If you get the breaks, you’re in there, you’re up on top, but if you don’t, you’re on the bottom.
—James J. Braddock,
as quoted by Peter Heller in In This Corner
Newark, New Jersey
September 25, 1933
Jim Braddock stood at the same oak bureau where he’d once felt so lucky. Opening one drawer after another, he shifted through the meager pickings of tattered clothes, mended repeatedly by patient fingers. The top of his dresser was scarred now and barren. No watch. No cross. Not even the silver frame to hold his and Mae’s wedding picture.
Outside the sooty window, something scampered through the dingy alley. A rat was Jim’s guess, part of the wildlife that came with the view from a basement apartment in a rundown tenement near the Newark docks.
Dressing was a quick affair these days. Whatever clothes Mae had patched the night before and dunked in the washtub, he pulled on. No need to spend time winding his expensive watch or kissing his solid gold cross for luck since both had been pawned years before. Besides, by now, everyone’s luck had run out—even Jim Braddock’s.
Behind him, three hungry kids shared the same mattress in the chilly family bedroom. Steps away hung a worn blanket, Mae’s idea of turning one cramped room into two. On the other side of the thin wool, his wife cooked breakfast by the light of a single bare bulb. Jim heard the meat frying, felt his empty stomach clutch at the smell.
A drawer stuck and Jim pushed hard to close it. The once richly polished bureau was part of a set that had been sold off piece by piece: the four-poster bed, the framed oval mirror, the night tables, even the silver lining around their wedding picture—but not the picture inside. Propped for Jim to look at every day, his wedding photo was the last possession left sitting on his chest of drawers.
Jim gazed at the image of Mae in her wedding dress, radiant and rosy cheeked, himself next to her, wearing a suit of clothes he no longer owned. To another man, this blissful couple might appear ridiculous, grinning fools from another time and place, completely oblivious to a future like this one. Another man might have shoved the photo into the deepest recess he could find. But Jim liked seeing the picture every day. It was the singular reminder of what had gone right in his life. The one thing that still made him a lucky man.
Tugging back the hanging blanket, Jim stepped into the kitchen—an old gas stove, a table, and four chairs. A few feet away sat a single shabby sofa. The Braddock parlor. Mae stood at the stove, frying two thin slices of bologna. Since their meals had become spartan, her curves seemed less pronounced, her face more careworn. Shadowy circles now lived beneath her eyes, and her plump, pink cheeks had become sunken and pallid. To Jim, however, she was still a raving beauty.
“Can’t find my good socks,” he called, buttoning his frayed shirt.
Mae turned from the stove, her voice a scolding whisper. “Jim!”
He winced, lowered his voice. “Sorry. God. Sorry.”
“Mama.” The sleepy whimper came from the other side of the blanket. Rose Marie, their youngest.
Mae closed her eyes. “Great.” The damage had been done. She leaned down, reached into the oven, pulled out his socks—the ones that hadn’t gone threadbare yet in the heels and toes.
“Sorry,” said Jim again, taking the precious strips of wool like an archeologist handling a rare find.
His wife sighed and turned away. Now that Rosy was awake, the girl would want breakfast too. With resignation, Mae picked up the knife and sawed a third sliver of meat from the meager stump.
“I washed them last night,” she said. “I took them right off your feet, remember? You were dead to the world.”
Jim shook his head, sat at the table, pulled on his socks. The fabric smelled clean and felt warm—toasty heaven on his freezing toes. He smiled at his wife. “How can I keep ’em this warm?”
Mae might have replied with a quip, or even a smile, but a tiny figure pushed forcefully through the blanket, reminding her of yet another reason she just couldn’t.
“Mama, I want to eat too.”
Mae hated that her six-year-old was too young to remember what it had been like to live in a spacious, well-heated house with a stocked pantry, to take a drive downtown and blithely purchase a brand-new pair of shoes and a pretty hat at Bamberger’s Department Store, to have a sumptuous picnic on a sunny day in Weequahic Park, throwing extra bread to the birds, or spending hours window-shopping on Market Street then refreshing yourself with an ice cream soda at the drug store on the corner.
As Rosy climbed onto her father’s lap, Jim smoothed her hair and kissed her head. To him, she was as pretty as her mother, with big, curious eyes and silky, chestnut-colored hair. Yet her face appeared gaunt, and her fingers and toes felt far too cold. Jim hugged her close. Seeing his children grow up like this was harder to take than any beating he’d endured in the ring.
“We got a notice yesterday,” Mae told him. “On the gas and electric.”
Jim’s shoulders sagged a fraction. He didn’t know which was worse about the Depression—fighting so hard for so little, or having no real opponent to target, nothing and no one to haul off and punch.
He looked toward a mason jar on the shelf, where they kept their big “rainy day” savings—a better bet for holding his money than his stocks and bonds had proved to be. He reached for the jar, shook it. The few remaining coins jangled against the glass. He set it on the kitchen table, raised an eyebrow.
“It must have been raining lately, more than I noticed.”
Mae didn’t laugh at the joke. She didn’t even smile. She stared at Jim, considering her once golden husband. His eyes appeared hollow now, the circles of fatigue like sooty smudges. His broken nose had healed slightly broader, one ear had gone cauliflower, and his clothes hung off his thinning frame. Even his teasing, boyish sense of humor had faded into recurrent stretches of weary sullenness. Yet Mae knew that beneath his rough morning stubble, his visible exhaustion, James Braddock’s square jaw was still firm, his quiet strength still evident. Mae counted on that strength like a tent counted on its center pole in a storm. She could keep herself steady, she told herself, keep the children protected—as long as he held her up, as long as he stayed firm and strong for all of them.
Jim ignored Mae’s stony silence and placed Rosy on an empty chair. “I’ll get the milk.”
At four in the morning, the sun had a few hours left to sleep. Jim didn’t have that luxury. The loading dock foreman would be choosing men soon and he had to get down there or he’d miss his chance. Quickly climbing the basement steps, Jim emerged into the predawn gloom of the tenement courtyard.
His charming white colonial with the manicured lawn and two-hundred-year-old tamarack trees felt like the remnants of a dream. The heart of a slum was where he lived now. Filthy bricks stretched eight floors up. Clotheslines crisscrossed the quad, the hanging laundry fluttering above him like raggedy signal flags. Below, rats scavenged through spilled garbage cans, consuming whatever paltry crumbs were left to pilfer.
Jim moved to the spot where the milkman always left his early morning deliveries. Two fat bottles stood empty. A few final drops of white clung to their insides. Pink past-due slips circled their necks like collars of shame.
“Mama, I want to eat too.”
That moment Jim knew Rosy’s words would haunt him all day long. Every hour. Every minute. He picked up the bottles, went back inside, showed them to Mae. Her face went pale. She held his gaze. Jim looked away. Like a hard tenth round, he felt himself weakening.
“Oh!” said Mae. Something in her voice surprised him. “Some left over, I think.”
Jim watched her open the icebox, pull out the last cold milk bottle, barely an eighth full. At the sink, she began to top it off with water. She smiled at Rosy, winked at him. “Who needs a cow?”
Jim didn’t laugh at her joke, just sat down heavily at the table. Mae’s smile was brittle. He could see the effort she was making, hear the forced brightness in her voice. She went to the stove, picked up three dishes, slid a slice of hot bologna onto each one. As she set down the pathetic plates of food in front of them, Jim found himself watching his wife’s hands. He remembered Mae’s hands from years before, when her brother routinely invited him to dinner at the Foxes’ house. He’d become entranced back then, watching such small, dainty hands offering him such large, heaping platters of buttered mashed potatoes, thickly sliced slabs of beef, steaming heads of cabbage, corned beef, and soda bread. He remembered how her looks, her eyes, had distinctly offered him more.
“Rosy,” Jim said, turning to his daughter. “Your fork, please.”
The meat may have been thin, but as he cut his little girl’s portion with the fork’s edge, the scent of sizzling fat made his mouth water. Maybe it was the idea of hot food that revived Jim, maybe the memory of that young, flirtatious Mae, or the sight of her now, trying so hard to appear happy for the sake of her husband and daughter. Whatever it was, when he spoke again, he did his best to sound more than cheerful—he sounded downright hopeful.
“I got Feldman tonight.”
Abe Feldman. Eighteen wins, one loss, no draws. A better record than his these days, but Jim wasn’t telling Mae that.
“That’s half a C,” he said instead. And half a hundred was better pay than a week’s worth of sweat on the loading dock, which he seldom got anyway. Well worth a few rounds of physical punishment.
“I beat him, maybe I can get back up to seventy-five.”
Mae looked up from her plate. The old fear in her eyes was better hidden than the doubt in his, but the familiar dread shuddered through her anyway. It had been two months since her husband’s last fight, and well over a year since she’d started actively praying that he’d give up the gloves for good. In the past, for his sake, she’d tolerated the sport. But as the Depression began to take its toll on her family, Mae had grown to hate the ring, its punishments—and all its empty promises.
“Mama, I want some more.”
“I’m sorry, honey. We need to save some for the boys.”
Jim looked at Mae and Rosy. Both their plates were empty now. His still held that mouth-watering slice of greasy meat.
“Mae, you know what I dreamed about last night,” Jim said, rising from the table. “I dreamed I was having dinner at the Ritz…” He pulled on his old coat, his mended gloves, his frayed hat “…and I had a big, thick steak…” He spread his thumb and finger. “This thick, Rosy, and so much mashed potatoes and ice cream, I’m just not hungry anymore.”
Rosy studied her father with lips pursed, eyebrows skeptically knitted together. Even at six, she was no pushover. Jim could see there was more scamming to be done—
“Can you help me out?” he asked his daughter. “Mommy cooked and I don’t want it to go to waste.”
When Rosy continued to hesitate, Jim picked up her fork again, this time to stab his own slice and deposit it on her plate. Eyes wide, stomach still hungry, the child immediately began to eat.
“Jimmy—” Mae tried to object, but his mouth covered hers, halting the debate.
When the kiss ended, Mae’s gaze found his. You can’t work on an empty stomach, her eyes protested. What are you thinking?
Jim’s answer was simple. “You’re my girls.”
When Jim thought he and his family had it bad, he just walked around the block. What he saw on the street made him count his blessings, few as they were. Near the tenement where he and Mae rented their one room, junker cars lay next to trashcan fires in an abandoned lot. Every day, Jim passed by the line of them on his way to the docks, rusted out and broken down, their cold glass windows steamed opaque with warm breath. Homes on wheels for the unemployed.
One car’s door suddenly swung open. A mother climbed out, pushing her two little boys in front of her. Bleary-eyed, they stumbled across the dirt to the side of the nearest building and began to urinate against its wall.
Jim walked on.
He’d come a long way from the stately, old neighborhood north of the city, where large frame and brick houses sat comfortably spaced and attractively landscaped. Here on the southeast edge of the business district, not far from the Port of Newark, cracked concrete sidewalks lined long stretches of store windows, every one boarded up. Buildings were a monotonous brown and gray, many of them crumbling with paint peeling, windows broken, gutters hanging loose because no one had the money to fix them. Soot and coal dust dirtied streets that the city could no longer afford to clean. Garbage cans lay on their sides, rummaged through, empty. These days, people threw almost nothing away, and whenever anyone did, another worse-off soul would find a use for it. Just like that, it was out of the can before a truck could haul it away.
Of the twenty-nine thousand factories in the New York City area, ten thousand had shut down. And the plight was no better across the river. By now, the Depression had gone well beyond factory workers. College graduates, professional men, people who’d thought of themselves as middle class, were out of work too. Hundreds of brokers and bankers had been fired, small businesses had gone bust, a third of the doctors in Brooklyn had been forced to close their practices, and six out of seven architects were now idle.
Men in four-year-old suits and frayed ties wandered like ghosts, nowhere to go, glad to clean a yard to make a dollar. Teachers, lawyers, accountants, businessmen were still leaving home every morning with empty attaché cases, ashamed to admit they had no work. Others sat on benches and bus stops in tattered coats, heads bowed like defeated rag dolls.
Everywhere Jim looked, he saw part of the army of unemployed, selling apples on Manhattan street corners, standing on line at employment offices from morning till night, waiting at bakery back doors for day-old bread.
Black Tuesday, the Crash, the worst day in stock market history, the end of the Roaring Twenties, the beginning of the Great Depression, whatever they wanted to call October 29, 1929, didn’t matter. What mattered was the country had been hit by a thousand-foot tidal wave, smashed by the power punch of a raging financial Goliath. In one day, sixteen million shares of stock had been dumped and the country lost more capital than it had spent in all of World War I. The entire week’s losses added up to 30 billion dollars, ten times more than the annual budget of the federal government.
Much of the nation was on its knees, knocked into a stunned stupor. At first, people told themselves it would all be over in a month or two, then a year or two. At first, Jim believed it too, even though he’d been among the group worst hit—short-run investors, small guys who believed that everyone could be rich. In a matter of hours, his stock investments had gone to zero. Then his bank failed, wiping out much of the money he’d put there. Finally, his taxicab company went under, but not before he’d sunk even more money into it. By 1932, the Braddocks had lost every cent of the $30,000 Jim had earned during his rise in the ring. Jim had borrowed from friends and relatives, but nobody was in any better shape. The Braddocks were only one drop in a desolate ocean of families who’d lost their homes, their life savings, and in some cases even more.
Within days of the Crash, the president of the Country Trust Savings Bank had taken a pistol from the teller’s cage at work, returned to his town house on West Twelfth Street, and blown his brains out. Everyone had heard stories like that, of men jumping out of windows. Less talked about were the ones who went into insane asylums and nursing homes, the ones who’d broke down mentally and physically, as well as financially. Others took their lives hoping to at least leave their wives and children some insurance money.
Fathers deserted their families, ashamed at not being able to support them, feeling what was happening to them was a consequence of their own personal failure. They’d just wandered off in disgrace.
The newspapers talked about overspeculation being the cause, how everyone had ignored the signs of economic downturn in the months before—rising unemployment, the fall off in automobile sales and department store revenues, farms failing in record numbers. The market just climbed higher and higher. Then the waves of panic hit, brokers ruthlessly unloaded margin accounts, banks withdrew their funds, and the market completely collapsed.
New York’s dazzling lights and frolicking revelers of the Twenties gradually faded, a vanishing mirage. Appearing in its place was a gray, raggedy throng of desperate down-and-outers rounding the block at relief offices, waiting on breadlines, freezing on street corners, their faces creased with want, looking everywhere for work and finding none. Hungry, empty, hopeless, defeated.
Jim’s only hope had been boxing. Although the prizes had gone down with the ticket prices, prizefighting was still a popular sport, mainly because it was a relatively cheap good time and a side bet might double a fan’s pocket. But after the crash, Jim’s career had gone into a tailspin. He’d racked up more losses than wins in 1930, ’31, ’32…and, thus far, 1933 wasn’t bucking that trend. As his fight record sank, he had a harder time getting on decent cards. Jimmy Johnston had Gould touring him on a low-rent circuit, Cauliflower Alley, and for over a year, Jim had been forced to take on any sort of work he could find.
With so many factories closed, the docks had been his best shot. Port Newark, on Newark Bay, was one of the country’s largest cargo ports. Inside of thirty years it had been transformed from a desolate marsh to a seaport terminal with twelve thousand feet of docks including space for large warehouses and twenty freight steamers. Shipments were constantly being unloaded here and then transferred to the many railroads and truck lines that ran through the area. So every morning before dawn, Jim rose and hiked down to the water, hoping to beat the odds among a horde of others just as desperate for work.
Shoving his cold hands into his pockets, Jim moved across a gravel lot and toward the small group of men already waiting by the locked gate of the high fence. The weather was cold for this time of year, even colder by the water, but the two-hour wait in the predawn mist earned him a valuable spot at the front of the swelling crowd.
When dawn finally hit Newark Bay, New York Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean beyond, Jim barely noticed. The sky was so overcast little sunlight could penetrate the gloomy mist. To the north, the Hudson remained slate gray under cement clouds, and across its churning currents, the great skyscrapers of Manhattan looked more like tombstones in a crowded cemetery.
The sudden rattling of metal drew Jim’s attention to the gate. The gaunt, middle-aged foreman stood on the other side. Jim straightened and glanced around at the murmuring crowd. Most of the men were huddled against the biting, wet chill, hands buried deep in the pockets of their old coats, faces stoned by sleeplessness. There were more than usual today, sixty at least.
With his clipboard under an arm, the foreman finished fumbling with the lock, then pulled the gate open and stepped up to the waiting swarm of unemployed. This man had the power over life and death, the power to change the fortunes of Jim and his family—of every man here.
“I need nine men and nine men only.”
The jostling began immediately. Me! Pick me!
“One, two, three…” The foreman was pointing out men far too fast. “Six, seven, eight…”
Jim could feel the panic around him, the fear, as the foreman’s joyless expression continued to scan the crowd. Me! Pick me! Jim prodded his way closer, trying to be seen.
“Nine.”
Jim closed his eyes. All that waiting, hours in the cold, and it was over in less than thirty seconds. He hadn’t been chosen.
“I been here since four.”
Jim opened his eyes. The crowd was dispersing around him, men were already heading off to look for work elsewhere. One man from the crowd had stepped up to complain. Jim recognized him from a short chat they’d had a few weeks before. His name was Ben and he had remembered Jim from one of his old boxing matches in Jersey City, in the days when Jim had had no trouble rolling over opponents. Like Jim, Ben had a wife and three kids—two were sick.
“Sorry brother,” the foreman told Ben, turning away. “Luck of the draw.”
Ben’s gun came out of nowhere. A pocket, a waistband, Jim didn’t know, but everyone knew where Ben’s revolver was aimed—point-blank at the foreman’s heart.
“I was here first.” Ben’s eyes were wild, desperate. The hand that held the gun began shaking. The foreman stared at it and began shaking too.
“What about it?” Ben asked.
The foreman lifted his eyes from the gun to Ben’s face. Time went perfectly still, then the foreman spoke, “My mistake, pal. I need ten.”
Still stunned, Jim’s gaze followed Ben as he stepped through the gate. Jim wanted to look away, but just couldn’t, simply watched and waited without breathing. Then it happened. Ben had barely put the gun back into his pocket when a few of the guys inside jumped him, wrestled him to the ground.
It was over for Ben now, thought Jim. Prison. How could the man help his wife and kids now? How?
Jim’s eyes looked away, down to the broken concrete. Beneath his ratty shoes, he saw the front page of today’s paper. The two-inch headline was no news to him:
UNEMPLOYED REACHES 15,000,000
“No shifts today, Dad?”
Hours later, Jim had finally returned to his tenement courtyard to find his eight-year-old, Howard, playing on the fire escape landing above the basement steps. One in four working people were now unemployed in America. One in four. But an eight-year-old didn’t need to know that. An eight-year-old couldn’t even fathom 15 million.
Giving his son a smile, Jim shrugged. Win some, lose some, he tried to say, even though he’d lost for hours, walking and hitching rides for miles, looking for work everywhere, finding it nowhere—not in Newark, Bayonne, or Jersey City.
“What’re you doing, son?” The boy appeared to be jumping on a mattress spring.
“I’m being good,” answered Howard. “I’m being quiet. I’m being hayve.”
Jim recognized Mae’s don’t-mess-with-me warning list—which told him something was up. He raised an eyebrow. “Good?” he asked, but before he could get more out of him, a tiny wide-eyed rocket fired itself down the alley and into his arms.
“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”
Rosy hugged her father’s neck, then the six-year-old grinned brighter than Times Square’s lights used to shine.
“What, sweetheart?”
“Jay stole!”
With a sigh, Jim carried Rosy down the steps and into their basement apartment. He found Mae standing over their eldest. Jay’s ten-year-old face was red. He was staring at the floor.
Jim set his daughter down. “What’s this all about?”
The little girl pointed at the table with a proud tattletale grin. “See? It’s a salami!”
Mae replied sharply. “Your brother is in enough trouble without you telling, young lady.”
Jim looked questioningly. Mae pointed. It was a salami, all right, and it was a beauty, fat and marbled and laced with garlic, and the way Mae slivered the meat these days, Jim figured it could surrender enough slices to feed the whole Braddock family for a week.
“From the butcher’s,” said Mae. “He won’t say a word about it, will you Jay?”
Mae’s stare moved from her son’s furious face to Jim’s questioning eyes. She held her husband’s gaze—a silent handoff.
“Okay,” said Jim. “Pick it up. Let’s go.”
For the first time, Jay raised his eyes to look at his father. The boy’s expression was pleading, desperate, angry—and full of fear. Don’t make me do this. Can’t you see we need it? Can’t you?
“Right now!”
The front door banged open. Jim was on his way, his son, salami in hand, dragging slowly behind. As Jim strode down the street, he said nothing. Jay followed on his heels, eyes downcast. When they reached the butcher, Jim opened the door, waved his boy inside.
A quick explanation, an apology, and the stolen property was presented to the victim. The butcher glanced from son to father. Braddock met the man’s eyes. I am not raising my son to be a thief.
No more words were needed. The butcher nodded approvingly, returned the fat, greasy salami to his meat case, then Jim and Jay left the shop. The two walked down the street, side by side. The embarrassment had been endured, the lesson was now over, and Jim couldn’t help recalling his own boyhood lessons at the hands of his stern father—after one of those lessons, Jim usually couldn’t sit down for hours.
Joseph Braddock was a massive figure of a man, with snow white hair and a thick Irish brogue. He believed in God, hard work, and doing right by your fellow man, and he’d instilled these lessons in every one of his sons.
Once, before one of Jimmy’s fights, his dad had said, “May the best man win.” The words weren’t really about winning. They were about being a certain kind of man—the kind who kept his dignity by fighting fair and respecting the rules. In Joseph Braddock’s view, only this kind of man truly deserved to win, to be admired, to be hailed a winner. Jim agreed. Being the best kind of man was not an easy thing, but it was the most important thing. His father had instilled that in him. Now it was Jim’s turn to do the same for his own son.
Jim walked beside his ten-year-old in silence, waiting, giving his boy time. Jay was a quiet kid, just like his father, and Jim knew why: It wasn’t always easy to find the right words.
“Marty Johnson,” Jay finally blurted out after a few blocks. “Marty Johnson had to go away to Delaware and live with his uncle.”
Jim frowned, but said nothing.
“His parents didn’t have enough money for them to eat,” Jay added.
Jim stopped on the street, turned toward his son. The boy’s anger was gone now. The shame and desperation were gone too. Only one thing was left in that young face…the same thing Jim felt earlier today, and almost every day since the Crash.
“You got scared,” Jim told his boy. “I can understand it. But we don’t steal. No matter what happens. Not ever. Got me?”
Jay swallowed, managed a nod.
“Are you giving me your word?” asked Jim.
“Yes.”
“Go on.”
“I promise.”
“Things aren’t so good right now, Jay, you’re right. But Daddy’s doing his best.” Jim touched his son’s cheek. Soon enough, the boy’s skin wouldn’t be peach smooth anymore, thought Jim, he’d be shaving—he’d be a young man. Now was the time to make the boy understand what kind of man his father wanted him to be.
“There’s a lot of other people a lot less fortunate than us. And if you take something, somebody else goes without.” Jim crouched down so he could look at his ten-year-old eye to eye. “Here’s my word, good as wheat in the bin. We’re never going to send you away, son.”
Jay’s small lips were already trembling, his eyes desperate. You promise?
“I promise,” said Jim.
Finally, the tears came, spilling from the little boy’s eyes. Jim pulled Jay into his arms. He held onto his child as tight as he could.