Classic American West Coast Boxing

[kikibalt]

Hey, you guys don't let me turn this thread into a Baltazar thread, need some stuff (Pic.?) from you guys.

[kikibalt]

We were in N.Y.C. for a Don King press conference.
1982

Who are the other fighters, Frankie?

Bennie,

I can only I.D. two, Juan "Kid" meza, far left, second from right is Marvin Camel.

[bennie]

Class





Classless

[bennie]

We were in N.Y.C. for a Don King press conference.
1982

Who are the other fighters, Frankie?

Bennie,

I can only I.D. two, Juan "Kid" meza, far left, second from right is Marvin Camel.

What was it like working with the shock-haired one (to hide the horns)?

[kikibalt]

Class





Classless

You are so right, Bennie.

[kikibalt]

Who are the other fighters, Frankie?

Bennie,

I can only I.D. two, Juan "Kid" meza, far left, second from right is Marvin Camel.

What was it like working with the shock-haired one (to hide the horns)?

In one word, "TOUGH"

[bennie]

Bennie,

I can only I.D. two, Juan "Kid" meza, far left, second from right is Marvin Camel.

What was it like working with the shock-haired one (to hide the horns)?

In one word, "TOUGH"

Can you elaborate?

[kikibalt]

What was it like working with the shock-haired one (to hide the horns)?

In one word, "TOUGH"

Can you elaborate?

I will later on.

[bennie]

In one word, "TOUGH"

Can you elaborate?

I will later on.

OK. I was a few inches from King recently in Cardiff, the man wearing all his brilliant jewellery like medals.
He looked old.

[Expug]

Is that ole Tex Cobb with the cowboy hat on?
Cant see his face to well.

[bennie]

Would the black guy with the shaven head be Freddie "Pebble" Jackson?

[dagosd2000]

Minor league Los Angeles was a little slice of heaven

Jack Herod / LAT
A member of the Hollywood Stars slides into home plate in a close play during a 1939 game. The Stars and the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League drew large crowds in the days when the major leagues stretched no farther west than St. Louis.

In the years before the Dodgers came to L.A., the Hollywood Stars and Los Angeles Angels were the only game in town. And that was no minor matter.

By John Schulian, Special to The Times

It was a far different world the night Paul Pettit drove in 10 runs for a team called the Hollywood Stars. This was a minor league town then, with the Stars on one side of it, the original L.A. Angels on the other and oceans of bad blood between them.

The Dodgers would bring the major leagues the next year, as if the magic in baseball couldn't come from anywhere else. But the big leagues seemed to matter most to grown-ups and politicians, two groups that should never be considered one in the same. To a kid listening to the Stars on the radio, baseball was fine just the way it was.

If anybody had asked me, I'd have remembered how Pittsburgh made Pettit the first of the $100,000 bonus babies when 100 grand was more than valet parking money. And how his left arm went bad and he reinvented himself as a cleanup hitter who wore glasses. I'd have remembered because I thought nothing was more important, and I'd have said that all the magic I needed was in Pettit's bat.

I would have gladly confessed to the same sentiment about the Angels' Steve Bilko even though the Stars were my team and I should have hated him reflexively. But he belted 55 home runs in 1956 and 56 in '57, and home runs in that quantity make willpower weak and temptation strong.

Besides, the moon-faced Bilko was an amiable, beer-loving galoot who bore a striking resemblance to a double-door refrigerator. The only time his smile disappeared was when someone asked if he had stepped on a scale lately. Said a headline in this very newspaper: "Not Even Mrs. Bilko Knows His Weight." L.A., which had yet to embrace the thin, the gaunt and the cadaverous, loved every well-padded inch of him.

He tore up the Pacific Coast League when it ran from San Diego to Vancouver, and never was he more terrifying than at home in L.A.'s Wrigley Field. With two decks and 20,000 seats at Avalon and 42nd Street, it was modeled after its namesake in Chicago and built by the chewing-gum magnate who put his name on both ballparks. The power alleys were short, and there was a jet stream that Gene Mauch, the Angels' second baseman from '54 to '56, said once carried one of his pop-ups into the right-center-field bleachers. No wonder they filmed TV's "Home Run Derby" at Wrigley.

They made baseball movies there too -- "Damn Yankees" and "It Happened One Spring" come to mind -- and Chuck Connors, a slugging Angels first baseman before Bilko, became "The Rifleman" on TV. But if you wanted to see celebrities, you went to Gilmore Field, the cozy, wooden home of the Hollywood Stars, hard by Farmers Market on the turf that CBS now occupies. The Stars attracted big names the way the Lakers do today -- Bing Crosby, Groucho Marx, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart. The young and scrumptious Elizabeth Taylor even took a turn as the Stars' batgirl.

If a player poked his head in team owner Bob Cobb's office after a game, he might find George Raft, the movie gangster, hobnobbing with the boss. (This is the same Bob Cobb who owned the Brown Derby and invented the Cobb salad.) And if the Stars looked in a certain box seat during a game, they would see a real gangster, Mickey Cohen, the scourge of the L.A. underworld.

But even with all those marquee names, the L.A. where the Stars and Angels dwelt had a small-town feel. Lou Stringer, a second baseman for both teams, sold my dad a '56 Chevy, and Eddie Malone, who caught for both, would have done the same. Roger Bowman, a 22-game winner for the '54 Stars, had an upholstery shop in Santa Monica, and Murray Franklin, who hit the homer that made champions of the '49 Stars, spent the off-season selling sporting goods for J.C. Penney. When Franklin wanted to turn the garage at his Compton home into a den, his teammates helped him.

Four years later, they squared off against one another in the damnedest baseball brawl L.A. has ever seen. What began as just one of many beanball wars between the town's teams turned nuclear when the Stars' Ted Beard slid into third base with spikes high. The blood he spilled was Franklin's. Old Moe was playing his first game with the Angels, but he never had to be asked twice to throw a punch, and he certainly wasn't going to start then.

While Franklin tried to rearrange Beard's profile, the rest of the Stars and Angels battled all over Gilmore, a donnybrook that couldn't be stopped until 50 uniformed cops poured onto the field. Life magazine filled three pages with photos of the mayhem, and in those days Life was as big a part of the culture as the Internet is today.

It was a far gentler moment, however, that convinced me to care about baseball before the Dodgers. One night at Gilmore, Red Munger, a rough-hewn right-hander for the Stars, spotted my head of corn-silk hair in the grandstand and said, "Hiya, Whitey." I couldn't have been more than 4 or 5, but I felt like the most important person in the world.

The wonderful thing is, I can still hear those words. They are never louder than when I go to the Pacific Coast League Historical Society's L.A. reunion every spring. I like being around people who remember the Stars' base-stealing Carlos Bernier, who had a temper as big as his chaw of tobacco. And there's always a chance that Gail "Windy" Wade, the '56 Angels' loquacious center fielder, might make another trip out from North Carolina, still looking as if he could play both ends of a doubleheader.

No reunion is official, though, unless someone mentions Steve Bilko. He died long before his time 30 years ago this month, but he lives again when old Coast League players and fans gather. For that one day, he's still hitting home runs, the big man with the big smile and the big belly. Everybody is young once more, and it really doesn't matter whether the Dodgers are here or not.

John Schulian is a former Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist and a longtime contributor to Sports Illustrated. He is the author of "Twilight of the Long-ball Gods," a collection of his baseball writing.

Couple of things:Will try to get there by 11;00 or Mexican time,11:30. Let me know if that's too early.

Nice post about minor league ball in the Southland. We had the minor league Padres playing in old Lane Field at the foot of Broadway. I would take the 32 Bus and get off right at the corner. Padres at that time were the Cleveland Indians minor league club. We had a good Mexican shortstop that played a while for Cleveland,Rudy Regalado. Very popular here. In those days many ball players finished their careers in the minors. We had guys like Harry"Suitcase"Simpson,Earl Averill,and Herb Score. Score was trying to get untracked after getting hit in the eye. I believe Averill hit that ball that hit Score.
Here's a good one. The announcer on the radio was a guy named Al Schuss. When the Padres were out on the road,Schuss would get the game from the ticker tape from the Western Union office. He had this piece of wood and a mallet. If the batter hit one,Achuss would hit the mallet on the wood. He even had a pillow he'd hit like the ball hitting the catcher's glove. There was canned crowd noise too.
Well one night they're playing up in Vancouver and the game is going into extra innings. The Western Union office closes at midnight and Schuss can't get any more ticker tape. So he fakes the rest of the game on the radio and doesn't have a clue of what's going on!!

Nice pic of Davila and his kids. They remind me of the kids at my school. I try to preach for the boys to respect the girls and for the girls to act like girls. We've got some real cuties and I want them to stay that way. Be good girls,respect your parents,be good in school,and don't put make up on in class. You don't need all that make up when you're 13. When a girl is a little shy and vulnerable it drives a man crazy. If you act like a tramp,the guy will treat you like a tramp and dump you after a while.
The other day we had some time left over in class. I saw this kid with one of them ear plugs listening to music. I asked him to come over so I could hear what he was listening to. Something modern,and wasn't that bad. I asked the kids if they listened to "Oldies". One of them answered,"Yeah,I listen to Led Zeppelin." I said I had an Oldie tape I'd made so I put it on. The first song was "Too Much Monkey Business" by Chuck Berry. I could see the kids heads sterting to move with the music. I thought of something then. I asked the trampy looking girls if they wanted to dance. They acted goofy and embarrassed and said they didn't dance. Imagine that, a Mexican girl who doesn't like to dance.
Well here we go pal. I saw one of those "cuties". The nice girl who's quiet and gets good grades. She looks like one of Davila's girls in that picture. I asked her if she wanted to dance.
"Sure Coach(the kids call me coach"
She takes off her backpack and I hold her and swing her nicely around the room. She was smiling so sweetly.The kids were laughing because they were immature,but let me tell ya' this little "sweetie" had more allure for me than all the other"popular" girls rolled into one. I asked the little"cutie" if she like to dance and she said she likes going to Quincienereas and parties in TJ and she has fun dancing. My granddaughter is the same way. She goes out on the dance floor and dances with her uncles and friends.

Got any girls Frank? Pug says he's got two daughters. You know Frank,me and my son always went at it. He knew I was a "heal." I don't blame him. He turned out better than me,which wasn't difficult. My girls always,I think, felt sorry for me. I love spending time with my grand children. When my daughters are aroiund me with their husbands they treat me like the man. Maybe that's because I look at them like little "sweeties" still.

[dagosd2000]

Former boxing world champion Albert Davila and his wife Roberta, neither of whom graduated from college, have steered their six children toward a college education, including, from left, Brittany, Alyssa and Brianne.
(Ringo H.W. Chiu / Los Angeles Times)

That picture is killin' me. One of the most beautifull things I've ever seen.

[Expug]

I have one daughter age 12 and one son age 10.
From early on I got em listening to that old Outlaw country stuff.
The Country classics.
Merle Haggard , Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams etc.
I can still picture my daughter at about 2 years old sitting in her car seat in the back singing Merle Haggards 'The Fugitive".

"Id like to settle down but they wont let me.
A fugitive must be a rollin stone"

[kikibalt]

Can you elaborate?

Bennie; this how it works with Don king.

Frankie fought for Don King once, Tony never, why? well in 1982 King invited Frankie, Tony and I to fly to N.Y.C. for 5 days on his dime, he wanted us to sign a contract for 3 years, 3 fights a year guarantee, sound good so far, yea? well here's where the deal went sour, he wanted to put the dollar amount for each fight up front at the time of signing the contract, in other words he wanted us to sign for 9 fights for each boy without knowing who the opponent would be but the dollar amount already set, well I turn that down, so he offer us another deal and that deal was that I bought Carl King in as co-manager, I said no to that, thanked Don for his hospitality and we flew back home.

[dagosd2000]

I have one daughter age 12 and one son age 10.
From early on I got em listening to that old Outlaw country stuff.
The Country classics.
Merle Haggard , Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams etc.
I can still picture my daughter at about 2 years old sitting in her car seat in the back singing Merle Haggards 'The Fugitive".

"Id like to settle down but they wont let me.
A fugitive must be a rollin stone"

Pug,
I think women know that we're always going to be "bad boys". That's what makes them attracted to us. The thing is ,if we're around them too much we don't act like "bad boys" any more,and then I know it's time to get away from them. To tell you the truth,I think that's why the women in my life give me a lot of slack. Then when I want to be civilized again,I go home to the wife and kids.It's a continuing circle.

[kikibalt]

diego,

We have one daughter,(Linda) she is the oldest of the siblings, will be 52 this year, she to had a very bad case of cancer, we almost lost her in 2000, poor girl has gone to worse times then I have with our cancers.

I wll post some pics. of her that will make you want cry. as soon as I fine them.
She and her husband and son will be at the luncheon on Sat.

The best time to get there is around 10:30 because of the parking.

[Expug]

I have one daughter age 12 and one son age 10.
From early on I got em listening to that old Outlaw country stuff.
The Country classics.
Merle Haggard , Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams etc.
I can still picture my daughter at about 2 years old sitting in her car seat in the back singing Merle Haggards 'The Fugitive".

"Id like to settle down but they wont let me.
A fugitive must be a rollin stone"

Pug,
I think women know that we're always going to be "bad boys". That's what makes them attracted to us. The thing is ,if we're around them too much we don't act like "bad boys" any more,and then I know it's time to get away from them. To tell you the truth,I think that's why the women in my life give me a lot of slack. Then when I want to be civilized again,I go home to the wife and kids.It's a continuing circle.

True Dagos , very true.

[bennie]

Can you elaborate?

Bennie; this how it works with Don king.

Frankie fought for Don King once, Tony never, why? well in 1982 King invited Frankie, Tony and I to fly to N.Y.C. for 5 days on his dime, he wanted us to sign a contract for 3 years, 3 fights a year guarantee, sound good so far, yea? well here's where the deal went sour, he wanted to put the dollar amount for each fight up front at the time of signing the contract, in other words he wanted us to sign for 9 fights for each boy without knowing who the opponent would be but the dollar amount already set, well I turn that down, so he offer us another deal and that deal was that I bought Carl King in as co-manager, I said no to that, thanked Don for his hospitality and we flew back home.

Either way, Don wants it all his way.

[dagosd2000]

Former boxing world champion Albert Davila and his wife Roberta, neither of whom graduated from college, have steered their six children toward a college education, including, from left, Brittany, Alyssa and Brianne.
(Ringo H.W. Chiu / Los Angeles Times)

That picture is killin' me. One of the most beautifull things I've ever seen.

You guys know how the Red Cross got started? Well a long time ago when soldiers were lying on the battlefield suffering from their wounds,I think it was Clara Barton,heard the wounded and dying soldiers calling out for their mothers. Well Clara Barton got the idea that women should also be with the doctors attending to the wounded. It was shown to be successfull. Nurses had a nurturing effect on the soldiers and the recovery rates skyrocketed. The Red Cross on the field tents originally were symbols to show the enemy that there were women inside those tents and not to fire their weapons on them. Imagine this world without women? The sport of boxing would be considered kindergarten stuff.

[kikibalt]

Is that ole Tex Cobb with the cowboy hat on?
Cant see his face to well.

Yes it is!

[dagosd2000]

Class





Classless

You are so right, Bennie.

Remember Rocky on those old TV shows with Martha Raye? They were pals. Rocky used to paint. It's funny sometimes we see these guys as one dimensional. Mickey Walker painted too. I knew an old "goomba" from the Bronx. He told me everytime he went to the fights in New York and Graziano and LaMotta wouldn't be on the card,they'd be sitting across ringside from each other. They'd be yelling back and forth about if they ever fought,the other guy should watch his ass. This old dago told me the reason they never fought was that they were too close. They'd be yelling at each other and before the fights were over they'd be having a beer together.

I remember watching LaMotta on TV not too long ago. He lost his sons. One to cancer. The other in that Flight 600 srash outside Long Island. Well the 'ol champ is sittin' there and looks up and says,"Hello Rocky. Hello Sugar Ray. I'm gonna' be joinin' you guys soon. Tell my sons their old man is on his way. You guys must like it up there. It must be nice cause you guys never come down for a visit."

More class,hey Bennie?

[bennie]

Great article by John Schulian.
John was a writer here in Chicago many years ago.
He wrote a book called "Writers Fighters" that is a very entertaining read.
I recommend it.
Some good stuff in it about the aformentioned Johnny Lira too, Benny.

Cheers, expug. Just been checking it out on amazon.

[bennie]

[kikibalt]

diego,

We have one daughter,(Linda) she is the oldest of the siblings, will be 52 this year, she to had a very bad case of cancer, we almost lost her in 2000, poor girl has gone to worse times then I have with our cancers.

I wll post some pics. of her that will make you want cry. as soon as I fine them.
She and her husband and son will be at the luncheon on Sat.

The best time to get there is around 10:30 because of the parking.

Our daughter Linda in her early 20's


Linda after her surgery and on chemotherapy, with her is my ex-daughter in law, Vivian.


Linda with her mom and my wife, Connie, last summer

Cancer can sure be a bitch.