From the Madhouse to Muldoon’s House: Nellie Bly’s Visit with John L. Sullivan

Nellie Bly arrived in New York City in 1887 out of work, out of money, and about to accept an assignment for which she had to pretend to be out of her mind.

As groundbreaking an opportunity as it was for an investigative journalist and social activist, hers was no task for the faint of heart. Nellie, however, was up to the challenge, having boldly penned her first published piece for the Pittsburgh Dispatch at the age of 16 in response to a chauvinistic article called “What Girls Are Good For” and later spent six months in Mexico chronicling the miserable living conditions of the general population suffering under the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz.    

Unafraid in the face of risk or controversy, the twenty-three-year-old Bly (born Elizabeth Jane Cochran) was asked by an editor for the New York World, Joseph Pulitzer’s prestigious daily newspaper, to gain admittance to and write an undercover expose of the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island, now known as Roosevelt Island with its famous tramway linking it to the Upper East Side of Manhattan. “I said I could and I would,” Nellie wrote in the opening lines of Ten Days in a Madhouse, serialized in sell-out editions of the World and subsequently published in book form. “And I did.”

After her week and a half-long dealings with the deranged patients “whose tongues uttered meaningless nonsense” and unsympathetic psychiatric staff responsible for the “cruel treatment of the poor things intrusted[sic] to their care” in the dark, dingy confines of the foreboding brick structure at Blackwell’s Island, traveling to the bucolic setting of upstate Belfast, New York two years later to conduct an interview with the hard-drinking, womanizing prizefighter who boasted that he could “lick any sonofabitch in the house” must have seemed like a working vacation by comparison. And to Ms. Bly, as a matter of fact, more accommodating Mr. Sullivan and his host William Muldoon could not have been. “If John L. Sullivan isn’t able to whip any pugilist in the world,” she claimed for the lead-in to her article, “I would like to see the man who is.”

‘The Boston Strong Boy,’ not unlike Nellie Bly except for the reasons why, was in need of professional guidance and financial assistance when he too staggered into Manhattan. Though he would have been loath to admit it, what John L. Sullivan required most was some tender loving care (more like tough love) pertaining to the personal and physical aspects of his being, ravaged as it was by his rough and tumble profession, an abominable diet, flagrant abuse of intoxicants, and a recent, nearly fatal malady.

John L. himself described the terrible affliction which confined him to bed for nine weeks beginning in August 1888 as “typhoid fever, gastric fever, inflammation of the bowels, heart trouble, and liver complaint all combined.” Twice given up for dead by flummoxed physicians, it was considered something of a minor miracle that the thirty-year-old Sullivan survived, albeit his recovery was begun hobbling about on crutches for six weeks due to a resulting bout of what he termed “incipient paralysis.”

Before he had even approached anything resembling full recuperation, John L. issued an open challenge to Jake Kilrain on December 7, 1888. A month later, Sullivan met with Kilrain’s backers in Toronto to sign the official articles of agreement for a July 8 bareknuckle brawl which was to be the last heavyweight championship match contested under the London Prize Ring Rules. Additionally, Sullivan had reverted almost immediately back to the detrimental habits that had contributed mightily to his pitiable condition, chasing as many steaks as he could devour in one sitting with whiskey served in beer steins. His training regimen, if you could consider it that, consisted mainly of vigorous walks followed by a rubdown and a three-hour nap. He also planned to set out on an ill-advised exhibition tour which would bring him right into Richburg, Mississippi on the day of the Kilrain fight.

This was serious cause for concern in the eyes of Sullivan’s handlers. That May, according to R.F. Dibble’s 1925 book on John L. entitled An Intimate Narrative, Sullivan was “howling and teetering around a New York hotel bar” just as “Jimmy Wakely, his present manager, entered with William Muldoon.”   

Most famous for his exploits as a Greco-Roman wrestler, Muldoon boasted an extraordinarily diverse and extensive resume with job titles such as farmer, wood splitter, Civil War cavalryman, Indian War soldier, warehouse loader, dock worker, cart driver, police officer, actor, and owner of a “saloon and reading room,” although he soon divorced himself from this last business venture due to the fact that he was by all accounts a no-nonsense teetotaler who personally abstained from and generally abhorred tobacco and hard liquor. In his Sullivan biography John the Great, Donald Barr Chidsey paints Muldoon in the colorless guise of one “who lived always as though tomorrow would be Judgment Day.”

Muldoon later stated, “This man Sullivan was a drunken, bloated helpless mass of flesh and bone without a single dollar in his pocket when I took him from New York to my place.” While Michael Isenberg suggests in John L. Sullivan and His America (1988) that Muldoon might have first met Sullivan on an 1880 trip to Boston, one certainty is that he staged the March 31, 1881 fight between John L. and Steve Taylor at Harry Hill’s in New York City. It appears as though another of Muldoon’s entrepreneurial endeavors was having built “rings for occasional clandestine bareknuckle bouts” which brought about a promotional opportunity in the expanding universe of prizefighting. Sullivan and Muldoon were, like it or not, about to become much more intimately acquainted.

“We had a little misunderstanding, but after a day we were led to bury the hatchet.” This was how John L. Sullivan chose to gloss over, in his memoirs, the almost constant friction between himself and his strict taskmaster who allegedly took the precaution of issuing sternly worded warnings to local bartenders and druggists that under no circumstance were they to cater to the champion’s urges. The ‘Boston Strong Boy,’ naughty as he was resourceful, still found a way to break camp on a number of occasions, including a brief rendezvous with the popular singer and “burlesque queen” Ann Livingston.

The gregarious John L. Sullivan rarely encountered a correspondent he didn’t like. He once went so far as to exclaim, “These young newspapermen are alright to me. I’m for ‘em!” Little Carrie author Theodore Dreiser was a beat reporter for the St. Louis Globe as a young man when he was tasked with interviewing Sullivan who urged him to “Write any damned thing yuh please, young fella. If they don’t believe it, bring it back here and I’ll sign it for yuh. But I know it’ll be alright, and I won’t stop to read it either.”    

William Muldoon, on the other hand, was suspicious of reporters and undesirous of non-essential visitors who would only serve to further distract the already restless Sullivan. It was rumored that he rented every room in the one and only nearby hotel and barred journalists from his premises except for Ban Johnson, the future founder and first president of professional baseball’s American League. If so, Johnson was not the lone exception to Muldoon’s rule regarding privacy from the press. 

Nellie Bly’s train pulled into the Belfast station at 7:30 in the morning, she and her unnamed companion the only passengers to disembark there. The descriptive power inherent to Nellie’s prose comes through as she gives her first impression of Champion Rest, the home of William Muldoon which Bly notes “is surrounded by two graveyards, a church, the priest’s home and a little cottage occupied by two old maids.” She is immediately struck by the fact that “One would never imagine from the surrounding that a prizefighter was being trained there. The house is a very pretty little two-story building, surrounded by the smoothest and greenest of green lawns, which helps to intensify the spotless whiteness of the cottage. A wide veranda surrounds the three sides of the cottage and the easy chairs and hammocks give it a most enticing look of comfort. Large maple trees shade the house from the glare of the sun.”

After being greeted at the door by who she refers to simply as a “colored man,” Nellie is taken to meet Muldoon, with his blue eyes and a smile that “brought two dimples to punctuate his rosy cheeks,” who informed her that Sullivan was in the midst of a rubdown following their two-mile walk but that he would promptly fetch him for her. “He was a tall man, with enormous shoulders and wore dark trousers, a light cheviot coat and vest and slippers,” Nellie remarked of the individual who she would have failed to recognize as “the great and only Sullivan” if not for Muldoon’s introduction. “In his hand he held a light cloth cap. He paused almost as he entered the room in a half-bashful way, and twisted his cap in a very boyish but not ungraceful manner.”

After an amiable handshake “with a firm hearty grasp and with a hand that felt small and soft,” John L. walked Nellie quickly through his daily workout routine, not only patiently explaining to his curious guest the benefits of the corduroy “sweater” he wore on his early morning runs and walks with Muldoon, but showing her the very “heavy knit garment” he owned “with long sleeves and a standing collar.”

Sullivan let his guard down around Nellie and, asked his feelings about training, confessed that “it’s the worst thing going.” He grumbled to her as well about the fact that “I couldn’t sleep after 5 o’clock this morning on account of Mr. Muldoon’s cow. It kept up a hymn all the morning and the birds joined in the chorus. It’s no use to try to sleep here after daybreak. The noise would knock out anything.” Evidently the peace and quiet suited Sullivan well enough during the day but was simply too much for a night owl such as himself to handle. “It’s all right to be here when the sun is out, but after dark it’s the dreariest place I ever stuck,” he told Nellie. “I wouldn’t live here if they gave me the whole country.” 

In his first effort to put the champion through his paces, and perhaps humble him in the bargain, William Muldoon had sent John L. to labor in the fields alongside the other farmhands which, needless to say, did not make for a reciprocally agreeable situation. No advocate of heavy weightlifting, Muldoon had Sullivan work instead with dumbbells of varying size to sculpt lean muscle and swinging Indian clubs for increased flexibility and agility. Initially, John L. had been barely able to maintain a dozen repetitions while jumping rope but became so proficient week after painstaking week that accomplishing 900 successful skips was not out of the question.

Muldoon routinely incorporated wrestling into their sessions, the master grappler imparting a good deal of his vast knowledge onto his student so that John L. could more effectively close the distance on Kilrain and roughhouse the challenger. The two would also toss back and forth a medicine ball (an invention credited to Muldoon) that Nellie Bly mentioned as being “enormous and so heavy that when Mr. Muldoon dropped it into my arms, I almost toppled over.”   

Football was another daily form of exercise, as was alternating between hitting the heavy bag and the smaller one suspended from an exposed ceiling beam in the barn which Sullivan attacked with a wild abandon that Nellie supposed “foretells hard times for Kilrain’s head.”

To help keep Sullivan limber, Muldoon encouraged him to go swimming although Allegany County was affected, as were many surrounding areas of Pennsylvania and western New York, by the runoff of the Johnstown flood. Sullivan recalled in his memoirs, “The river running through Belfast was filled with debris from all the upper country, and was quite a sight to see.”

A local hangabout identified in Sullivan’s autobiography as “Lauk” was swept away while attempting to navigate through the falls or over a dam where “his body was found some miles below.” This didn’t stop John L. from plunging one day into the raging rapids after one of Muldoon’s English Mastiffs and colliding with a large rock beneath the surface. The direct point of impact was one of his shins which had been spiked by Charlie Mitchell and never healed properly.  

Nellie’s query as to whether he liked prizefighting elicited another candid confession from Sullivan. “I don’t,” he replied. “I did once, or rather I was fond of traveling about and the excitement of the crowds.” He then tells Bly “this is my last fight.” Pressed for an explanation, John L. responded, “Well, I am tired and I want to settle down. I am getting old.” By his own accounting, he made somewhere around $600,000 over his career but admitted, “I have been a fool and today I have nothing. It came easy and went easy.” But not all of Sullivan’s earnings were casually pissed away on whiskey and women. “I have provided well for my father and mother, and they are in very comfortable circumstances.” Asked how he might adjust to retirement, Sullivan mused, “I think I shall spend the rest of my life as a hotel proprietor.”

Nellie remarked to John L. that “Your hands look very soft and small for a fighter.” Sullivan, seemingly charmed by this observation, replied, “My friends tell me they look like hams.” Before detailing the composition of rock salt, white wine, and vinegar with which he scrubbed his face and hands, he insisted that Bly feel his arm, a recommendation she is happy to comply with. “I tried to feel the muscle, but it was like a rock,” she would write. “With both my hands, I tried to span it, but I couldn’t. Meanwhile, the great fellow sat there watching me with a most boyish expression of amusement.” 

Having outlined for Nellie the disparity between fights conducted under London Prize Ring Rules as opposed to those endorsed by the Marquis of Queensbury, Sullivan delighted in the fact that he was permitted to strike “any place above the belt that I get a chance” and brushed aside Bly’s question regarding concern for his adversary by stating matter-of-factly, “I don’t think about it. I never feel sorry until the fight is over.”  

Suppertime arrived and, rather than being asked to please excuse herself, Nellie was extended the courtesy of an invitation to break bread with them. Once again, her recall and attention to detail in relating the contrast between her roughhewn hosts and their surprisingly civilized habitat are astonishing. “At a nearer view the dining room did not lose any of its prettiness and the daintiness of everything-the artistic surroundings, the noiseless and efficient colored waiter, the open windows on both sides giving pretty views of the green lawns and shady trees; the canary birds swelling their yellow throats occasionally with sweet little trills, the green parrot climbing up its brass cage and talking about crackers, the white table linen and beautiful dishes, down to the large bunch of fragrant lilacs and another beautifully shaped and colored wild flowers, separated by a slipper filled with velvety pansies-was all entirely foreign to any idea I had ever conceived of prizefighters and their surroundings.”

Muldoon and Sullivan then escorted Nellie along a guided tour of Champion Rest which took them through the horse stalls and the barn house converted into a gymnasium and concluded in the downstairs den where she mentally catalogued the “photographs of well-known people and among them several of Modjeska, with whom Mr. Muldoon at one time traveled.” Helena Modjeska was a glamorous Polish actress who was so smitten with Muldoon upon first sight that she personally arranged for him to undertake the role of Charles the Wrestler to her Rosalind (with Maurice Barrymore, a former boxer and patriarch of the famous family of actors, as Orlando) in an 1883 production of the Shakespearean comedy As You Like It.

Bly additionally recorded, “There are also a number of photographs of Mr. Muldoon in positions assumed in posing as Greek statues. On a corner table are albums filled with photographs of prominent athletes, and scrapbooks containing hundreds of notices of Champion Muldoon’s athletic conquests. Then there are a number of well-bound standard works and the photographs of Mr. Muldoon’s favorite authors-Bryant, Longfellow and, I believe, Shakespeare.”

Referring to the personal expenditures involved in running a training headquarters, Muldoon indicated to Nellie that “I make no money by this.” His assertion conflicts with the less philanthropic version of the story given by Donald Barr Chidsey in John the Great wherein Sullivan’s manager Jimmy Wakely and Charley Johnston, a restaurant owner who was Sullivan’s main money man, jointly offer Muldoon $10,000 to take the unhealthy and uncouth John L. up to his sleepy little village of Belfast and somehow whip him into shape for the Kilrain fight. As told by Chidsey, Muldoon not only consented but said he would accept payment only if Sullivan were victorious. Pertaining especially to a larger-than-life public figure like John L. Sullivan, contemporary readings of antiquated biographies are entertaining but need to be taken with the requisite grain of salt.

Before parting ways, John L. confidentially discloses to Nellie, “You are the first woman who ever interviewed me. And I have given you more than I ever gave any reporter in my life.” What Nellie Bly gave back was an articulate and richly detailed story which would prop open for women the previously blockaded door into sports writing (boxing, specifically) through which Djuna Barnes would follow soon after.

Hailing from the ominously-named New York town of Storm King Mountain (which sounds like something out of Tolkien), Barnes would unleash throughout her 90 years on earth a journalistic tempest with such quirky and controversial Jazz Age works as The Book of Repulsive Women and Ladies Almanack as well as her celebrated 1936 novel Nightwood. Djuna filed a stunningly-composed report for Nellie’s former employer The New York World in 1914 headlined “My Sisters and I at a New York Prizefight" after attending an evening of bouts in Far Rockaway and followed up with exclusives entitled “Jess Willard Says Girls Will Be Boxing For a Living Soon” and “Jack Dempsey Welcomes Women Fans,” both based on private interviews with the current heavyweight champions.  

Enter Margery Miller who, reading The Ring magazine while the other kids in Springfield, Vermont were probably preoccupied by comic strips, grew up a boxing fan just like her father with whom she traveled to Yankee Stadium in 1938 to witness Joe Louis historically avenge his prior loss to Max Schmeling. So enamored was she with ‘The Brown Bomber’ that Louis was chosen as the subject of Margery’s senior year thesis at Massachusetts’ Wellesley College. Her paper was submitted to A.A. Wyn and accepted for publication by Current Books in 1945 as Joe Louis: American before she had even graduated, making Margery’s volume one of the earliest Louis biographies. Miller’s book was favorably reviewed by Ring magazine founder and editor Nat Fleischer, to whom it was dedicated, and Eleanor Roosevelt is said to have stayed up half the night reading it.

Nicknamed ‘Cauliflower’ by her college classmates and having once described her physical stature to an enquiring reporter as “a flyweight,” Margery was subsequently brought in on the ground floor as a staff writer for Sports Illustrated, producing for the fledgling publication’s introductory issue its very first boxing article, a short feature on Rocky Marciano.

Who can forget, in today’s Trumped-up culture with its ridiculous efforts to define and validate “locker room talk,” Mike Tyson’s 2002 on-camera conversation with Max Kellerman which became infamous for his bizarre and disturbing comment to a female reporter who dared break in with a question that “I normally don’t do interviews with women unless I fornicate with them. So, you shouldn’t talk anymore unless you want to…you know.” The chivalrous Joe Louis had a very different attitude toward the matter, relaying an open invitation to be conveyed to Margery after their first encounter: “You tell Miss Miller that if she will call me in advance, I’ll be sure to be wearing my terrycloth robe and she can come back anytime.”  

Meandering leisurely through the ensuing decades up to the present moment affords one the opportunity to stop occasionally and sufficiently acknowledge the contributions to pugilistic literature made by the likes of Bev Will, Joyce Carol Oates (even if she scoffs at women’s boxing), Katherine Dunn, Kasia Boddy, Kate Sekules, Mischa Merz, Anna Freeman, Malissa Smith, Sarah Deming, and former professional fighter turned WBAN (Women’s Boxing Archive Network) administrator Sue Fox. Covering from a variety of angles and bringing fresh perspectives to the sport are ringside photographers Linda Platt, Mary Ann Lurie Owen and Rebecca Weiss, documentarians Katya Bankowsky, Jill Morley, Sue Jaye Johnson, and Georgina Cammalleri, in addition to television analysts Dana Jacobson, Marysol Castro, and Jordan Hardy to name a few. And then there are the memoirs written by female boxers Jane Couch, Mary Kom, Laila Ali, Katie Taylor, Nicola Adams, Deirdre Gogarty, and Christy Martin with, I can safely assume, many more to follow.

Ruminating on what was commonly referred to during her era as “the manly art,” even Nellie Bly seemed to have been inclined toward the view that females were somehow genetically precluded from participating in rough stuff. “I have often thought that the sparring instinct is inborn-in everything-except women and flowers,” she wrote in A Visit with John L. Sullivan. “Almost as soon as a boy learns to walk, he learns to jump into position of defense and double up his fists.” These thoughts seem curious emanating from a progressive-minded woman whose body could hardly contain the bold and adventurous spirit which led her Around the World in Seventy-Two Days, her nearly 25,000-mile journey besting Jules Verne’s optimistically make-believe contrivance by eight days.

Almost a full century later, Joyce Carol Oates advanced these views (or dragged them further backward, if you will) when she wrote, “Raw aggression is thought to be the peculiar province of men, as nurturing is the province of women. The female boxer violates this stereotype and cannot be taken seriously-she is parody, she is cartoon, she is monstrous.” 

If women’s boxing is still considered a “niche sport” today (if not cartoonish or “monstrous”), it existed in the 19th Century on the outermost fringes of prizefighting, generally disregarded as a brutish pastime as it was. Yet exist it did. Two prominent female fighters of the day were Hattie Stewart and Hattie Leslie, who were not only identifiable by their shared first name but a common moniker. The Female John L. Sullivan.

In 2014, Hattie, Hattie and Nellie were inducted into the Bareknuckle Boxing Hall of Fame which resides conveniently within the refurbished barns at Champion Rest in Belfast. Its former occupant, William Muldoon, was enshrined in the BKBHOF’s inaugural Class of 2009 along with his one-time problem child, the ‘Boston Strong Boy’ John L. Sullivan.

Sources:

Nellie Bly. Ten Days in a Madhouse (Ian L. Munro, 1887)

Nellie Bly. A Visit with John L. Sullivan (1889) 

Donald Barr Chidsey. John the Great (Doubleday, 1942)

R. F. Dibble. John L. Sullivan: An Intimate Narrative (Little Brown and Co., 1925)

John L. Sullivan (edited and with an afterword by Gilbert Odd). I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch in the House (Proteus Books, 1979)

Talking with Women's Boxing Trailblazer Cora (Webber) Degree About Fighting For What's Right

 

“You know, this is a man’s world. We live in a man’s world. We have to constantly defend what we believe in,” Cora Degree, formerly Webber, said to me during our recent talk. “But that’s a good thing, because we’ve proven ourselves quite a bit from where it was.” She’s referring to the evolution of women’s boxing and the significant role she played in its advancement throughout the course of a twenty-year career.

“It’s come a long way, and I’m a pioneer, so I can appreciate it even more now because I can look back and see how we got all of this started. If it wasn’t for a lot of us, it probably wouldn’t be where it is today. The women are accepted more and more,” she says proudly, while acknowledging that growing pains are a natural and necessary part of the maturation process. “It’s not like we made millions. I got $3,000 for fighting 15 rounds. What fighter today do you think would even do that?,” she asks rhetorically. Just as previous eras of female prizefighters blazed trials that paved the way for Cora’s generation, the hardships she and her peers literally and figuratively fought through in the 1970s and 80s splintered down doors for the next wave of indomitable women to come crashing through.

“To me, it wasn’t about the money,” Cora insists. “I just loved the sport and I wanted to show people we could do it.” Her own personal journey from a teenaged runaway to International Women’s Boxing Hall of Famer to a coach and mentor for kids is a testament to the fact that, with intense enough focus, drive, and perseverance, not to mention the iron-willed determination to apply all of those characteristics to the given task at hand, anything is possible. Not just in boxing, but in life.       

“I started in martial arts when I was like 12 years old, because I wanted to learn to protect myself because I had a rough childhood. A really rough childhood,” Cora told me. “So, we’ve got to know how to protect ourselves or, God knows, we could be in a grave at an early age.” Competing as a novice in the karate discipline known as kumite provided the angst-ridden pre-teen with its own unique challenges. “Being a white belt, I didn’t know how to pull my punches, so they would disqualify me,” said Degree. “I was already a tomboy, playing softball and football with the brothers and always outside playing some kind of sport. Me and my sister Dora always filled in when the guys didn’t have enough football players.”

Cora grew up with her identical twin sister Dora and their four siblings in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with their supportive mother and abusive father until she finally decided she couldn’t stick around and take the mistreatment anymore. “When I was fifteen, I ran away from home because I didn’t want to go back home and get another beating. So I split,” she says. “It took them three years to find me but the only thing I regret was doing that to my mom, making her worried to death. But she pretty much understood. Enough is enough. Enough beatings. If one kid got a spanking, all six of us got one. And it really wasn’t a spanking. It was more like getting your butt beat by a man.”

Settling in Los Angeles, Cora took up kickboxing and would soon after make a name for herself in the women’s boxing scene that was beginning to gain serious momentum, especially on the west coast. “I just kept training and training and fighting whenever I could get a fight,” said Degree, whose first professional outing was a four-round decision over another accomplished kickboxer turned prizefighter, Lilly Rodriguez.  

Cora’s next fight would be a momentous, though anticlimactic, one. On February 11, 1979, she was matched against bantamweight phenom Squeaky Bayardo in Hawthorne, California as part of the first ever all-women’s boxing card which also featured Shirley ‘Zebra Girl’ Tucker in one of the other two prelims and the always popular Lady Tyger taking on Carlotta Lee in the main event.  

“I won that fight,” Cora stated defiantly when I asked her about it. “In the middle of the fight, I hit her with a straight right hand and she put me in a headlock. I could not break free. It took the referee like two minutes to break us. At the end of the third round, the beginning of the fourth, they announced the fight was going to be five rounds. It was supposed to be six rounds, so they ended up giving me a draw. But I won that fight. I had only had one fight and she had maybe seven or eight if I remember right and she was top ranked, maybe number two in the world, and I beat her.” In the 2023 documentary Right To Fight, Bayardo told a story about her manager and trainer Dee Knuckles betting on Webber and trying to convince Squeaky to take a dive for the under the table payoff. An offer, by the way, Bayardo refused. Cora hadn’t heard about that but she didn't seem too surprised. She’s been around long enough to know what a backstabbing, cut-throat business boxing can be.      

Carlotta Lee, who had dropped a decision to Lady Tyger in Hawthorne and had also been a kickboxer, was Cora’s next opponent for what would be another all-female show promoted by Sammy Sanders, this time at the LA Sports Arena on July 13, 1979. “I went in there and fought eight rounds. I won every round, and won the California State championship,” remembers Degree. The super-featherweight title wasn’t all Cora would get out of winning that fight. “He (Sanders) gave me $800 like he promised and I went out the next day and bought me a 250 Yamaha Enduro dirt bike, which was street legal. And I was hooked. It was easy for me.”

What wasn’t so easy was putting her undefeated record to the test against Women’s World Lightweight Champion Lady Tyger in a non-title fight in 1981. Following a tactical six-round skirmish, Cora’s unbeaten streak would remain intact. “It went the distance. I won the fight. It was a good boxing match because she was a technical fighter too. I just outboxed her that day,” said Degree, whose admiration for Lady Tyger runs deep. “I give Tyger her props. I love that girl to death. She helped a lot of people. She was there in the beginning, and if it wasn’t for her and some of us, it (women’s boxing) wouldn’t have gone really anywhere else. My hats off to Lady. She’s good people too. She’s down to earth. I really like that girl. She helped women’s boxing so much. She really did.”

Cora expressed the appreciation she had for everyone she stepped into the ring with and that there were never any hard feelings. “We have a job to do, go in there and do the best you can do. Before and after, you give them respect. You don’t judge them, you do what you’ve got to do,” she philosophized. “I was never like that, man. I’m old fashioned, you know, I respect everybody. I’m good and you’re good and let’s go in there and do the best we can do and prove ourselves. Build it up and build it up and keep fighting for what’s right.”

After extricating her sister from their terrible living situation back home in Florida, the twins were eventually able to reunite in Los Angeles. “Dora came up one year. I finally got her out of Fort Lauderdale and got her out of trouble, and I trained her and took her to a friend of mine,” Cora recalled. Degree reminisced enthusiastically about the many roughhouse sparring sessions she and Dora would engage in at the Olympic Gym, sharing the same space with the likes of the Baltazar brothers, Frankie and Tony, Danny ‘Little Red’ Lopez, and Salvador Sanchez. “We were there all the time. We had a lot of wars there with a lot of different people,” recounts Cora. “We would spar fifteen rounds, twenty rounds a day. We ran seven miles a day, six days a week. We ran the hills. We were old school. We’re old-time fighters. That heavy bag is your bread and butter.”

(Cora and Dora with Smokin' Joe Frazier)

Following in her sister’s footsteps in more than ways than one in 1983, Dora would debut by notching a second-round stoppage of Toni Lear Rodriguez, who Cora had outpointed in Salt Lake City a little over three and a half years earlier. Meanwhile, Cora hadn’t been in the ring since beating Lady Tyger two years prior and wouldn’t see action again until 1986 when she would take on the pride of Waterville, Maine, Laurie Holt, in a history-making fifteen-round title fight with the vacant IWBA world super-featherweight championship on the line.

“I showed up because I was young and I was prideful but I was sick in that fight. She won the first six rounds,” concedes Cora, who came out on the wrong end of a split decision in the high altitude of Denver for her first defeat. “I won rounds seven to fifteen easily. I totally outboxed her,” she was quick to add. “I was a technical fighter and I took her to school after that and it took me that long just to warm up. The people just wanted a brawl. They didn’t really understand about the art of boxing. They just wanted two pitbulls to go at it. I don’t take nothing away from her, but I won that fight. Easy fight because I wouldn’t stand there and brawl with her. I outboxed her and outsmarted her.”

Cora feels that the decision going against her was a de facto punishment for refusing to sign a long-term contract with the fight’s promoter. Why would the security of such an arrangement not appeal to her, you might wonder? “Because they wanted to own you,” she explains. “You have to do that or else they can cause you a lot of losses, they can cost you money, and they want to rule you. And I’m not like that. I told them ‘No, I’m staying a free agent.’ That’s how they try to control fighters. Once you sign a contract, you’re obligated to them and they can sue you and they can stop you from doing so much. And I said, ‘No, I’m not signing my frickin’ life away to nobody.’ Because it’s all about money and who owns who. And it ain’t really ever going to change. The root of evil is money and the love for money.”

Dora would score a TKO victory over Betty ‘Mean Jean’ Garner five months after Cora’s loss to Laurie Holt but neither one of them would step between the ropes again until eleven years later. Degree contends that the frustration of promised fights falling through and opportunities dwindling down to nothing paled in comparison to the continued resistance of the general public and mainstream media to view women’s boxing as a legitimate sport.

“Even when I started boxing back then, they would throw matches together like mud wrestling, girls in bikinis, and that would just put another damper on it. Because then the guys would think it was all like that,” Cora elaborated. “That’s where the men’s mindset was, so we had to constantly fight to prove ourselves and show them we can be as good as the men. If not better. And we are better than some of the men fighters and we proved it. Then there was nobody for a while, then Christy Martin came along and the girls started coming along and it just picked it back up.”

The 1990s revival of women’s boxing, precipitated by the aforementioned emergence of Christy Martin onto the worldwide stage, not only opened the floodgates for a new era of rising stars such as Jane Couch, Lucia Rijker, Regina Halmich, Ann Wolfe, Layla McCarter, Sumya Anani, Chevelle Hallback, Laura Serrano, Alicia Ashley, and Laila Ali to name just a few, but provided an open invitation for the return of a few familiar faces from the recent past like welterweight standout Britt VanBuskirk and the Webber sisters.

After embarking on their joint comeback, Cora and Dora would share the bill together on two all-women’s boxing cards, the first of which took place at the appropriately named Lady Luck Casino in Lula, Mississippi on October 24, 1997. Unfortunately, Lady Luck did not smile on Cora that night and defending IBA world featherweight champion Bonnie Canino walked away with the split decision and her title belt. Dora, however, had her hand raised at the end of her six-rounder against then-unbeaten Jane Couch, the future Hall of Famer who would shortly thereafter make history as the first licensed female boxer in Great Britain after emerging victorious over the BBBofC in a lengthy court battle.   

Dora would prove her win over Couch was no fluke when the two squared off again three months later on another all-women’s show in Atlantic City and Webber’s second consecutive victory over the ‘Fleetwood Assassin’ would earn her not only bragging rights but the vacant IWBF world super-lightweight title. Both Webber sisters could have been crowned world champions on the same night, but they were denied this watershed moment when Cora suffered yet another split decision defeat, this time to Zulfia Kutdyusova with the IWBF world lightweight title up for grabs.   

“When I fought in Atlantic City, almost every girl on that card came in overweight. Let me say half of them. Except me. Seven or eight of them came in overweight. Even Dora,” Degree told me. “I took the girls out the night before because they gave us several hours to lose the weight. Not me, but them. So, I took them out and we ran probably six, seven miles. My fight was at 135. When we went to re-weigh in, I weighed in at 122 pounds. I’m telling you, my corner could have killed me. But I didn’t let it stop me. It was a hard fight and she was bigger than me. I lost a split decision but it is what it is. I still went out there and performed good. I don’t really see it as a loss. I did the best I could. So, I might have lost on paper, but I didn’t really lose.”

Just as the sisters had a common opponent in Toni Lear Rodriguez during the first act of their parallel boxing careers, Dora had fought Kutdyusova previously in this second incarnation. That bout had occurred on Kutdyusova’s home soil and Cora recounted for me some tense moments Dora had experienced in Moscow. “She (Dora) said when she would go and do her road work, they used to take her back to the hotel with firearms at her back,” said Degree. “She just took off running and whatever area she was in, you weren’t allowed to go leave the hotel. She took off running and she said they brought her back with weapons drawn. Life’s a journey. It’s all about how well you handle it.”

(Cora with Sugar Ray Robinson)

Lasting a little over two decades in total duration, Cora’s stop and start prizefighting journey reached its final port of call on February 20, 1999 at Madison Square Garden of all places when she lost an eight-round decision to undefeated (16-0) Melissa Del Valle on the Felix Trinidad/Pernell Whitaker undercard. “Well, we all know Don King was all about owning people and money,” was all she had to say on the subject of the show’s infamous promoter. As for getting to compete in the ‘Mecca of Boxing,’ Cora reminisced, “Madison Square Garden was really big, lots of famous people and, you know, some rowdy. But it was a great experience and I met a lot of cool people. I was mostly about business and the flight home was early the next morning, but it was a great honor being selected to fight there.”

Four months later, Dora also hung up the gloves for good following her second straight defeat at the hands of Sumya Anani (on another all-female card, incidentally) but the sisters still maintain a strong and lasting presence in the boxing community. These days, Cora and Dora coach and mentor as many as fifty kids at a time, from the age of four years old and up, at DogHouse Boxing & Fitness in Ocala, Florida.

“Every age bracket is in that gym. We treat everybody the same whether they’re going to compete or not. No matter what, I teach them discipline and respect. Make them a better person,” said Cora with regard to her personal mission statement. “Even if they don’t compete, they’re going to be a good person in life because they’re going to understand the hard work and discipline and loyalty it takes to accomplish things. Once you set them straight and they start doing good, their schoolwork is good, the parents are happy, the frustration is gone and they’re a much better person than they were before they came in. The kids are comfortable because they find somebody that cares and gives them direction. The kids want that and they don’t have that. Kids today need to be brought back down to earth. They don’t know what it’s like. They think they do but they really don’t.”

And if anybody should know, it’s Cora. “I’ve been coaching ever since I was boxing because you’re always coaching somebody. I’ve got over 55 years’ experience. I always tell them mind over matter. Improvise, adapt, and overcome. Clint Eastwood, he always used to say that,” she remarked. “You’ve got to adapt to things that happen inside the ring and overcome if you get nailed or you get knocked on your butt. You get up and prevail from that. Go back to your basics. You don’t have to be fancy and cocky and try to prove to everybody that you’ve got a great style. That stuff gets you knocked on your butt. Go back to your basics and overcome. Some do and some don’t. They might look good in the gym but you go and actually fight and everything’s out the window. Everybody’s different. You’ve got to know your fighter.”    

Right around the time we spoke, Cora was preparing to take fifteen of her students to compete at the Golden Gloves. She has worked as a professional “cut man” and just took her exam to become a licensed referee. “Now I have to do clinicals, hands-on stuff,” Cora explained. “Learn how to work the glove inspection table, sit ringside to learn how to judge a fight, then get in the ring to ref. It’s a process and I’ve got to go through the motions.”

Cora is clearly enjoying what she’s doing and taking nothing for granted. “I’m retired, so I’m just doing what I like,” she said. “Some people are in it for the money. It’s a business. Not me. I’m in it for the love and the discipline it takes to do the right thing. That’s how I look at it.”

Cora and Dora Webber are both members of the International Women's Boxing Hall of Fame, inducted in 2022 and 2021 respectively. 

‘Countess’ Jeanne LaMar: The Enigmatic Life and Tragic Death of Boxing’s ‘Mystery Lady’

Sometimes Truth is Stranger Than Fiction

Shortly after Jackson Lake Park Ranger Harry Grace heard gunshots coming from up the mountain road, a distraught young man swinging a suitcase riddled with bullet holes burst through the door of his station house, babbling a breathless, barely coherent story about the gruesome discovery he had just made. Grace directed the frantic stranger toward the Big Pines ranger station, and he was then sent to San Bernardino where the sheriff filed an official report from William Benedict Smith.  

A 22-year-old drifter, Smith had been through San Bernardino just three days earlier, looking for work regardless of how temporary. He found it when he was solicited by a woman in her forties who offered him sexual favors and a fistful of dollars as compensation for doing odd jobs around her cabin on an isolated ridge of the San Gabriel mountains. On this, the third day of his short-term employment, Smith was sent out to hunt rabbits for dinner, but stumbled upon a human skeleton instead.

The remains were badly decomposed, a rusty .22-calibre rifle lying beside the splintered skull. Lime powder was sprinkled liberally around the trash pit in which the body was located in an effort to accelerate its degradation. Eerily enough, the nearest access road was known then as Dead Man’s Canyon Road.

William immediately jumped to the conclusion that the woman with whom he had been staying for the last two days was responsible and dashed back to the cabin, shoved his few belongings into his suitcase as fast as he could, and ran for it. She chased after him firing a hunting rifle, quite possibly the very same one she had given him earlier to shoot rabbits, thankfully missing Smith but perforating his valise with birdshot.     

Everyone he related his fantastic story to knew exactly who he was talking about. No stranger to law enforcement, or to the locals unfortunate enough to have crossed paths with her, the woman in question was known as ‘The Mystery Lady of Big John Flats.’

She had the reputation of a hard drinker with a hair-trigger temper whose more peculiar behavior involved trolling for young men in the undesirable neighborhoods of the valley below or at the nearby Civilian Conservation Corps and wandering about picking fights with males and females alike in the hope that someone, anyone, would take her up on her belligerent challenges to engage in fisticuffs.

All she had to show for such exasperating antics were getting herself tossed out of a general store and over the railing of a park ranger station. Two recent arrests, one for operating a motor vehicle under the influence, appeared on her record.

It was determined that the body was that of a male in his mid-twenties who had occupied the cabin along with the ‘Mystery Lady’ when she took up quarters there three years before, in 1935, his living space limited to the confines of the cramped attic. She would introduce him as her nephew Gus, although there was widespread speculation as to his real identity. It is believed that he was actually her son, born Gustave Marcel van Herren in 1912, and that she concealed this fact to uphold the illusion of her own youth that she had manufactured and worked diligently to protect.  

The tale told to the police by the ‘Mystery Lady’ was that a heartsick Gus had gone missing the year prior following a breakup with his girlfriend and that she had feared all the while that he was suicidal. He had in fact been admitted to the Stockton Hospital for the Insane some time before for this same reason. Despite initial suspicions and gut instincts that told him otherwise, Chief Criminal Deputy William Bright officially documented the cause of death as suicide.     

It’s said that one evening she makes a drunken confession to having committed the murder, confirming that it was indeed her son and that she had kept his fingers in a box as a macabre trophy or sick souvenir of some kind. She insists to others, however, that her husband Gerald committed the crime, though she has no spouse to speak of. The subterfuge becomes murkier still when public records are found on file showing that Gustave had purchased two plots of land north of her cabin after his supposed disappearance, contradicting her version of events.

Months later she vanishes herself, abandoning her cabin except for a handful of personal keepsakes left behind which serve as clues into the real-life past of ‘The Mystery Lady of Big John Flats,’ or as she was formerly better known, the European Female Boxing Champion, ‘Countess’ Jeanne LaMar.

 

The World Sits Up and Wonders

Just as the end of her life was obscured beneath a shroud of mystery, so too did it begin. Establishing a definitive timeline is extremely difficult and distinguishing between fact and fiction all but impossible. Contrary to her claims of her point of origin being Paris, Jeanne Vina LaMar was born in New York to French parents, although exactly when isn’t clear. A 1930 New York census gives her year of birth as 1900, but this hardly corresponds with the fact that her son Gustave was born twelve years later.

At some point in her childhood, Jeanne and her parents relocate to France where she takes up acting, ballet dancing, and singing soprano, becoming quite the cultured, refined young lady. Mostly. It seems the fighting spirit for which she would later become reviled was within Jeanne from an early age.   

“When I was 10 years old, I lived in a section of Paris where a number of small boys my own age used to tease the girls,” she recalled. “I beat up a lad of 15 and from that time on I was spared from jeering remarks.” LaMar enrolled in boxing lessons and proceeded to ply her newfound roughhouse trade by taking on all comers in fairground carnival booths where she boasted of knocking out twenty-five women and five men. Besides serving as a nurse with the Red Cross during World War I, it was reported that she boxed exhibitions against Georges Carpentier and Eugene Criqui for the benefit of wounded soldiers.

It was in France where she met her first husband, Paul LaMar, who was a member of the American Expeditionary Forces, and together they moved back to New York after the war. Jeanne frequented the world famous Stillman’s Gym on Eighth Avenue to strengthen her leg muscles for her dance performances and soon began working out a routine whereby she would hit the speed bag in time to a musical rhythm. Gym owner, and legendary boxing trainer Lou Stillman not only tolerated her eccentricities but thoroughly enjoyed them.

In 1920, LaMar competed in a two-round bout against middleweight fighter Jack Stone at Manhattan’s Roseland Ballroom as part of a “girl championship boxing exhibition” for the New York American and Evening Journal Christmas Relief Fund Benefit.

Jeanne traveled often to Chicago where she furthered her boxing education as a pupil of Kid Gleason, but New York was where she aspired to make a name for herself by securing a legitimate fight at Madison Square Garden. In the hopes of accomplishing this, LaMar brazenly approached Jack Dempsey’s handlers, promoter Tex Rickard and manager/matchmaker Leo Flynn.

She would sign a contract with Flynn, becoming the only female in his stable of more than sixty boxers, and pursue a bout with Mae Deveraux. Like LaMar, Deveraux was also a singer and actress whose real name was May O’Hara. Her brother and trainer Eddie also worked with Jack Dempsey, who personally endorsed Mae’s pugilistic skills. LaMar’s fight with Devereaux never materialized, nor did an exhibition between her and Dempsey, who politely declined Jeanne’s challenge.      

Instead, she toured theatres and music halls across America, making and accepting challenges of all kinds and supposedly fighting exhibitions against Harry Greb and Charley Phil Rosenberg. Two documented occurrences in Pennsylvania from that time had her knocking down Johnny Watson in the third round of their exhibition in Reading and then traveling to McKeesport where she got the better of Ray McCall, who “took the lacing like a man” and “didn’t have the heart to even muss her nicely penciled eyebrows.”

Jeanne was set to box an exhibition against reigning world lightweight champion Benny Leonard at New York’s Winter Garden Theatre in February 1923. “I’ve always been afraid of this LaMar woman,” Leonard is quoted as saying. “They say she packs a wicked right.” Whether or not this event took place is unclear.

What is known is that in 1923 Jeanne became the first ever woman to obtain a professional boxing license in the United States, issued by the New Jersey State Athletic Commission whereas her efforts in New York the year before proved fruitless. “Someday all the women will be fighters and not be afraid to admit it, and then the world will be much better,” she philosophized. “Boxing develops character and, quickness, and intelligence. It is especially good for a woman because it makes her strong and self-reliant.”

LaMar was on a crusade, her mission statement being that she was out to elevate boxing beyond “commercialized brutalism” and “to place women of the world on a level with men by proving her right to be known as the world’s champion lady fighter.”

She was under new management as well, now represented by the team of Joe Woodman and George Lawrence, who promptly signed her to fight a three-round exhibition with gangster turned boxer, Bugs Moran. What ‘Countess’ Jeanne LaMar really craved, though, was the legitimacy of a sanctioned fight. Unable to corner either Kiddy McCue or Princess Henry, LaMar believed she had finally found the highly publicized opportunity she had been seeking in the form of Brooklynite Ida Schnall.

One of the premiere renaissance women of the day, Ida had made headlines for being barred from competing as a swimmer and high diver on the 1912 U.S. Olympic squad due to the Committee’s “preservation of modesty,” starring to great acclaim in Al Jolson’s vaudeville revue The Passing Show of 1912, diving off a 130-foot cliff in the motion picture Undine, winning a New York to Philadelphia bicycle race, being crowned 1915’s “most beautifully formed woman in America,” and pitching for the New York Female Giants, a baseball team she founded and captained.

Schnall called out LaMar to face her in a boxing match and, challenge accepted, their fight was set to take place on May 12, 1923 with the ‘Countess’ going into training at Long Beach on the south shore of Long Island. Ultimately, the New York State Athletic Commission squashed the match by denying the women a permit and venue.    

LaMar missed out on what would have been a high profile exhibition opposite the great Pancho Villa in 1925 when the Filipino flyweight champion died unexpectedly at the age of 23 of complications resulting from a routine extraction of an infected tooth. Also disheartening was the fact that a theatre manager in Albany, New York insisted on billing her as an “artist” rather than a boxer and her bouts as “vaudeville exchanges.”

It probably didn’t help her cause any that a three-round exhibition against Young Stribling’s kid brother Herbert ‘Baby’ Stribling was laughed off as a farce when LaMar’s second, a comedian by the name of Michelena, upstaged the competitors by performing lewd antics between rounds and Jeanne threatened to have Stribling arrested for assaulting a woman after he hit her in the nose. 

 

Toward the Mountains of Madness

With her pugilistic exploits dwindling down, despite an unanswered challenge from African American fighters Emma Maitland and Aurelia Wheeldin, and an unsubstantiated report that she had been granted a boxing license in Texas, Jeanne would rely on her other talents to stay in the spotlight by singing in both English and French on stage or on radio programs. She would routinely appear at public events looking to belt any spectator up the challenge of a fight or else belt out a version of the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.”

With the proceeds going to the Vina Science, Health and Art League, of which she was founder and president, LaMar assumed the lead role in a December 1927 Chicago Opera Company production of Carmen, dreaming that one day she would play the part in a feature film.

Less than three weeks later, Jeanne married her business manager, Thomas Failace, and the newlyweds moved to Los Angeles. The couple’s wedded bliss was short-lived. Just fourteen days after exchanging vows, the Hollywood police were summoned to their Whitley Avenue apartment on a domestic disturbance call where the responding officers found husband and wife “engaged in a fistfight.” They went their separate ways not long after. 

Popular Los Angeles radio personality and sometimes boxing promoter Bill Sharples tried and failed to get LaMar’s fistic career back on track and, to add insult to injury, Dr. Harry Martin, presiding over the California State Athletic Commission, rejected her application for a license in 1931.

Her only means of grabbing some positive media attention around this time was to weigh in on the debate over the appropriate length of women’s skirts by boldly suggesting pantalettes as an alternative. “It takes a little courage, that’s all,” offered LaMar. “And it’s so much more comfortable and sensible that it’s worth it.”  

Badly itching for a fight, LaMar challenged 1932 Olympic track and field gold medalist Ella ‘Babe’ Didrikson, who at the time, was training for a proposed novelty boxing exhibition with Yankees slugger Babe Ruth in a ‘Battle of the Babes.’ Neither fight came to fruition.

Becoming gradually more unhinged due to an unfortunate run of personal and professional failures, Jeanne then turned her agitation toward Clara Bow, silent film’s “It Girl,” who had starred in the 1927 boxing-themed romantic comedy Rough House Rosie. To no one’s surprise, Clara had no interest in lacing up the gloves other than on a movie set or for publicity photos.

Dejected and increasingly erratic, in 1935 she picked up and left Los Angeles and, with her son Gustave, made her ill-fated retreat into the seclusion of the San Gabriel Mountains where ‘Countess’ Jeanne Vina LaMar would finish out her life as ‘The Mystery Lady of Big John Flats.’ Even her boxing nickname ‘Countess’ is part of her mysterious lore, up for debate whether it refers to a referee’s count of ten or LaMar’s having supposedly once been married to an Italian nobleman as she liked to claim.

Fittingly, her own death was subject to rumor and innuendo. Some said she was struck down by a reckless taxi driver, others that she met her demise in a seedy San Bernardino hotel. What really happened was far sadder.

Having run through the cash-out from the insurance policy of her first husband Paul, who had allegedly died under questionable circumstances, she turned up in 1940 at the Los Amigos Indigent Home in Norwalk, California. Penniless and friendless, she was comforted in her dying days by Alberta Farnbaugh, the daughter of the original homesteaders of the Big John Flats property where the mysterious ‘Countess’ devolved from a history-making boxer to an agitator and sexual predator to, speculatively anyway, a cold-blooded killer.  

Sources:

Joe Blackstock. The Countess Who Lived in the San Gabriel Mountains Was Always Ready for a Fight (Daily Bulletin, May 6, 2019)

Caroline Crawford. Urges American Girls to Learn to Box (Des Moines Register, October 5, 1924)

Bob Dorman. Women Fighters to Better World Says Buff’s Challenger (Berkshire Evening Eagle, June 13, 1922)

Terry Graham. The Countess’ Last Stand (WBAN, July 10, 2007)

Terry Graham/Sarah Jo Rauschi. 1920’s Female Boxer—Jeanne LaMar: Flash From the Past (WBAN, September 26, 2005)

L.A. Jennings. Jeanne LaMarr[sic]: Boxing Champion, Countess, Murderer? (Vice, October 20, 2016)

Adelaide Kerr. Dresses Topic of Hot Debate and Both Long, Shorts Urged (Ogden Standard-Examiner, December 13, 1929)

Lucille E. Morehouse. Woman Pugilist, Singer Dreams of Role in Carmen (Indianapolis Star, November 2, 1929)

Melania Sebastiani. The Last Shot of the Countess (Storie di Sport, 2019)

Malissa Smith. A History of Women’s Boxing (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014)

Mixed Match (Danville Bee, September 25, 1922—accessed through WBAN)

Lady Boxer at the Moose (Monessen Daily Independent, October 19, 1922—accessed through WBAN)

Mixed Match (New Castle News, February 21, 1923—accessed through WBAN)

Challenger (Millville Daily, March 17, 1923)

Frederick News, April 19, 1923

Just What Are These So Called Arts, Anyway? (Fall River Evening Herald, July 18, 1923)

She’s Ready (Fort Myers News-Press, September 6, 1923)

St. Paul Colored Girl Challenges French Battler (St. Paul Echo, January 15, 1927)

Female Ring Star Makes Stop Here (Indianapolis Star, December 5, 1927)

Jeanne LaMar Gets Into Domestic Fight with Husband (Chicago Tribune, January 3, 1928—accessed through WBAN)

LaMar Request Boxing License from California and is Denied (San Antonio Light, April 27, 1931—accessed through WBAN)

Mme Lamarr [sic] Once Boxed Bugs Moran (Boxing Illustrated, August 1974—accessed through WBAN)

Harlem Renaissance Boxers Emma Maitland and Aurelia Wheeldin Fought All Around the World

 

From Tobacco Farm to Moulin Rouge

November 16, 1926 was opening night for the rechristened Seven-Eleven Club in midtown Manhattan, 47th Street and 7th Avenue to be precise, after having been padlocked by Federal decree back in March when it was known as the Chummy Club.

An entirely African American revue was assembled for the occasion featuring a variety of singers, dancers, and comedians. The team of Emma Maitland and Aurelia Wheeldin, who had just returned from a 22-month tour of Europe in August, were placed prominently at the top of the bill as the main attraction.

Maitland and Wheeldin had wowed audiences in France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, and Holland with the sensational novelty act they called Tea For Two. Don’t let the name fool you. Theirs was no dainty, demure routine intended to please discriminating socialites. The highlight of their stage show, you see, involved Emma and Aurelia boxing one another for three rounds every evening.

The fact that they were friends wouldn’t prevent them whatsoever from getting into a good scrap. One review of their Seven-Eleven appearances, which would run through into December, noted that the pair would “shake each other up rather badly, at times drawing blood.”

So intense were her nightly bouts with Wheeldin that Maitland remarked, “Those six minutes at times seem like two hours.” And yet they were both skilled defensively to the point that they managed to avoid injury no matter how hard and how often they went at it. “That’s where art comes in,” boasted Emma. 

“I was brought up on a farm with seven brothers, and took part in all their sports and activities,” Maitland reflected, “of which boxing was my favorite.” Emma’s given name was Jane Chambers, born in Richmond, Virginia in 1893 to Wyatt and Cora Chambers, sharecroppers who were both descended from slaves. The children were not exempt from the arduous task of harvesting tobacco. Emma remembered having to toil away for an entire season just so that she could afford to buy a new outfit for church and two pairs of shoes, one to wear while working the fields and the other to keep pristine for Sunday worship.

It was while singing in the choir at A.M.E. Mother Zion Church that it was first suggested to Emma that she had a voice suited for the concert stage, as far flung a fantasy as that must have seemed at the time. Up to that point, she didn’t even have a formal education, something to which her father strenuously objected.

While recuperating from a fall out of a tree, Emma was visited by a priest who encouraged her to attend classes at the Rock Castle Convent where she would eventually earn a teaching certificate, not to mention the displeasure of her entire family. Nevertheless, a rebellious and determined Emma asserted, “I am through killing tobacco worms.” She yearned to distinguish herself from her siblings, who she described as “rough country folk who had no way of improving themselves mentally, physically, or financially.”

After teaching locally for three years, Emma departed for Washington DC, seeking out bigger and better opportunities in the nation’s capital. There she met and fell in love with Clarence Maitland, a medical student at Howard University. Upon graduating and obtaining his degree, Clarence wed Emma and the couple wasted little time welcoming a baby girl into the world. Sadly, Clarence contracted tuberculosis which stole him from Emma in rapid fashion. “Within one year, I was a fiancée, a wife, a mother, and a widow,” she lamented.

Leaving her daughter in the care of her parents, Emma made her way to New York City where she would soon be swept up in the raging cultural and creative revival that was the Harlem Renaissance. Maitland danced in Shuffle Along, the first Broadway musical solely conceived of and performed by African Americans, as well as a production called Follow Me. She also sang and played the role of Sister Bridge throughout a 40 performance-run of the musical How Come? at the Apollo Theatre.

In April 1924, Maitland boarded a steamer bound for Paris as a member of an all-black female ensemble that one newspaper referred to as “Brown Skin Vamps,” one of whom was her future boxing partner, Aurelia Wheeldin. A native of St. Paul, Minnesota, Wheeldin was born on September 18, 1902 and had studied music at Macalester College. Aurelia was pulling double duty on the excursion to France as a dancer and traveling secretary for the company run by Billy Pierce, a journalist turned dance instructor, choreographer, and booking agent who had arranged a six-month engagement for the women at the world famous Moulin Rouge cabaret. 

Emma and Aurelia each later recalled the treatment they received from the spectators and crowned heads of France alike as being enthusiastic and very respectful. There was, however, one publicized occurrence wherein British actress Doris Lloyd (best known for her later film work in The Time Machine and The Sound of Music, among others) protested having to share the stage with African American performers. Llyod’s complaint fell on deaf ears, and the show went on without further incident.      

During their stay in Paris, Maitland and Wheeldin made the acquaintance of Jack Taylor, a black heavyweight prizefighter whose nickname was the ‘Nebraska Tornado.’ Like Emma, Taylor was originally from Virginia. He moved to Omaha early in his career, hence his ring moniker, before emigrating to the far more racially inclusive environs of France. By the time he met Emma and Aurelia, Taylor had gone toe to toe with the likes of Bearcat Wright, Kid Norfolk, Battling Siki, and the great Sam Langford on four occasions.

Whether it was to learn self-defense so that they could fend off unwanted advances or for the purpose of incorporating pugilism into their routine, or perhaps both, Maitland and Wheeldin began a training regimen with Taylor consisting of running, brisk walking, gymnastics, and boxing basics. Emma became so proficient with the gloves, even participating in matches independent of her stage show with Aurelia, that she was presented with a ceremonial loving cup by the French Boxing Federation.

“When the scheduled six months’ contract engagement was ended, the captain of the company, Miss Emma Maitland of Virginia, and I formed the team of Maitland and Wheeldin and started a tour of Europe,” said Aurelia about opting to remain behind and continue on to Milan with their Tea For Two act after their time at the Moulin Rouge had run its course and the rest of the girls returned home. From that point on, Emma took charge of the logistical aspects such as travel and booking them into venues.

 

Maitland and Wheeldin Weren’t Messin’ Around

Back in America, Emma and Aurelia followed their stint at the Seven-Eleven Club at the tail end of 1926 with a run of performances to ring in the new year at Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre, or as it was dubbed by the proud black community, ‘The House Beautiful.’

It was around this time that both Maitland and Wheeldin, who were being advertised respectively as the Champion Featherweight and Bantamweight Female Boxers, issued an open challenge to the self-professed European Champion, ‘Countess’ Jeanne La Mar, who had applied for a professional boxing license in New York in 1922 to no avail but successfully obtained one from the New Jersey State Athletic Commission the year after. Subsequent to this provocation, which was never acted upon by La Mar, there is no evidence that either Emma or Aurelia pursued the opportunity to fight professionally, although both were licensed to box exhibitions. 

The pair took their show on the road throughout the United States and Canada in 1928, beginning with an appearance as the “Extra Added Attraction” to the Butterbeans and Susie Girly Revue at the Elmore Theatre in Pittsburgh. In the fall of that year, they brought their act to Mexico City and Havana, Cuba.

Simultaneously featured in the cast of the play Harlem at the Apollo Theatre in the spring of 1929, Maitland and Wheeldin were booked to exhibit their boxing prowess as part of a brand new revue called Messin’ Around which, according to one newspaper reporter, was aptly named as it was allegedly “a mess of the most trite and familiar musical comedy stuff.” Emma and Aurelia were singled out as the saving grace of this “noisy sideshow.” Although the aforementioned critic offered his stuffy opinion that “the spectacle of two women engaged in this form of combat is not particularly elevating,” he nevertheless commended them for giving “every evidence of being out for blood.”

From there, it was back to Broadway for Emma and Aurelia to perform in Change Your Luck at George M. Cohan’s Theatre in June 1930 and Fast and Furious at the New Yorker Theatre in September 1931. Presumably, they kept boxing in between. With Emma billed as “The Pride of Harlem” and Aurelia as “The African Dodger,” the matchup between Maitland and Wheeldin at New York’s prestigious Roseland Ballroom on 51st and Broadway on November 17, 1932 was the highlight of a tournament featuring “girl boxing bouts.”

The team of Maitland and Wheeldin toured together and boxed one another on a regular basis until 1940 when Aurelia decided to leave show business behind and begin a family. She married Ulrich Carrington, a physician who was one of a dozen doctors to co-found the Upper Manhattan Medical Group, the first African American owned and operated clinic in Harlem. They had a daughter, Joan, who became and still is to this day a jazz-oriented singer/songwriter. Joan Watson-Jones crafted a loving tribute to the legacy of her trailblazing mother Aurelia, who passed away in November 1963, on the title track of her most recent album, Choices.

“I’ve fought all over the world. I like the chance it gave me to travel,” Emma reminisced later in life. “And I have a hint to the wise. Boxing is a better reducer than dieting.” With her friend and boxing partner retired from public life, Maitland sought out the option of transitioning to wrestling, which she did for several years.

Additionally, she taught dance and gymnastics and preached the virtues of “clean living” to young women, forbidding them or anyone else for that matter from smoking in the gym or even near the premises.

Emma had befriended Wilma Soss, an eccentric and feisty widow who inherited her deceased husband’s stocks in the New York Central Railroad and, unhappy with the way chairman Robert R. Young was conducting business, was ejected from the 1955 shareholders’ meeting for relentlessly menacing the Board of Directors.

To ensure that this would not happen again the following year, Wilma asked Maitland to come along as her bodyguard. It is little wonder why Soss was permitted an uninterrupted turn behind the microphone free from harassment at the 1956 gathering, what with Emma positioned directly behind her, standing straight and tall while wringing her hands at the waist of her velvet dress and wearing a no-nonsense scowl etched across her face.

Having become a registered nurse and beloved member of the community, Maitland spent her remaining years at her Oak Bluffs summer home on Martha’s Vineyard which, in 2015, was commemorated as a historic site on the African American Heritage Trail. One woman attending the ceremony fondly recalled Emma protecting her from neighborhood bullies when she was a child and teaching her how to swim.

“I can teach, sing, act, dance, box, wrestle, or nurse,” said the multi-talented Emma, who died in 1975 at the age of 82. “Which would you prefer?”

Sources:

Jimmy Jemail. The Inquiring Photographer (New York Daily News, July 24, 1942)

Pat Waring. Welcome to the Trail, Emma Maitland (Martha’s Vineyard Times, June 24, 2015)

Joan Watson-Jones. My Mother Wore Boxing Trunks (YouTube, March 27, 2010)

Elaine Weintraub. Boxing Her Way to Equality and Justice (Vineyard Gazette, July 18, 2013)

New York Daily News, October 30, 1924

White Actress Draws Color Line in Paris (Nebraska Monitor, December 12, 1924)

Sister Team Is In Milan (Baltimore Afro-American (August 8, 1925)

Colored Girls Will Film Picture in African Interior (Topeka Plaindealer, September 3, 1926)

Local Girl Returns From Europe After Brilliant Stage Success (St. Paul Echo, September 4, 1926)

Pittsburgh Courier, September 11, 1926

Pittsburgh Courier, November 20, 1926

St. Paul Colored Girl Challenges French Battler (St. Paul Echo, January 15, 1927)

Pittsburgh Courier, December 31, 1927

Emma Maitland Learned Boxing From 7 Brothers (Baltimore Afro-American, January 14, 1928)

Pittsburgh Courier, January 7, 1928

Emma Maitland in Mexico (California Eagle, November 2, 1928)

New York Daily News, April 24, 1929

Plays Reviewed (Brooklyn Life and Activities of Long Island Society, April 27, 1929)

Harlem Girls in Boxing Tourney (New York Age, November 19, 1932)

She’s Not Hunting Fight, Just Wants to Be Set (Dayton Journal Herald, May 23, 1956)

Fort Worth Star-Telegram, May 25, 1956

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