Max Baer and the Star of David Read online

  Our home, built in 1916, was a simple, solid clapboard house with lovely Wedgewood-blue trim and shutters, and it suited us well. Without a basement, it had a galley kitchen and combination dining area and living room on the first floor, where Horace Jr. slept on a daybed when he was home from college, and, on the second floor, adjoining the bedroom, a fair-sized storage area. There was a narrow, thin-walled mud room at the rear of the house, and a front porch that was ample, and upon which we often sat, especially in the late afternoon or early evening, reading, or watching the changing colors of the sky.

  Our needs were modest, and we had solved the problem of where to keep the many books we had accumulated by donating a large quantity of them to our local library in San Francisco while retaining one or two books each by favorite authors, along with books that had sentimental value: Horace Jr.’s childhood books, scrapbooks that chronicled Max’s boxing career (and mine), and—the largest single grouping, which we kept on wide floor-to-ceiling shelves that lined the lone doorless and windowless wall of our bedroom—religious books: several Bibles, picture books of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and books about both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles that were especially meaningful to Joleen, for she believed they had been the inspiration for Horace Jr.’s choice of vocation, and had, during her dark times, nurtured in her qualities that had kept her mind and spirit from deteriorating.

  During the decade that followed the war, Max had come to spend the greater portion of his time either in Hollywood, for the making of movies and commercials, or at home in Sacramento with Mary Ellen and their children. Although I usually accompanied him on trips that took him beyond the borders of California, and though he and I continued to spar now and then, it was clear that he had less and less need for my services. At the same time, their children no longer infants, Mary Ellen was able, with help from her mother, who came to live with us in 1953 (both of Max’s parents had died before the war), to take care of the house and grounds without our assistance. Nor did she or Max ask for Joleen’s assistance in tutoring their children.

  When, in 1955, the Baers sold the ranch in Livermore, our presence in the Baer household became, in Joleen’s words, decidedly redundant. It is my belief, too, though I do not know this for certain, that the decline of my intimacies with Max paralleled a similar decline in his intimacies with Joleen.

  And so, one evening in the last week of July 1956, when Joleen and I had, after serving dinner to Max and his family, joined them for dessert and coffee as we were sometimes invited to do, Joleen used the occasion to announce that she had been to San Francisco the day before, and had begun a process for the renewal of her teacher’s license. In order to qualify, though, she would be required to take two additional college-level courses, which she could do in the evenings. In the interim, she would obtain employment as a teacher’s assistant. Within the next week or two, and in time for the opening of public schools after Labor Day, she could expect a provisional placement that the person who interviewed her at the offices of the board of education assured her would be forthcoming.

  Ten days later, Joleen received notice of a position open to her in a school in the Mission Hill section of the city, a neighborhood that had been mostly Polish and Irish but was, more recently, becoming home to Mexican families, and she registered for the two courses she needed in order to update her credentials. At the same time, she and I began looking for a home of our own in San Francisco and, after we had found the one we came to live in and informed Max of our intention to make an offer for it, he told us that, in gratitude for the years of service we had given him and his family, he was going to bestow a gift of cash upon us that would enable us to buy the house outright.

  We accepted his gift, and moved into the house in the fall of 1957, two weeks before the start of the school year. That same week Joleen received a letter of appointment to a position as a full-time fifth-grade teacher in an elementary school in the Mission Hill school where she had been working as a teacher’s assistant. Nor had I been idle. At the beginning of the summer, I had taken a part-time position at the Granelli’s Boxing Gym, performing janitorial tasks while also working with young fighters who trained there. One of them, a twenty-year-old Mexican named Luis Olmo Sanchez, a welterweight who had been a regional Golden Gloves finalist the previous year, told me that the Embarcadero YMCA that sponsored him was looking for someone to coach their boxing teams. He had already spoken to the director of the YMCA about me, and so I applied for the job and, my association with Max Baer and my own boxing career proving valuable assets, I was offered a full-time position wherein my responsibilities would be divided between being assistant youth activities director, and coach of the YMCA’s two traveling teams: one for boys above the age of sixteen, and the other, a “Silver Gloves” team, for boys between the ages of ten and fifteen.

  The YMCA was located on Fillmore Street, a convenient ten- or twelve-minute walk from our house. I enjoyed scheduling youth activities within the YMCA—basketball leagues, swim meets, workout schedules, skill classes, and exercise classes—but my great pleasure lay in training and coaching the boxing teams. When the director of the YMCA put up a notice on the bulletin board in the building’s lobby about me joining “the YMCA family,” and also succeeded in getting an article in the Sunday edition of the San Francisco Chronicle about me—about my career with Max, and my own stint in the boxing world—a two-page spread with pictures, and the announcement that for those unable to afford membership for their children, there would be a dozen scholarships made available to worthy boys and young men, we were overwhelmed with applicants. The scholarships were named in memory of Frankie Campbell, who, I had learned from the director of the YMCA, had been a member of the YMCA’s traveling team and a national Golden Gloves light-heavyweight champion a year before he turned professional. The scholarships had been endowed, anonymously, by Max.

  I invited Max to meet with my teams, which he did several times, and when he did, to the delight of everyone at the YMCA, he put on great shows: telling jokes, reminiscing about his fights, giving the boys pointers, especially about footwork, which he would introduce by performing brief tap dances that had us all handclapping. He would also spar with me, and all the while we traded jabs, feints, and punches he would chatter away about what he was doing and why, and about how lucky everyone was to have a great boxer like me as their coach.

  I also continued, though at greater intervals, to accompany him to some of his out-of-town engagements, which usually took place on weekends, though if one of his engagements required that I be away from the YMCA for a day or two during the week, grateful for the publicity generated by Max’s visits (and for his generous donations to the scholarship fund), the YMCA would grant me time off to be with him.

  The stated mission of the Golden Gloves of America, posted on a wall of a large room the YMCA put aside for the use of our teams, was to provide an active and safe environment that protected and enhanced the physical and emotional well-being and social development of young men by developing their athletic skills, sense of good sportsmanship, self-respect, work ethic, and pride, while also providing wholesome entertainment for the community. The possibility that any of the young men I worked with would become professional prizefighters was minimal, and so I devoted myself to inculcating in them a sense of self-discipline—a work ethic they could apply to other realms of their lives—and to perfecting their defensive skills, which could, in those chance encounters that might occur throughout their lives, prove useful in insuring their safety, as well as the safety of others.

  Within a few months, improvements in the skill levels of the boys were such that, after doing well in local tournaments against teams sponsored by the police and fire departments, we entered our first regional event. It took place an hour away, in the Stanford University gymnasium (Stanford University did not itself officially sponsor a boxing team, but it did have a first-rate boxing “club” that included several members of their nationally ranked football tea
m), and at this event we came away with two champions in the Silver Gloves categories, at weights of 135 and 160, and three Golden Gloves winners, at weights of 112, 118, and 160. The team was ecstatic, as were their families and the larger YMCA community, and we received excellent press in both the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner.

  I never sparred with boxers on our teams, but I would shadow-box alongside them, and I’d put on punch mitts and have them go at me, and—how I came to acknowledge the degree to which my eyesight had been failing—one afternoon in April I challenged our best heavyweight, a young Negro boy named Billy Pidgeon (he had been defeated at Stanford by a young man who would go on to become an All-American linebacker), to throw everything he had at me. He did so with enthusiasm and, while drilling me with lefts and rights in patterns I had taught him—one two slip; two two slip; one two one two slip slip; one two one two slip slip slip—he suddenly faked a left to my right mitt, and swung a roundhouse right that caught me by surprise and hit me so hard on the side of my head—I was not wearing protective headgear—that, though I did not fall, I became aware, immediately, of a dead cushion of air to the right of me that meant I had lost hearing there.

  To my relief, my hearing returned several minutes later. Billy apologized, insisting he had not meant to hurt me but had been carried away by my command to give me all he had, and while members of our team gathered around, I praised Billy for the strength and swiftness of his blow, but reminded him that power without discipline was as useless as discipline without power. I urged him to stick to the routines, and only the routines, until he was ready to go it on his own in a free-style manner informed by what he did not yet possess: a sure knowledge of essentials and, equally important, control of those essentials.

  On my walk home that day, I realized that, though my hearing seemed fine, my vision was not. I was squinting in order to see things—boats in the bay, cars along the highway leading to the bridge, signs on storefronts—and, at times, though not in a consistent manner, I was repeating a habit that had, in recent months, become second nature: turning my head slightly to the right or to the left in the hope this would enable me to see things directly in my line of vision more clearly. Had Billy’s blow dislodged something critical to my vision, I wondered—a temporary loss such as those I had suffered in earlier years during and after several bouts—or had his blow aggravated a condition that had been there, on and off, for nearly a year but that I had been choosing to ignore?

  Two days later, when Joleen and I were sitting on our front porch after dinner—it had rained heavily the night before and into the early afternoon, and the air seemed to have been vacuumed clean so that when one stood at the far end of our porch, one could see farther than ever into the Bay and across the Bay to Marin County, to the sailboats anchored there, and to the houses on low rising hills beyond—I told her about the blow I had taken to the head, and also about my vision—that objects in front of me had been becoming more and more severely blurred, as if smudged, with each passing day.

  Rather than chastise me for having kept this information from her, she put me through some simple tests: standing first to one side of me and then to the other, and moving several steps backwards and forward while I kept my eyes fixed on a point in front of me so that we could determine when I began to lose sight of her. When we had established that my peripheral vision had not been compromised in a significant way, Joleen had me compare what she could see at various distances—a particular boat at rest along the Embarcadero shoreline, or moving out to sea, a chimney or television antenna on a nearby rooftop—and the results led her to an obvious conclusion: I should make an appointment to see our family doctor as soon as possible.

  “Not an eye doctor?” I said.

  “Not an eye doctor,” she said, and she said no more, but it was clear she already suspected my failing eyesight was a result, not of an accumulation of blows to the head, or to a loss of vision that might normally accompany aging (Joleen had begun wearing eyeglasses several years before), but was a consequence of something more commonly lethal, especially, as I would learn, for Negro men: diabetes.

  Our family physician, Doctor Martin Baskin, gave me a thoroughgoing examination. After the examination, he asked me when I had last seen an eye doctor, and I replied that I had never been to an eye doctor because I had never, until recent months, experienced any problems with my eyesight. He said he was going to refer me to a colleague, Doctor Simeon Levitzky, an ophthalmologist, and expected Doctor Levitzky to concur with the preliminary diagnosis he had arrived at: that my problems with vision were caused by diabetes.

  He made this diagnosis not only because of the significant loss of visual acuity shown by my difficulties in reading an eye chart, but because of what he saw when he looked into my eyes with his ophthalmoscope: the presence of apparently new and fragile blood vessels covering the surface of the clear, vitreous gel that filled the visible part of the eye. He expected that Doctor Levitzky would find similar blood vessels growing within the eye, along the retina, that some of the blood vessels would be found to have been leaking blood—hemorrhaging—and that it was this ongoing process that was causing vision loss and could eventually lead to blindness.

  This initial diagnosis was based on several other factors: my telling him that I had been losing weight though I had not changed my diet in any way, and my report of symptoms that commonly accompanied the onset of diabetes: increased appetite and thirst, and greater frequency of urination. He predicted that when results from blood tests arrived, they would show high levels of blood sugar, and that this would be an indication that my body either was not producing enough insulin, or that it was not able to metabolize the insulin being produced. In addition—what had informed Joleen’s diagnosis—diabetes was a disease with a higher than average prevalence among Negro men, and occurred with increasing frequency as Negro men aged.

  I saw Doctor Levitzky two days later, and he confirmed Doctor Baskin’s diagnosis. I had diabetic retinopathy, and had, he believed, been suffering from it for some time. The fact that I had failed to inform Joleen or anyone else about my blurred vision or—another telltale symptom I had been ignoring—the persistent flights across my line of vision of red specks (blood!) had not been helpful, and only the fact that I had remained fit, and had not gained excessive weight (and had not, thus, driven my blood sugar to even higher levels), had kept my condition from becoming worse. At the same time, however, being in excellent physical shape had masked the gravity of my condition, and had kept me from acknowledging that there was cause for alarm.

  To complicate an already grave situation, Doctor Levitzky concluded I was also suffering from what was called macular edema, which resulted when fluid created by abnormal blood vessels, along with fatty deposits, leaked into the center of the macula—the part of the eye responsible for straight-ahead vision. Alas, he said, macula edema was rarely reversible.

  The prospects, he said, both literally and figuratively, were not—apt word—bright. There were no surgical treatments he trusted that were capable of reversing what was happening. It was his opinion that cauterization, for example, which some ophthalmologists might recommend, would do more harm than good (laser surgery was still decades away), though he thought insulin could slow down the course of the diabetes. He suggested that Joleen and I come in together so that his nurse could teach us how to administer injections. He prescribed a minimal daily dosage that he would increase gradually as needed, and as my condition became more grave.

  The most important advice he could give me, however, was to prepare for the possibility that my loss of vision would be progressive and that I might, within a few years, lose my eyesight entirely. “By vocation and character,” he said then, “you are a fighter, Mister Littlejohn. But against the natural course of illness and disease, being a fighter who battles an adversary has little relevance for a condition such as yours.”

  He strongly advised that I do no boxing whatsoever, and that I li
mit weight lifting and other exercises that might prove jarring to my system and could thereby induce hemorrhaging. Most of all, he urged me to visit the offices of the San Francisco Lighthouse for the Blind in order to educate myself about future eventualities.

  And then—this was the first and only time this rather severe man, whose mien was itself defined by the very word he repeatedly used to describe my situation—“grave”—smiled at me. He wanted me to be sure that the person I saw at the Lighthouse for the Blind was Miss Marie-Anne Hémon, to whom he had previously referred several patients. She was highly knowledgeable about services available to individuals with vision loss, and this was due in part to the fact that she was herself the mother of a boy who suffered from a significant visual impairment. In addition, she had a daughter who, though not completely deaf, suffered from substantial hearing loss. He believed these unhappy facts of her life enabled her to be unusually empathic to the people with whom she worked. She was, also, a woman of color, and he thought this fact would put me at ease when I conferred with her about my condition.