BoxRec

Great stuff, Charlie...keep'em coming...

They remained great friends for life after their careers ended. They saw each other often when Archie came to NY City. Archie had a 16mm film copy of the fight, but my father never got a hold of it to make a copy.

I will add this: In ALL the interviews that my father did for TV,newspapers, and boxing magazines and in telling me his life stories on boxing, my father never waivered about who was "the toughest fighter he ever fought". After battles with Ezzard Charles,Willie Pastrano,Crowe Peele and Danny Nardico (just to name a few) it was always Archie Moore he said that gave him his toughest fight.
He said he simply couldn't "get in on him" to deliver his head shots or under him to go up the middle. Archie's famed "peek-a-boo" style of crossing his arms in front of his face prevented not only my father,but many opponents from attacking the great Champion. My father said it was the prime reason that Archie's longevity in the ring and his huge ring record exists today.
My father went on to say that getting hit by Archie was about the same as being hit by other fighters,but he remained strong due to his defense- and not being worn down by the end of the fight.

raylawpc wrote:

kikibalt wrote:

raylawpc wrote:How is Don doing, Frank? Didn't he have his surgery this week?

Tom, his surgery got postponed last week, because as he was been ready for surgery, his BP went over 200. He is now schedule for Wednesday, the 19 of this month. Talked to him this morning, he sounded okay...

Thanks Frank. I hope all goes well for him next week.

My sentiments as well. Frank / Rick Please keep us posted. Don's a fighter himself.
We are all in his corner !

CNorkusJr wrote:

raylawpc wrote:

kikibalt wrote: Tom, his surgery got postponed last week, because as he was been ready for surgery, his BP went over 200. He is now schedule for Wednesday, the 19 of this month. Talked to him this morning, he sounded okay...

Thanks Frank. I hope all goes well for him next week.

My sentiments as well. Frank / Rick Please keep us posted. Don's a fighter himself.
We are all in his corner !

My father won The US Marine Heavyweight Title 1948 in San Diego,CA.
Along with that title came the All US Navy Heavyweight Champion Title and the All US Service Heavyweight Champion Title. Twice my father was in the NY Golden Gloves-in 1946 he had to bow out of the Heavy Open Finals against Bobby Isler due to hurt hand. He won the NY Silver Gloves for being in 2nd.
In 1945 he went to Semi finals and lost in Lt- Heavy Novice Division.
My father was training for the 1948 Golden Gloves but was instead picked for the US 1948 Olympic Trials as a US Marine. He went to the Semi Finals in Boston Garden where after knocking down Coley Wallace twice in the 2nd Rd, he himself got KO'd by Wallace in the 3rd ending the adventure. Coley Wallace then fought Norvell Lee in the US Olympic team Heavywt finals,where Lee won and went on to London,England where he lost in the medal Rd.
Coley Wallace could not participate as the US Heavy alternate (I believe injury)-my father was then selected as First Alternate to 48 US Olympic team as Heavywt should Mr Lee get hurt. He did not-the rest his history.Here is some early career remarks on my father.

The Charlie Powell vs Norkus 1 articles (1954)

I'll post the fight stories later when I have more time

If you wish to view the fight highlites

http://sosoboxing.com/boxing-video-watc ... -powell-i/

Greatest sports figures in L.A. history, No. 17: Elgin Baylor

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/sports_ ... aylor.html

CNorkusJr wrote:I'll post the fight stories later when I have more time

If you wish to view the fight highlites

http://sosoboxing.com/boxing-video-watc ... -powell-i/

CNorkusJr wrote:I'll post the fight stories later when I have more time

If you wish to view the fight highlites

http://sosoboxing.com/boxing-video-watc ... -powell-i/

Sweet left hooks. That first knockdown by your Dad was a beauty. Remind you of anybody you are related to, Frank?

raylawpc wrote:

CNorkusJr wrote:I'll post the fight stories later when I have more time

If you wish to view the fight highlites

http://sosoboxing.com/boxing-video-watc ... -powell-i/

Sweet left hooks. That first knockdown by your Dad was a beauty. Remind you of anybody you are related to, Frank?

Tom,.

Chicano History Brick by Brick :

THE BRICK PEOPLE by Alejandro Morales (Arte Publico Press: $9.50, paper; 300 pp.)

September 18, 1988|Margarita Nieto | Nieto is a specialist on Latin American and Chicano literature and coordinates the Minority Creative Writing Program at Cal State Northridge. and

In 1905, Walter Robey Simons founded the third of eight brick factories on land that today comprises Montebello and a corner of Commerce. In the 50 years from its founding until its demise in 1952, Simons Plant No. 3 produced the building materials for many Southern California landmarks including the Walt Disney Studios, UCLA's Royce Hall, parts of the Uniroyal Plant and materials for the reconstruction of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. Boasting in its heyday of being the largest brickyard in the world, its contribution to the social history of urbanization of Southern California goes beyond the number of brick and tiles used to construct downtown Los Angeles and Pasadena.

Along with the plant, Simons constructed a self-enclosed company town with a store, post office and school in which workers immigrating from Mexico lived with their families. Through segregation and paternalism, Simons Plant No. 3 became a microcosm of the divisive social order that dominated Southern California during the formative years of the early 20th Century.

In "The Brick People," Alejandro Morales' first novel in English, the red common brick stamped Simons is a metaphor for the Anglos and Mexicans who worked and lived together at Simons Plant No. 3. Based on the intriguing wealth of material associated with the plant's 50-year history, Morales again returns to the interplay between historical fact and creative fiction that had been the basis of his 1983 Spanish-language novel, "Reto en el paraiso" ("Menace in Paradise"). A professor in the department of Spanish at the University of California, Irvine, Morales' first two novels, "Caras viejas y vino nuevo" ("Old Faces and New Wine") and "La verdad sin voz" ("Truth Without Voice"), published in Mexico by Joaquin Mortiz in 1975 and 1979, were the first novels to be written in Spanish and published in Mexico by a Chicano writer. They introduced the mixture of historical, mythical and imaginative dimensions that Morales continues to develop in this novel.

Through an omniscient narrator, the novel presents a chronological and linear synthesis of local and personal history through characters drawn from real life. Morales graphically describes violent scenes, particularly those dealing with massacre or murder. However, the plot centers on the founding of the plant and the development of its town and relates a series of episodes ranging from a retelling of the Chinese Massacre in downtown Los Angeles in the early 1900s, Simons' journey to the Hearst Ranch in Mexico, power struggles between Joseph and Walter Simons, and finally Octavio and Nana Revueltas' story and their struggle to survive the benevolent paternalism of Simons Plant No. 3.

Initially, it seems that the novel's guide is Rosendo Guerrero, the plant foreman, an immigrant from Guanjuato. He has mysteriously arrived in California led by his intuitive knowledge of a pre-Columbian cosmic "mandala" that he also uses to lay out the physical features of the brickyard. His story foreshadows another reference to the magical, the curse evidently cast on the Simons by Dona Eulalia Perez de Guillen, heir to the Rincon de San Pascual Land Grant, on which the Simons later built their homes. Rumored to be 155 years old at her death and forced off her land, legend has it that her body disintegrated into millions of large brown insects after her death. The Simons in turn, will choke to death on a plague of the same insects.

Echoing Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Oscar Zeta Acosta ("The Revolt of the Cockroach People,") this metaphor of rancor begins preparing the reader for the socio-historical themes concomitant with the Magically Real. You are almost led to believe that Morales is about to revise history and erase chronological time through myth and imagination to follow the metaphor of the oppressor and oppressed.

But no. Morales, instead, allows time to become a mere record of a historical past, trapping both the narrative and the reader in an episodic and linear novel abounding in characters and events bordering on the predictable. Perhaps the problem lies in the dominance of the narrative voice and the lack of character development.

In a Sept. 23, 1983, article in the Los Angeles Times, Virginia Escalante reported on five years of research undertaken by Montebello resident Ray Ramirez on the history of the Simons Plant and of a planned 30-year reunion of the community that once lived there. While "The Brick People" serves as an introduction and reminder of the stories and narratives surrounding the plant, it is obvious that it only begins to scratch the surface of this segment of Southern California history.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

My sisters, Cecilia, Annie and I are doing an interview this morning with Alejandro Morales for a documentary on the Simons Brickyard

In Los Angeles, there was a Chinese massacre which took place during 1871, not during the early Twentieth Century.

Frank- Hope the interview goes well.

- Chuck Johnston

d

CNorkusJr wrote:I'll post the fight stories later when I have more time

If you wish to view the fight highlites

http://sosoboxing.com/boxing-video-watc ... -powell-i/

Thanks for posting, I just called my dad to see if he went to the fight since we are San Franciscan's and said no he was away on his own stint with the Marines but believes he saw it on TV. Do you know anything as to where your dad trained or stayed while he was in San Francisco for the fight? The Civic was/is a pretty good place to see a fight.
Bruce

Bobbin & Weavin wrote:

CNorkusJr wrote:I'll post the fight stories later when I have more time

If you wish to view the fight highlites

http://sosoboxing.com/boxing-video-watc ... -powell-i/

Thanks for posting, I just called my dad to see if he went to the fight since we are San Franciscan's and said no he was away on his own stint with the Marines but believes he saw it on TV. Do you know anything as to where your dad trained or stayed while he was in San Francisco for the fight? The Civic was/is a pretty good place to see a fight.
Bruce

I just read one of the articles that you posted and see that your dad trained at Newman's gym, which was Newman and Herman's Gym on Leavenworth St. while Powell trained at Dolph Thomas' gym which I believe was called Royal but was gone before I got into boxing in the late 60s. I loved Newman's gym like no other place, by the time I was training there it had been in business thirty or more years and I swear I could feel the likes of fighters like your father coming and going from there.
Bruce

Bobbin & Weavin wrote:

Bobbin & Weavin wrote:

CNorkusJr wrote:I'll post the fight stories later when I have more time

If you wish to view the fight highlites

http://sosoboxing.com/boxing-video-watc ... -powell-i/

Thanks for posting, I just called my dad to see if he went to the fight since we are San Franciscan's and said no he was away on his own stint with the Marines but believes he saw it on TV. Do you know anything as to where your dad trained or stayed while he was in San Francisco for the fight? The Civic was/is a pretty good place to see a fight.
Bruce

I just read one of the articles that you posted and see that your dad trained at Newman's gym, which was Newman and Herman's Gym on Leavenworth St. while Powell trained at Dolph Thomas' gym which I believe was called Royal but was gone before I got into boxing in the late 60s. I loved Newman's gym like no other place, by the time I was training there it had been in business thirty or more years and I swear I could feel the likes of fighters like your father coming and going from there.
Bruce

During the 1960s, Eddie Muller and Jack Fiske were boxing writers at the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle respectively. That is quite a duo.

- Chuck Johnston

The Simons company town reminds me of the clusters of company housing on large citrus ranches (which would be called farms in other parts of the U.S. outside of California) in the vicinity of Santa Paula and Ventura, which are located in Ventura County, California. The ranches included Limoneira and Rancho Sespe. Limoneira, which has been known for growing lemons, is going great guns to this day.

By today's standards, most of the houses were small wooden structures which were rather primative. As I recall, they started tearing them down in large numbers during the 1960s and 1970s.

But there were people from a variety of ethnic groups who were living in such housing, notably during the 1930s and 1940s when many people from the Midwest, including Oklahoma, moved to Ventura County. West of Santa Paula, Lemoneira had a large presence. In that area, there were two elementary schools, Olivelands and Briggs. For awhile, the kids of Mexican descent went to Olivelands while the white kids went to Briggs.

My mother, a middle class girl, attended Briggs about 1940. She told me about seeing a poor kid from Oklahoma wearing dirty underwear at school.

- Chuck Johnston

Bobbin & Weavin wrote:

CNorkusJr wrote:I'll post the fight stories later when I have more time

If you wish to view the fight highlites

http://sosoboxing.com/boxing-video-watc ... -powell-i/

Thanks for posting, I just called my dad to see if he went to the fight since we are San Franciscan's and said no he was away on his own stint with the Marines but believes he saw it on TV. Do you know anything as to where your dad trained or stayed while he was in San Francisco for the fight? The Civic was/is a pretty good place to see a fight.
Bruce

Hi Bruce, My father and cornermen were guests of the St Francis Hotel in San Francisco. A most memorable place my father told me, and wonderfully situated in downtown. Part of the fight agreement was a week stay in San Fran-prior and after the Powell I fight in 54, and the Moore fight in 58. Several news conferences and radio interviews were held throughout spots in San Fran that week leading up to the fight. At ODouls place around the corner, in The St Francis itself and my father did train in Newmans Gym. What roadwork he did do in San Fran was all uphill he said LOL. He loved San Fran. A mag did a picture spread on him here turning the cablecars around, At DiMaggio's on the wharf.etc etc. (My father was good friends with Joe DiMaggio here in NY, Joe was a huge known boxing fan,and attended many NY fights including Yankee Stad cards. He enjoyed my fathers fights even in Miami during spring training. My father has a picture of himself with a huge chef's hat on in the kitchen of DiMaggios,where he was treated like a king.)Your dad might have heard of Art Norkus-the famed bandleader in san Fran. No relations here,but my dad gave him a nice plug in town.

On my fathers strict advice I went to San Fran in 1988 with my first wife, where we visited the old Civic Center,where on the 2nd floor they had a small CA boxing museum. We did mostly the tourist thing-but I certainly agreed with him that it is one of the MOST Beautiful
cities that one can go to.!!


Bruce, Can you tell me if Newman's Gym is still there. I didnt get a chance to look it up in '88, but would love to try and get there someday. Maybe under a different name and I'm sure a new look, but would be interested to know if it is still there ? Thanks.
A few years back I went to the old Miami Bch Aud. which is still there,but now called The Fillmore at Jackie Gleason Theatre,and is now a renovated concert hall in the interior. Just like the SF Aud. which is now The Bill Graham Theatre I heard last,doing the concert thing too. By the way, the old Garden and Stillman's gym in NY are long gone into the history books.

Chuck1052 wrote:

Bobbin & Weavin wrote:

Bobbin & Weavin wrote: Thanks for posting, I just called my dad to see if he went to the fight since we are San Franciscan's and said no he was away on his own stint with the Marines but believes he saw it on TV. Do you know anything as to where your dad trained or stayed while he was in San Francisco for the fight? The Civic was/is a pretty good place to see a fight.
Bruce

I just read one of the articles that you posted and see that your dad trained at Newman's gym, which was Newman and Herman's Gym on Leavenworth St. while Powell trained at Dolph Thomas' gym which I believe was called Royal but was gone before I got into boxing in the late 60s. I loved Newman's gym like no other place, by the time I was training there it had been in business thirty or more years and I swear I could feel the likes of fighters like your father coming and going from there.
Bruce

During the 1960s, Eddie Muller and Jack Fiske were boxing writers at the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle respectively. That is quite a duo.

- Chuck Johnston

My father got decent Press from these gentlemen AFTER the Powell fight. As you can see, Charlie Powell was the highly touted odds on favorite here,and why not- a local sports hero and a state icon. He was promised a shot for Marciano title to if he got by my father.
My father's role back then was Ring spoiler (a story for another day-Al Weill put him to work on these fights), upsetting the apple cart for a few heavies.
After the fight-he got good press from the writers including Fiske and Muller.

Before the 2nd Powell-Norkus fight in san Diego in 58- Jack Murphy wrote some good things too.I'll post what clippings I have for that fight after I finish the Powell I series.

Here is a photo you might like to see. 1958 a few days before Moore vs Norkus in SF.

My father (left) with his then mgr. Marty Sampson who took over the reins in 1956.
Marty Sampson was a pretty formidable middlewt back in his day too.

I think they call it "The Beaux Arts Pavilion" ?