the education, time and enthusiasm to talk about ideas. He championed dissent and debate, discussed literature and music.” He urged Gene to educate himself, and against Gene’s parents’ wishes, he also encouraged the young man’s boxing aspirations.
“Gene reveres the memory of Dr. Van Vliet,” recalled a friend a half century later. For many years after the doctor’s death, Gene walked by his house to remind himself of the mentor who had taught him that a library was the chart room of knowledge. Gene began to see writers as confidants, and he memorized words and passages from books, hoping that he, too, might become as erudite as those who had written them.
Apart from his pranks, Gene was considered by his friends to be something of a prig, almost a stereotype of the perfect altar boy. He didn’t drink or smoke, and he regarded swearing as crude and sacrilegious, turning away when another boy told a suggestive or an off-color story. Early on, he liked to use big words he’d picked up from reading, words that he wrote down in notebooks stashed beneath his bed like treasures. “In a way, Gene was as out of place as a fish in a park lane, and yet somehow, we didn’t seem to think it anything unusual that he could be one of us and yet so different,” said his childhood classmate, Eddie O’Brien Jr. “If some other boy had been such a stickler in the matter of language and deportment, he would have been in danger of getting his head punched.”
Facts learned from reading and conversations with the doctor also gave the maturing Gene grist for his increasing defiance at the dinner table where Papa dominated. If someone read a book, Papa had read it first. If someone had a quote, he corrected it. If someone knew an historical incident, he cited the dates. (To try to get a word in edgewise and impress his father, Gene’s youngest brother, Tom, memorized the births and deaths of the English kings.) Papa was practiced at using ridicule, belittling his seven children to make a point, and was unwilling or unable to display affection or to acknowledge that their schooling matched his as they grew older. The hard man from the docks also refused to tolerate complaints or whining. If he detected infractions in behavior or received a report of lack of discipline at school, whether it was true or not, he meted out punishment harshly.
For his oldest son, fear came at night. “Bring the belt!” shouted Papa.
Gene was made to bend over a kitchen chair with his pants pulled down to his ankles. He closed his eyes, gripped the chair with all his strength and struggled to hold back the tears that he knew his father saw as a sign of weakness. He recalled hearing the frightful hiss of the leather winging through the air, warning him of the pain to come. He tried to block it out, tried to forget that he had been flogged before and that it would inevitably happen again. The impact of the belt raised red welts on the back of his legs and his bare bottom, and sometimes, if Papa had too much gin and missed the target, welts ran like red valleys of blood across his back.
Gene rarely remembered later what he had done wrong. What he remembered was the intimidation and the fear. If he had been flogged at school by the Christian Brothers, which was common practice, and if his father learned of it, he was whipped twice as hard at home. There were days when he could barely sit in a chair. There were nights when he cried himself to sleep. It didn’t matter that other Irish fathers used a whip, too, because he knew that some fathers never did.
The diversity of Gene’s reading and his ability to withdraw into his imagination became essential to his withstanding his father’s outbursts. Words became his refuge. At home, there were Bibles, books of poetry, including “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Quentin Durward, and Sidney Lee’s A Life of William Shakespeare. He borrowed novels from the doctor and from the library and read newspapers and his older sisters’ schoolbooks.
Gene saw himself in the romantic adventures of James Fenimore Cooper and in Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers. The swashbuckling deeds of D’Artagnan in the service of the French king fired his dreams of faraway frontiers and service to his country. He imagined himself a hero — always a hero — fighting duels, engaging in battles in the name of justice, winning the hand of a beautiful princess.
Reading helped him see himself as independent and courageous, and it made him feel he could achieve something great that would make his family proud. As a young fighter, he would journey alone to boxing bouts, fantasizing that he was a Roman gladiator, a mysterious, lonely, defiant Titan out to avenge wrong and save the kingdom, a knight in shining armor, the Ivanhoe of Sir Walter Scott’s novel. “Other lads of the neighborhood would go to see me box. They’d want to accompany me to the fight club, but I wouldn’t let them. I wanted to go to battle alone, alone with my will...the lone, solitary spirit of self-will.”
By the time he was a teenager, Gene was the tallest in his family; at almost 6 feet 2 inches, he hadn’t yet filled out his big frame. He was almost four inches taller than his father, a size difference that put an end to Papa’s floggings, although his father belittled him further by dubbing him “Skinny.” The nickname stung and made Gene only more determined to show that he was tough. He became obsessed with proving his worth, especially to his father.
At age 15, when the family could no longer afford tuition, Gene, like most of his siblings, left school. He found a job for five dollars a week as an office boy at the Ocean Steamship Company near the piers where he lived.
Ring bouts at $5 to $10 became a regular sideline and brought in extra money. At first, he didn’t dare tell his parents and so fought defensively, lest black eyes and bruised lips give him away. “Winning was always my only option,” Gene said. He spent his days classifying freight loads of cotton moving on ships from Georgia and Alabama to New York and Boston. Hoping to work his way up, he enrolled in correspondence courses in mathematics and English. It was tedious work, and he longed for more stimulation and excitement, an outlet for his nervous energy.
Night was his time. The docks lay in darkness, and the expanse of the Hudson became a shimmering black belt cutting off the empty steamship offices from the rest of the world. After the paperwork was done and the lights turned out, Gene stayed behind, pushed the desks out of the way for space, rolled up his sleeves and laced on his gloves. With the twinkling lights of New Jersey in the distance, he fought imaginary opponents, sparring with the shadows and envisioning himself a champion in a great arena. He liked the seclusion and the quiet, broken only by the occasional piercing whistles and sound of foghorns or buoys in the river. Sometimes other junior clerks stayed with him to practice.
“You can do it,” urged his younger brother John, his best friend, supporter and sparring partner. “You will be the greatest champion the Village has ever seen.”
At other times, he sat alone behind a shanty on the dock, reading aloud the rousing stories of the early Greeks, words that exercised his lungs and raised his spirits, making him feel that in battling opponents, he was carrying on a noble tradition. He avoided small pleasures, such as ice cream and other desserts, becoming almost monastic, knowing it made him more self-proficient and independent of Papa.
“I felt I could make myself do anything,” he said. “I could will anything to come true. Anything, everything, was possible. I had fantasies of willpower. I felt nothing, absolutely nothing, could ever stop me.”
As the oldest son, he could do no wrong in his mother’s eyes, and he desperately wanted to please her. He carried his rosary in his pocket, attended Mass regularly and began to take account of his deficiencies: slender arms of ordinary length and average reach, hands that were abnormally small and soft-boned. “But I kept on trying,” he said. “I didn’t think of the gloves as a career, a profession. It was merely that I loved to box and always tried hard at anything I was doing. I put everything I had into it.”
Continuing a practice he had started as a schoolboy, Gene kept a notebook in which he wrote the definitions and correct pronunciations of every new word he read. Words like “expatiate” (to write or speak at length), “prolixity” (needless profusion of words) and “thrasonical” (boastful). He carried a dictionary in his pocket, and he made it a practice to read and re-read books until he understood every sentence. He read that mothers in ancient Sparta toughened their infants by having them look into the sun and that Demosthenes put pebbles in his mouth to develop his skill as