Pete Rose: An American Dilemma Read Online Free PDF Page B

of boxing gloves and lead the boys to the one flat patch of yard in back of the house and let them settle things that way. He’d wait until things got pretty convincing, one way or the other, before he stepped in to break it up. Harry had been a hell of a boxer himself, having fought 16 Golden Gloves bouts as a featherweight mostly, and 15 times a winner. LaVerne, though, liked to say she was the real champ, undefeated by her count in the public scuffles she was given to have. Once she pulled a woman off a barstool and took her outside, miffed that the woman had said some things that LaVerne didn’t like. “I knocked the living hell out of her,” was how she described it.
    Pete’s own official boxing career was brief, lowlighted by an amateur fight downtown at age 15 when he got beaten so badly in three rounds that even Harry could barely stand to watch. Beaten, yes, but unbowed; Pete was proud that though he had been battered so that his face and body stayed bruised and welted for many days, he had hung on to the end of the fight without getting knocked to the mat.
    Harry’s message in setting the kids up to box in the yard, and it was a message preached again and again by the other fathers in that Anderson Ferry neighborhood—men who worked at the riverside factories, or as car mechanics or postal workers, or other honest jobs, and among them former Army officers and U.S. Marines—was that you were to stand by what you did or said, or what you believed, even to the point of suffering for it physically. Away from the backyard boxing Pete still got into it just the same, and on the street (no gloves; feet and elbows fair to use) he fared well. He never minded if the guy was bigger, that was no obstacle at all. “Pete was tough, and he would never get whupped,” says Greg Staab, who grew up a few houses down on Braddock Street. “You couldn’t hurt him. He’d scrap. Pete did not take any shit.” The next day, often as not, the guys who’d fought would be friends again, more or less, and up to something.
    They’d raid Mr. Stadtmiller’s vegetable garden down between the train tracks and the riverbank, sneaking over after dusk with a small blade and cutting into the sugar melons and the cantaloupe. They’d bring a salt shaker one of them had pinched from the Trolley Tavern (where LaVerne had now found work as a waitress to help out with the bills) and they’d salt Mr. Stadtmiller’s tomatoes and eat them right off the vine. There were gardens and greenhouses all over Delhi Township, a community of green thumbs.
    On summer days the boys dived into the dun and rippling waters of the Ohio River and swam across to the sandsoil beaches and the low green hills of Kentucky, or they would “borrow” a johnboat from just downriver, take it for a float to nowhere in particular. When heavy rains came, the Ohio overtopped and the river rats—the real rats, some of them big as raccoons—came rushing out for dry land, and the boys went after them with their baseball bats on raucous, murderous sprees. Staaby’s father would sit on his front porch, his .22 in hand, and shoot the rats if he saw them headed across River Road.
    They believed in the West Side and in the life they led along the river— “If you have to go downtown stay west of Vine!” went the half-joking caution—shaped as they were by the unflinching blue-collar view, the value of work that was real and plain. The neighborhoods were Catholic in name and ideal, unmistakably so, even if the churches weren’t full on Sundays. There was a sense of hardship in life that you accepted uncomplainingly. Maybe you were angling for a way to get up and out of there if you could, but you would never come out and say you had such a thing in mind. You might signal a kind of aspiration by laying too much down on a 10-to-1 horse at River Downs or on a ballgame with a bookie over in Covington. But you didn’t show or even feel any true ambition to change things, only,