Word: dempsey
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Hope flared last week among viewers who may have longed to see a subject of This Is Your Life poke M.C. Ralph Edwards in the nose that he sticks weekly into a private past. The week's subject: Jack Dempsey. The ex-heavyweight champion, now 61, was the prize catch so far among celebrities whom Edwards has tricked unsuspecting into TV camera range for exposure to a parade of memory-rattling acquaintances, some of whom they have forgotten (or would just as soon forget). But the Manassa Mauler was caught with his guard down in the middle...
Gamely he tried to roll with each blow in the M.C.'s unctuous volley. The first guest was a Utah farmer who reminded Dempsey that they had sparred as boys. Dempsey stared in blank dismay as the man climbed into the ring, then went into a friendly clinch and clung as if for the bell. Next he was asked to recall the maxim his religious mother taught him. "Go to church and believe in God?" he guessed desperately. "Live by the golden rule and keep goin'," prompted Edwards firmly. "Keep goin'," repeated Dempsey. He kept goin...
...ring foes piled through the ropes, Dempsey engaged each in a heavyweight exchange of compliments. Said towering Fred Fulton, whom the Mauler knocked out in 18 seconds of the first round in 1918: "If I had to lose, I was glad it was to Jack Dempsey." Replied Dempsey: "It was you fellows who made me." From France came Georges Carpentier, a dandy of 63, who plugged not only Dempsey but his own Paris restaurant. From the Argentine came Luis Angel Firpo, 62, once the Wild Bull of the Pampas, now a lumbering giant whose dignity shone somehow through his confusion...
...young elder of the Mormon Church who, true to his faith, has never touched tobacco or whisky. Gene Fullmer was named for his parents' idol, gentleman Gene Tunney (whose real name is James Joseph), but he grew up to admire a different type of heavyweight, man-eater Jack Dempsey. At the age of eight he decided he wanted to become a prizefighter, fought his first bout at twelve...
Gaudy Pitchmen. The show was the joint effort of some of the most gaudy pitchmen in the fight racket. There was ancient Jack Kearns, owner and groom to seven whilom world champions, the man who took so much money out of Shelby. Mont, when Jack Dempsey beat Tommy Gibbons in 1923 that he almost broke the town. There was fat Jack Solomons of London, the ex-fishmonger, determined to give the brawl some real English class. There was a Canadian mining promoter named David Rush, a talented sport with an improbable aptitude for turning penny stocks into folding money...