all the children would have jobs, with every nickel handed over to Nana for household expenses.
Gene worked as a butcher’s boy at John McNamara’s meat market for $2.50 a week, taking orders from customers in the morning and making deliveries after school. When he showed up late for class, which was most days, the nuns wielded their rulers like scimitars, rapping his knuckles until they were raw. But waiting on stoops for the various McTigues, O’Sullivans and Duffys to find dimes for beef allowed the altar boy to see neighbors in provocative undress and using language that he had never found in a dictionary.
One day, Gene slipped and fell, slashing open his leg on a butcher’s knife. Summoned from home to help, Nana wrapped her son’s bleeding leg in her petticoats, hoisted him across her broad shoulders and, breathless, raced six long city blocks to the hospital emergency room.
“I’m Dr. Van Vliet,” said the man in a white jacket. “And what shall I call you, young man?”
Dutch-born Dr. Frederick Van Vliet, the most highly educated man Gene had ever met, dazzled him with information and the prospect that, like a storybook hero, Gene could find a path out of his humble beginnings. Gene went to work for him as a messenger and carried the doctor’s medical bag on calls. In becoming his first trusted teacher, the doctor gave much-needed direction to Gene’s life.
“It was the books, all those treasured books that captured me, full of words and ideas. I couldn’t read fast enough, couldn’t get enough of them.” Four walls of the doctor’s office had bookshelves, not just medical books but novels, historical fiction, travel books, short stories and tomes on modern and ancient history. When the doctor was busy, Gene sat alone in a big leather chair with the sound of a ticking clock and a veritable library stacked beside him on the old, wide-plank floors. Van Vliet encouraged him to ask questions and to challenge himself. “The doctor exposed me to a broader world,” Gene said, “and he had the education, time and enthusiasm to talk about ideas. He championed dissent and debate, discussed literature and music.” He urged Gene to educate himself, and against Gene’s parents’ wishes, he also encouraged the young man’s boxing aspirations.
“Gene reveres the memory of Dr. Van Vliet,” recalled a friend a half century later. For many years after the doctor’s death, Gene walked by his house to remind himself of the mentor who had taught him that a library was the chart room of knowledge. Gene began to see writers as confidants, and he memorized words and passages from books, hoping that he, too, might become as erudite as those who had written them.
Apart from his pranks, Gene was considered by his friends to be something of a prig, almost a stereotype of the perfect altar boy. He didn’t drink or smoke, and he regarded swearing as crude and sacrilegious, turning away when another boy told a suggestive or an off-color story. Early on, he liked to use big words he’d picked up from reading, words that he wrote down in notebooks stashed beneath his bed like treasures. “In a way, Gene was as out of place as a fish in a park lane, and yet somehow, we didn’t seem to think it anything unusual that he could be one of us and yet so different,” said his childhood classmate, Eddie O’Brien Jr. “If some other boy had been such a stickler in the matter of language and deportment, he would have been in danger of getting his head punched.”
Facts learned from reading and conversations with the doctor also gave the maturing Gene grist for his increasing defiance at the dinner table where Papa dominated. If someone read a book, Papa had read it first. If someone had a quote, he corrected it. If someone knew an historical incident, he cited the dates. (To try to get a word in edgewise and impress his father, Gene’s youngest brother, Tom, memorized the births and deaths of the English kings.) Papa was practiced at using ridicule, belittling his seven children to make a point, and was unwilling or unable to display affection or to acknowledge that their schooling matched his as they grew older. The hard man from the docks also refused to tolerate complaints or whining. If he detected infractions in behavior or received a report of lack of discipline at school, whether it was true or not, he meted out punishment harshly.
For his oldest son, fear came at night. “Bring the belt!” shouted Papa.
Gene was made to bend over a kitchen chair with his pants pulled down to his ankles. He closed his eyes, gripped the chair with all his strength and struggled to hold back the tears that he knew his father saw as a sign of weakness. He recalled hearing the frightful hiss of the leather winging through the air, warning him of the pain to come. He tried to block it out, tried to forget that he had been flogged before and that it would inevitably happen again. The impact of the belt raised red welts on the back of his legs and his bare bottom, and sometimes, if Papa had too much gin and missed the target, welts ran like red valleys of blood across his back.
Gene rarely remembered later what he had done wrong. What he remembered was the intimidation and the fear. If he had been flogged at school by the Christian Brothers, which was common practice, and if his father learned of it, he was whipped twice as hard at home. There were days when he could barely sit in a chair. There were nights when he cried himself to sleep. It didn’t matter that other Irish fathers used a whip, too, because he knew that some fathers never did.
The diversity of Gene’s reading and his ability to withdraw into his imagination became essential to his withstanding his father’s outbursts. Words became his refuge. At home, there were Bibles, books of poetry, including “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Quentin Durward, and Sidney Lee’s A Life of William Shakespeare. He borrowed novels from the doctor and from the library and read newspapers and his older sisters’ schoolbooks.
Gene saw himself in the romantic adventures of James Fenimore Cooper and in Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers. The swashbuckling deeds of D’Artagnan in the service of the French king fired his dreams of faraway frontiers and service to his country. He imagined himself a hero — always a hero — fighting duels, engaging in battles in the name of justice, winning the hand of a beautiful princess.
Reading helped him see himself as independent and courageous, and it made him feel he could achieve something great that would make his family proud. As a young fighter, he would journey alone to boxing bouts, fantasizing that he was a Roman gladiator, a mysterious, lonely, defiant Titan out to avenge wrong and save the kingdom, a knight in shining armor, the Ivanhoe of Sir Walter Scott’s novel. “Other lads of the neighborhood would go to see me box. They’d want to accompany me to the fight club, but I wouldn’t let them. I wanted to go to battle alone, alone with my will...the lone, solitary spirit of self-will.”
By the time he was a teenager, Gene was the tallest in his family; at almost 6 feet 2 inches, he hadn’t yet filled out his big frame. He was almost four inches taller than his father, a size difference that put an end to Papa’s floggings, although his father belittled him further by dubbing him “Skinny.” The nickname stung and made Gene only more determined to show that he was tough. He became obsessed with proving his worth, especially to his father.
At age 15, when the family could no longer afford tuition, Gene, like most of his siblings, left school. He found a job for five dollars a week as an office boy at the Ocean Steamship Company near the piers where he lived.
Ring bouts at $5 to $10 became a regular sideline and brought in extra money. At first, he didn’t dare tell his parents and so fought defensively, lest black eyes and bruised lips give him away. “Winning was always my only option,” Gene said. He spent his days classifying freight loads of cotton moving on ships from Georgia and Alabama to New York and Boston. Hoping to work his way up, he enrolled in correspondence courses in mathematics and English. It was tedious work, and he longed for more stimulation and excitement, an outlet for his nervous energy.
Night was his time. The docks lay in darkness, and the expanse of the Hudson became a shimmering black belt cutting off the empty steamship
