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TI: Now, when he sort of talks about those years, any story that comes to mind that kind of captures the life of a boxer on the road doing this?

BS: Well, yeah, the biggest fight towns were towns, at least on the West Coast, where a lot of minority, fighters from the minority community, the black community, Jewish community, and Asian community, where you had populations, say, a lot of Filipinos. He fought in Stockton, California, and a lot of the migrant workers there, or the farm workers, are Filipino, so any time there was a boxing match in Stockton, California, all the Filipinos would show up at the arena for the fights. So many times the arenas were filled up with Filipinos or other ethnic communities if they had an ethnic fighter. I mean, the whole community would come out. And the promoters noticed that, and so they were promoting fights in all the major cities in California where a big Filipino population was, and Seattle had a large Filipino population because of the seafood industry, lot of the Filipinos were brought here as domestics, mostly men. They worked in the farmlands in eastern, central and eastern Washington, so they would end up in Seattle.

TI: So did your father have, these stories, so like at Stockton, for instance, or any community where there's a large Filipino community, so when he fought, how was he treated by the community?

BS: Well, the main community, the white community, the sports followers, the followers of sports, they would support the local fighters, boxers, local fighters and if they brought someone from out of town that they were, if you're fighting in Stockton and you brought someone in from San Francisco, the local fighters, the ones in Stockton would be the heroes, right, the hometown guys. Unless it was a white guy. And so the Stockton crowd would root for the white guy from San Francisco rather than the Filipino guy from Stockton, but they would be all outnumbered because there'd be more Filipinos at the boxing matches. So he wound his way up to Seattle 'cause he heard Seattle was a good fight town, lot of Filipinos, and he knew that he would be among the main eventers, the elite boxers, in the lightweight, he was a lightweight division fighter. And so there was a guy named Nate Druxman. Nate Druxman was a jeweler in downtown Seattle, and he was a boxing promoter and he latched onto my dad and became my dad's promoter. And this is now, we're talking about the mid '20s, at least 1924, '25, '26, in that era there, and there happened to be quite a few Filipino fighters when he came to town, but he sort of rose above those guys and became their buddies, their heroes. And I don't know the exact number of boxers, but I looked through the old scrapbook and I see at least five or six Filipino guys in the photos that the family had taken. A guy named Joe Calder and a couple other guys, and so Dad was, had his group of buddies and he seemed to be the leader of the, of the group.

TI: And when you look through these scrapbooks, where in Seattle were they, would they fight?

BS: There were two boxing arenas. One was the Civic Center and one was the armory, and the armory must've been on, right where the Pike market is. I don't know if it was on Western Avenue or the street below Western. It had to be on Western Avenue. And then there was an old swimming pool called the Crystal Pool, Second Avenue and, I don't know the cross street. The facade of the old Crystal Pool is still there on Second Avenue and they built a whole apartment building above it, but they preserved that, the facade of the first, first floor. So I remembered him taking me to the old Crystal Pool and showing me around, and I think it was after his boxing days, but I remembered the gymnasium was set over the pool. Swimming, the water at Crystal pool, they'd get it up from Puget Sound and became a fresh, saltwater pool, and then I don't know, I think boxing probably became more popular so that was probably a better money making venue.

TI: So they actually covered the pool to...

BS: They covered the pool.

TI: And then made that a boxing ring?

BS: Yeah.

TI: And then people could watch...

BS: A little boxing arena, yeah. He became very popular and some of his fights were with top ranked lightweights in the nation, ranked in Ring Magazine, which was the bible of the boxing industry at that time. One, he fought an ex, a former lightweight champion, a guy named Todd Morgan -- [coughs] excuse me -- and that was really promoted. I mean, the whole city showed up for that, local boy fights this former champion. And the word was, and even the articles, my dad won. He knocked down Todd Morgan two or three times during the fight. Todd Morgan was a lot quicker and faster, so he won the match on points, so that was quite a controversy at that time. Most of the writers thought that my dad would've won, and if he had won that, his next step would've been fighting a contender for the lightweight title. Maybe not the championship, but a contender, one of the top two or three boxers in that division.

TI: Now, when you say there was, like, controversy, I mean, controversy like people say, oh, the fight was fixed, or things like that? Is that the kind of stuff that people talk about?

BS: Well, that, a lot of that was happening then, but it didn't seem like that, the controversy on fixing fights came a little bit later. I remember my uncle Joe and my dad talking about a guy named Frankie Carbo coming into town, and after Frankie came into town the Northwest, Tacoma had a middleweight champion by the name of Freddy Steele, and Seattle had a middleweight champion by the name of Al Hostow. That's when Frankie Carbo was managing both of these fighters, so there were payoffs and stuff like that. But getting back to Sammy, I looked at his, we looked up his record, and his record, partial record that they document was forty-six wins, twenty-two losses, and eleven draws, so that was pretty good. And he was quite a puncher, so most of his forty-six wins were by knockout, so if he couldn't knock the guy out the guy would probably win. Part of the twenty-two losses were by points. He was never knocked out or he, according to him, or never knocked down, so I sort of believe him.

TI: So he would be the type, I'm just imagining, that would stand, take lots of punishments because they would just keep hitting him.

BS: Yeah. He liked that kind of stuff. Toe to toe.

TI: Toe to toe, but he would just, like these haymakers, just, like, try to knock the other guy out.

BS: Oh yeah. He was known for that.

TI: But take huge, huge... but, and I'm thinking, we're talking about sixty, almost eighty fights right there. I mean, that's...

BS: And those were the ones that were documented, 'cause we see some of, in the scrapbook, where he had fights in Pismo Beach that weren't documented as part of the last, the later records, his boxing records.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.