Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  "I know," Willie said, "but what can I do?"

  Willie was living in the big suite alone. He found a doctor to treat Lew's hip, but he couldn't find Lew. The fight was on a Monday, and on Friday afternoon Lew showed up, stewed. He flopped into bed and he slept until Saturday morning.

  "I'll tell you what we'll do," he said to Willie when he woke up. "Let's go on the road."

  They went down and Willie called a cab and they rode out to Fairmount Park. Lew got out of the cab and he disappeared. He was gone for an hour and a half.

  "Where is he?" the cab driver kept asking Willie.

  "I don't know," Willie said. "Maybe he fell in the lake."

  Finally they saw Lew coming down the road. Willie said Lew's arms and legs were going, and he was flying. He got in the cab and they went back to the hotel. He had a meal, flopped into bed and that afternoon he worked a couple of rounds in the gym. He had another meal, and he slept until Sunday morning when they went to the park again and he disappeared for another hour and a half. Then he ate, went back to bed, woke up at midnight, ate and then slept again until it was almost time to go to the weigh-in.

  "Man," he said when he got up and stretched. "I feel good."

  "You must," Willie said, looking at him. "How good can you feel?"

  Hymie Caplan had come in from New York. He waited until Lew went into the bathroom.

  "Willie," he said, "what kind of shape is he in?"

  "What shape can he be in?" Willie said. "He's lucky if he can dumb up the steps to the ring."

  In the third round Lew was on the floor. He had just belted Montgomery with a right to the body and Montgomery had hit him with a long right on the chin, and he was face down on the canvas.

  "Well," Willie said, turning to Hymie in the corner, "That's two in a row."

  "But look!" Hymie said. "He's gettin' up!"

  He got up at nine, punching. He hurt Montgomery with a right hand, and Montgomery went into a shell. While he was in the shell he kept walking to Lew, and Willie said that if Montgomery had just walked away, Lew would have fallen on his face.

  "Lew," Willie said to him after the ninth round, "it's the last round. That guy just about got to his corner."

  "I know," Lew said, gasping, "but I can't get off this stool."

  Willie lifted him off and pushed him out. Halfway through the round Lew was bleeding from the mouth and nose, but he kept throwing punches, and they wrote on the sports pages later that this was the most savage fight in Philadelphia since Lew Tendier and Willie Jackson, fifteen years before.

  "At the end," Willie was telling me, "the referee walks over and he lifts Lew's hand and he says, "The winner, Lew Jenkins!' I just stood there and I said to myself, 'Did I see this thing? Can it be true, with his hip and his knee, and the way he's living?' "

  "How could I do that?" Lew was asking me at Benning. "How could I even stand up for ten rounds in those fights with good men, the shape I was in?"

  "I don't know, Lew," I said. "Don't ask me."

  "When did you decide," I said to him now, "to call it quits on the booze?"

  "I stopped about twenty-five years ago," he said. "I just had to quit. I was just bein' crazy. I said to myself, 'I can't go on. I got a son and a wonderful wife, and my wife and son are doin' without.' I used to drink days, weeks, months at a time."

  "I know," I said.

  The day after the Montgomery fight in Philadelphia, Lew went back to Sweetwater, and he got there just as his mother died. After the funeral he bought a new Cadillac in Dallas and he drove it back to New York. He put it in a parking lot, and he took a plane to Miami.

  He was married then to Katie, and they had had another of their rows. When they first met, Katie was a stock car racer in Dallas, and theirs was a marriage that should have been made in a carnival booth. It was a Punch-and-Judy show, and in Miami they had another go-round and Lew walked out. He was ambling along the street when, in a store window, he saw a display of new motorcycles.

  "How do you turn one of these things on," he asked the salesman, "and how do you turn it off?"

  The salesman explained it to him, took $500 from Lew and fixed up the license. Lew wheeled the motorcycle out onto the street, ran it once around the block, and started off for New York.

  "Man," he was telling me, "you fall off a motorcycle about ten times goin' sixty miles an hour and it raises hell with your insides. I was near shook to death by the time I got to New York."

  They matched Lew to defend his title against Pete Lello in the Garden on November 22, 1940. Lello had stopped Lew in seven rounds in Chicago the year before, and Lew was supposed to be. training at Pompton Lakes, New Jersey. He trained there, if you want to call it training, for a number of fights after that, and it was always the same.

  "He'd disappear," Allie Stolz was telling several of us in the boxing office at the Garden one afternoon, and Allie was a good lightweight. "He'd be gone three or four days. Then he'd call me up and say, 'Where have you been?' I'd say, 'Me? Where have you been?' He'd say, 'Don't go away. I'll be right out.' Sometimes he'd come out that day. Sometimes it would be another three or four days.

  "After a while," Allie said, "he had three motorcycles. He had one for straight speeding and one for hill climbing, and one that, so help me, ran in curves and circles."

  I remembered Lew telling me that evening on the LST off Normandy about the last cycle he owned. He said that Katie was trying to find it, but that he had it locked up in a garage at Pompton Lakes where, he said, the New Jersey State Troopers were guarding it.

  "One day," Allie was saying, "he was missing from camp, and just about when it was time for him to box we heard a terrific clatter out on the road that runs past the camp, and there he was at the head of about fifty guys on motorcycles, waving to us as they roared past."

  Lew also had a guitar and a phonograph and a stack of cowboy records. He would play them over and over, and then take the guitar and strum it and sing.

  "Don't I sound like him?" he'd say.

  "No," Allie would say.

  He would write a couple of songs a day. Allie said that no matter what the words were, the tune was always the same.

  "Listen to this one," he would say, and then he would start strumming and singing again.

  "I heard that one yesterday," Allie would say.

  "No you didn't," Lew would say. "I just wrote it. I hear fellas get a lot of money for writin' songs. I'm gonna write some more and sell 'em and make a lot of money."

  On the afternoon of the Lello fight the police picked up Hymie Caplan. Hymie was out of New York's Lower East Side, short and pasty-faced, blue-eyed and blond, and he had a brother who was known as "Kid Dropper." Kid Dropper was what they used to call a torpedo or trigger man, meaning a gun-for-hire, and that was the way he died. Hymie also had a brother who taught in the New York school system and another who worked for the United States Customs, and I leave that to the child psychologists, family counselors, and sociologists.

  Hymie was one of five the police rounded up, and Bill O'Dwyer, who was the District Attorney of Kings County then, before he became Mayor of New York and Ambassador to Mexico, described it as a $4,000,000 marked-card swindle. A real estate dealer was taken for $150,000 and a Park Avenue doctor for $18,000. Two manufacturers from Philadelphia had lost $40,000 and $25,000 apiece, a jeweler went for $75,000, and a yarn manufacturer for $100,000. There were thirty-eight other business men who said they had lost $700,000 in two years, and O'Dwyer said Hymie was the godfather who had been putting up the money for the expensive establishments.

  Hymie went to Sing Sing, but it was always around New York that he took the fall for somebody else. When he was dying of cancer in 1949, Irving Rudd and I went over to see him in the hospital in Brooklyn, and I wanted to ask him then about it, but I never did.

  "I'll get him off," Lew said, when he heard they had Hymie.

  They were holding Hymie in a Brooklyn hotel, and when Lew got on the phone with the detectives, he k
new he was not going to get Hymie off. He pleaded with them to bring Hymie to the fight so that he could see it, and when they told him that they couldn't do that, he asked them to put Hymie on the phone.

  "Listen, Hymie," he told him on the phone, "when you hear the building shake, that's Lello hittin' the floor."

  Lello hit the floor in the second round. They were coming out of a clinch and Lew threw a hook and Lello started down. Lew was on top of him, and he came back with a right as Lello was going. Lello rolled over on the canvas and got up at nine. When he did, Arthur Donovan moved in to wipe Lello's gloves, and as he lifted them Lew belted Lello with another right and he went down again. He was down three more times and was on his knees in Lew's corner, about to pitch forward on his face, when Donovan stopped it.

  "Did you miss Hymie," one of the newspaper men asked Lew in the dressing room.

  "I missed Hymie," Lew said, "but I didn't miss Lello."

  "Against Lello," Dan Parker wrote in the New York Daily Mirror, "Jenkins looked like a great champion. Certainly no lightweight within the memory of this present generation of fans could hit like this bag of bones."

  It was a month after the Lello fight when they put Lew and Fritzie Zivic together in the Garden. Zivic had just won the welterweight title from Henry Armstrong, and it would have been a tough fight for Lew, even if he had bothered to get in shape. The fight was on a Friday night, and Lew and Willie were out at Pompton Lakes when Lew disappeared on the Saturday before the fight. He showed up on Monday and they decided to finish training in New York. He was out every night, though, and at three o'clock on the morning of the fight, Willie left him and the Texans on Broadway. The weigh-in was at noon and at 10:30 Willie was in the lobby of the hotel, waiting for Lew.

  "You waiting for Lew Jenkins?" a bellhop said to Willie finally, at eleven.

  "Sure," Willie said.

  "He's gone an hour and a half ago," the bellhop said.

  "Are you kidding?" Willie said.

  "No," the bellhop said. "I saw him go out with a pair of ice skates."

  Willie went down to the Boxing Commission. Zivic was there waiting and so were the newspaper men. When Lew finally walked in, it was one o'clock.

  "I got lost on the subway," Lew said.

  He was never very good with a lie, though. It seemed as if he always had to get it off his chest.

  "You know, Willie," he said when they were alone later, "I didn't get lost in the subway."

  "I know," Willie said.

  "I went ice skatin'," Lew said.

  "Why?" Willie said. "Why on the day of a fight?"

  "Well," Lew said, "somebody told me it's good for your legs."

  After the weigh-in Willie took Lew to eat, and then they went up to the suite in the Astor. Lew took a cigarette—he always smoked three or four in the dressing room waiting to get into the ring—and he fell back on the bed with his hat and coat and his shoes on, and he went to sleep. Willie took the cigarette out of Lew's hand, and he said there must have been twenty others in the suite, smoking cigars and shouting to be heard. Every now and then the phone would ring in the bedroom, but Lew slept until seven o'clock when Willie woke him.

  "Man, I feel good," he said, stretching, and that was the night he and Zivic fought that great draw and Cas Adams wrote about the two finely conditioned athletes.

  "Lew had that heart attack you know," Lupie was saying now.

  "So Jack Fiske told me," I said. "When was that?"

  "In April of 1973," Lew said. "I felt somethin' here in my left arm, and I laid down on the bed and I kinda blacked out, like when I fought Primo Flores in the Bronx and I was down five times, but I knocked him out and I didn't know it."

  "And in the dressing room," I said, "Lester Bromberg told you that you'd won."

  "That's right," Lew said.

  "I got on the phone," Lupie was saying, "and the Fire Department came."

  "They took me over to San Francisco," Lew said, "and with that electric shock a couple of times, they like to knock my goddamn head off."

  "The side of his heart broke open," Lupie said, "but it healed itself. It was what they call a myocardial infarction."

  "I was in San Francisco three weeks," Lew said, "and in John Muir here. That cost sixteen or seventeen thousand dollars."

  "Did you have Army insurance that covered some of that?" I said.

  "Yeah, I had some insurance," he said, "but I had to pay practically all. It left me with nothin'."

  "We're still paying it off," Lupie said, "but I'd live in a tent if we had to."

  "I got about eight pills a day," Lew said. "I weighed 119 pounds when I come out of that hospital. I stuttered and I stumbled all over the place, and it was three months before I could talk. A rough, tough guy like me and starvin' to death with that diet, and I thought I'd jump under a car a few times, but I didn't have the courage."

  "You know," Lupie said, "Lew types and exercises his hand. He taught himself to touch-type, but he can't make the 'a,' and before he had the heart attack he was a terrific speaker. He used to tell about his cotton-picking days, and they were fascinated. Some people would come up and say, 'I lived like that, but I was ashamed to say so.' "

  "Yeah," Lew said. "They were ashamed of bein' poor and workin'."

  He was born Elmer Verlin Jenkins in Milburn, Texas, on December 4, 1916, one of seven kids. For a while his father was a blacksmith in Brownwood, and then he tried running a secondhand clothing store. He could never make a go of anything, and each time that he tapped out he would load the family in an old covered wagon and hitch up the two mules and they would push off in hope, while they really knew that it would never be any different. In all, over those years, they hit twenty-two towns.

  "I come from a poor, ridiculous family," he once said to Jimmy Cannon, and Jimmy said that about told it all.

  The whole family would pick cotton. They would go out in the fields at sunup, and they would still be out there at sundown.

  "We'd pick fourteen hours," he said, "and no ten-minute break or nothin'. We'd get to the end of a row and my dad would say, 'Come on!' In cold weather your hands would chap and the burrs would prick 'em. That's the way it was with the poor people of Texas in my time."

  When Lew was sixteen they were living in Sweetwater, and he fought Mexican kids in an alley that ran along the side of a pie shop and the winner got a pie. The following year his father died, and Lew hooked up with the T. J. Tidwell carnival, boxing all comers.

  "They weren't fighters," he said, "but neither was I. I only weighed 120 pounds, and some of them were heavyweights."

  When the carnival folded in January of 1936, Lew went to Mesa, Arizona, to pick cotton. He and a couple of others cleaned out an old chicken house and were living in that when he read in a paper that Jim Braddock, who was then the heavyweight champion of the world, was to box Jack McCarthy, his sparring partner, in Phoenix.

  "I never seen a champion or been close to one," Lew told the others. "I'm gonna get me a fight on that card."

  With one of the others he bummed into Phoenix, and the promoter gave him a dollar in advance of the five he was to get for boxing four rounds. The fight was a week off, and Lew's buddy starved out and hopped a freight, but Lew lived on oatmeal and water and won his fight. He picked up the four dollars and bummed to Dallas and lived for a week on doughnuts and coffee waiting for another fight.

  "You could get doughnuts and coffee for a nickel," he told me, "and after I licked the guy, he told them I won because I had a big steak. I could have killed him, because I had to lay back between rounds because I was exhausted and the referee had to tell me I was winnin' to keep on. Why would that guy lie that I had a steak?"

  "I don't know, Lew," I said. "I don't know why."

  "But why would he lie?" Lew said, sitting there in Benning and still hurt by just the thought of it after sixteen years and all he had been through since then.

  After the fight in Dallas, he caught a freight for El Paso and enlisted in
the cavalry at Fort Bliss. He was not yet twenty. What he was to see of man and feel for man in war was still years away, and he enlisted because he was hungry and tired of sleeping out.

  "They think more of a horse hj the cavalry than they do of a man," he told me. "Horses cost a lot of money, and they could get all the men they wanted for $21 a month."

  He weighed only 136 pounds, but he was the welterweight champion of Fort Bliss, and he fought pro in El Paso and Silver City. When his two years were up, he boxed in Dallas and then drifted to California and Chicago and Mexico. In Mexico he put together enough of a stake to start for New York, and when he hit the city in July of 1939 he and Katie had eight dollars between them.

  "When he first came into Stillman's," Willie Ketchum told me, "he didn't look like anything."

  "Jenkins," Joe Williams was to write in the New York World Telegram, "looks about as much like a fighter as a Bohemian free-verse writer. A starved cannibal wouldn't take a second look at him. He has a hatchet face, and a head of wild, stringy hair, and deep, sunken eyes that seem to be continuously startled. Where he gets his punching power is baffling."