Even though I live in Virginia, I still subscribe to my old home town newspaper, the Times Union, in Albany, New York. One of the features they run is called, “Around the Region” and they publish news articles from 50 and 100-years ago. This article is from 100-years ago and is a bit of a rib tickler as the way the car is described…
Earlier I posted an article from the same archives of my old hometown newspaper announcing the new way that the police would ticket illegally parked cars…
This most recent achieve is announcing the arrival of Jack Dempsey’s visit to my old hometown in Aug 1923. At this time, he was the World Heavyweight Boxing Champion and when he came to town, the town turned out for him…
His car was described as a “Sassy Gasoline Wagon…”
+1 to the Packard ID.
Someone who had some serious money in those pre-Depression years, and who appreciated engineering excellence, frequently chose a Packard.
Packards were not as flashy as… let’s say… Cadillacs, but the quality of a Packard was unsurpassed by any American make, with the possible exception of Pierce-Arrow and Peerless.
Packard, Pierce-Arrow, and Peerless were once called “The Three Ps” of quality motor cars.
Either fighter could easily have afforded any of those cars… Dempsey pocketed $468,750 (Over $8 million today), and Firpo earned $156,250 (Almost $3 million today…).
And now, the “Rest of the Story…” The match between these heavyweight titans unfolded into one of the most violent and shortest battles in the history of heavyweight boxing.
Firpo displayed his power immediately, when he dropped a lunging Dempsey with a right hand just after the start of the first round. Dempsey landed on one knee, then quickly recovered. Dempsey then rushed onto his rival and proceeded to drop Firpo seven times within a minute and a half. There was no “three knockdown” rule, and Dempsey was permitted to stand over the fallen fighter and immediately knock him down again, as there was yet no rule about going to a neutral corner.
But only half a minute later, towards the end of the first round, Firpo struck again. Trapping Dempsey against the ropes, he connected with another right to Dempsey’s chin. Dempsey tumbled backwards out of the ring, and a photographer caught him as his legs pointed upwards. Dempsey hit a ringside writing machine during his fall, and he suffered a severe cut to the back of his head. He was helped back into the ring by the writers at ringside. Film of the fight shows the referee had reached the count of fourteen by the time he returned. Fighters are allowed 20 seconds to recover instead of the usual ten seconds allowed on an inside-the-ring fall, should they fall outside of the ring.
After that scare, Dempsey recovered, dropping Firpo two more times in the second round, for a knockout victory at the fifty-seven-second mark of that round.
… and then, Dempsey went on to the famous bout with Tunney. By refusing to retreat to a neutral corner, he gave Tunney several seconds to recover, and Tunney wound-up winning the match because of Dempsey’s “less than sportsman-like” behavior. But, not to worry, because Dempsey went on to run a Manhattan restaurant/bar that catered to underworld types, and he made some significant money from that venture.
Studebaker suffered from a bunch of really bad decisions by management. IMHO, their biggest blunder was their refusal to allow Ford to produce Studebaker’s automatic transmission under license. This would have brought in millions over the space of several years, and I cannot fathom how Studebaker thought that they would benefit from forcing Ford to delay the production of cars with an automatic trans.
I think the thought process was that if they had a better product, people would recognize that and buy Studies instead of Fords. Either the buying public was uninformed or didn’t care about the important difference.
