Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  "I don't know the answer, Lew," I said. "I guess we just have to ride with the punches."

  "That's right," he said, sitting down again, "and it's comin', and the Man upstairs better say somethin'."

  While he had been talking, the phone had rung. Lupie had picked it up in the dinette, and now she was walking back and smiling.

  "Little Lew is coming over," she said.

  "Good," I said. "When I last saw him it was at Benning, and he was about hip high. We three were watching a review on the parade ground with him, and Lew said to him, 'Come on, take a boxin' stance.' Little Lew said, 'I don't wanna.' Lew said, 'Come on, let's see your stance.' Little Lew took the pose, and Lew said to me, 'Look at that. Don't he look better than those bums you see fightin' on the TV now?' "

  "That's right," Lew said now. "He did."

  "When he was born," Lupie said, "the headline said, 'No Boxing Career for Lew Jenkins' Son.' He was never interested."

  "He was in the ROTC," Lew said, "and when he got his bars I was the first one to get a salute from him. Hell, he's so far ahead of the rest of the world it's sad."

  "But you brag too much about him," Lupie said. "It embarrasses him."

  "Hell," Lew said.

  "He'll be thirty this December 27," Lupie said.

  "And what business is he in?" I said.

  "He went to San Jose State and got his engineering degree," Lupie said. "In the ROTC he was a distinguished military student. Then he went to Fort Bliss in missile training, thirty years after Lew was there as a horse-shoer."

  "From horses to missiles in one generation," I said.

  "He set up computers in the Army," Lew said.

  "Did you read about that black market in Korea?" Lupie said. "My little Lew stopped that. He set up the system to catch everybody. Colonels and everybody was scared of him. Now he sets up computers for businesses, and he's in business for himself and he's married and they have two little ones. He's like his father. He doesn't know how to go around and connive."

  When he came in, his wife, Linda, and their two children, Jimmy, five, and Stephanie, two, were with him. He is six feet, nicely built, a handsome young man with his mother's facial features and his father's coloration, and after the introductions and we were all seated, there was that pause that precedes the start of a new conversation.

  "Well," he said, smiling, "would you believe all this domesticity?"

  "I believe it because I see it," I said, "but there are some others who remember your dad who won't."

  "When I register at a motel," he said, "they say to me, 'You've got a famous namesake.' I say, 'That's my father.' They say, 'A wild man.' I don't know if they believe it, but I say, 'He's changed now.' "

  "They're always picking up guys who say they're Lew Jenkins," Lupie said.

  "There were a couple of guys out here," Lew said, "and one in Pontiac, Michigan, and one in New York. Big stories come out that I'd been picked up stealin' here or there, and drunk everywhere."

  "A couple of years ago," Lupie said, "Lew signed the register in a motel in Greenfield, and the fella said, 'Yeah, and I'm Jack Dempsey.' "

  "They were always pickin' me up," Lew said. "It started in Dallas. They throwed me in jail for no reason at all. I was in my damn car, and I went to Forth Worth to see Ernest Tubb, the hillbilly singer, and I got thrown in jail there and in Arlington and in Dallas again and in jail everywhere. I wasn't doin' anything. The cops just picked me up.

  "Did you ever see a guy in jail who never did anything?" he said. "That was me."

  I looked over at young Lew. He was smiling and shaking his head slowly.

  "A couple of years later," Lew was saying, "I fought in Arkansas, and after I fought I was standin' on the damn corner and they put me in jail. I was goin' to Pittsburgh to fight Fritzie Zivic, and they put me in jail in St. Louis. They beat the hell out of me in St. Louis for no reason. I was in the railroad station, and I'm layin' on an old bench, and I woke up and the cops are just beatin' up on me. They knew I was gonna fight Fritzie Zivic in Pittsburgh.

  "Imagine me fightin'," he said, and he seemed small and frail, sitting there in the armchair. "The next morning I paid the $10 fine, and they wished me luck."

  "The cops should see Grandpa now," I said to young Lew.

  "They wouldn't believe it either," he said, smiling.

  "I was in Miami," Lew said, "and I was tryin' to get across the street to this bar. Maxie Rosenbloom run it, and they put me in the damn jail. There was three of us drunks, and the other two made it across the street and I didn't."

  "Maybe they were on a point system," I said, "and they got extra points for picking up Lew Jenkins."

  "Yeah," Lew said. "Somethin' like that."

  We talked for another twenty minutes or so, about young Lew's business and about children, and then young Lew said they had to leave. He is a ham radio operator, and his club was involved in a contest, the point of which, as I understood it, was to try to reach as many other operators as possible around the world. He said that, starting at five o'clock, he had to man the apparatus throughout the night.

  "He's a fine young man with a fine family," I said, after they had left.

  "When Lew and I were married," Lupie said, "I was working in the finance office at Camp Stoneman. We were only going together two days when we decided to get married."

  "That's right," Lew said.

  "So I quit," Lupie said. "In the old days, when you got married you quit your job. Then I took my three-months old son to show him off to the people I worked with, and the colonel said, 'Come back to work.' I said, 'He's a lot of work, and I'd rather be with him.' The colonel said, 'We can get a little cradle, and you can rock it with your foot.' I said, 'No, thanks.' I took care of my family for thirty years."

  "I was comin' back from Japan in 1948," Lew said, "and little Lew was ten months old and . . ."

  "He was walking by himself at seven months," Lupie said, "and at the Presidio at San Francisco, Lew was on the ship. As an enlisted man he couldn't get off right away, but he wanted to jump off and get down to his baby, and he threw his duffle bag onto the dock."

  "That's right," Lew said.

  "When he got off," Lupie said, "I let the baby walk to his father. He had on a little blue snowsuit, with a little bit of red hair coming out and his little nose sticking out. He went right to his father, and Lew said, 'Is this little Lew?' I wondered who he thought it was."

  At about 5:30 we got into the car to drive back to Oakland and have dinner. When we joined the traffic it was moving well and in the lanes, and then a motorcyclist, helmeted, passed us on the right and cut in ahead of us.

  "Look at that guy," Lew said, sitting in the front with Lupie.

  "Do you ever get the urge," I said, "to get on one of those things again?"

  "No more," he said. "Hell no."

  The story about Lew and his motorcycles that became a classic around New York involved Mike Jacobs. There was a good advance sale for Lew's second fight with Bob Montgomery in the Garden, and a couple of days before the fight Mike came out of the Brill Building, where he had his office then, to cross Broadway and have lunch at Lindy's. He was about to step off the curb when he heard the noise, and there was Lew on his cycle swinging into Broadway from Fiftieth Street.

  "Hey, Mike!" Lew hollered. "Look! No hands!"

  "Did you take your pill?" Lupie was saying to Lew now.

  "No," he said.

  "You were supposed to take it at five o'clock."

  "I'll take it at the restaurant," he said, and then, turning back to me, "I smoked all my life. I used to smoke with a towel over my head during the rest period. I smoked and drank and frigged around, and people said when I had the heart attack that boxing done that. Hell, boxin' had nothin' to do with it."

  The restaurant specializes in sea food, and it is on an inlet off the bay. We got a table after only a short wait, and from where we sat I could look across the band of water at a pleasure-boat dock. The sun had gone do
wn by now and the air was clear and the sky cloudless and again, as on that evening when I had first met him off the beaches of France thirty-three years before, there were those same pastel colors of pink and blue in the placid water as in the sky.

  "Sitting here," I said to him, "and seeing the pinks and blues in the sky and water, I'm remembering that evening when I first met you on that LST off Normandy."

  "The sacrifices," he said. "The sacrifices were so great that I can't even think of it. I'll break down."

  "I know," I said.

  I knew what it was in Europe, but he knew what it was in Korea, too. He told me about it, sitting in that EM canteen at Benning.

  "You remember," he said, "how they were all sayin' in 1946 that we were gonna fight the Russians. I read about all that in the papers, and I went right to Baltimore to enlist and told them I wanted to be in it."

  At the time they were talking about putting Lew in with Charlie Fusari in Jersey City. Fusari was a Jersey boy, and the fight figured to draw a good gate, and they were going to guarantee Lew $6,000.

  "I got a chance to make this six thousand," Lew told the colonel at the enlistment center. "If I sign up now, can I get off to make that fight?"

  "No," the colonel said. "I'm afraid you can't. When you're in the Army, you're in. Why don't you fight that fight and get the six thousand, and then come back and enlist?"

  "No," Lew said. "I'm afraid if I wait I might talk myself out of it. You better give me that paper. I'll sign it now."

  He signed it, but no war came. At the end of 1948 he was discharged after two years in Japan, married to Lupie now and the father of young Lew. He fought around Philadelphia, training by playing the guitar in a night club called "Big Bills," and singing songs like "I'm a Plain Old Country Boy," and "Take an Old Cold Tater and Wait." Then came the invasion of Korea, and Lew stood up to what he told me that evening off Normandy about praying for another war.

  "There's nobody can know what it's like," he was saying at Benning. "There's nobody but the front-line soldier knows, with the shellin' and the woundin' and goin' without food and bein' so tired that you want to die. The poor front-line soldier he knows, but nobody knows if they ain't been there.

  "I ain't so young any more," Lew was telling me—and he was thirty-five then, "and my legs ain't so good. I'd get to the top of a hill and I'd be so tired I'd holler, 'Dig in! Dig in, everybody!' Then I'd just turn around and I'd holler, 'Kill me, you sons-abitches! Kill me! I'm so tired I don't care.' I was too tired to dig in, but there was only one fella ever beat me to the top of a hill, and he was twenty-two years old and from Philadelphia and a squad sergeant. I just had to do it, and you know why?"

  "No," I said.

  "I had my pride," he said sadly, again in that way of his. "I was Lew Jenkins, and the rest of 'em were kids and they looked up to me. We'd take a hill and I'd be scared, but they'd all be watchin' me, so I'd make up a rhyme about the hill bein' so rough but we'll get them gooks sure enough. Then they'd all holler, "Listen to old Lew, he's singin'! There he goes!' Then they'd all follow me, and we'd take that hill."

  On August 17, 1951, they set up a road block and they held it for ten days against the Chinese Reds. Only sixty-eight out of a company of two hundred eventually got out, and Lew said he would have gone back to the battalion with the rest of them, but he was too tired to make it.

  "They were shootin' 'em down all around me," he said. "It was rainin' and I lay in a creek bottom and I didn't care if I got killed, and I could see 'em takin' prisoners and killin' our guys. I remember one kid was nineteen years old and with his leg blown off, and when they started to take him out they went by me and he said, 'So long, Lew. I'll see you.'

  "I had a kid in my platoon, one of those screw-off kids you give details to. He got it through the leg and the arm when it was man-eat-man, and this kid was about seventeen and he come limpin' out two or three miles in the rain. Then I got a letter from him later from the hospital, and it was signed, 'Your Buddy, the Detail Kid.' He wanted to know who got out and who got killed, and that shows you he was a real man.

  "When they had us surrounded there was another kid I could see was breakin'. I told an officer about him and he said, 'He's fine. He's bigger and stronger than I am.' The kid wasn't even in my platoon, but he used to come to me. This second day he come to me he started to scream. He was hollerin', 'We'll all get killed! They'll kill us all!' I patted him on the shoulder and I told him tanks were comin' up to get us, and they were gonna give us artillery for support.

  "Hell," Lew said, "none of that was gonna happen, but I had to tell him somethin'. Then I saw him walk over to some trees, and I heard a shot and I walked over to the trees. There was the kid, and he had put his rifle under his chin and he pulled the trigger. I looked at him with the blood runnin' all over and his face blown, and I got sick and I threw up right there."

  In the ten days at the road block Lew formed a company of Americans and some remnants of the 36th ROK Regiment, and they sent another company down to him. That is what they gave him the Silver Star for, and the citation said that George Company and Fox Company were being withdrawn when Lew took his Fourth Platoon up a draw and held there and saved what was left of the battalion.

  Over dinner now we talked about the efforts that over the years I and several others had made to get someone in Hollywood to make a motion picture of Lew's life. Lupie said she couldn't understand why, with the pictures they have made and are making about prize fighters' lives, they wouldn't want to make one about Lew. I said I couldn't understand either, and when we got back to the motel and I got out of the car Lew got out too.

  "Now stay well," I said as we shook hands.

  "Yeah, and you too," he said.

  "And I'm sorry," I said, "about what we see happening in this country, but I guess it's true that the problems of peace are more difficult than the problems of war."

  "I just don't understand it," he said. "I don't understand it at all."

  "I don't either," I said, "but I've often thought how in war—as they say, the most evil of man's inventions—the good in man, his willingness to sacrifice himself for others, comes out. That's still there in man, but we can't seem to find it in peace."

  "I don't know," Lew said. "I sure as hell don't know."

  "Anyway," I said, "what I'm trying to do is thank you. I mean thank you for all you did in two wars."

  "Hell, what I did was nothin'," he said, "compared to all them that got killed. They gave their lives, and it's such a goddamn shame."

  On my way up to my room and then in my room I thought about all he had seen and all he had done. Then I remembered the day I spent in early December of 1944 with a graves registration unit in the Huertgen Forest while they picked up American dead. It was raining and we went out in a jeep hauling a trailer, and we made several trips. They would pick them up, every one of them a mother's son, and lay them in a trailer, one on top of another, and when the trailer was full they would tie the tarpaulin down over the mound of them and then, with the rain beating down on the tarpaulin and running off it, they would haul them back to the regimental collection point. They had a small radio in the jeep tuned to the Armed Forces Network, and on one of our trips back we could hear the play-by-play of the Army-Navy football game being played in Baltimore.

  14

  The Smallest Titan of

  Them All

  I think no virtue goes with size;

  The reason of all cowardice

  Is, that men are overgrown,

  And, to be valiant, must come down

  To the titmouse dimension.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson,

  The Titmouse

  "Little guys," he said once, "usually don't have it their own way."

  His mother was sixteen when he was born, and he weighed three pounds. She told me that for two months the doctor who had delivered him came to the house daily to bathe him in warm water with whiskey in it. She said she didn't know why that was, and until he was fou
r months old her own mother used to wrap him cotton flannel strips, and they called him "the shoe box baby."

  "The only thing I ever hungered for as a kid," he said, "was the size to play baseball. Those other kids didn't want me. I was always the one left over."

  For the month of August of 1955 I was tailing him around Saratoga where, for those four weeks, New York thoroughbred racing moves each year as it has since 1863. Tailing is the right word, for I never took on as elusive a single subject as Eddie Arcaro when he was this country's greatest jockey, or one who, when I could corner him and sit him down, was more of a delight with that quick mind, that frankness, his ability to paint word pictures, and his sophisticated knowledge of his calling.

  "On the streets," I asked him once, "did the other kids beat up on you?"

  "Hell, no," he said. "I was too small to fight."

  "What about that temper of yours?" I said.

  "That's an odd thing," he said. "I've asked my mother about that, and she says I was kind of a nice, mild-mannered kid. The temper was what racing did to me."