Floyd Patterson Page 2

  As Floyd’s truancies became more frequent, he began prowling the streets of Brooklyn, finding alleys or shadowy corners where he could be by himself. If he had the eighteen cents for admission, he slipped into the comforting darkness of second-run Brooklyn movie houses like the Banco, the Regent, or the Apollo. If he didn’t have the eighteen cents, he sneaked in. He might remain in the theater all day and into the evening, staring raptly at the giant images on the screen before him. The white actors represented to him what “normal” life should be: people who lived in comfortable houses, families with well-mannered children, a father who didn’t come home completely used up by his job.

  Sometimes he boarded the Eighth Avenue subway and rode it all day. One day he discovered a little room off the tracks near the High Street station. When no one was looking, he’d climb the metal ladder leading to it and push open the door. The tiny enclosure housed tools used by subway crews. He’d step inside and close the door. Suddenly, he’d be in complete darkness. And it was silent in that room, except when a train roared past. Floyd felt safe there, no eyes peering at him, no voices talking about him. This tool closet became his refuge from the real world, a place where he’d spread old newspapers on the floor, lie down, and drift into dreams of candy, nice clothes, and money.

  But he couldn’t stay in his hole in the wall forever. Skipping school was a serious offense, and Floyd drew the attention of truancy officers. He tried hiding from them, but they caught him often enough. He became familiar with courtrooms and judges. He pleaded with his mother to let him just quit school altogether. He fantasized that he could get a job, do a man’s work, and supply badly needed income for the family. His mother would hear nothing of it. She adhered to the adage that staying in school meant staying out of trouble, so his fantasies of becoming a full-time worker evaporated. But he still skipped class as often as he could. And, as his mother feared, he found trouble.

  He regularly snatched fruit from delivery trucks as well as from the Ess & Eff stores and Sam’s Grocery. One night, he burglarized a shop to steal food. He took his booty to a corner two blocks away and began eating while sitting on a curb, convinced he’d pulled off his crime undetected. But he was wrong. A policeman soon nabbed him. Floyd was off to juvenile court yet again, where authorities added the incident to what was becoming a growing record of truancy offenses and petty crimes. Once, he stole for his mother. He saw female teachers wearing pretty clothes but never Annabelle. He resented this, so he broke into a store at two in the morning, grabbed an armload of dresses, and ran out the front door. “I carried them all the way home,” he said, “taking special care when I had to jump over a wall. When my mother asked where I got the dresses . . . I told her I found them.”6 His mother grew suspicious about the mounting number of things young Floyd “found,” but there was little she could do to stop him. His daring escalated. He even managed to steal a truck from the Sheffield Farms milk company and take it for a short joy ride, though his legs were hardly long enough to reach the pedals. He ran home after abandoning the truck, with no one pursuing him. But he knew this act, like his other misdeeds, would catch up with him at some point.

  One day, the Bishops, a group of Bed-Stuy toughs, cornered Floyd on the street and tried to steal his pocket change. Outnumbered and smaller than his assailants, Floyd nonetheless flailed at them wildly until someone pulled a knife. Fortunately for Floyd, his older brother Frank happened along at that moment. Frank grabbed a stick in the gutter and threatened the thugs, who fled—without Floyd’s money. In fighting back, Floyd had tapped into a familiar well of rage within himself. It proved effective against the Bishops. But when it surfaced during a confrontation with a cop, Patterson’s whole life changed.

  It started when Floyd snatched a case of soda from a bottling plant. As he hurried away, a police car pulled up.7 A whole case of soda was too much for a ten-year-old boy like Floyd to carry while running, so he dropped it, snatched two bottles, then took off again. But even those two bottles were too much to handle. He threw one aside. Then, after a few more steps, he tossed the other one away. He made it all of a half block before the policeman from the patrol car collared him.

  “You just robbed the factory down the street,” the officer declared. “I saw you. Let’s go.”

  The patrolman led him back to the soda plant, where he tried to make Patterson fess up. Floyd refused, claiming some other boy had given him the sodas, so the officer started slapping him around. The policeman also accused Floyd of hurling soda bottles at him. When Patterson began crying, the patrolman picked up an empty wooden crate and smashed it over Floyd’s head. In that moment everything changed: Floyd went from the reclusive, shy, quiet kid to being “crazy mad,” as he later described it.8 Snatching up a crate himself, he attacked the officer. The patrolman later told Annabelle he’d never seen anything like it. Floyd had become a miniature wild man, screaming and fighting. It took two or three more cops to subdue him.

  The incident sent Floyd back to juvenile court, where he went before a judge who knew him all too well from previous appearances. Patterson stared at the floor as he listened to the judge tell Annabelle that he feared Floyd was headed toward more serious crimes. It was time to take some action, the judge said. The boy needed a more regulated life. Annabelle agreed. Ten-year-old Floyd left the courtroom certain he was bound for prison.

  Patterson had good reason to assume he was going to jail. Where else could he have been headed? Government-funded social services were all but unknown to Bed-Stuy denizens. The service providers that were prevalent had affiliations with churches and benevolent groups, and most chose not to deal with troubled African American youths. But one alternative existed, one Annabelle Patterson learned about from the courts. It sounded unreal: a facility in upstate New York where boys could find plenty of open spaces, woods, fresh air, and, most important, teachers dedicated to inner-city kids who battled internal demons. But the Wiltwyck School for Boys was real, and that was Floyd’s destination as he departed Brooklyn in September 1945, riding in a car driven by a school counselor named Clarence Cooper.

  Cooper attempted conversation during the ninety-mile drive to Esopus, the small town near Wiltwyck, but Patterson kept his eyes closed and his lips locked, fuming to himself and angry at his mother. Cooper tried to reassure Floyd, telling him that he was traveling to a place that would help him. But Patterson would have none of it. He gave every indication that he planned to fight whatever awaited him to the very end.

  With his eyes clamped shut in the car—eventually he fell asleep—Patterson missed the startling changes in landscape as Clarence Cooper drove from Brooklyn up to Poughkeepsie, then across the bridge to Esopus. Had he been looking, Floyd would have taken in things he’d never seen before: mountains, forests, rivers, open fields, pastured horses. When the car finally came to a stop and he opened his eyes, Floyd saw four stone buildings trimmed with wood painted white. Behind them wooded hills stretched into the distance. As he stepped out of the car, he was impressed by what he didn’t see: bars, barbed-wire-crowned fences, guards with guns. He did see a lot of other boys, mostly his age, mostly black. The kids seemed to be dressed better than he—he was still in his outsized hand-me-downs—but from the very beginning he felt like he could relate to them.

  “One thing really astounded me,” he said years later, reflecting on life at the school. “I found it didn’t make any difference that I was colored, the way it did in Brooklyn where white boys called me names. There were about thirty white boys, and forty to fifty Negro boys at Wiltwyck, and they all got along. I never heard one remark about the color of a boy’s skin, or his religion.”9 Other Wiltwyck boys had different memories, but the school’s equitable treatment of residents probably served to minimize racial tensions.

  As he settled in, Patterson learned that the standard form of corporal punishment common in public schools of the time was discouraged at Wiltwyck—although some staff members were known to beat unruly students, and plenty of ten
-year-old thugs were on campus to challenge the staff’s authority. Each residential cottage had a counselor and a trained social worker. A public school administered by the New York City Board of Education functioned on the grounds, and all the boys were required to attend. But the classroom atmosphere was far different from what was typical at a city school. The class size was smaller, allowing the teachers to devote more time to each of their students. The teachers themselves had made a conscious decision to work with emotionally troubled children, so they did not consider boys like Floyd to be a disruption or something to be endured. They had chosen to work with kids like him.

  Many of the teachers had remarkable backgrounds. Art instructor Edith Kramer had learned painting from masters in Vienna, where she had been born and reared. She befriended a number of the early psychoanalysts in Vienna and underwent therapy herself. In Prague in the late 1930s, she taught art for children of Jewish and Communist refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. There, she helped pioneer the idea of art therapy for traumatized children. She eventually fled Hitler-controlled Europe herself and wound up at Wiltwyck, where she employed on the street kids from New York techniques she’d first used with refugees in Prague.

  Miss Vivian Costen did not boast an exotic pedigree along the lines of Kramer’s. But she became one of the most important people in Floyd’s life. Almost nothing exists in public records about Costen. She was African American and had never married. Census records indicate she may have been born in North Carolina in 1901 and lived in Connecticut before her Wiltwyck days. According to Patterson, she died sometime during the mid-1950s. Other than that, she’s unknown. But there is one thing about which there is no mystery: her influence on Patterson lasted a lifetime.

  Working with just seven or eight boys at a time in the classroom, Costen patiently attempted to bring them out of their shells and convince them that they could learn. One day she asked a question of the class, but Floyd’s lack of confidence kept him from responding. When Costen announced the answer and Floyd discovered he had been right, he leaped from his chair and darted out of the classroom, furious with himself for not speaking up. When Costen caught up with him in the hallway and saw the tears streaming down his cheeks, she told Floyd she knew he’d known the answer. She said she wanted him to overcome his fear of speaking out, that he was no different from any other boy his age.

  From that point onward, Patterson began to risk speaking out in class. He was often wrong with his answers at the beginning, but newly engaged with his studies, he started to catch on. Soon, as a reward, Costen invited him to spend a weekend at her house—a candy-sweetened honor she gave to the boy who had done the best academic work for the week. She also bought Floyd clothes and other small gifts.

  Patterson soon proved himself to be among the bright lights at Wiltwyck. As such, he developed key friendships with two prominent adults. Ernst Papanek, who later became the school director, was a well-known man of the world who’d once been a member of the Vienna city council and the executive committee of the Socialist Youth International as well as a groundbreaking psychiatrist. He was best known for the work he’d done to protect Jewish children from Nazi persecution during World War II. After the war, he moved to the United States, where he became associated with the Children’s Aid Society and the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. His work brought him to Wiltwyck, where he met Patterson. The two stayed in touch for the remainder of Papanek’s life, with Papanek, an unlikely fight fan, writing Patterson letters supporting his pro boxing career.

  Floyd also befriended Eleanor Roosevelt, the president’s widow. Wiltwyck, located just across the Hudson River from her Val-Kill home, existed only because of her ability to raise money for it. Justine Wise Polier, the first woman to serve as a judge in New York City and Roosevelt’s friend, had convinced the Episcopalian Mission Society to create the Wiltwyck School for Boys at Esopus in 1936. Wiltwyck began accepting “disturbed” boys referred from New York City, with the city paying the private school for its services. Most of the students were like Floyd Patterson—poor and black, with criminal records and symptoms of mental illness. The school had its share of failures, and violence was fairly common among the students. Sometimes the staff reacted in kind when confronting offenders. But it also had its successes, boys whose lives were turned around by the Wiltwyck experience. However, the school soon became more than the Mission Society could support and would have closed had Mrs. Roosevelt not intervened.

  Beyond addressing the school’s funding issues, Roosevelt also gave her time. She strolled the campus wearing a fox stole, pausing to engage the boys in conversation. Her Independence Day picnic at Val-Kill was the highlight of each school year. “We would hop, skip, and jump for lollipops and hotdogs and ice cream,” Cliff Arnesen, a Wiltwyck alumnus, said. “Then she would read Winnie-the-Pooh stories to us. It was really nice. All the kids would gather around after the hotdogs and ice cream and she would read those stories in that high-pitched voice.”10 She also read from Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. And, when it was time to serve the holiday meal, she made a point of personally taking part in buttering the rolls served to the boys. When Wiltwyck’s director told her she didn’t need to go to such lengths, she said, “When the King and Queen were here we had buttered rolls for them. Why should the children of Wiltwyck be given anything less?”11 Floyd caught Roosevelt’s eye, and he was among the students invited to spend two Christmases at the Roosevelt Hyde Park estate. Those visits began a friendship that lasted until her death in 1962.

  The Wiltwyck experience eroded Patterson’s cynicism and transformed him into something of a juvenile egalitarian. It also taught him that he was a natural when it came to smashing his fist into another kid’s face.

  Three or four times a year, Walter Johnson, Wiltwyck’s executive director, staged boxing bouts for the boys, coaching them himself beforehand. With prodding from his mother during one of her Wiltwyck visits, Patterson agreed to give ring fighting a try. The first kid he boxed was bigger and had boxing experience, so Patterson doubted he could beat him—until the first round was under way. Floyd discovered that he could easily dominate his foe. He flattened the other kid’s nose, and with that, Floyd had his first boxing victory. He showed little style in winning. In fact, he looked flat-out clumsy, leaping into the air to launch punches, throwing haymakers that missed the mark by feet, not inches. The boys in the audience howled at his missteps, but at the same time, they rooted for him and gave him a rousing ovation when he won. It was the first time he had ever heard a crowd cheer for him, and he loved it. He fought two more bouts while at Wiltwyck and, as the audience favorite, won them both.

  Patterson left Wiltwyck at age twelve feeling like a winner for the first time in his life. During his two years at the school, he’d learned to read and write. He’d overcome his paralyzing shyness. He could look people in the eye and hold a conversation. The fits of screaming at night had disappeared. He never again sleepwalked. He would come to understand his experience at the school as fostering in him the belief that ghetto-formed nihilism can be overcome, that hope exists for even the most downtrodden, that black people and white people can live and work together. Now, he was ready to go back to New York City to finish his public school education. More important, he wanted to get back into the ring. “My mind,” he would later recall, “was already taken up with boxing.”12

  2

  Taken Up with Boxing

  IN THE MID-1940S many young black men and boys found their minds taken up with boxing. It was the one major sport that was integrated to any significant degree. Big-league baseball boasted not a single black player. Top-flight college football programs were almost without exception white. Black players turned up in the National Football League only sporadically—a situation that would not change until 1946, when the Los Angeles Rams signed African Americans Woody Strode and Kenny Washington, a move that prompted other teams to add black players to their rosters as well. Professional basketball would not in
tegrate until 1950.

  But blacks had been making their mark on boxing for decades. The most lauded athlete in the world immediately after World War II was heavyweight champ Joe Louis, from Detroit. Louis was the first African American to become a national hero, a status he acquired by hammering the German Max Schmeling in 1938’s “Battle of the Century” fight. His private life was one thing, but his public persona was that of a clean-living, hard-working, respectable black man, and he inspired countless other young black men to pursue success inside the ring, not the least of whom were Frank, Billy, and Floyd Patterson. They started at the most basic of makeshift boxing gyms. Brooklyn’s Carlton Avenue YMCA had virtually no training equipment except sparring gloves and a solitary speedbag hanging in a corner.

  It was all asses and elbows out there on the basketball court of the Carlton Avenue Y, where pairs of kids faced off and threw punches at each other, all of them going at it simultaneously. The boxing matches Floyd participated in at Wiltwyck had been wild exhibitions between untrained boys. But here he began to learn how to keep his hands up, how to feint jabs, and how to slip punches thrown at him as he sparred round after round. It was akin to figuring out how to swim by being thrown into a deep lake, but it worked for Floyd and his brothers. Frank Lavelle, the trainer in charge of Carlton Avenue’s boxing program, took notice of the Patterson boys. They seemed to have potential.

  Lavelle, whose day job was at the US Custom House at the port of New York, was not unlike other white trainers in big cities across the country. Boxing had been integrated as far back as the late 1800s, except for championship bouts—white promoters ensured that only white boxers competed in those. But that changed in 1902 when Joe Gans won the world lightweight title. While Gans’s victory did not immediately create complete integration of championship-level boxing, it opened the door. More and more blacks appeared in the prizefighting ring as the twentieth century progressed, most taking up the sport as a way to escape poverty. After the war, as African American fighters were becoming more and more dominant in the professional fight ranks, men like Lavelle prospected for future pro talent in gyms catering to blacks in poor neighborhoods. If he could find a fighter capable of eventually winning some pro fights, Lavelle stood to make some money. As much as a third of a fighter’s purse went to his manager and trainer. Lavelle didn’t necessarily have to find a potential champion. In those days before television became pervasive, pro boxing matches took place in auditoriums around the city every week, so there was plenty of demand for boxers, a few of whom earned a living from the ring without ever contending for a championship. Their managers and trainers made out well enough too. After a couple of years of working with the Pattersons at the Y, Lavelle decided it was time to take Frank and Billy to the next step. Floyd tagged along.