Recounting the Lewis vs. Conn Championship Farce

[Most of the journal excerpts published on this blog to date deal with descriptions of Army life, musings about society and politics, and the occasional introspective journey. My father’s journals, however, are also filled with critiques of books he read and movies he saw, along with dozens of other wide-ranging topics. The following excerpt is an example — a wry description of the June 19, 1946 World Heavyweight Champion bout between Joe Lewis and Billy Conn, held in Yankee stadium and experienced by my father via radio. The detailed — and amusing — recount of the match speaks well of both the broadcast’s quality and my father’s reporting and writing skill. Perhaps he should have gone into sports writing rather than political journalism. Mike Jacobs, mentioned in the first paragraph, was the Don King of his day, a boxing promoter who exerted near total control over the sport.]

June 20, 1946 (Fort Lawton, WA)

The records set in Yankee stadium last night were not exactly those predicted in the pre-fight ballyhoo. Possibly there was as much interest in the “three-million dollar gate” as there was in the projected controversy between Joe Lewis and Billy Conn. But the gate was a flop, slightly less than two million dollars when the turnstiles stopped clicking. Though this was the second-highest haul in history, it will draw only sneers from Americans, who have no sympathy with second-best performances. Not a few cynical ladies and gents, who have recently been advised in national magazines of the stranglehold which Mike Jacobs holds on prizefighting, will no doubt derive a perverted pleasure from this financial fiasco. The sportswriters, in a sudden burst of honesty, have come as close as possible to biting the hand that feeds them. They have been hard put to find enough adjectives to describe the avariciousness of kindly old “uncle” Mike. A lot of folks get a hell of a kick out of the disappointment of greed, except when they are involved as principal parties in the drama. Of course there’s no possibility that Mike lost money on his show, but certainly his prestige was deflated just a little.

First congratulations should go to Louis, who has always been a great and fair fighter, and who suffered no loss of reputation last night. Second congratulations should go to the thousands of people who could have got into the stadium for a price, and stayed outside instead. And Billy Conn should get some kind of consolation prize for covering more space in eight rounds than any previous challenger or champion, even after deducting from the total distance the six feet which he covered in the final ten seconds.

Billy put up his best fight in the newspaper article which appeared under his name a couple days before he met Louis in the ring. He was full of Irish cockiness as he claimed right out that Louis was as good as a dead pigeon. Louis, of course, mentioned that Conn might be mistaken in this opinion, but not many people took Joe seriously. The idea was fast gaining ground that the champion was practically in his dotage. Conn himself seemed to be making a lot of this notion; he knew he couldn’t whip Louis by trading punches, but apparently he expected the Negro to drop from the sheer exhaustion of the chase. This strategy might have succeeded on a quarter mile track, with no time between rounds. But in the ring Billy kept running into the ropes and couldn’t dodge quite all of the punches that Joe threw at him.

As heavyweight brawls go, this one was a very genteel affair. Billy and Joe obviously remained good friends throughout. A couple of times Billy slipped on a corner and fell to the canvas. Joe simply stepped back and waited for him to regain his feet, being content to score his putout unassisted. Billy kept grinning every time Joe managed to get close enough to jolt him. Possibly he wanted to reassure his backers who expected him to keep out of range until Louis was staggering with weariness. “A mere tactical error,” he seemed to be saying. Then in the eighth round it was a mere tactical error which laid him flat on his back, and for once poor Billy couldn’t manage a grin.

I heard the fight in Seattle at the Servicemen’s’ Center. Approximately a hundred fellows were bunched around the big radio in the second-floor ballroom. Most of them were sailors, since the Fort Lawton authorities, apparently fearing a race riot, had imposed a fifteen percent quota of passes. That sounded to me like a typical example of brass-hat reasoning. The only riotous phenomenon which came to my attention was the laughter the fellows bestowed on the announcer’s description of Conn’s frantic race against time. The fellows got just as many laughs and were far more comfortable than the suckers who paid a hundred bucks for the privilege of shivering in a ringside seat at Yankee Stadium under the assumption that they were going to see a fight.

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Reflections on Post-War Seattle, New Year’s 1946

[One more vignette of post-war Seattle, written on New Year’s 1946. As a 20-year resident of the city’s suburbs, I find many of my father’s observations of mid-1940s Seattle quite interesting (the aversion to umbrellas remains strong, but is no longer universal). It seems that the good citizens of Seattle were more than happy to make a profit off the returning troops, who for all their drinking and partying couldn’t — to my father’s mind — conquer the “loneliness of spirit” that they shared with most other Americans.]

January 1, 1946 (Seattle, WA)

Seattle is one of the northernmost of US cities, but, being within breezing distance of the Japanese current, its winters are not as severe as they are exasperating. It’s an unusual day when a little rain falls. On a usual day a lot of rain falls. No one really worries about getting wet, but accepts his daily soaking as a matter of course. I haven’t noticed an umbrella during ten days in Seattle.

Seattle, like most other American cities, is much less impressive as an old acquaintance than as a bustling stranger. As a port city, it sees more than its share of soldiers and sailors, and sees them only as short-time transients bent on having a good time. Entertainment is a booming business for Seattle people, and the boys in the service are never in any doubt that it is a business. They pay top prices for anything that’s offered to them, and most of what they get is second-rate, or worse. But the simple pressure of their numbers makes them powerless to protest, and most of them have enough money to give them a “what-the-hell” attitude. But among themselves they curse the city volubly.

No doubt the good people of Seattle do a little private cursing of the troops. The boys go into town to get drunk and look for girls. These are the things they’ve been dreaming about most avidly during the months overseas, and as they come plowing deep into Puget Sound on the ships, they begin to build Seattle up into the Mecca of their longings. The people of Seattle apparently don’t make much objection to the damage done their city’s morals by the uniformed pilgrims, but they probably grow quite weary of their streets reeling with drunken, brawling, flirting kids.

On First Avenue are the military trinket stores and the penny arcades. Most of the boys make a bee-line from the ships to the trinket stores to stock up on the stripes, patches, medals, buttons, theater ribbons, overseas “hershey bars,” caps, and hash marks which become the visible marks of glory. Then, after everything is sewed and pinned in place (often at the USO on Second Avenue), they launch off into the city to consume and conquer. Several hours and a good many dollars later they drift back to their ships and barracks to boast or bitch, according to their respective fortunes.

The only regular stage performance in Seattle is a dingy burlesque show at the Rivoli on First Avenue. (Sin, by the way, is arranged symbolically in Seattle. It parades in its rawest forms along First Avenue, which is the waterfront, becomes more refined on each succeeding avenue up the hill, and is sophisticated practically beyond recognition by the time one reaches Sixth Avenue.) The movie theatres, which carry such piquant names as the Blue Mouse and the Music Box, are mostly all owned by a Mr. John Hamrick. Mr. Hamrick had a very mediocre offering for the Christmas season. “The Stork Club,” featuring Betty Hutton and Barry Fitzgerald, was as good as anything going, and it was not good at all. But the theatres stay open all night, and draw the bulk of their late-evening patronage from boys on pass who have no other place to go.

There’s one thing about Seattle, and about any other American city, that most fellows can’t understand, because they’re products of the city way of life. They’ve learned to depend on the mechanical, commercialized dispensers of “pleasure,” which never really please. The human spirit has probably never before been more completely neglected than it is in America today. Even lovemaking has no significance beyond its physical thrills, and the most intimate moments are shared by fellows and girls after an evening’s, or even an hour’s, acquaintance. There is in almost every American a tremendous loneliness of spirit coupled with an ignorance of the means of spiritual fulfillment. Spending money is the most obvious opiate for his vast restlessness, and just now he has plenty of money. Probably during this New Year of 1946 Americans will spend more money to satisfy personal wants than ever before, and then come to the end of the year as dismally dissatisfied as ever.

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Modern World Threats to Creativity and Culture

[This journal excerpt revisits the theme of individual creativity, which my father saw as being threatened by many of the conveniences and distractions of the “modern” world in 1942. After all, how could the average person be creative when they were so easily drawn into passive activities such as listening to the radio, watching movies, or driving their automobiles through the countryside? Plus, people’s association with culture was fast becoming one of paying to experience its expression by others, rather than one of contributing to culture themselves.

My father, of course, would eventually see television eclipse all other forms of passive entertainment, and lived long enough to witness the emerging role of the Internet as a huge time sink. One can make a case that the Internet cuts two ways — both as a vehicle for endless browsing and superficial exchanges, and as a platform on which individuals can create and disseminate creative works with an ease unparalleled in history. On balance, though, I think the warnings my father raised in 1942 are much more apparent, and dire, today.]

January 28, 1943 (Middlebury College)

A central point in the arguments for socialism is the increased leisure time that will redound to the working classes, which they will be able to use in “a new burst of cultural feeling,” as E.C. Lindeman puts it. More efficient organization and utilization of the means of production will make comparatively short that part of the day which each individual must spend in physical labor. In other words, we put the machine in the proper place, as our slave, or, at least, as a subordinate partner, and then use our leisure time to participate in a great revival of the arts.

Maybe. We might remember, however, that our leisure life is as completely mechanized as our working life, – the automobile, radio, motion picture machine, and mass production printing presses. So we wonder if our machines really can give us new leisure, to be used creatively, or do they simply force us to live at such a whirlwind pace that we shall never really have the time for a “new burst of cultural energy.” We get our culture in such fitful and varied snatches that each one of these snatches becomes practically meaningless to us. We cram our lives up with incidentals in which we ourselves have no creative part – listening to the radio, watching sports contests, going to the movies and the theatre, driving through the countryside.

All these activities are supposedly part of the “broader, fuller life” which our machines have made possible for us. I don’t agree. If anything, the life of the common man today is narrower, even than that of the pioneer on our Western frontier a century and a half ago. Then a man was forced to produce the essentials of his own life. Though this was admittedly hard labor, it furnished a wide range in which he might exercise his creative powers. Today we don’t build; we buy. Our vaunted division of labor has been carried so far that we learn to spend our days as assembly lines, performing the simplest single operation in the manufacture of a product which we shall probably never use ourselves. For this degradation into an automaton we learn to be satisfied with a wage with which we can buy the essentials of life, and perhaps have enough left over to buy a little culture. Is it any wonder that men who find their lives crammed into such a narrow orbit sometimes go on strike. Wages aren’t their primary objective, no matter what they are told. Way down in deep they have a yearning to be men. Of course they are fighting against the feeling of insecurity, but behind this feeling is the caged fury of wild creative beings who have grown up in a society that has made the cramping of their native powers a prerequisite of existence.

No malevolent “ruling class” has consciously willed this situation. We grow up learning to listen to the radio, to watch movies, to ride in automobiles. Most of us never have a chance to be born, in any creative sense. We become culturally lazy by learning to admire the cultural activities of a few outstandingly creative, or skilled, persons in our society, and worse than this, we learn to look upon this admiration as a privilege, by often being forced to pay for it. We become hero-worshippers, and forget that we ourselves might have become heroes.

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