The oil company’s representative filed a criminal complaint alleging assault with a deadly weapon. This time friends had to post bond to get Ahron out of jail. About a year later Ahron returned to Bakersfield from his new home in Los Angeles and pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of simple assault. A ninety-day jail sentence was suspended. He was fined $50. The previous assault charge was later dropped.
The Kerkorian family’s financial collapse and forced relocation to Los Angeles would be among the earliest and most unsettling memories of young Kerkor’s life. It also ushered in prolonged periods of economic uncertainty that would extend more than a decade—deep into the Great Depression. Missed rent payments and evictions, sometimes as often as every three months, repeatedly uprooted the family and made the boy a new kid in a new neighborhood over and over again.
There were lessons to be learned from adapting and readapting to sudden changes, unfamiliar surroundings, and frequent disappointments. The bond growing from shared struggles and distress—“us against the world”—fostered fierce family loyalty and underscored the value of friendships over possessions.
But all the moves were also chances for Kerkor to reinvent himself. A first step was to Americanize his name. In the big city, Kerkor became Kirk. And the farm boy who arrived in Southern California speaking only Armenian had to learn English on the streets of Los Angeles.
By age nine Kirk was hawking the Evening Express on street corners, making about fifty cents a day and turning over pocketfuls of pennies to help support his family. His earliest experience with gambling was pitching pennies and bottle caps with fellow newsies.
Ahron tried to stay in the farm business as a produce broker. For a time he had his own fruit stand near what is now Universal Studios at the intersection of Ventura and Lankershim Boulevards. With another Armenian neighbor he started a produce-hauling business, trucking fruit to the city from the San Joaquin Valley over the Tehachapi Mountains. Kirk’s older siblings, sometimes including sister Rose, drove the notoriously steep and winding Ridge Route over the mountains. The family enterprise ended after one summer growing season. The trucks were repossessed.
In his teen years Kirk came to regard his father as a heroic figure. Ahron was the man who had sailed to America in steerage, landed in California without a dime, built that million-dollar agriculture empire and then lost it all—but who never stopped working hard and dreaming big. And he managed all the ups and downs despite the handicap of illiteracy, with what Kirk always regarded as “two strikes against him.”3
With perhaps a mix of pride and chagrin, he would later describe his father as “a big, rough man who didn’t take anything from anybody.” But Kirk and his father shared an important gambler’s trait—a degree of comfort with risk.
One of Ahron’s biggest scores came when he cornered the watermelon market in the Imperial Valley east of San Diego. Summer in that desertlike area had been uncommonly cool and overcast. Watermelon farmers accustomed to sunny days with temperatures well over one hundred degrees feared cucumber-sized crops and financial ruin. Many opted to cut their losses by suspending irrigation and saving on water costs.
Ahron saw opportunity. He scraped together every dollar from his fruit stand business and drove more than two hundred miles to El Centro. He had enough cash to get an audience with just about every farmer in the region. Few could resist. Ahron found as many takers as he had cash for buyouts.
As gambles go, it wasn’t like Ahron was shooting craps or wagering on pure chance. He was betting on the weather, something familiar to the farmer from Weedpatch. His was a big risk, but a smart bet. When the sun finally came out in the Imperial Valley, Ahron ended up with truckloads of big, ripe melons in the midst of a region-wide watermelon shortage. His watermelon jackpot was an $18,000 profit, a twenty-first century equivalent of about $250,000.
Flush with cash, the family moved into a bigger house in a better neighborhood just west of the University of Southern California. Ahron bought a new car, invested in new business opportunities, and saw his small fortune once again ebb steadily away. Frequent family moves resumed all too soon.
Kirk discovered early in those vagabond years that every new neighborhood and every new schoolyard was likely to be his own personal testing ground. His shy nature and slender build made him an easy target for bullies. But he was also scrappy and determined never to back down, even when the odds—and the sizes of his tormentors—were against him. Kirk became something of a legend among pals after a beating he suffered one afternoon on his way home from school.
“This kid beat him up, really beat him up good,” recalled Leo Langlois, a friend who was there. “The next day, Kirk waited for this kid and fought him again. And the other kid beat him up again.”
They did this for three or four days in a row. What Kirk noticed, even in defeat, was that each time they fought, the bully was a little less aggressive. What the bully noticed, even in triumph, was that Kirk was getting to be a serious nuisance. For Kirk, the contest was a matter of honor. For the bully, it was increasingly a chore. He was losing heart. Finally, Kirk was the last boy standing. The bully “kind’a gave up,” by Leo’s account. The fights stopped. “And they wound up being best of buddies.”
As Kirk entered his teen years, his closest friends tended to be the sons of working-class immigrants of limited means. They called themselves “the League of Nations” for the diversity of their family origins—French, Swedish, Mexican, Armenian . . . and more. Their idea of mischief was slipping into entertainment venues, like movie houses or the car races at Ascot Speedway, without paying for admission. When Kirk’s sister, Rose, dropped out of school to dance in a vaudeville revue downtown, she offered her brother’s band of friends complimentary tickets. They declined the freebies.
One night while waiting in the wings to go onstage, Rose gasped when she caught sight of Kirk and pal Norman Hungerford (the Swede) crawling across the backstage. They slipped down into the orchestra pit, jostling musicians, before disappearing into the dark rows of seats. When she confronted him after the show, he shrugged and said, “It was more fun to sneak in.” Something about a little danger clearly appealed to the prankster side of this otherwise mild-mannered kid.
Public school held little interest for Kirk, and in all the family moves he was falling behind other boys his age academically. He was a bright enough student, but he was bored by the repetition of math. One of his worst subjects: geography. To Kirk the world was pretty small. He never traveled outside the two-hundred-mile stretch of California separating his Los Angeles home from his Fresno birthplace.
His education ran into fresh difficulties when he entered Foshay Junior High School, just west of the Memorial Coliseum. Kirk’s growth spurts were adding to his length but not his heft. The campus bully was bigger—and better connected. His father was a gym teacher. Once again Kirk didn’t back down. A series of challenges and long-forgotten provocations led to an alley off campus. Minutes into the fray Kirk’s fist smashed the bully’s Adam’s apple. The brawl stopped as the coach’s son grabbed his throat, gasping for air and making desperate gurgling sounds.
Kirk was promptly transferred to Jacob Riis School for Boys in South Los Angeles. It was only five miles away, but for the students sent to Riis it may as well have been South San Quentin. Discipline was corporal. The all-male faculty was armed with swinging two-inch, rivet-studded leather belts. And fights were more common than ever. Nonetheless, pal Norman missed his friend so much back at Foshay that he provoked scuffles of his own in order to be reunited with Kirk at Riis.
After another year Norman moved on to high school. The closest Kirk got was some vocational training—an auto shop class at Metropolitan High School. It was enough for him to pick up some valuable mechanical skills, but it turned out to be the end of his formal education—the equivalent of eight grades.
Kirk entered the Southern California job market as a middle-school dropout at the worst possible time—the depths of the Grea
t Depression. It was the early 1930s. He had to settle for a series of odd jobs, caddying at the old Sunset Fields Golf Course on Crenshaw Boulevard, selling orange crates for curbside benches at the Pasadena Rose Parade, anything to bring home a few cents a day. Everyone in the family had to contribute. Art worked with Ahron in the produce brokering business. Rose danced. And Nish parlayed his schoolyard brawling into a hard-earned meal ticket as a boxer known on fight cards up and down the state as “the Armenian Assassin.” Kirk dreamed of his own prizefighter’s moniker—but he was still too young, too small . . . and too nice.
In the fall of 1934, Kirk and Norman, both seventeen, were among the nation’s 11.3 million people looking for work—part of the official 21.6 percent unemployed that had prompted creation in 1933 of a New Deal program called the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). The goal was government-funded public works employment in national parks and forests for young men that would ease demand for the limited number of private sector jobs. The pay was $30 a month, more money than Kirk or Norman had ever made. One problem: the boys weren’t yet eighteen, the minimum age. Of course, getting into places where they didn’t belong had become something of a sport for these charter members of the League of Nations club. This time they begged their parents to lie a little . . . to swear that they were each a year older. It worked. The pair reported for duty at Fort MacArthur, a harbor area military reservation, where they donned World War I–era uniforms and got their assignment—the California Sierras.
After an all-night train ride to Sequoia National Park, they went immediately to work. It was especially demanding high-altitude work—digging, chopping, and clearing paths on terrain like the 14,505-foot face of Mount Whitney and in the nearly inaccessible wilderness area of Mineral King.
From day one there was an obvious difference between the limited stamina of city boys like Kirk and Norman and the superior endurance of farm-raised youths. Familiar faces from the Los Angeles train started disappearing as the workload and demanding schedule drove many to sneak off down the mountain to thumb rides home.
Privately, Norman asked Kirk if they should bail out, too. Kirk shook his head.
“Let’s stay. We can do it.”
At first, “the farm boys pretty near killed us . . . we couldn’t keep up,” recalled Norman. “But we worked hard and we got tough.” The boys had signed on for six months, promising to work into April 1935. Winter turned out to be especially rugged. Kirk was snowed in for a time at an outpost camp in the high country. But their work so impressed CCC management that both were invited to stay on in the spring. It was good money and good experience, they agreed, but Kirk and his friend wanted their freedom back. And they wanted off the mountain.
Kirk probably didn’t realize how much he had changed until he got home. He was as lean as ever, but more muscular. Rock hard where he had once been soft. Also, he was near his full height, right at the edge of five foot eleven, and a lot more confident. He and Norman lined up outside MGM Studios in Culver City along with dozens of other would-be day laborers late one afternoon and got the once-over from a job foreman looking for strong bodies—men who could move boulders on a movie set. They got the call. The boys spent a night shift pushing and shoving rocks around a big tank used for filming underwater scenes. They made $2.60 each, personal bests for a single day’s work.
With regular work still hard to come by throughout the mid-1930s, Kirk turned entrepreneurial. He bought equipment for steam-cleaning car engines and rented space at a gas station as his operations center. Used car dealers became Kirk’s primary customers. He made enough money to start buying and trading old clunkers. He’d get them running with his auto shop skills, swap out bald tires for other used tires with a few more treads, and then wash, polish, and steam clean. Presto—he could clear a $15 profit.
One of those who had noticed Kirk’s physical transformation after his CCC stint was Nish. His older brother’s own fighting days were over by the mid-1930s. After more than a hundred bouts, Nish had slowed down considerably. He stumbled easily. His equilibrium was off and his speech slurred. The Armenian Assassin hadn’t brought in any fight payouts for more than two years when he offered to teach an eager Kirk what he’d learned. Nish became Kirk’s backyard trainer.
By late 1937, Kirk, now twenty years old, was learning footwork, defensive strategies, and counterpunching. He still didn’t pack a lot of weight in the ring, but he had other advantages—long arms, quickness, and an easy, graceful style. Kirk’s debut was a preliminary bout at the Hawthorne Arena a few miles south of Los Angeles. He won on points. But the fight that got the most attention came out of town a short time later—in Bakersfield, not far from Weedpatch.
The Bakersfield Arena, in a converted barn on Twenty-Second Street, held up to twelve hundred spectators and was a popular venue for top California amateurs. Kirk must have hit town looking particularly young and inexperienced. Promoter Steve Strelich took Nish aside to warn him that Kirk’s opponent that night would be a seasoned amateur, undefeated in his first four fights.
Kirk entered the ring for his four-round preliminary bout wearing hand-me-down gear from his older brother and a practiced air of confidence. But moments later, watching his opponent warm up and shadowbox in the far corner of the ring, Kirk’s expression darkened.
“Nish, I can’t do it. I can’t fight the guy.”
“Why not?”
“Look at him! He’s no good. You can see that, can’t you? I might hurt him.”
If Nish had any doubts about his little brother’s confidence, they disappeared in those moments before the prefight introductions. His advice was simple: “Look, Kirk, just go in and put him out quick—and he won’t get hurt much.”
The bell rang.
Kirk circled his foe at the center of the ring, moved in close, and kept him busy deflecting a left jab . . . jab . . . jab . . . jab. The kid never saw the right hand that staggered him, an uppercut to the side of his face. Kirk saw his eyes go dead. Seconds into the first round the bout was over and Kirk had his first knockout—and a feeling he would never forget.
“There’s nothing like it,” he would say. “The most beautiful feeling in the world is when you know it’s the other guy that’s going down.”4
For making the drive over the Tehachapi Range that evening and spending a few seconds in the ring, Kirk pocketed $4 in amateur expenses. He also went home with a cherished keepsake, his new fighter’s nickname—“Rifle Right” Kerkorian.
Early success brought Kirk to the attention of George Blake, a prominent fight referee and manager from Westlake Park (what is now the MacArthur Park area of Los Angeles). He had a private training facility. Nish took his brother in to spar and work out under Blake’s supervision. Kirk was invited to join Blake’s stable of potential professionals.
Through the year and into mid-1939, Kirk won thirty-three of thirty-seven fights and was never knocked out. His only losses were decisions. But he was frustrated by Blake’s refusal to let him go pro. In response, Kirk sometimes took on bigger opponents to prove he could stand a pounding.
At another fight in Bakersfield against the bigger Johnny Mendoza, who outweighed Kirk by fifteen pounds, press accounts5 described how Kerkorian “uncorked a stunning salvo of right crosses and uppercuts to the chin” to turn Mendoza’s jitterbug style “to a slow waltz.” Kirk went on to win the Pacific Coast amateur welterweight championship.
Still, Blake worried that Kirk wasn’t putting on enough weight. He seemed to consider the youngest Kerkorian too fragile. Sure, he had the grit and drive of a champion, he had classic boxing skills, he had endurance, and he always got up on those rare occasions when he was knocked down. But he also needed to be able to take heavy body blows and shake them off. That required more physical heft. Blake feared that Kirk could get seriously hurt and end up physically impaired like his brother.
The issue remained unresolved that day when Kirk touched down after his first plane ride with Ted O’Flaherty. Within week
s of that fifteen-minute flight over Alhambra, Kirk was back in a Bakersfield ring to win a decision over Buddy Souza of Fresno. The victory preserved Kirk’s Pacific Coast amateur welterweight title. It also marked Rifle Right’s last big fight.6
Kirk’s new love was flying—and she was a demanding mistress. He needed more money to pay for $3-an-hour flight lessons. So he took an extra job at a bowling alley bar as a bouncer. He saved fifty cents a lesson by declining the parachute rental during practice loops and rolls. Kirk also looked for flight academies that might admit a middle-school dropout but was repeatedly disappointed. Many even required some college.
Along with O’Flaherty, Kirk enrolled in night school classes to study the same math that once bored him as a schoolboy. He had to solve the mysteries of a compass and protractor. He had plenty of motivation now. Math was essential to all aspects of aviation. From navigating to tracking fuel consumption, a pilot’s computations were serious matters . . . life or death matters. And Kirk now had one overriding goal in life: a pilot’s license.
Sometime around the spring of 1940, a newspaper advertisement caught Kirk’s attention. The famous American aviatrix Florence “Pancho” Barnes had opened a flight school at her dairy farm in the Mojave Desert—the Happy Bottom Ranch and Riding Club. Pancho was a Hollywood stunt pilot and the reigning “fastest woman” in the sky after topping Amelia Earhart’s speed record a decade earlier.7
Kirk hitched a ride more than eighty-five miles to the Mojave and made Pancho a proposition. He was short on education and money for flight lessons, but he was willing to work hard. If that meant getting up at dawn to milk cows, slop hogs, and muck out the barn, Kirk was ready to start immediately.
Pancho Barnes seemed very impressed with the young man’s initiative and obvious ambition. She also may have found it especially hard to turn away such a polite, good-looking young man so eager to fly that he would shovel manure every day. In any case, she winked away her own requirement of a high school diploma and Kirk became one of fifteen young men entering her next flight academy class later that year.
The Gambler Page 3