My Ears Are Bent

by Joseph Mitchell

  The Countess has a license good in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The New York commissioners have been holding out on her. She does not need a license in Florida, and so most of her exhibitions are held there.

  Her most famous fight, in fact, was held in Florida. This ring battle of the century was held in Miami in 1931 and her opponent was the late W. L. Young Stribling. Johnny Risko, who refereed, called the three-round fight a draw. The Countess agreed.

  “Stribling was a tough baby,” said the Countess. “He gave me a poke in the eye, the bum. In the first place, I don’t like to fight with men. And when I fight them I want it called an exhibition and not a contest. They called the fight with Stribling a contest. I was in the ring before I found out, and I said, ‘I beg your pardon, but this is just an exhibition.’ Then I stung Stribling with a solid right to the jaw, and he woke up. He put up a stiff fight.”

  The Countess does not sanction prizefights between women in burlesque houses or on the vaudeville stage. She thinks women should be allowed to fight at Madison Square Garden, but her enemy, Jimmy Johnson, is strictly against the idea. And it has been difficult for her to find an opponent. She has challenged Mary Pickford, Clara Bow and most of the huskier female stars without success. They do not answer her letters.

  “I would like to have one round with Clara Bow,” said the Countess.

  She said that her other interest is the Vina Science Health and Art League, of which she is the president, founder and organizer. She works out in her apartment and in Central Park. She jogs and prances around the Reservoir every morning.

  She is a French-American. She married an Italian count when she was fourteen and came to the United States the next year. She said she has always left the underworld alone and has always fought clean. She feels she has been persecuted.

  She is a dramatic soprano. When she gets tired of smacking the punching bags she sings a few songs from “Carmen.” She has been married twice—once to the Italian Count and once to Paul La Mar, or “Chicago Kid” Gleason. She owns a sewing machine and makes her own clothes.

  “I am just a ball of fire,” said the Countess.

  3. OLD BALLPLAYER IN WINTER UNDERWEAR

  One of the most interesting athletes I ever interviewed was the Rev. William Ashley (Billy) Sunday, the second-rate ballplayer who became the most raucous evangelist in the history of Christianity. I saw him a few months before he died, painfully, of a heart attack in Chicago. He had expanded his heart by tossing chairs around and pushing pulpits out of his way during revivals; his zealous widow once said she saw his heart under a fluoroscope in a doctor’s office and it was “tremendously enlarged.” It may be blasphemous to say so, but toward the end of his career I think he got a little tired of fighting the devil. The afternoon I saw him he lay in bed in his room at the Salisbury Hotel and gathered strength for the old-fashioned revival sermon he planned to deliver that night in Calvary Baptist Church.

  When I went into his room the slangy, tired old man reached under the blankets and scratched his back lustily.

  “I got on my winter underwear,” he explained. “I can’t get along without it—no, sir! I don’t know what I would do up here in New York City, N.Y., if I hadn’t put my woolen underwear in my grip.”

  “I just had to put Dad to bed,” said Mrs. Sunday, who insists on being known as “Ma.”

  “I wanted to take me a walk around town,” said the evangelist, a trifle plaintively, “but Ma made me get in bed and take a nap. I haven’t had a chance to get around town yet.

  “I had quite a few visitors. There was a sculptor, and there was one of the men who ushered for me when I held my previous meeting here in 1917, when 65,492 souls accepted Christ as their Saviour. That was a great meeting. We took up $120,000 in collections.”

  “And don’t forget,” said Mrs. Sunday, “to tell about the $100,000,000 we collected in the Liberty Loan drive around the same time. Of course, we’re not bragging, but we do feel proud of collecting that money for Uncle Sam.”

  “That’s right,” said Mr. Sunday, “and another visitor was Mickey Welch, who used to pitch for the old New York Giants years and years ago. As a matter of plain fact, he quit playing ball in 1892. I played against him many a time.

  “He brought up the story about the time I was scheduled to run a race with Arlie Latham—fastest man on the St. Louis team. I was the fastest man on the Chicago team, of course. Well, in the meantime I got converted at the Pacific Garden Mission, in Chicago.

  “So I was very put out, as a practicing Christian, when I heard they were going to hold this race on a Sunday afternoon. I went around to my manager and I said, ‘I’ve been converted and I can’t run in this race on a Sunday.’

  “And he said, ‘The hell you can’t. I got all my money on that race, and if you don’t win it I’ll have to eat snowballs for breakfast all winter.’ So I said, ‘The Lord wouldn’t like for me to run on a Sunday.’ Well, the manager looked at me and said, ‘You go ahead and run that race and fix it up with the Lord later.’”

  The evangelist roared with laughter. He laughed so hard he shook the bed. Mrs. Sunday also laughed.

  “So,” said Mr. Sunday, “I ran the race and won.”

  The evangelist was asked if he drank beer when he was a baseball player.

  “No,” interrupted Mrs. Sunday, “he never drank any beer. The other ballplayers did, but Dad never liked it.”

  “Well,” said the evangelist, “I guess I drank a little, but not very much. I used to like to chew tobacco, though. If a man drinks beer it creates a taste for the hard stuff and he’s a drunkard before he knows it. I never would compromise with the liquor traffic.

  “I believe prohibition is the best law a nation ever enacted, and it will come back, as sure as you’re born. But, I don’t know. I never dreamed they would destroy that law.”

  “Now, now,” said Mrs. Sunday, “that’s all done and over with. Let’s forget about that.”

  The evangelist began to talk again about his days as a baseball player, and how efficient he was at stealing bases, and he was asked if it is true, as Heywood Broun reported, that he used to put his off heel in the water bucket when he was up to bat.

  “Well, now,” said Mr. Sunday, looking at the ceiling, “well, now, to tell you the truth, I never was a champion hitter. But I sure was good at stealing bases.”

  “And he was good at bunting, too,” said Mrs.Sunday. “I often heard how good he was at bunting. Didn’t someone say that you were one of the players who originated bunting, Dad?”

  Mr. Sunday did not answer. He appeared to be meditating.

  “No,” he repeated, “I never was a champion hitter, but I sure was good at stealing bases.”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Sunday, “we’re not talking much about religion.”

  “That’s right,” said the evangelist. “Well, seeing Mickey Welch got me to thinking about baseball. Well, young man, I’m still preaching the gospel. I been at it thirty-eight years now. No, it’s been years since I preached in a tent and had a real sawdust trail. The tabernacle I had in New York in 1917 would seat 20,000 souls, and the church I’m in now only seats about 1,200. Times are changing. Nowadays, when I extend the invitation to come forward and accept Christ it’s not anywhere near like it used to be years ago. Of course you have to take what you can get …”

  “Dad,” interrupted Mrs. Sunday, “I think you’re tired out. I think you better go back to sleep now. You’ve talked too much today.”

  “That’s right,” said the obedient evangelist. He turned over on his side and closed his eyes.

  4. “IT MUST HAVE BEEN SOMETHING HE ET”

  One blistering afternoon I was sitting in the dressing room of the Brooklyn Dodgers, which is reputed to be a baseball team, when John (Buddy) Hassett walked in. Mr. Hassett is twenty-five years old and he is a plumbers’ helper, a crooner and a left-handed first baseman. He lives in the Bronx and to reach Ebbets Field he had to ride one hour and twenty minutes on the su
bway. However, he was cheerful.

  He walked to his locker, and while he pulled off his green, blue and yellow necktie and his dark blue shirt he began to croon. He crooned a favorite of his, “That’s How I Spell Ireland.” All over the dressing room ball-players began to shout and moan. Several stuck fingers in their ears, and whimpered as if in extreme pain. Ragged Bronx cheers issued from the mouths of others.

  “What is that awful noise?” shouted a ballplayer in the dim recesses of the room.

  “It must have been something he et,” yelled another.

  “I am being haunted,” yelled another.

  “Why are you so cruel to us?” yelled another.

  Mr. Hassett did not pay any attention to his pained colleagues. When he finished crooning about the manner in which he is accustomed to spell Ireland he began another song, “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” which is also one of his favorites.

  When he completed that number I edged up to him and asked him some questions about his art.

  “I never took a lesson,” said Mr. Hassett with pride in his voice. “I can croon and I can sing, but in the summer I generally croon.”

  “Don’t you ever plan to develop this wonderful talent of yours?” he was asked.

  “Why, yes indeed,” said Mr. Hassett. “I expect to take some lessons in the fall. I figure I may as well capitalize on my voice. It may be the means of making me some money. On the road with the ball club I often sing. Like when we put up at a hotel where they have an orchestra the fellows usually frame me up, and I am asked to sing, which I do. Also I sang last year at the dinner of the Baseball Writers’ Association. Also I have been on the program at many Holy Name Society affairs.”

  Mr. Hassett said he began his musical career when he was a little boy. His father, John J. Hassett, former member of the Examining Board of Plumbers and Democratic leader of the Eighth Assembly District in the Bronx, used to take him to his club, the Shamrock Democratic Club, and young Hassett would stand up and sing old Irish favorites.

  “They would have beer and sandwiches after the meeting and some entertainment,” said Mr. Hassett, “and I would get up and sing. Lately, just to kid me, the members got up a petition asking me to get some new numbers.”

  “I imagine you are a lover of grand opera, Mr. Hassett?” I asked.

  “Can’t say I am,” said the first baseman. “I never been to one in my life. It never appealed to me. I like to relax, and you cannot relax when you have to keep looking at a little book to find out what they are singing about. My favorite singer is Bing Crosby. I like his style.

  “If I was washed up in baseball I could turn to plumbing or crooning. My father is a journeyman plumber, and I hold a plumbers’ helper card in Local 463 of the Plumbers and Steamfitters Union. However, I do not like plumbing very much.”

  Mr. Hassett was born in the San Juan Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, where he played sandlot baseball. He moved to the Bronx in 1925. He played baseball and basketball for Manhattan College, from which he was graduated in 1933. He played with the Shamrocks and the Bay Parkways, semi-pro teams, and immediately after the graduation exercises at Manhattan he reported to the Wheeling, West Virginia Stogies. Then he played for the Norfolk Tars. The Dodgers bought him from Newark. Casey Stengel thinks highly of his ability as a first baseman and also likes to hear him sing “The Last Rose of Summer.”

  Music is the only subject about which Mr. Hassett is talkative. He will open up about his ability as a crooner; but about other matters he is an extremely suspicious conversationalist, weighing his answers like a Yankee farmer. Sometimes he sits for hours in the dugout without uttering a word.

  “It’s going to be a hot day,” I said, moving out of the blazing sun.

  “Well, it might get a bit warm,” said the cautious first baseman, swinging two Louisville Sluggers to limber up his arms.

  5. JOE RUNS TRUE TO FORM, BUT HE WAS RIGHT ON LOUIS

  I had a bet on Joe Louis to win in the first round. I bet $1.50, and won $16 but it will not do me any good, because when Arthur Donovan counted ten I jumped up and knocked a table-lamp to the floor in my home and kicked over a cabinet in which I had a collection of Bessie Smith records, any one of which was worth $16, now that Bessie is dead and gone.

  I drew the bet out of a pool made up in a saloon. It was a pool with thirty-two chances, a chance on Louis and a chance on Schmeling in each round and two decision chances. Each chance was 50 cents.

  The first chance I bought was Schmeling in the eleventh. I was disgusted because I do not admire Schmeling and never have, and even if he won I did not want to win any money on him. So I bought another. It was Schmeling in the eighth. I felt very tragic. So I bought another. That turned out to be Schmeling by a decision. Then I broke down and began to sob.

  “You are a big fool,” said the proprietor of the saloon. “You haven’t got the sense God gave a billy-goat. Schmeling in the eleventh is the best chance in the pool.”

  I told him it was against my principles to have a bet of any kind on Schmeling. I have always admired Joe Louis, not only because he is a great fighter, but because he never says an unnecessary word. I am not that way. I am always putting my foot in my mouth. If I am in a roomful of people and there is something that absolutely shouldn’t be said in that room, I always say it; I never miss.

  So I stood there at the bar, with three chances on Schmeling, feeling very tragic and down and out. Then a copyreader who hangs out in the saloon heard I had Schmeling in the eleventh.

  “You want to swap?” he asked. “I got Louis in the first.”

  “Don’t say any more,” I said.

  So that is how I bet on Louis in the first round. By nightfall I will be telling people that I not only had a bet on Louis in the first round, but that I had bet on him to knock out Schmeling in two minutes and four seconds. Even now I think I am a fight expert. By next week I will be applying for Arthur Donovan’s job.

  However, I wish I had not broken all of my Bessie Smith records.

  6. HARLEM IS PACKED FOR THE FIGHT

  The bars, poolrooms, sporting cafés, and basement cabarets of Harlem were packed tight today with loud-laughing citizens from the Negro sections of every large city in the United States, but they were all too busy shaping up their bets and making flamboyant predictions about the horrible state Max Baer will be in when Joe Louis gets through with him to shoot pool or eat fried fish.

  Harlem was described as “looking like a corn patch when the fence broke down and the milk-cows got in” by Gill Holton, the Lenox Avenue gambler, who has opened and lost three cabarets since repeal closed up his famous establishment, the Broken Leg and Busted Bar & Grill, which was celebrated for a brief period in 1931 as the wildest cabaret in the Western Hemisphere.

  “Way I look at it,” said Holton, who put three rubber bands around his wallet at noon and resolved to bet no more, “if Joe Louis loses this fight, every Negro sporting man in this great country of ours will have teardrops in his eyes as big as oysters. Only an act of God will stop him from winning, like a tornado might come up and strike Yankee Stadium right in the belly, because you know and I know they will be a lot of mean people in that place tonight, and I don’t like to be in the midst of so many mean people. Like being under some trees when the lightning is striking.

  “Yes, sir, unless a tornado strikes, Joe will win. When Mr. Baer stick his head out it’s going to be touched. Like a man stick his head into the dumbwaiter and a ice wagon fall on it. People up here got every cent they own put up for Joe except the money they saved to be buried with—funeral money, I mean.”

  Holton stood in front of the North Carolina Barber Shop, at 424 Lenox Avenue, and gave out his predictions. One of the old bartenders, James P. Melvin, seconded him.

  “When I collect my money,” said Melvin, who weighs 278 pounds in the summer and 302 in the winter, “I’m going down to 125th Street and get me a T-bone steak and one dozen little yellow yams and some chitterlings and crackling bread
and a big pound cake, and then I’m going to work my way up town, stopping off at every eating place on the way until I get to 140th Street. When I get there I’m going to call me a taxicab and go home and see what Mrs. Melvin cooked up for me.”

  Every saloon in Lenox Avenue had pictures and statues of Joe Louis in the windows, except the Melon King’s Inn at No. 438. In its window was a painting of a great iceberg watermelon, dripping with red juice and black seeds, and a photograph of Haile Selassie on a white horse. There was a charcoal sketch of Louis in the Southern-Oriental Café, at No. 386, and the sketch was offered as a prize to the one who thought up the best four-word title for it. Salesmen walked the streets selling little plaster casts of Louis, painted bronze, and a bent old man stood in front of the Big Apple, the most popular rendezvous of sporting figures, at 2300 Seventh Avenue, selling a life of Joe Louis.

  At the Brittwood Bar and Grill, 594 Lenox Avenue, there was a big sign across the front, “Only Official Headquarters for Detroit Boosters’ Club.” Inside, sitting in booths, were a group of the wealthiest Negro real estate and pressing-club owners in the Middle West.

  They were drinking straight rye and slapping each other on the back. One man had a wad of bills big enough to choke a dragon and at intervals shouted, “He’ll go into the ring even up, but now it’s 7 to 5. Bring me a drink of Old Taylor.”

  “Wait to tonight,” said Fred D. Hudson, the manager.“Everybody up here’ll be full of beefsteak and beer, and the boys will be laying bets on fights which won’t happen until 1939.”

  Hudson’s establishment is the headquarters of Jack Johnson, the former heavyweight champion, who now wears a blue beret and drinks Bourbon through a straw. Johnson was at home getting in plenty of sleep today, but he is scheduled to appear at the Brittwood at dinner time to make his prediction concerning the round in which Louis will knock Baer into the deepest part of the Harlem River.