Books: Strong Boy

JOHN L. SULLIVAN—R. F. Dibble— Little, Brown ($3.00). Lonely in their libraries, sat Whittier, Lowell, Emerson, Holmes. From a dusty railway coach in the Back Bay station, with splendor in his mien and whiskey on his breath, emerged a bull-necked Irishman. Milling crowds roared greeting. “I thank you one and all very kindly,” rumbled the Irishman. “Yours truly, John L. Sullivan.”

Before he was a year old, he had given his aunt the prettiest black eye, that woman swore, which she had ever received. In adolescence, he astonished the citizenry by setting a derailed horsecar back on its tracks. Yet his parents, until that day, had been sceptical of his abilities. “There’s men in old Ireland could break you in two with a slap of their hand,” his father, a wizened hod-carrier, had told him. His mother had intended him for the priesthood.

Then he returned from New Orleans. He had laid low one Patrick Ryan in seven blood-red rounds. He, the “Strong Boy of Boston,” was champion heavyweight pugilist of the U. S.

During the next ten years, with iceberg jaw, fists like demijohns, he begot a legend for his country. He toured, offering $1,000 to any man who could last four rounds with him. He thumped Charlie Mitchell, “The Bombastic Sprinter.” He broke half the ribs of Jake Kilrain in a fight at Richburg, Miss.—75 rounds and the temperature 120°. When he had his hair cut, girls gathered up the coarse, black strands, treasured them in lockets.

Rivers of assorted drinkables gurgled down his gullet. When drunk, his behavior was colorful. Vainglorious, he would swagger the streets, throwing handfuls of small silver to the ragamuffins following at heel. Sentimental, he would warble Go Tell Aunt Rhody or Oh White, White Moon. Belligerent, he would ravish a saloon, break all the glassware, splendidly pay for it next day. He put on flesh.

Then he revisited New Orleans, met Gentleman Jim Corbett in a square place with ropes around. Fourteen rounds, and the Strong Boy lay still, with blood purling down his jowls. By the ropes, Senator Roscoe Conkling, tall in black, was graven in wood; Steve Brodie, apoplectic with woe, wobbled about on his seat. Thereafter, the Strong Boy devoted himself to other activities.

He acted historic roles in Honest Hands, Willing Hearts, A True American, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He was the friend of Roosevelt, McKinley, Taft.

Queen Victoria did not see fit to receive him. Spying her one day, he waved a friendly hand. She did not return the greeting but merely “muttered comments which I did not hear.” On Mar. 5, 1905, he ordered a whiskey, lifted high his glass. “If I ever take another drink,” he declaimed, “I hope to choke, so help me God.” The rabble guffawed. Sullivan poured the drink into the spittoon—a conversion which constituted the chief prop of the Temperance Party for years thereafter. In 1915, on a small Massachusetts farm, John L. Sullivan died.