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champion if he's got the stuff in him,” just sat there listening to us. He was bashful, I guessed, because he had not had a fight and so had nothing to talk about. “He is pretty big for a baby, only six feet five inches,” Mrs. Braune said, “but he don't make no trouble at all. I was going to get him a special long bed, but he says no, he would just as soon sleep slanting.” Some fighters are difficult about beds, Mrs. Braune said, and keep asking for new ones until they have tried every bed in the house. They sleep reasonably well in any of them, apparently, but there seem to be gradations in the profundity of a fighter's unconsciousness, caused by differences in bed springs and not explainable to other persons. Mrs. Braune's hands, while she talked to Goldman and me, were busy with a darning egg and a pair of socks undoubtedly belonging to a prize fighter.

There is a Mr. Braune, but, like most roominghouse husbands, he stays in the background. Until about twenty years ago, he and Mrs. Braune ran a stationery store. Then, she told me, she leased the Fiftysecond Street rooming house which disappeared into Jack and Charlie's. The new business was somewhat in the family tradition, she felt, because one of her maternal uncles in Switzerland had kept a big hotel near Lake Geneva. “I would like to see again the Genfersee,” she said parenthetically. “The Lake of Geneva, you know. But conditions must be pretty hard over there now. I got confidential postcards from the old country that every mountain is full of cannons. Still, what can they do now they got Hitler all around them?” She went on to say that the fighters are always offering her tickets to bouts but she never goes. She's afraid she couldn't stand the sight of blood. She does listen to fights on the radio, though, whenever she has a chance. When Ambers was fighting Henry Armstrong, the great colored boxer, Mrs. Braune prayed between rounds that her lodger would grow stronger. “And he did get stronger in the last,” she said. “He won.”

“Why don't you go upstairs and see Marty?” Goldman suggested. “I got to make some phone calls, but just say who you are, and he will be glad to see you. Marty is the baby of the house. He's only nineteen. He went up to Van Cortlandt Park Sunday and wanted to show the other boys how good he could play football. So he is laid up with a skinned nose and a sprained ankle.” I climbed to the third floor to see Marty. Over the bed in which the boy lay hung a picture of the late Pius XI and, under the picture, a crucifix. Marty wore a large silver religious medal around his neck. His small, impish face made him look younger than nineteen, but his biceps and forearms were big and brown. He was restless, lying in bed with nobody to talk to, and was glad to see me. He said he had just been looking through an old scrapbook of newspaper clippings about his amateur fights. “I had ninetythree of them,” he said. “I only got three or four dollars a fight. I was the highestpaid amateur in the Hudson Valley.” Marty said his real name was Mario Severino and that he came from Schenectady. (Weill, since he got Ambers, has picked up several fighters from upstate.) “I didn't know anything before I turned professional,” the boy said. “I thought I did, but I didn't. Amateur fighters aren't smart like my roommate, Al Nettlow. Al is a real cutie.” Nettlow, he explained, is seldom around the house until the weather gets very cold because he is a “fishing nut.” He leaves before dawn every morning he can get off training and takes the long subway ride out to Sheepshead Bay, where he boards one of the deepsea boats that take fishermen out all day for two dollars. When he gets back, he tries to make the other fighters eat the fish he has caught, but only Tony, the heavyweight, who almost always uses up his weekly meal ticket in five days, displays any enthusiasm. Nettlow is a very clever fighter and is now of nearchampionship class. I gathered from Goldman that if he wins a title, he will probably want to pose in his publicity pictures with a dead swordfish.

Marty said