corner man for his father’s fighters.
At the gym, I’m like a little mascot, a little white mascot. All the guys are black where I train. Spring Garden Gym—Sixth and Gerard. There might be a hundred fighters training there, some in the morning, some in the afternoon, some at night. It’s staggered.
Dave has this fighter, Georgie Miller—one of those great guys—outgoing, funny, good guy. I’m fourteen, fifteen. He’s a middleweight, about one hundred and fifty-six pounds, tall, about six feet, pretty tall for a middleweight, very dark skin, so black it was almost purple. Great teeth, great smile, and he has two cauliflower ears and very proud of it. He’s twenty-four, twenty-five. My old man wants to have them slice the ears and fix them. No, no, he won’t have it. Who wants to walk around with that? But that’s his badge of battle, so he leaves it. Dave wants the procedure—then it won’t get hit again and infected, whatever. Usually they cut it and it all collapses in. But no, not Georgie.
Georgie takes to me. We just like each other. I’m training and he says, “Come on, man, step it up, faster on the rope!” Then he shows me tricks in the ring, how to duck and dodge, stuff like that. He’d say he’d like to go a couple of rounds with me and teach me which is the superior race of men. Then he’d lean down and whisper in my ear, “Hey man, we fighters got to stick together, don’t we?” One time he calls me over and whispers, “Hey man, you want something real good?” I say, “Yeah, what?” He whispers, “I can get you some high-grade barbecue sauce.”
He’s almost like a father to me in a way. That’s the feeling I get from him. I’m the boss’s son, but he goes past that. He likes me for what I am. He has a protective feeling toward me, and I really like this guy. In the gym, or he comes around the used car lot. He’s an older guy, he pats my shoulder. I wished I owned a set of teeth like he had. They sparkled when he smiled. He was always smiling, even when he climbed into the ring.
One night, he’s the third fight on the ticket. Unless you were one of the top-liners of the night, the fighters shared a common dressing room. His opponent was a mean-looking Polish guy. He had hair all over his body. I don’t remember his name. “Hey, man,” Georgie says, “Catch that hairy-lookin’ dude.” The guy never cracked a smile or said anything. He just turned his back. Georgie’s grin kind of froze. I think he realized his joking had gone too far.
The old man doesn’t show up that night. I’m working the corner, buckets and all that. He can’t handle the Polish guy. Just too strong for him. The referee doesn’t seem to care when he butts Georgie with his head in the clinch. I think in the third round he goes down. Bleeding from everywhere. He’s shot. Loses a front tooth, right in the middle of that great smile. He’s beat up. Beat. In those days, they would do that, you know—a mismatch. Put one guy in with a sure winner so they knew how to bet. Never mind how bad the patsy gets beaten up.
I get all peed off at my old man.
“Man, your fighter was there! Where were you? Georgie got hurt bad. You should’ve been there. You should’ve stopped the goddamn fight. Was he set up?”
He don’t talk. Who knows? All he says is, “Don’t ask too many questions.”
I sparred with other fighters and learned a lot dodging their fists. When I got hit it made me madder than hell, so I trained hard and was in top condition. Dave came around the gym and watched but he never gave me encouragement or even a smile.
Surprisingly, I’m bar mitzvahed. They get me a rabbi, he teaches me the words, I study hard because Dave promises me a party with money and presents. Says I’ll become a man. The day comes and, ah-ha! The old man takes all the checks. I never see the money. He says, “I’m holding it for you.” Well, I’m still looking for it. My mother dresses up that day. Everything was good. That’s it. I’m a man.
By then, I had some friends. Met my friend Stuffy. He plays the piano, and so do I, a little from my mother. We play drums and piano for hours. Good hand-eye coordination. He has a good solid family. Mother, father who’s a taskmaster. We play poker down in the basement for pennies, big win, a quarter. Stuffy’s father says “Henry”—that’s Stuffy’s real name—“Henry, it’s time to come up and study.”
There’s also a clarinet player, Marv Goodman, around where I live and he has a little band. Somehow we meet and he gets this little gig at the Temple Youth Club, three nights a week from five to seven, something like that. I’m a kid, about thirteen. Piano, drums, and clarinet: just a trio, three guys. We play tunes—tunes of the day. I just lock into what I’m doing. I don’t see anyone out there.
When I hit the ninth grade, I dropped out. I couldn’t stand the place, the teachers, the kids. I didn’t make a lot of friends like some kids do. I didn’t join clubs and that type of thing. Still, some voice inside kept warning me, “Don’t do it, Stan. Don’t quit. You’ll be sorry.” What the hell? I did it anyway. Well, later in life you regret it, yeah. I would’ve liked to have an education. I learned mine on the street, which a lot of people did in those days, you know.
That went for music, too. There was no information anywhere. No books or videos. No records, hardly. You had to wait for a band to come in maybe twice a year, try to get a look at the drummer, see what he’s doing. There’s no information about how to hold sticks, or how to set up and put a drum kit together. Now every kid has a garage with a drum set. I was completely self-taught because we couldn’t afford a teacher, and that’s why I play left-handed although I am right-handed.
Stan went to work with his father and grandfather, washing and simonizing jalopies at the used car lot, located at Broad and Huntingdon Streets, where Dave Levey was not above putting sawdust in a crankcase—an old trick used to silence worn-out parts and keep a bad engine from smoking.
In 1942, Dave was arrested and jailed in a gambling raid. His charges were later “dismissed for lack of evidence.” Working with partner Jack Hofberg and trainer Jimmy Collins, Stan’s father also continued to manage a stable of fighters, including knockout specialist Johnny Walker; promising lightweights Dorsey Lay and Bob Jennings; welterweights Pedro Tomez and Leo Peterson; heavyweights Willie Thomas, Gus Jones, and Jackie Saunders; and middleweights John Finney and Newton Smith, who died tragically from blunt trauma while fighting Sam Bouradi for Dave in 1947 (eerily, Bouradi died under similar circumstances only six months later at the hands of Ezzard Charles). Dave lost another fighter the following year when Johnny Walker drowned in a YMCA swimming pool in Ohio.
For Stan, the pieces fell into place for the typical deadend life of a dropout, but the young man waited less than a year before setting himself on the path that would lead him out of the used car lot and on to bigger things in life. Stan would modestly attribute it to luck with a qualifier of ability, but American-style ambition and some considerable chutzpa also helped when he hitched his wagon to the fastest rising star in the music business.
John Birks Gillespie earned the nickname “Dizzy” for his mischievous ways and onstage antics. In the early 1940s, he was back home in Philadelphia after a stint in New York and a coast-to-coast tour with Cab Calloway’s band, one of the top grossing acts in show business. Dizzy Gillespie was only twenty-five years old and not yet well-known, but he was about to become the vanguard of a new movement and a new paradigm of virtuosity. Stan couldn’t have found a more auspicious musician if he’d tried. One afternoon, he was walking down the street when he chanced upon Gillespie’s music wafting down from a rehearsal on the second story of the Downbeat Club.
I’m walking down Eleventh Street in Philly and I hear this trumpet coming through the window, in the daytime. I don’t even know they have any music in there. I hear this trumpet and I say, “Man, it sounds like Roy Eldridge but with a left-hand turn.” The changes!
I’m hearing this guy and I think, “Wow, I gotta go up and see what’s going on up there!” And I go up these steps to this bar, daytime, and they’re rehearsing, and I just sit around the bar, listening, listening, listening. And then Dizzy comes down after they take a break and he says, “How you doin’, man?” I say, “I’m a drummer too, you know.” I was a little pissant.
“You’re a drummer?