggest security lay in simply keeping the bad guys from finding us in the first place.

Al had gone to the “clubhouse” on the evening of Christmas Day to give it a routine check. He did that every few days; he was the one who lived closest to the location, so it made sense for him to serve as our caretaker in between meetings. Inside, he quickly noticed a box that had not been there before. It was a plain, cardboard box, big enough to make a fair armload, with a big bow around it.

Al was flabbergasted. How in the world had anybody gotten in there without our knowing about it? Who could it have possibly been? He knew it couldn’t have been any of the rest of us. We had all been out of town for the holidays. And nobody else was supposed to know about our headquarters. Even the FBI had consented to let us keep its location a secret (President’s orders—it must have killed Hoover to have to hold back like that. And believe it or not, as far as we know he never did find out where we were).

Al didn’t know what to do. The box looked like an innocuous Christmas gift. But for all we knew, some crime boss with a particularly nasty sense of humor might have booby trapped it to blow us up when we opened it. Obviously Al couldn’t contact the police, so he tracked me down and contacted me.

When I arrived in New York, I went out to the clubhouse with Al and saw the thing for myself. We discussed it among ourselves and decided to move it, very carefully, to an isolated location late that evening, when nobody was around to get hurt in case something blew. I don’t mind telling you that we were two very nervous “superheroes!”

Of course we still thought it might just be a bomb—and neither of us knew anything about bomb disposal. We decided to immerse the package in water for half an hour in hopes of maybe disarming it that way. Then we took the sopping package out of the water and, very carefully, started cutting it open. I did the cutting—I was an archaeologist, and used to delicate work. Al stayed on the sidelines—I made him do it, so there’d be a surviving witness in case anything happened to me—and kept telling me to watch for wires while I cut. Even on that cold December night I was sweating bullets.

Finally I got it open, and we could see inside. Turned out the box was full of smoked fish, cheeses, nuts, and chocolates from Zabar’s Deli. Good, good quality stuff, the sort of thing that would soon, in wartime, become very hard to find. Somebody had taken the trouble to sneak a goodie box into our HQ, and we had nearly destroyed it! Fortunately most of the stuff was packaged well enough to survive our immersion.

Al was thrilled. Zabar’s was still a pretty new business at that time, not yet well-known in the Gentile community. He insisted we break open the chocolates and try them right then and there. That night I got hooked on Zabar’s food. We debated among ourselves whether to tell the rest of the gang about it. It wasn’t because we wanted to hoard all the good stuff for ourselves—we just felt awfully sheepish at thinking it could have been some kind of infernal device. Of course we got over that, shared our good fortune, and took the others’ ribbing as gracefully as we could.

So who was our benefactor? Well, inside the box we found a piece of dark, heavy cardboard cut into the shape of a stylized bat. We knew who it had to be. The Batman had never approached us about joining the JSA, and we had never gone looking for him. We assumed that he and his sidekick Robin just weren’t joiners, and left it at that. There was never any bad blood between them and the JSA, as some have speculated.

But evidently he felt, as the only major mystery man vigilante in the area who didn’t join the JSA, that he should give us a little goodwill gesture. None of us ever figured out how he learned of our HQ’s whereabouts, or how he broke in and left the gift without setting off any alarms. It was, to be honest, a bit creepy to think that anybody could do that. If Batman could do it, maybe somebody else could.

Despite that bit of lingering concern, we all considered the Batman’s mysterious gift a bright spot in an otherwise dark season. Even in wartime there was still goodwill to be had, and there were still good guys out there. We all agreed that we were glad the Batman was on our side.

And would you believe it, he managed to turn the gift box into an annual tradition! No matter where we moved our HQ to—and we had several different locations over the years—once a year, right around Christmas, that gift box from Zabar’s would show up. We sometimes wondered whether he flew there in a sleigh drawn by eight tiny bats….