For someone determined as the man called Doc Lunt was to keep his real name a secret and his face out of camera range, he was not exactly a shrinking violet.
In the 1920s Lunt was a familiar figure in the American hinterlands he crisscrossed by automobile with a troupe of professional boxers, staging bouts anywhere they could draw a crowd. To boost interest and their take wherever they encamped, Doc also booked himself into weekly luncheon meetings of the local Rotary or Elks club to entertain members with popular songs of the day??There is no death,? ?By the waters of Minnetonka? ?rendered in the exquisite falsetto voice that, according to more than one review, made George Lunt one of the top contra tenor singers in the world. He was also a virtuoso on the piano, and when not training and shepherding fighters Lunt gave voice and keyboard lessons.
Born on May 10, 1866, George Joseph Lunt Colby was one of eight children sired by George J.L. Colby, a Newburyport, Massachusetts newspaper editor and politician whose vociferous crusades against slavery made him renowned north of the Mason-Dixon Line and reviled below it. At least two of young George?s sisters became medical doctors, but music was his bag. As a boy he often snuck into a neighborhood church to play the huge pipe organ. At age five he was giving recitals, and later he studied voice and piano in Europe. Lunt reportedly got his doctorate?and hence his nickname?in music while in England.
In September 1915 he resided near Boston as George J. Colby, advertising in area newspapers for students who wanted to learn ?vocal culture and pianoforte playing.?
Five years later he was living in Milwaukee as George ?Doc? Lunt, and devoting himself to music lessons and training boxers. Why had he left Massachusetts and dropped his birth surname? How did he end up spending as much time in gyms as in conservatories?
He never said. And deepening the mystery was Lunt?s adamant refusal, for the rest of his life, to have his photograph taken.
But if the camera-shy musicologist was hiding, it was pretty much in plain sight.
?An odd character in the boxing world,? wrote Tom Andrews, ?in Milwaukee Lunt had quite a large class in both piano and vocal teaching, but a request to train a certain fighter meant that the pupils at his conservatory could wait their time, which sometimes meant a week or more and even a month. It made no difference with the doctor whether a pupil wanted to take a lesson or not; the fighting part of the game came first with him, no matter what the cost might be. He would much prefer to hustle over to a gymnasium and give some preliminary or star fighter a rubdown than to hobnob with the greatest song bird in the country. There were times when Dr. Lunt would make trips to New York or to Denver, at his own expense, just to train and rub some boxer he was interested in. He was thorough in all his work, but always said that the fighter had more attraction for him than all the monied men or stars of the opera in the country.?
Best-known of the fighters Lunt trained was Richie Mitchell, the Milwaukee lightweight contender whose January 14, 1921 riotous championship fight with Benny Leonard at Madison Square Garden?Mitchell was down three times in the first round, Leonard once?was won by the champion in six rounds.
Lunt was a member of the Mitchell entourage in New York, but was absent from Richie?s corner at the Garden. Too big a spotlight? Perhaps?or maybe Lunt was banished on account of the bizarre interview he gave on the morning of the fight in which he predicted that ?Leonard will win on a knockout; Richie will last not more than seven rounds.?
?But you have been training Richie for this match,? said an incredulous Sam Levy of The Milwaukee Journal, to which Lunt mysteriously responded with a smile, ?No, someone more adept at the art has prepared him?for the knockout.?
Around that time, from Winnipeg, Canada to Milwaukee moved the Gaudesi?soon shortened to Gaudes?family. There were five boys, all of whom became boxers. The oldest, Peter, went about 110 pounds, and purportedly was flyweight champion of Canada when he partnered up with Lunt. At least that?s how Doc billed him when they barnstormed their way to the West Coast in 1923 in a car stuffed with boxing and camping gear. Also squeezed in was another flyweight called Sid Kelly, who was Peter?s opponent wherever they set up shop and invariably ended up on the losing end of things, which had less to do with his ability than the fact that Kelly was actually Sam Gaudes, Peter?s brother.
Their bouts were always crowd-pleasers, and so were Doc?s demonstrations of his vocal chops. After the Gaudes boys ?put up one of the greatest boxing exhibitions ever staged in El Paso? on April 22, 1924, reported the El Paso (Texas) Times, ?Dr. George Lunt gave several tenor selections, which were well received. He was forced to give several encores.?
In Phoenix a couple weeks later, Doc was a knockout headlining the local Mother?s Day program, and after Peter knocked out his brother it was on to Los Angeles. In a preliminary bout at Hollywood Legion Stadium, Gaudes finally fought someone other than ?Sid Kelly? and lost the decision. ?The mix-up was sort of a tame affair,? reported the LA Times, ?[Art] Springer finding Gaudes a sort of cream puff.?
But California wasn?t a total bust. Gaudes had an uncle in LA who swapped property he owned there for the deed to 50,000 acres of prime coal and timber land in Kentucky with a reported value of $10 million. As long as he was already looking after Peter?s interests, Doc was only too happy to do the same for the uncle. As he and Peter continued their boxing/singing tour of the country over the next couple years, Lunt made plans for the mammoth windfall coming their way. ?Since Doc Lunt, former trainer of Ritchie Mitchell, fell heir to a fortune in Kentucky, he has offered to wager $10,000 (real money) that Peter Gaudes, the Canadian flyweight, can whip any boxer in the world at 108 pounds, which he claims is the real flyweight limit,? reported the Muncie, Indiana Star Press on June 18, 1927.
Furtive as he was in so many respects, Doc had an almost Trumpian facility for getting his name in the papers. When Filipino bantamweight Clever Sencio died of a brain hemorrhage after his April 21, 1926 fight with Bud Taylor in Milwaukee, Lunt made headlines insisting that it wasn?t Taylor?s punches that killed him. ??Following the tenth round,? he said, ?I went towards the dressing room, being anxious to get a look at Sencio. As he was led by two men and very unsteady on his feet, he fell forward, going through the doorway, and striking his head on the cement floor. His head was bruised and the blow was sufficiently hard to have caused the cerebral hemorrhage which is said to have brought death. I will make affidavit to this.? Nothing came of it.
Lunt settled in Dodge City, Kansas in late ?27 and trained of a stable of local fighters that included heavyweight sensation Roy ?Hoot? Burger. He also made weekly trips to Wichita, 150 miles to the east, to give piano and voice lessons at the university there.
In August 1929, Doc and Peter Gaudes took their last trip together, to Colorado Springs to get medical treatment for Lunt; he had liver and heart problems. He died on September 3 at 63.
According to the Hutchinson, Kansas News, ?the Dodge City pianist, recital singer, music teacher, and boxing trainer died without revealing to even his closest friends why he had dropped the use of his real name and lived under an assumed name, or why he always refused to be photographed? Relatives who came to the funeral refused to reveal the secret. He desired to carry his secret to the grave with him, they said, and they would respect his wishes.?
Sam ?Sid Kelly? Gaudes died in North Hollywood, California on July 10, 1971. Four days later, Peter Gaudes died in Milwaukee.
Peter never did become a Kentucky coal baron. A month after Doc Lunt?s death, Gaudes finally went to lay claim to the coal rich land his uncle had traded for, and for which Doc had handled all the paperwork. ?Accompanied by an attorney on horseback,? recounted a newspaper story, ?the two made their way into the backwoods of Kentucky, a distance of 180 miles southwest of Louisville, and found that fully 5,000 people were living on the land and claimed squatter rites, as they had been there for many years.?
?Sorry, young feller,? the county clerk told Peter, ?but this here land has been sold by some sharpers more than once during the past 40 years.?
