Mrs. Granahan, who doesn?t know Galento from gelato, leaves the shindig, sniffily observing, ?I didn?t realize it was a publicity gimmick??
?Dey got me to give the joint some class.??Tony Galento
It?s in the ?60s that former heavyweight contender ?Two Ton? Tony Galento gets a job managing the Speakeasy Room of the Gaslight Club in New York. The place has checkered red-and-white tablecloths with photos of guys like Jack Dempsey and Mayor Jimmy Walker on the wall, interspersed with an ?appropriate number of nudes,? as Oscar Fraley, UPI sportswriter and co-author (with Eliot Ness) of The Untouchables, observes. The man who knocked the great Joe Louis to the canvas back in ?39 spends his time doing the Twist with chorus girls. But he dons the gloves once again in March of ?64.
Galento contemporary, King Levinsky, takes time off from selling ties on the corner to head into the 5th Street Gym and tell Muhammad Ali what he thinks of him. Tony don?t go that far, if only because he ain?t in Miami Beach, but he does tell Fraley that Ali is ?a real bum? and Sonny Liston ?an old geezer,? who sat and stayed sat like a pouty little girl who didn?t like the way mommy braided her hair. ?We had fighters,? Galento sneers through what?s left of his stogie. ?Louis, Max Baer, Arturo Godoy, Leroy Haynes, Lorenzo Pack. Whole bunches of ?em. And none of ?em ever quit sittin? on a stool.? He?s 54, but has Fraley check out his forearm, which is ?as big as a side of ham and hard as a block of concrete.? He tells the writer that he ?kayoed three guys in one night in Detroit in 1931 in a total of five rounds,? that Ali and Liston are ?bums,? and that he?d ?moida? the two of ?em, same place, same night, no fair and plenty of foul.
But it isn?t Ali or Liston who the ?Jersey Nightstick? takes on that March evening, but a dame by the name of Kathryn Granahan.
Following a stint in Congress, the lady was appointed Treasurer of the United States, serving from January 1963 to November 1966. On the night in question, Mrs. Granahan is invited to a party in her honor at the Gaslight. Not the usual venue of a woman who reminds me of no one so much as Natalie Schafer, Lovey Howell of Gilligan?s Island. ?I thought it was a little joke,? she says. ?So I went.? A joke, perhaps, but she doesn?t wind up doing a whole lot of ladylike tittering.
Tony comes into the room, see, perhaps wearing the gold-buttoned red vest and white silk tie he was known to sport in them days, telling Mrs. Granahan to put up her dukes. Next thing you know, they both got on the gloves and they?re squaring off. The flashbulbs pop and Tony exits stage left to head back to the chorus girls and the Twist. Mrs. Granahan, who doesn?t know Galento from gelato, leaves the shindig in high dudgeon, sniffily observing, ?I didn?t realize it was a publicity gimmick.?
Now I got nothing against the colleen, but she did go to one of them collitches. Two Ton, he didn?t. Instead, he gets hisself turned down by manager Jersey Jones. ?What else am I gonna do?? said Jersey. ?I go into the gym and this guy has a beer in one hand and a hot dog in the other.? I like that. The guy don?t have much in the way of academic credentials, but he knows what hands are for?in one you got your beer, in the other your hot dog.
It takes a mighty small man, and that?s me all right, to tell ya that I get a kick outta letting ya in on Tony outliving the Granahan dame by 12 days.
