My old man was a different kind of guy. I guess he wrote the odd letter to my mother, but that was it. There was a stretch of three years where he didn’t communicate with her even once. She used to tend sheep at her father-in-law’s farm back in the old country, and her whole life revolved around waiting for letters from Canada. She lived and worked on the farm, and in all that time she never ventured more than a few hundred yards in any given direction and only made the 14-mile trip by donkey to neighboring Mostar, the capital of Herzegovina, once in 30 years. Can you imagine? It wasn’t much of a life.
Why my father never contacted her over those three years is anybody’s guess; that’s just the way he was. In fact, he brought his younger brother Tony over to Canada first, because Tony was the seventh and youngest child in the family. By the time he finally sent for my mother, my old man had been living and working in Canada for a full decade.
My parents’ respective family trees kind of illustrate how they were polar opposites. My great uncle on my mother’s side, a priest named Petar Barbaric, is revered to this day in the former Yugoslavia—and in the Catholic faith—as a beatified “Servant of God” (sort of a saint-in-waiting) for his pious devotion and service to the church. He was only 23 years old when he died of consumption in 1897, but when his body was exhumed five years later, it looked like he’d only been buried five minutes before.
When word got around that Uncle Petar’s corpse was perfectly preserved, his grave became a site of pilgrimage, which led to his beatification. In fact, in 1997 at the Cathedral of Sarajevo, Pope John Paul II cited my great uncle’s devotion during an address commemorating the 100th anniversary of his death. He’d become a priest at the age of 21 and spent the last couple of years of his life writing letters in an effort to repair the rift between the Roman Catholic Church in the Vatican and the Christian Orthodox Church in Istanbul, Turkey.
My father’s family, on the other hand, wasn’t quite so celebrated. In 1952, my dad’s cousin, Luka (Louis) Krivic, was kicked out of the U.S. for racketeering!
Shortly after my mother arrived in Toronto, she became pregnant. She thought the fact that King George VI had recently taken the throne was a good omen, so she decided that if her baby was a boy she’d name him after both my father’s older brother and the King of England. Not a bad lineage, eh? My middle name, Louis, is what my parents thought was the English derivative of Luka (it’s really Luke), which was my grandfather’s name on my father’s side.
I arrived on the scene on September 12, 1937, at St. Joseph’s Hospital. My parents never agreed on what time I was born; my mother said it was 11 a.m., while my father insisted the big event was two hours later. When I was very young, my mother used to take me to my aunt Eileen’s place. She was an Irish-Canadian girl who was only 17 when she got married—12 years younger than my uncle Tony. I remember my dad telling me how he and some other guys threw a big stag party before the wedding and everybody was crying because they figured poor Tony would never again enjoy good Croatian cooking. That sounds so innocent today, but back then, contemplating life without Croatian food was a major consideration.
Aunt Eileen took care of me while my mother went to work as a chicken plucker at Royce Poultry Packers on Dupont Street, which was owned by the father of my future manager, Irving Ungerman. Every morning we’d walk a mile to Aunt Eileen’s house, and then my mother would walk another three miles to work. Most of the chicken pluckers were Eastern European women, and they all wore the same basic outfit: hair tied in a kerchief, full-length black burlap smock and a pair of rubber boots. Their days were long and the pay was brutal: half a cent per bird.
The guy who killed the chickens would slash their throats, then dunk them in hot water and toss them in a wide, rotating tank lined with rubber studs, which removed most of the feathers. When that was done, the chickens were tossed onto a long table, where my mother and the other pluckers would hang them from strings and remove whatever feathers were left. At half a cent a bird, you had to be fast to make it worthwhile, but my mom did that job for 15 years.
When I was older, I remember reading a letter that my grandmother sent from Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1940, profoundly thanking my mother for the $2 she had sent as a gift. My mother had to pluck 400 chickens to earn that $2!
My father was a cattle skinner at Canada Packers. Today, they have machines that rip the hide from the cow flesh, but in those days they just used knives. If you want to know about my father and his work, there’s one story that illustrates it perfectly.
One day, long after my boxing career was over, I was soaking in a steam bath at a Toronto health club when an older gentleman with a very heavy Scottish brogue came in and sat down opposite me. I thought that was a bit odd since we were the only ones in there, but he said, “Hey Geordie, d’ya remember me from Canada Packers?” I’d briefly worked at the plant during the spring and summer of 1953 after I quit school, but I had no clue who this guy was.
“D’ya remember when your old man took his holidays?” he asked. That didn’t ring a bell, either. I knew my father had a two-week vacation every year, but I couldn’t recall him ever being at home during those times. Then the guy told me why I couldn’t remember. He said my father spent his annual vacation sitting with his lunch pail for nine hours a day on a chair down at the Canada Packers slaughterhouse. He was so paranoid about losing his job that every year, for 40 years, he spent his vacation watching not one guy, but two guys, perform his job.
When I heard that, and I thought about my poor father, who never verbalized many things, and how he must have been frustrated and frightened about losing his job, it brought tears to my eyes. He did the job of two men, and he did it with a malformed arm. If he did half the work of one man, that’s what you might expect. But he did the work of two men—with half an arm. And all the guys at Canada Packers knew that.
I can’t tell you how many times over the years people came up to me, guys who worked with him, and said, “You know what, George? Your old man was a legend. He was an honest-to-God legend.” And I’d think to myself, “Why are they calling my old man a legend?” I didn’t realize what it was about him until I heard that story from the guy in the steam bath.
My old man was tough as nails, too. I remember one time one of his co-workers accidentally splashed some water on him, which he didn’t like too much. He gave the guy a boot in the head and broke his jaw. He got fired for it but was back on the line the next day, thanks to the union.
He was a cut above most guys, my dad. And I never once heard him whine or complain about anything. He had no use for the immigrants who came to Canada in the 1930s and ‘40s and then griped about how the old country was better. He’d say, “If the old country is better, maybe you should go back there.” If anybody ever questioned his lot in life, all he would say was, “Canada good country; give me job.”
My father only had a Grade 2 education. When he was eight years old, his parents took him out of school and put him to work in the tobacco fields that were all over that part of Bosnia-Herzegovina. It was rich, moist Turkish tobacco, and he would spend all day chopping and cutting it. The day after he broke his arm at age 10, he was right back in the fields, chopping and cutting. The ironic thing about not getting that broken arm fixed in order to stay out of the army was that he was eventually drafted into the Yugoslavian army in his late teens and was assigned to the nursing corps for a couple of years. Apparently, in those days, a permanently broken arm was not considered much of an impediment to the working duties of a Yugoslav soldier.
My parents met at my uncle’s wedding. My dad’s older brother married my mother’s older sister Janja, so I have cousins with basically the same DNA who are related to me on both sides—and not one of them looks like me!
The first time I visited Yugoslavia, in 1969, I met a lot of relatives at a reception in Zagreb. A guy with curly red hair and light-green eyes walked right up to me and gave me a kiss on both sides of my cheeks. I asked him in Croatian what his name
was, and he introduced himself as my cousin Kreso. I thought to myself, “How the hell can I be related to this guy?” I was sure there must’ve been a little detour somewhere down the old bloodline. He explained that his father was my father’s brother, and his mother was my mother’s sister. Whoa! When I asked him where the curly red hair and green eyes came from, he told me it was the result of a little R&R by Richard the Lionhearted and his crew on the way to the Crusades in Palestine. That must’ve been one hot weekend!
The Croatians, of course, were all mixed up with Mongols and a dozen other bloodlines: Kurds, Armenians, Albanians, Hungarians, Turks … a veritable ethnic smorgasbord. They also used to have a thing called primus noctus, or “first night,” back when my ancestors were part of the Ottoman Empire, for 450 years. In those days, when a Croatian girl got married to her Croatian fiancé, the poor guy wouldn’t even get the first crack at his new bride. The Turkish landlord reserved that right—and he could continue to exercise it over the course of the marriage. That way, when the girl got pregnant, there would always be some doubt as to who the actual father was. Over the course of so many generations, it’s no wonder the bloodlines got all mixed up.
(By the way, if I’m ever in Tampa, Florida, again one of these days, I might go to a certain restaurant there where they can check your DNA via saliva test, and if it proves that you’re a direct descendent of Genghis Khan you will score a free dinner. I think that would be pretty cool. Experts realize that ol’ Genghis was more than somewhat prolific in the baby-making business and that a very high percentage of Eastern Europeans can trace a lineage back to the Mongol hordes—even to boss man Genghis himself. As a matter of fact, if you have type-B blood flowing through your veins, as I do, then apparently at least one of your ancestors came from the Siberian tundra.)
When I was five years old, I went to a public-school kindergarten for exactly one day. Once they found out I was a Catholic kid, they kicked me out. That was a long day, though. I remember the other kids on my street at the time laughing at me because I had such a heavy accent. Other than a very few words, my mother spoke no English at all—and my father wasn’t much better—so at home every conversation was in Croatian. English was the language of the other kids, so the accent made me a target.
The funny thing is that after I was kicked out and ordered to go to a Catholic school, we found out the Catholics didn’t have a kindergarten in those years, so I spent my days roaming around the Junction. I always had my ears open, and I learned to speak English by listening to the shopkeepers and snippets of conversations on the street. Years later, my first wife, Lynne, taught my mother conversational English by regularly accompanying her on trips to Toronto’s Kensington Market district.
As a kid, I didn’t know anything about World War II or about how hard my parents were struggling just to survive and to keep me and my sister Zora, who was a year younger, fed and clothed. In 1943, I started Grade 1 at St. Rita’s parochial school, and it was then that I began to realize that my family was a bit different from the rest of the neighborhood.
There was strong ethnic mix in the Junction and everybody was poor, but in my family there was only me and Zora and our parents. A lot of the other kids had six, seven, even eight siblings, so when they saw my mother bringing me a sandwich or a snack, they’d really give it to me. Our mother was very loving, and her kids were her whole world. Every day at recess she would run the quarter of a mile from the poultry plant to my school, and I’d meet her at the fence. She’d have blood and guts and bits of feathers stuck to her smock, and terrible raw sores between her fingers from handling the hot, wet chicken carcasses. But she was always smiling, and she’d flip a pomegranate or a bag of chips over the fence, then give me a kiss through the chain-link fence. After I walked home on cold winter days, she would gently take off my rubber boots and wet socks and rub and kiss my feet. No wonder I was a mama’s boy!
I remember exactly what I was eating one day in front of my house: a sandwich on pumpernickel bread with a big piece of flank steak and a dill pickle. It tasted scrumptious! Immediately, a bunch of other kids surrounded me and started yelling, “You bastard! You fuckin’ Jew-boy!” I didn’t understand—but there was no way they were getting any part of that sandwich.
Our family was as poor as any of theirs, but my parents always made sure we had plenty of good food to eat. Of course, it wasn’t always steak. Most of the time it was stuff like tendons, as well as beef tripe, cow brains, kidneys and other organ meats. In those days, all of those things got thrown in the garbage at Canada Packers, so my father would wrap them up in brown waxed paper and bring them home for the family.
Sometimes my mother brought home pigeons that she and the other ladies used to trap and kill in the lofts at the poultry plant. My mother could make a feast out of nothing: collard greens (rastika), headcheese, pig’s feet. In the mornings she would cook Zora and me a pan full of maza—yellow corn meal that looked like grits. That was my favorite—even better than the Kellogg’s All-Wheat cereal I used to scarf down in order to get the trading cards depicting Joe Louis and other sporting champions. On the back of the cards were little write-ups by Canadian fitness guru Lloyd Percival, and they were my first real introduction to boxing. I studied each one until I could duplicate the moves it depicted.
I was a pretty good student in elementary school; in fact, I skipped Grade 4. My English was good by then, but I still had problems fitting in. Kids used to throw rocks through the windows of our house almost every week. My old man would go out to chase them away and they’d yell stuff like “Go home, you goddamned hunkies!” It was wartime and there was a lot of animosity, but I didn’t understand it at the time. I just kind of sucked it up.
The only time I remember being affected by that kind of thing was when a bigger kid I didn’t know called me a “fucking foreigner” on the street one day. I couldn’t understand that, because I’d been born right there in the Junction. I went home and cried myself to sleep.
One afternoon when I was eight years old, a kid named Richie Lucas threw a rock through our front window. Richie lived in the house diagonally across the street from ours, and I found out that he had told the other kids he could beat me up.
A couple of days later, peeping through a hole in the wooden fence, I saw him walking at the end of the alley behind our house. I picked up a brick, which I hid behind my back, then waited patiently. When he got close enough, I yelled, “Hey, Richie!” When he looked up, I cracked him right over the head with the brick.
Richie didn’t go down, but there was blood spurting out all over the place. His hair was so blond that it was almost white, so you can imagine what it looked like with all that blood streaming down his head and soaking into his shirt. He kind of staggered backwards and ran howling down the alley, while I just stood there and laughed like hell. I felt so proud of myself! Looking back, that might have been the first indication that I had what boxing trainers call the killer instinct.
After that little episode with Richie, I became one of the regular guys around the neighborhood. When we weren’t in school, we hung out in the streets, playing wallball or hopscotch or building scooters out of orange crates and roller skates that we raced down a bridge right around the corner from our house.
We had to make our own fun. There was no TV in the neighborhood until an Irish guy named Mr. Davies got one in the late ‘40s, which was a real big deal at the time. I remember Mr. Davies because he died of a heart attack watching the rematch between Billy Conn and Joe Louis. He bet a bundle on Conn because Billy had given Joe such a hard time in their first fight. That was the end of poor Mr. Davies.
Most of the other kids were scared to death of my father, so we didn’t hang around the house much. Like my son Mitchell used to say, my old man looked like he just stepped out of Dracula’s castle in Transylvania, so he intimidated anybody who came to the house. He was only about 5 foot 9 and a half and 200 pounds—a tad smaller than my mom, who was a big woman at 5–11 and
215—but my father was the disciplinarian, no question. There was never any conversation or negotiation with him, just terse directives: “Shut up.” “Do this.” “Do that.” He was Sergeant Bilko with attitude.
There was never any warning before my dad lowered the boom—he’d just whack you. If I stepped out of line, he’d wrap his hand around my fingers and thumb and whip them with a pussy-willow branch. That was the punishment for minor infractions, and it hurt like hell. If I did something serious—like the time I busted Zora’s baby carriage by loading it up with rocks—he’d spread cinders from the furnace on the basement floor and make me kneel on them while I begged God for forgiveness. That particular penance could last for hours, depending on the crime, so for the most part I was pretty well behaved.
My dad took us to church every week, and I was an altar boy for a couple of years. My mother never went to church because she thought it was too exclusive. Her philosophy was simply to be a good person all the time, not just on Sunday. To her, being a good Catholic meant you didn’t lie, cheat or steal, and you didn’t have to go to church to learn those things. The old man saw things differently. To him, church was where you went to repent for all the bad things you’d done in the previous six days—even though he had his own ideas about penance.
Was it abuse? I didn’t see it that way; it was normal to me. As tough as he was on the outside, my father had a good heart, and I knew he loved me. He could be surprisingly sensitive, too. He loved western movies, and on Saturdays he’d often take me to a show or a concert or to the museum. We lived in a tight-knit community and there was always a Croatian wedding or somebody’s birthday party, so we did a lot of stuff as a family.
Like most big brothers, I had kind of a love-hate relationship with Zora. It was a pain when she wanted to tag along when I was doing stuff with my buddies, but I was protective of her. One time when I was eight and she was seven, we were walking through High Park near the Junction when a guy drove up alongside us and offered Zora some candy to get into his car. She was all set to do it, but I knew something was awry and started screaming at the top of my lungs for her not to get into his car, so the guy took off.
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