There are two things in this world Pete Rose loves most. Baseball and Pete Rose. Not necessarily in that order.

I spent a lot of time with Rose. I first interviewed him in 1979, for Philadelphia Magazine, right after he signed with the Phillies. I would go on that year to do The Playboy Interview, the one that created national headlines, with Rose talking of the easy use of amphetamines in the Phillies’ locker room.

In this first never-before-heard interview, with his pal Larry Bowa in the room, I asked Rose who he thought was the best player in baseball.

To read my full Playboy Interview, click here: http://wp.me/pCUdu-S

Copyright 2012 by Maury Z. Levy. This interview may not be used, in whole or in part, without permission.

Muhammad Ali with Maury Z. Levy

To read my full Ali story, click here: Poor Butterfly: The Muhammad Ali Story

Copyright 2012 by Maury Z. Levy. This interview may not be used, in whole or in part, without permission.

When I spent a couple of days with Muhammad Ali, back in the ‘70s, after he lost to Joe Frazier, Ali showed me his Rolls-Royce. And then he told me this story about how he got stopped for speeding one day by a Georgia State trooper. Ali, always with a flair for the dramatic, played both roles. Click below to listen.

Maury Z. Levy Interview – Ali 2

To read my full Ali story, click here: Poor Butterfly: The Muhammad Ali Story

Copyright 2012 by Maury Z. Levy. This interview may not be used, in whole or in part, without permission.

Muhammad Ali, Maury Z. Levy

This is the first in a series of never-before-heard interviews with some fascinating people.

In 1975, right after he lost to Joe Frazier, Muhammad Ali called me and asked me to come to his training camp in Dear Lake, PA. I stayed for a couple of days. I was the only writer there. I ran with him, I sparred with him, then we watched a tape of the Frazier fight. Ali kept rooting for himself to win this time. When it was over, late at night, we sat and talked. Click below to listen.

Maury Z. Levy Interview- Ali 1

To read my full Ali story, click here: Poor Butterfly: The Muhammad Ali Story

Copyright 2012 by Maury Z. Levy. This interview may not be used, in whole or in part, without permission.

There are over 50 stories and columns on this site. They cover a period from the late 1960s to the present. Publications range from Philadelphia Magazine to Playboy, from New York magazine to a book from Random House. The ten stories below represent the most visited pieces in the last few months. Just click on titles to go to stories. Enjoy. [All stories are copyrighted by Maury Z. Levy, 2011. All rights reserved. No story may be used, in full or in part, without the written consent of the author.]

1. Poor Butterfly: The Muhammad Ali Story In 1975,  Ali had been the king of the world for a long time. He was always surrounded by press people fighting for interviews. He talked a lot, but never let anyone get really close to him. Until this.

2. Jimmy Stewart: The Interview America’s favorite actor talks candidly about knocking Hollywood on its ear and Garbo on her ass.

3. The Sex Chapter From the book Gym Psych: the Insider’s Guide to Health Clubs. Written at the height of the fitness craze, this became a tongue-in-cheek manual for those who knew it was better to look good than feel good.

4. Jessica Savitch: Please Don’t Send Me Panties Before she became the talk of the nation, Savitch was the queen of the Philadelphia new jungle. Follow her adventures with co-workers, bosses and fans who send underware.

5. Dead End at Toms River: A Bizarre Murder Mystery  A young girl disappears from the streets of Philadelphia. Her body is found half a state away in the woods of Toms River. In pieces. The murderer? No one knows. Certainly not the cops.

6. Raquel Welch: The Playboy Fashion Guide Interview One of the most beautiful women in the world shows it was brains and a really good sense of humor that got her to the top. Oh, and that she likes French asses better than American.

7. The Last Steve Carlton Story  When the future Hall of Fame lefty came to Philadelphia for one of the greatest individual seasons ever, he soon became known as the enigma who never spoke to the press. This was the only in-depth story Carlton did before he shut down.

8. Soul on Ice: What You Never Knew About the Philadelphia Flyers This is a happy story. It’s the story of a lot of all‑American boys from Canada and a Jewish vegetable hustler from Washington and Kate Smith and Ed Van Impe’s jockstrap.

9. Terry Bradshaw: The Playboy Interview This hit the stands the day the Steelers’ QB won his first Super Bowl  and his first Super Bowl MVP trophy. Most of America thought he was a country bumpkin. Here, he showed a side they’d never seen.

10. The Best of Philly. And the Worst: In the Beginning We never knew that this little feature we invented one day at lunch would become an institution. Dig in.

Twenty-some years ago, Peter Edward Rose was just another tough kid growing up in the river wards of Cincinnati. He was a tough kid who liked girls and fast and fancy cars and baseball. Today, at the age of 38, not much has changed about Pete Rose. The girls have turned to women and fast cars are getting more expensive. But Rose, who makes his living–and a very good one, at that–playing baseball, is still tough. And he is still very much a kid.

Rose may play with different toys now–a $4000 fur coat, an $8000 gold-and-diamond watch and a $44,000 car that goes 130 miles an hour–but he hasn’t really changed. Baseball has. The game has become big business and he has grabbed more than his share of the big bucks that go along with it. At an age when the major decision facing most players is whether to become a car salesman or to open a taproom, Rose was faced with the enviable task of choosing from among a slew of major-league teams offering him millions of dollars for starters. And Rose, who had never played a home baseball game outside Cincinnati, picked the Philadelphia Phillies, who would pay him at least $3,200,000 over four years.

But how, many asked, could Rose be worth the money? Well, he packs ball parks. And while, as a technician, he really can’t be ranked up there with the Dave Parkers, the Rod Carews and the Jim Rices, Rose has one very important thing going for him. He has become perhaps the most famous white sports star in the world.

Just last year, a world far beyond baseball watched as Rose look on the seemingly unbreakable record of Yankee great Joe DiMaggio–who hit safely in 56 straight games. In a streak that started in mid-June, Rose scratched, clawed, hustled and bunted his way to one plateau after another. On July 31, 1978, he set a National League mark of 44 straight games. The streak would stop there, but Pete Rose would go on to a White House visit with Jimmy Carter, a highly heralded tour of Japan and commercial deals that would make him millions. And while Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium was only a line drive away from his boyhood home, Rose had come a long way.

Rose is the son of a bank employee. His father’s passion for sports rubbed off easily on him. Too small to make it as a football player, he concentrated on baseball. He played hard and tough, but he never had a great deal of natural talent. Luckily, he knew somebody in the business. His uncle was a minor-league scout for his hometown team, the Reds. He talked them into giving the kid a tryout. Rose was impressive enough to be signed to a minor-league contract. He spent three years riding the battered buses of thefarm teams. The Reds finally called him up in 1963.

That’s when baseball people really started to take notice of this hard-nosed kid who ran to first on a base on balls, the hustling hot-shot who, instead of sliding, dove headfirst into bases. They noticed him enough to vote him Rookie of the Year.

It was the beginning of a notable career. Along the way, he would lead the league in batting, runs scored, hits and doubles. Rose would become the perennial All-Star and consummate team player, switching positions, moving to wherever he was needed most.

In 1976, Rose, who broke in making less than $15,000, led his team to a world-series sweep over the Yankees. He had become the major drawing card for the 2,600,000 fans who came to Riverfront Stadium that year. He had become the strongest driving force on a team that was called the Big Red Machine. And Rose decided it was high time his wallet got oiled. He decided he was worth $400,000 a year. That, he said, was what the Reds would have to pay him to retain his services.

That contract ended with last season, one that had Rose spending much of his time in the sports headlines. When the Reds’ management refused to talk to him about a bigger money package, he decided to test his value in the open market. He became a free agent, negotiating with any team that would have him. And many would. They saw Rose as a team leader and a great drawing card. He traveled all over, eventually narrowing his choice to five cities–St. Louis, Atlanta, Kansas City, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. He presented his case and sat back and listened to the offers. In addition to tremendous amounts of money, they included everything from a beer distributorship to race horses.

The team that was offering the least financially was Philadelphia. Why go with the lowest price? Well, Rose had some friends there. But mostly it was because the team was a winner. And if there was one thing Rose hated more than anything else, it was losing.

He had survived some rocky times in his marriage, a relationship that yielded him a 14-year-old daughter, a carbon-copy ten-year-old son and, last summer, a troubled separation from his wife, Karolyn. And just when things were back together and looking good again, Rose was slapped with a paternity suit by a young woman from Tampa who had spent a good deal of time in his company.

With the pressures of the season, the suit and the big money hanging over him, Rose has been reluctant to talk about much more than baseball clichès. To get the real story behind this curious American folk hero, Playboy sent Maury Z. Levy and Samantha Stevenson, who had teamed up recently to write “The Secret Life of Baseball” (Playboy, July), to talk with Rose. Levy is editorial director of Philadelphia magazine and Stevenson is a seasoned sports free-lancer who made headlines when she successfully sued to get into the Phillies’ locker room.

They followed Rose halfway across the country, starting in Philadelphia, following him home to Cincinnati, and then on the road to St. Louis and New York, to talk with him. Levy’s report:

“Rose thought this was going to be just another interview. And he’d been through so damned many of them, he had his act down pat. We spent the first couple of hours in his hotel room in Philadelphia. It was all very patterned. He had answers to questions that weren’t asked. He was running through his basic Pete Rose interview, the one he had done on national TV with Phil Donahue and others and the one that had appeared in almost every newspaper in the country. He had it down so well he didn’t even bother looking at me through most of it. Instead, he lay in bed, his eyes fixed on the television set that he insisted on leaving on. He was watching ‘Days of Our Lives.’

“It was clear through all the clichès, though, that Rose was not just another dumb athlete. He’s not much of an elegant speaker, but you learn quickly to look beyond that. He has a street sense that is very sharp. It was OK for him to be talking about baseball in generalities, but when it came to money, he was specific to the penny. He rattled off profit margin from projected business deals like a Wall Street wizard.

“‘I see you’re wearin’ one of them Cartier watches,’ he said to me. ‘See this baby,’ he said, pointing to a very large Corum gold-and-diamond Rolls-Royce watch on his own wrist, ‘this baby cost me 8000 bucks. That could buy a lot of Cartiers, couldn’t it?’ “You can take my word for it. There will be no athlete anywhere that will make more money than me this year.”

“Rose had easily convinced me that he could buy and sell me. He had also proved that he had the attention span of an eight-year-old. He couldn’t sit still for more than a few minutes. His mind would wander and then his body. ‘Ain’t you asked enough questions yet?’ he would constantly want to know. ‘You’re all business, man. Don’t you ever have any fun?’

“Rose’s idea of fun was driving me around Cincinnati at 90 miles an hour while he blasted Rod Stewart tapes on his stereo. I kept expecting him to pull into a hamburger joint, grease back his hair and try to pick up some girls. When I told him about my own hot-rodding experiences, he was finally convinced that I was all right.”

PLAYBOY: Who’s the best player in major-league baseball?

ROSE: I am.

PLAYBOY: How do you figure that? Are you a better hitter than Rod Carew? A better slugger than Dave Parker? A better all-round player than Cesar Cedeno?

ROSE: It’s not that simple. If you’re talking about everything included–selling the game of baseball, public relations, popularity off the field as well as on the field, versatility playing more than one position, hitting the baseball from both sides–I’m number one. That’s why I make the most money.

PLAYBOY: A lot of people would dispute that. There are other players who make more—-

ROSE: You can take my word for it, there will be no ballplayer or no athlete. I don’t think there will be any athlete anywhere that will make more money than me this year.

PLAYBOY: What about Carew’s salary and Parker’s?

ROSE: Yeah, you can read this stuff about Dave Parker and you can start saying–well, you can get $100,000 if he is a Most Valuable Player and $50,000 if he is second. So he will be a millionaire if he does all these things he has to do, including helping the parks that draw 1,500,000 people. So there is a lot of stipulations in his contract.

PLAYBOY: And there aren’t any stipulations in your contract?

ROSE: That is my salary. I don’t have to get 200 hits or draw 2,000,000 people or anything like that.

PLAYBOY: You sound pretty sure of yourself.

ROSE: Look, I’ve been here 16 years and I still do it all. I got the fan appeal. I play harder than anybody. I’ve played against Willie Mays, Stan Musial, Henry Aaron, Roberto Clemente. It’s hard to become number one when you’ve got guys like that around. But I done it.

PLAYBOY: Does that make you a superstar?

ROSE: Yeah, I think so. I think I’m consistent, adjust to situations, handle people. I think I do all those things. A superstar don’t necessarily mean you have got to hit 40 home runs. It don’t mean you have to get 234 hits or 235 hits every year. I mean, a superstar does a little bit of each. A little bit of everything. Now, Frank Sinatra is a superstar in what he does. He’s consistent over a period of time. He can handle situations. That is why he is a superstar. Just like me.

PLAYBOY: So you feel you’re some kind of legend?

ROSE: I don’t even know what a legend is. A legend is old times. A legend to me is something like a Jesse James or Bat Masterson or somebody like that. Jesse James. Babe Ruth is a legend. I guess. I have a lot better chance of being a legend if I get Stan Musial’s record [for most hits in the National League]. You know, I will become the number-one hitter in the history of our league. That is really something to work for. How many guys in the history of this league do you think have a chance to do that?

PLAYBOY: Is that how you feel you became a legend?

ROSE: Well, you know a legend–there aren’t too many guys who can look at you and say I have got a little girl 14 years old. I only failed to hit .300 one time since she was born. Fourteen years old she is.

PLAYBOY: If you’re not a legend yet, how would you describe yourself?

ROSE: How would I describe me? Well, I have fun. I play the game with enthusiasm. I play unorthodox. I’m not graceful. You know, most guys are graceful. But I’m not one of those guys that everything’s got to look smooth. I swing good. But I’m not smooth when I catch a ball. I’m not smooth when I run. But I just play like a roughneck. I play baseball like a football player would play it. I’m hard and I’m tough.

PLAYBOY: And you’re pretty cocky.

ROSE: Well, some people will call me cocky and arrogant, but I’m not arrogant. I’m just confident. And I just learned a long time ago that I have to have confidence and believe in myself, because there’s going to be people who doubt you out there. There’s going to be people who don’t like you out there. I mean, a lot of people thought that I was arrogant when I made the statement that I felt I should be the highest-paid player in baseball. A lot of people don’t realize that I’m not the same as the other ballplayers in baseball. There’s a little difference with me, because the other ballplayers in the game, they’re not as well known as I am everywhere. That’s the truth. There may be a couple close. But other than Muhammad Ali, who is the most recognizable athlete in this country?

PLAYBOY: O. J. Simpson, maybe.

ROSE: And me. So I’m the only white one, right?

PLAYBOY: If you say so.

ROSE: No contest.

PLAYBOY: And you didn’t exactly get to the top on grace and finesse, did you?

ROSE: Naw, like I said, I was a roughneck. I wasn’t scared of nothin’. And I didn’t give a shit about anything. I still don’t worry about anything. I’m not a worrier. If something’s going to go wrong with your business or your marriage or things like that–the best way to make the problems easier is to have a good year. You create more problems if you hit .220. You create less problems if you hit .310 every year. You’ll have less problems than anybody. That’s the best way to go about your job, just have a good year and everything will fall into place. It’ll take care of itself. You’ll get the commercials. You’ll get the raise in pay and everything. “How would I describe myself? I have fun. I play the game with enthusiasm. I play unorthodox. I’m not graceful.”

PLAYBOY: That’s if it’s all going right. What if it’s not?

ROSE: Everything goes wrong when you have a bad year if you’re an athlete.

PLAYBOY: And as you get older, isn’t it easier for things to go wrong?

ROSE: Well, I didn’t shrink last year. It was one of the most at-bat seasons I ever had in my career, 700, and I struck out 30 times, the all-time low. So what that says is, the more experience you get, the smarter you get and the more you learn. I’m smart enough to know it’s going to come to an end someday. But I’ve been fortunate to be able to prolong it.

PLAYBOY: Why do you say fortunate? Don’t you have the reputation for taking good care of yourself?

ROSE: I like to think I play every game like it’s the last one. That’s a good way to play the game. But maybe it’s just something that’s interlocked inside your mind, that this might be your last year or next year might be your last year. So I don’t think about what’s going to happen tomorrow. I worry about what’s going to happen today.

I play like a machine. I don’t get tired. I just keep coming back and coming at you. I’m the type of guy, if I was in a fight, the other guy would knock me down and I would get back up and he would knock me down and I would get back up. I would be like Rocky.

PLAYBOY: Is that how you’d like to be remembered?

ROSE: Well, I don’t want them to forget me as a man out of baseball. I don’t want them to forget me. I mean, I just want people to say there is a guy that worked the hardest and the longest to become a switch-hitter, the best switch-hitter that ever lived, plus the guy who no matter where he played, he was a winner.

PLAYBOY: You mentioned being the most popular guy in the game–but you do have a lot of people who dislike you. Why is that?

ROSE: There’s people who would dislike me if I’d signed for the Reds for $300,000, or if I had said I’ll play for the Reds for S100,000 and to hell with the money. There’s still somebody who’d say, well, he still makes too much. You know, there are so many people in the world. There’s idiots everywhere. Just downright stupid people. They have no values of money or no values of talent or nothing. They’re just stupid people.

PLAYBOY: What do you think makes the fans so angry with you?

ROSE: There’s a lot of things that make them mad about me. Maybe the way I talk on TV. There are some people who don’t like me the way I play, because I prove to people if you work hard at something, you can accomplish it without super talent. And, see, I make the lazy guy look into the mirror and be mad at himself. I show up lazy people because I play hard and play every day. Because they could do it if they worked hard themselves, and they know they’ve messed up.

PLAYBOY: And so they resent you?

ROSE: Sure. They resent it because they’re saying, “There’s no ballplayer worth that.” I mean, was I supposed to say I don’t want it? I’m not worth it? You know, I don’t understand people.

PLAYBOY: Maybe the fans forget that you are being paid to entertain.

ROSE: Yeah, but they don’t get mad if Rod Stewart makes millions of dollars for his concerts. They don’t say nothing. I never hear anybody say anything about Wayne Newton making $5,000,000 a year in Vegas. You know, I’m not saying he’s not worth it. He’s the best entertainer out there. Frank Sinatra gets $250,000 a week out there. Ann-Margret makes $200,000 a week. But they’re worth it, because they get up and they do two shows a night.

PLAYBOY: And Sinatra doesn’t get booed if he misses a note. How does it feel, getting booed?

ROSE: Booing’s something you learn to live with. But sometimes the fans go nuts. Like, a guy threw a whiskey bottle at Bake McBride in St. Louis. You know, that kind of shit, that ain’t part of the game. And I’ve had that happen to me. I’ve had to be taken off two or three fields. L.A., New York and Chicago. I had to be taken off the field because garbage was being thrown at me. I don’t agree with people who think that’s part of the game.

PLAYBOY: Were you in danger at any of those times?

ROSE: Well, a whiskey bottle just missed my head. I got shot on my neck with a paper clip and it bled for three innings. What if the guy had put my eye out? What’s the guy gonna get, a $25 misdemeanor fine? And my career is over? Guys threw bottles, chicken bones, garbage. A guy threw a crutch at me once in left field in Chicago.

PLAYBOY: That sounds as though it could have hurt.

ROSE: See, you’re just like the fans. Whadya mean, that coulda hurt? When a crutch hits you, you get hurt. I don’t classify them idiots as fans. Most fans who go to the ball park are good fans. There’s always a couple. You know, you get a 40,000 crowd, there’s got to be an idiot in the crowd. I mean, there’s got to be some people who just don’t have any sense. They’re just there to make a scene.

Look, I go watch Rocky, Sylvester Stallone ain’t gonna give me an autograph. He’s not gonna give me a boxing glove. He’s not gonna talk to me. If people go to the ball park, they think they’re supposed to get an autograph. You’re supposed to give them a bat. They think all that’s part of the four-dollar ticket. I mean, they forget about the entertainment of the nine-inning game.

PLAYBOY: Maybe there are some people who still don’t think you’re worth it.

ROSE: I don’t give a shit what people think. I used to really worry about that, too. I really did. When I used to hold out for more money every year, I used to worry about that, because I always wanted to make everybody like me. Playing hard, being nice, signing autographs. I used to give in to the Reds a lot, because I didn’t want to hold out. But when you start getting letters like I get and phone calls and stuff like that, and people being idiots, I say the hell with them. I’m not going to worry about anybody.

PLAYBOY: What kind of letters do you get?

ROSE: Oh, you know . . . racial letters and shit like that. I say the hell with them. I mean, some guy is sitting behind me when I’m getting in my car one night. He’s getting in his truck and he’s got his load of people with him and he’s gotta yell at me. He’s gotta tell me, “Got all your money in your suitcase?” I say, “I can’t get it all in there, asshole.” And he just shut up. I mean, why don’t he just get in his car and move on?

PLAYBOY: Fans can be fanatics.

ROSE: Oh, Yeah. They always want a piece of you. I was at a place the other day; I’m sitting upstairs with [Larry] Bowa and Schmitty [Mike Schmidt], we’re having breakfast and I come in and I go to the john. So I’m sitting there, going to the john, and all of a sudden I hear this guy come in. Now, I haven’t said nothing to Bowa and Schmitty. And this guy, I guess he’s taking a leak or something, and this other guy walks in and he asks him how he’s doing. He says, “Oh, I’m doing fine.” He says, “I just been upstairs and had breakfast with Pete Rose and I been talking to him.” And he don’t know I’m sitting in there. You know, I’m sitting there, saying, “You’re a goddamn liar.” That’s why when I go in a bar, I don’t drink and I never let anybody buy me a drink, never. Because people go to work next day and say, “I was out drinking with Pete Rose till four in the morning”–only I left at 10:30.

PLAYBOY: Are you hassled by fans at home?

ROSE: Oh, I can go home, where I can listen to prank telephone calls. Shit, I get my phone number changed every three months. It’s the idiots that just sit and think or reasons why they should call. That’s the way people are. I just laugh at them. That shit don’t really bother me. Nothing bothers me except these people that start calling me disloyal and stuff like this. I abandoned Cincinnati? I put in a lot of endless hours of hard work for that city, both on and off the field. And I’m not looking for anything for it. That’s why I ain’t gonna try to satisfy everyone. Just like the time the Reds’ management told me not to drive my Rolls-Royce to the ball park, because it makes the fans mad.

PLAYBOY: And, naturally, you didn’t agree with their way of thinking.

ROSE: I told them to go to hell. I worked hard for that car. They didn’t tell [Joe] Morgan and those guys not to drive their $20,000 Corvettes and Cadillacs to the ball park.

PLAYBOY: Those sound like the problems of a rich and successful athlete. Were you always a winner? How about when you were growing up?

ROSE: No, I was a loser with the books. I was too busy playing ball and getting into trouble.

PLAYBOY: Did you ever get into any real trouble in school?

ROSE: No, just punk stuff, like throwing rocks at windows and putting shit in a bag and setting it on fire. Knocking on somebody’s door. Let them open the bag.

PLAYBOY: What about chasing girls?

ROSE: I had my share when I was a kid. I think I got the pretty girls. I don’t know if they got the good-looking guy, but they got the guy everybody knew.

PLAYBOY: When did you first get involved with girls?

ROSE: What are you asking, when did I get my first piece of ass? Is that what you are asking?

PLAYBOY: Not exactly, but that’s a good start.

ROSE: I don’t remember specifically what day it was or how old I was. I’m no different than any other kid.

PLAYBOY: Well, were you a teenager?

ROSE: Probably. No, I don’t think I was a teenager yet, I don’t remember.

PLAYBOY: Since we brought up the subject, let’s talk about sex. Should an athlete have sex before a game?

ROSE: No.

PLAYBOY: Why?

ROSE: It makes you tired.

PLAYBOY: You believe that old wives’ tale?

ROSE: Well, let me ask you a question. If you make love for a half hour or 45 minutes or an hour on the day of a game, are you tired? How are you going to go to the ball game and perform at the utmost of your ability if you are mellow? If you have got to go to the ball park hyper?

PLAYBOY: But you’ve had other things to take your mind off the game. You and your wife, Karolyn, separated last summer. Wasn’t she ready to file for a divorce?

ROSE: Well, I don’t think it is anybody’s business. I don’t know what the accounts were. But I don’t think she was going to file for a divorce. It was better to separate when I did, because, like I just said, one of the secrets of playing baseball is not going to the ball park and being worried or being mad about something. So if I was going to be mad living at home, the separation was my fault, it wasn’t her fault. So it proved that I had some weaknesses. I mean, I am not the only guy in the world who ever separated from his wife for a couple of months. So it ain’t that big a deal to me. It ain’t nobody’s problem in Philadelphia and no one’s problem is the same as mine. And I handled it. I handled it in my own way. Other guys would have handled it differently. I handled it my own way.

PLAYBOY: Did it work?

ROSE: Yeah, well, obviously.

PLAYBOY: Still, aren’t there women everywhere who turn your head?

ROSE: Once in a while they turn my head. As long as I don’t touch.

PLAYBOY: What kind of women do you like?

ROSE: Just, I guess, I like class. I don’t mean rings and cars and clothes. I mean just people who you can just tell have class by looking at them. You know, just the way they handle themselves and the way they walk. I like people with personality.

PLAYBOY: Do you like pretty women around you?

ROSE: Oh, yeah. I like women with pretty legs. Pretty legs and pretty mouths.

PLAYBOY: What is it about mouths?

ROSE: I just think because that is what you look at. You don’t talk to somebody and look at their navel or at their shoulder. People with pretty mouths are pretty. And most people with pretty legs are built good. So those two qualities usually make a complete girl.

PLAYBOY: You don’t like breasts?

ROSE: I can only speak for mine. I don’t like mine. I mean, to be kissed. I don’t know. I can’t stand it . It bugs the shit out of me. It makes me feel like someone’s taking their fingers to a screen door.

PLAYBOY: What’s your fantasy life like?

ROSE: What’s a fantasy?

PLAYBOY: Imagination. Illusion. You can have sexual fantasies.

ROSE: What is the sense of having a fantasy about going to bed with somebody that is supposed to be the prettiest girl in the world? If I can’t do it, why should I waste my time even wondering about it? Sitting here right now, I am fantasizing about playing in the world series with the Phillies. I would like that to happen. Yeah. That is the utmost thing on my mind right now.

PLAYBOY: OK, back to baseball. You mentioned earlier that you get “racial” letters from baseball fans. What did you mean?

ROSE: It goes back a long way. I was actually called into the office in 1963 for hanging with the black players too much.

PLAYBOY: Why?

ROSE: The white players didn’t want to associate with me. See, in 1961, the Reds won the pennant and they had a guy named Don Balsingame on second base. In 1962, he had his best year ever. He hit .281. So because of those reasons, in 1963, they all thought that he could help them win their pennant again. Fred Hutchinson, the manager, stuck me at second base, and they all resented that. They didn’t want a rookie on second base, because they had veterans in all the other positions. And the only guys that treated me with any dignity and decency was Frank Robinson and Vada Pinson, the black guys. It was a very cliquish team in those days. That’s why they didn’t win.

The black players were just like me when I was a kid. No car, no money, no suit of clothes. All they had to do was play sports. If you ride downtown Manhattan, every time you go by a basketball court or a handball court, they’re all blacks out there playing. How else are they going to get an education? How else are they going to make a good living? So the blacks do it because they don’t have the things.

PLAYBOY: Had you always been a second baseman?

ROSE: I was a catcher all the way up to high school. That’s why I was never a polished fielder. When I made the big leagues, I was only second baseman for three years. One year of high school and two years of the minors. And you don’t become a good fielder if you don’t practice day in and day out.

PLAYBOY: Why do you think that fans started coming back to baseball?

ROSE: Because we brought them back. Me and the Reds, after that ’75 world series with Boston. That was the greatest world series in the history of baseball, action-wise. Five out of seven of the games were one-run games. That’s what started people coming back. Baseball was exciting again. And then there was my hitting streak. . . . What that did, what the 44 streak did, what that did to me is, a lot of people were rooting for me that didn’t even know me, that didn’t know anything about me. Because that got a lot of national attention–or publicity. You know, ’cause people started following that every day. Every day that I hit, they had it on TV. So that really helped me out in that respect. It brought a lot of fans back, too.

PLAYBOY: What was the most memorable thing to you about the ’75 series?

ROSE: I was Most Valuable Player.

PLAYBOY: Anything else?

ROSE: Well, getting some key hits, making some key plays and winning. There’s a big difference in winning a world series or just losing one. Most guys are just happy to get there and they don’t even concentrate on winning. Not me. I don’t get nowhere to lose.

PLAYBOY: How do you find Philadelphia? Is it as strait-laced a town as Cincinnati?

ROSE: We had too many rules in Cincinnati. I guess it was because it was such a conservative town. No long hair, no mustaches–things like that. I guess in Philly, I can really let my hair down.

PLAYBOY: And you don’t like to follow rules?

ROSE: Well, if a guy sets rules, yeah, I’ll follow them. In Philadelphia, you have the type of players who don’t need a lot of rules. Danny Ozark don’t have to stand there with a gun and make sure I get my ground balls. He’s got guys that are professional enough that they go about their job in the right way. What Danny does is tell you what he wants done and lets you go about it. He lets you be your own man.

PLAYBOY: Is one of your goals to become a team leader to the Phillies?

ROSE: No. That’s not my goal. I probably coulda had a better impact on the team as far as leadership if I had a good spring training as far as getting a lot of hits. But I hit .194. You know. But I think the guys on the Phillies know that I work hard and I do my job and I’m just gonna play hard every day. You know, it takes some time to earn the respect of your teammates. You just don’t walk in and say, “I hit in 44 in a row, I got 3000 hits, I’m your leader.” I mean, you just can’t do it.

PLAYBOY: But you would like to be the leader of the team, wouldn’t you?

ROSE: Oh, sure. I think it took a long time for me to become a leader in Cincinnati, even though you got a guy like Johnny Bench. He hits all them great home runs, makes all them All-Star teams and is a great player. Great, but that don’t qualify you as a team leader. A team leader has to come from a guy respected from the way you play day in and day out. Consistency. You don’t have to be the best player to be a team leader. No, you have to be a certain type player. Johnny Bench is good, but he just ain’t the type.

PLAYBOY: When do you think you became the leader of the Reds?

ROSE: I think probably after the ’73 play-offs with the trouble with New York. The fight I had with Bud Harrelson. I just knocked the Mideast war off the cover of the New York Daily News.

PLAYBOY: And that’s when the Reds noticed you?

ROSE: Yeah: “Look at this guy. He’s incredible. He don’t care about nothin’. All he wants to do is win.” I was playing the whole city of Manhattan.

PLAYBOY: You were certainly swinging away then. Would you categorize the Phillies as a swinging team?

ROSE: I don’t know what you mean by swingers. I don’t drink, so I never been out with any of them. I don’t know what they do off the field. In order to have that image, you have to hang in bars. I mean, because girls don’t hang in supermarkets. I just don’t like to go to bars and stuff–and I’m not a prude or anything–I just haven’t been able to convince myself that drinking is gonna do anything for me. That don’t make them guys bad guys and me a good guy. Some guys like to go have a beer after the game and just relax. It’s good for you in that respect. I’d rather go home and watch TV and get room service and that way no one bothers me. I take my phone off the hook at 11 o’clock, and I’ll be a son of a bitch if some guy didn’t call me at 20 after two and wanted to get an autograph. In the hotel. I don’t know how he got through. They say it’s the price you gotta pay, but if I go someplace to eat, all I do is sign autographs.

PLAYBOY: Is that bad?

ROSE: It’s getting worse. I don’t have no time of my own. Somebody always wants somethin’ from me.

PLAYBOY: So you just stay in your room and hide?

ROSE: No, I go out some. I go into bars, but I don’t drink. Yet, there will be people who say they saw me in there drinking. People have a tendency to think you’re drinkin’ if they see you there in a bar. If they see me go into a room with a girl, they think we’re in there screwin’. That’s what people want. They think what they want to think. It’s the truth. Regardless of what happens, people are always going to think the negative things. That’s just the way the world is.

PLAYBOY: How about on the field? How is the atmosphere in the Phillies’ dugout?

ROSE: Good. Wide-awake. Well, you’re rooting for each other and if you make a good play, they’re always patting each other on the back. You know, keepin’ in the game–bein’ involved in the game. The players should be out there rootin’ for each other. They shouldn’t be up in the clubhouse during a game, drinkin’ coffee or playin’ cards during a game.

PLAYBOY: What do players talk about in the dugout?

ROSE: The game. The situation of the game. Always. You don’t talk about where you’re going to eat and shit like that. You may do that if you’re ahead 12-1 or something. A laugher. But in a close ball game, there’s strict attention to what’s going on.

PLAYBOY: Do you give advice or offer help to players?

ROSE: I always do. Every time I come back, I always tell the guys what the pitcher is throwing. If they’re smart, they listen to me.

PLAYBOY: Who’s the most eccentric player you know?

ROSE: The guy that’s craziest, is that what you mean? On the field?

PLAYBOY: Yes.

ROSE: Probably the most eccentric guy I ever played with was Pedro Borbon. He’ll pitch his ass off any time they ask him and if there’s a fight, he’ll be the first one there. He’s the type of guy if he gets in a fight, you just have to kill him to stop him. He don’t give a shit about nothin’. Just a nice, even-tempered guy, but if you push him the wrong way, he’s got that Latin temper and he can get his dander up real good.

PLAYBOY: What are your feelings now about being on first base?

ROSE: There’s a lot of action there. Boy, it’s fun. I’m getting more and more used to it every day. I like the communication there. The action part of it is nice. Hell, you talk to the runners, the coach, the umpires, the pitcher. You’re talking to everybody there.

PLAYBOY: Do you psych guys out when they get on first base?

ROSE: No, you can’t psych major-league ballplayers out.

PLAYBOY: What do you say on first base to your visitors?

ROSE: I just tell them nice hitting. What kind of pitch was it? You want that one back you fouled? Stuff like that. Kidding. Having fun. I might ask them about their family, ’cause a lot of guys ask me that—-

PLAYBOY: Such as “How’s Karolyn?”

ROSE: No, like how my little boy is. They just talk about my boy, they don’t talk about how my wife is.

PLAYBOY: Do you have it a lot easier now in the field, playing first base?

ROSE: Hey, the people who say first base is easy are full of it. It’s the most involved position I’ve ever played. You make put-outs, you hold the runners on base, you work real close with the pitcher. You don’t have to have a ball even hit to you and you get an easy 15 chances a game. You never handle that many chances at third base. Plus, you’ve gotta bust your butt hustling over to be the cutoff man. But it’s fun.

PLAYBOY: What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done in baseball? Was it your hitting streak?

ROSE: No, the hardest thing I ever had to do was keep my edge during the 1975 world series against Boston. We were rained out . . . what . . . three straight days? I guess that was good for the league, ’cause they got all that extra ink, but it was tough on the players. I’ll never forget a bus ride out to Tufts University for those practices. There we were, a major-league baseball team in full uniform, sitting on a Greyhound bus, stopping at a gas station to ask directions to the school.

PLAYBOY: Doesn’t it all get to you after a while, playing baseball every day without rest?

ROSE: When you don’t play games, you lose your sharpness. You gotta play a week, ten days straight to really find your groove. When you play a game, then sit around for two or three days, it slows you down. If I set up the schedule, I’d have all the Eastern clubs play on the West Coast the first month. There’s a lot of things they could do to improve the schedule. They could eliminate off days. That way, they could start the season two weeks later and end it two weeks earlier. Weather wouldn’t be as big a factor. We don’t need off days. I didn’t have an off day last year. Every day we didn’t have a game, I worked out. What’s the difference?

PLAYBOY: After a game, your locker looks like a delicatessen on a Saturday morning. All those people waiting to talk to you. Does that get to you?

ROSE: It’s been quite a challenge to get my work done and still be cooperative with the media. I could have been a bad guy about it, but I’m not that way. I try to cooperate with everybody, but it’s hard to find peace. The games are the easiest part. So you can get away from all the questions. I wish they’d stop asking me about my salary. That’s all anybody ever talks about–money. In St. Louis the other day, a group of fans said they expected me to catch a ball that was ten rows in the stands because I was making$800,000 a year. It’s just not fair. I didn’t ask for anything. I turned down twice that amount.

PLAYBOY: What really makes the Phillies your kind of team?

ROSE: Well, this team will entertain you more ways than any team in baseball. We have speed, long-ball power, great defense, guys who are capable of pitching no-hitters, a great bull pen. And, sure, I think we’re gonna win, but what’s more important, I think we’re gonna have fun. The old Reds team, we used to have fun. Everybody was loose, cutting up. Did you see the Reds when we played them this spring? I stood around the batting cage. I couldn’t believe how quiet it was. Nobody said a word. That’s not like the Reds. Morgan and those guys were always yapping. There’s just something missing now.

PLAYBOY: Have you analyzed the Phillies’ problems? The team seems to fold during play-off games. What do you think?

ROSE: I don’t know, they just ran into bad breaks. They don’t play with the same aggressiveness in the play-offs that they do in the season, it seems like. Why? I don’t know. It’s just experience. If we get in the series this year, things will be all right.

PLAYBOY: And what if you don’t make it to the world series?

ROSE: Well, I can’t do everything.

PLAYBOY: One of your trademarks is the headfirst slide into first base. Have you always done it that way?

ROSE: Yeah, always did it that way. I used to practice that. I used to practice in the swimming pool all the time, used to always dive in the swimming pool like that. Exactly like you’re playing baseball. That’s about the only place you can practice that without getting hurt.

PLAYBOY: Why do you do that? Some people think it’s just to showboat.

ROSE: Showboat, shit. It’s just the easy way to slide and the fastest. And the safest, I think.

PLAYBOY: Is that how you got the nickname Charlie Hustle?

ROSE: No, that came in 1963, in spring training. Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford gave it to me because I ran to first every time I got a walk.

PLAYBOY: What made you start that?

ROSE: Oh, my father brought that to my attention one night. He just said that’s the way to play the game of baseball. You play it hard. Always run. Have fun and be happy.

PLAYBOY: That was the Hustle. When did the Charlie come in?

ROSE: Back in those days, any time you did anything, you know, you put Charlie in front of it. Hot-dog Charlie. Hollywood Charlie. Charlie Tuna. Anything.

PLAYBOY: Do you like that name?

ROSE: Yeah, that name’s all right. The image is OK, because it’s not a phony image. It’s not something that I started doing when I became a big-league baseball player. I can honestly say that the reason that I run to first on a base on balls is just that it’s a habit. It’s something I’ve been doing ever since I was nine years old. I run to first if I’m 0 for 15 or if I’m 15 for 15. I still run to first on base on balls.

PLAYBOY: How about running to your position? You’ve stopped doing that.

ROSE: I know how to conserve my energy. I don’t walk to my position. But I don’t sprint. I get out there and I look good on the way.

PLAYBOY: Why do you think you are such a consistent hitter?

ROSE: Well, there’s a lot of reasons. I’m a switch-hitter. I don’t strike out. I know how to hit. I hit the ball to all fields. There’s a lot of reasons why I’m a good hitter. But when I give a hitting clinic, the less you can talk about, the better off you are. There’s just three or four different things you talk about–you don’t want to get a kid thinking about 15 different things. I just think if you’ve got good eyes and strong hands, you can be a good hitter if you practice.

PLAYBOY: OK, so a kid is up there ready to learn how to hit. Tell us what you would tell him.

ROSE: Well, aggressiveness. Swing and get the bat out front, lift from the top. Don’t worry about your shoe, or your feet or your knees or hip. Don’t worry about anything. Your ribs, your shoulders. Don’t worry about how you look. Just go and hit the ball. Because it’s immaterial how you look. The whole secret to hitting is being comfortable.

Then you just put the basics of getting the bat out in front and being aggressive and being quick. You can’t tell a guy to swing at strikes only. Because there’s some guys if they swung at strikes only, they wouldn’t be aggressive. Roberto Clemente, if he swung at strikes only, he’d have been a .230 hitter. But he was super-, superaggressive. Yogi Berra was another one. Bad-ball hitter. But a good one. Joe Morgan swings at nothing but strikes, and he’s been successful that way. So, you know, whatever you’re successful at, that’s what you should do.

PLAYBOY: Is choking a mental thing?

ROSE: Yeah, 75 percent. There’s 15,000 different things that can go wrong as you hit the baseball, and when you’re hitting the baseball, everybody knows what you’re doing wrong. All the experts know. I do six things when I go in a slump. I move back in the box, up in the box, further away from the plate, closer to the plate. Heavier or lighter bat. I can tell what I’m doing wrong by the flight of the ball. If I’m batting left-handed and everything I’m hitting is over the third-base dugout, I know it’s swinging late. If I’m fouling everything down here, I’m swinging too early. That’s why before every game, I clean my bat off. After I bat the first time, I go back and look at my bat. I can see where I’m going wrong, where I’m hitting the ball. I make adjustments when I’m not at the plate hitting. Other guys don’t do that.

PLAYBOY: Are baseball players an unintelligent group of men? Are they dumber than other groups of athletes?

ROSE: Oh, I don’t know. I think baseball players are some of the smarter guys. Because, you know, a lot of the football and basketball players, when they have college education, all their college education is, is physical education. And baseball players get the education of hard knocks, going through the minor leagues and becoming street smart like me. You know, they may not talk like it, put their words together right. Just like me. I don’t talk good, but you understand everything I’m saying. I think I have a vocabulary and tone for getting things people understand. Kids understand me. I can get across to kids because I talk just like them. I’ve listened to football players and basketball players on interviews and I don’t know what the hell they’re saying. That don’t mean they’re stupid. I can get up in front of a bunch of people and I can have them laughing for a half hour. But I have to–because I can get $5000 for starters to do it.

PLAYBOY: You don’t seem to be stupid when it comes to making money.

ROSE: Well, nowadays you have to be more conscious about what you are going to have and what you are going to do after you get out of baseball. You know, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, the old-time ballplayers, they didn’t worry about saving money. They didn’t worry about what they were going to do when they got out of baseball. But today, with the prices the way they are and what is expected of you today, to be in a baseball park, you have to be taught about what is going to take place when your baseball-playing days are over. You don’t want to play baseball your whole life and at the age of 35, you have to pick up and get a new job and don’t have any money to start in that job. So I think we are more thinking about what is going to happen when you are through playing.

PLAYBOY: Do you realize that you are only playing a game?

ROSE: I realize it’s a game, but the odds of the game are the win. You know, you learn that in professional sports, you get in trouble sometimes, when you say that around kids, but winning is everything.

PLAYBOY: What kids are told is that winning or losing isn’t important; it’s playing the game that counts.

ROSE: It all depends on what kind of person you are. I mean, there are some guys that just fall in the trend that they’re used to losing. Other guys–some guys can’t stand the pressure of playing on a winning team. They can’t. I mean, that’s what I was reading the other day. I didn’t say it, but somebody was saying the other day that they wondered how Carew’s reaction would be if he played with the Yankees, a winning team. I don’t know. There are some guys who can’t play–because there are some guys who feel the pressures of being on a winner every day, day in and day out. Anybody can play on a last-place team.

Winning and losing is everything. I think you learn the differences in professional sports. I think you should teach it to kids, because winning and losing is important in life or in sports or in schoolwork or anything. I mean, if you had to worry about winning and losing in school, you wouldn’t worry about passing or flunking. I mean, winning or losing is passing or flunking, isn’t it? So when parents say that it is not important to my kid to worry about winning and losing, it’s just not true. “Winning and losing is everything. . . . When parents say that it’s not important to my kid to worry about winning and losing, it’s just not true.”

PLAYBOY: But the bottom line today, past who wins or loses, is how much money you’re paid to win, right?

ROSE: Well, I’m not in it to make everything I can as fast as I can, just to make a fast buck. The guys in Atlanta offered me $7,000,000 for four years–with some conditions attached. That’s pretty serious. So I didn’t get into this game to try to become independently wealthy overnight. A lot of people seem to think that. The Philly deal is a great deal. All the deals were great deals. I couldn’t have gone wrong with any deal. And when you start talking about friends on other teams and personnel on other teams and fans and ball parks, the Phillies lack nothing. Everything I looked at, the Phillies were right at the top. Fans, fan appeal, ball club, personnel on the ball club, the ball park, the ownership. Everything I looked at for the Phillies was positive. Now, Pittsburgh is a good, ball club, good ownership, good management. No fans. No fan appeal. Nobody goes to the ball park.

PLAYBOY: Having all those people bid so highly on you must have swelled your head a little.

ROSE: I don’t know why that should be. The only difference between this year and last year, or the only difference today as compared with when I was nine years old, I get just as dirty today playing ball as I did when I was nine years old. The only difference today, I make better money. I wasn’t a poor guy last year. I made almost $400,000. That’s not exactly suffering. But I gotta play to make it. My philosophy is, I gotta prove to Philly I deserve it. That’s the funny thing about this game. No matter how old you are or how good you are, you can hit .300 for 15 years and you get 38 years old and you gotta prove to people that you’re not old. By hitting .300 this year, I’ve got to prove to them next year that I’m not going downhill. Because there’s some people who are just sitting there, waiting for me to go downhill, so they can start yelling at me.

PLAYBOY: What is your net worth? With all the deals and endorsements you’ve got going, do you really know how much money you’ve got?

ROSE: I get a statement every three months. But I’m not going to tell you how much. It’s not good to do that, because you get idiots who’re kidnapers sitting out there, waiting for that kind of stuff. But unless it’s totally necessary, I don’t see the importance of putting a specific figure in the paper. I mean, so I’m a millionaire ballplayer. OK. I mean, everybody knows that. So what’s the difference if I got $2,200,000 or $1,600,000?

PLAYBOY: It’s a big difference from last year, isn’t it?

ROSE: Oh, I made good money last year. Well, I knew all that hard work and all that busting my ass and everything was going to pay off. I mean, the one reason, besides pride, I guess, that I worked so damned hard to get it is so I won’t have to worry about where I get my next meal from. I’ve seen many, many of my friends and guys I’ve played with, and they don’t even have a job. They’re looking for a job and their home is in hock and their family is hungry. Once I sign the contract, I forget about the money. Money’s not that important. It goes to my financial advisor, anyway. I never see a check.

PLAYBOY: How has your lifestyle changed?

ROSE: None. Hasn’t changed at all.

PLAYBOY: Nothing? Still buy the same clothes?

ROSE: My wife still shops at K Mart.

PLAYBOY: You have a Rolls-Royce.

ROSE: Well, you know, I don’t try and be a big shot because my wife drives a Rolls-Royce. I think it’s smart to buy a Rolls-Royce rather than buying a Lincoln or something–or a Cadillac every year and losing $3000, $4000 on it. Get a Rolls-Royce, you ain’t going to lose no money.

PLAYBOY: How did you manage to become an international media celebrity out of Cincinnati, Ohio?

ROSE: The reason for that is that I’ve been very fortunate to have a lot of things exciting happen to me on national TV. The fight with Harrelson started the All-Star thing with Ray Fosse. The world series, the hitting streak, you know, all the magazine articles, covers of Sport, Sports Illustrated. You know that I’ve been on the cover of every magazine. I mean, I’ve been on the cover of Ebony!

PLAYBOY: You’ve become a highly marketable commodity, in other words?

ROSE: Other ballplayers don’t understand that that’s why I got that big contract. Because I’m recognizable, I’m marketable. You know, Parker, [Jim] Rice, Carew, those guys are tremendous ballplayers, but I mean, do you think they deserve the money that I do? Because you have to put more things in perspective than just hitting the baseball. I mean, Ted Turner, in Atlanta, wanted me to play for his team so he could sell his TV station. You know, the guy from Pittsburgh wanted me to play with their Pirates so they could turn their attendance around. The Phillies wanted to sign me to a contract and surpass their all-time record of season tickets by 5000. That proves something to me, that somebody thinks I’m marketable.

PLAYBOY: Is there a point where you begin worrying that you might be over-commercializing yourself?

ROSE: No, because if the stuff is credible and it’s class, you can’t be overexposed. If you get attached to a nice bank or a good supermarket, a good automobile agency, oil company, you don’t have to worry about it. But baseball players as a rule don’t make a lot of money in commercials. I mean, I do commercials for Aqua Velva and I get paid pretty good. But, hell, if I told you some of the salaries that Bob Hope and those guys get. . . . Because there’s only one Bob Hope. If they don’t want Pete Rose, if he says no to Aqua Velva, they can get Larry Bowa. If he says no, they’ll go to Dave Parker. There’s so many guys they can get.

PLAYBOY: But one of the reasons you are considered so marketable is that you’re a white athlete, wouldn’t you agree?

ROSE: It has something to do with it. Look, if you owned Swanson’s Pizza, would you want a black guy to do the commercial on TV for you? Would you like the black guy to pick up the pizza and bite into it? Try to sell it? I mean, would you want Dave Parker selling your pizza to America for you? Or would you want Pete Rose?

PLAYBOY: Doesn’t all that show business interfere with your game?

ROSE: Oh, I don’t do that shit during the summer. No, once baseball starts, I don’t fool with it. I don’t do no autograph signings, no charitable work, none of that stuff when the season starts. I’m not going to mess up the hand that feeds the mouth. I just play baseball in the summertime.

PLAYBOY: But off season, you seem to be everywhere. What’s next, the movies?

ROSE: I could have went into that last year. I just didn’t feel like it. What they wanted me to do, it just seemed like a lot of time and hard work for what they were going to pay me.

PLAYBOY: What movie were you going to be in?

ROSE: I was going to be a copilot in an airplane cockpit. Something to do with the Government. I didn’t get all the details, because I didn’t want to do it. I don’t need them. I didn’t need that film publicity.

PLAYBOY: How about the new candy bar you’ve come out with? Supercharg’r?

ROSE: Not candy. Don’t put candy down there. It’s all natural. It don’t have no sugar.

PLAYBOY: Just lots of royalties.

ROSE: Yes, that could be the best royalty I’ve ever got. I’ve had other bars–energy bars. When you took a bite out of them, you almost needed a glass of water to wash it down. But you can substitute them for a meal, too. They sell half of what the projection is, I’ll make one and a half times more than I do with the Phillies.

PLAYBOY: Do you have a ball-park idea of how many you think you’ll sell?

ROSE: Some of the competitors sell 57,000,000 and they don’t taste good. If I sold 300,000,000 of those bars, I would make $4,500,000 myself, just me. There’s no question about it. I can’t wait.

PLAYBOY: So you’re a pretty good money man. That must have helped you in your negotiations with other teams.

ROSE: Yeah, I guess you could say I really had my pick.

PLAYBOY: What were some of the other deals like, the ones you didn’t take? We’ve heard some outrageous stories.

ROSE: That ain’t so outrageous. Ted Turner, he’s a real character. He wanted to pay me 1,000,000 bucks a season for the years I could play and then $100,000 a year for as long as I live. See, he owns the TV station down there that carries the Braves games. He figured he’d make up the money easy in what they’d bring in on bigger ratings.

PLAYBOY: Sounds good. Why didn’t you go for it?

ROSE: I’m telling’ you, I really wasn’t in it for the money. What could I have done for the Braves? Make them a contender, maybe. There’s not much more one man could do for that club. It was more important to me to play with a team that could win the pennant, a team that could take the world series.

PLAYBOY: But turning down $1,000,000 a year?

ROSE: And that wasn’t the only one. John Galbreath, the Pirates’ owner, wanted to make me a millionaire, too. He owns Darby Dan Farm, too. He was going to give me race horses. Brood mares. He knows what a horse-race nut I am. He was going to give me some mares to breed with a couple of the best studs in the world. You know what that would be worth? You can’t even put a price on that. And the guy was going to pay me $400,000 a year besides that.

PLAYBOY: That must have been hard to turn down.

ROSE: Yeah, and there was others, too. Kansas City was offering me over $1,000,000 a year. And Augie Busch in St. Louis was going to throw in a big beer distributorship with his money. I really coulda had my pick. “My problem over all these years with contracts in Cincinnati was that I am always too fair.”

PLAYBOY: And you picked Philadelphia for less money?

ROSE: Well, the money wasn’t that much less. And I got lots of friends on the Phils. This team’s got a first-class front office. That meant a lot to me after what happened in Cincinnati.

PLAYBOY: What exactly did happen?
ROSE: Well, I’ll tell you, my problem over all these years with contracts in Cincinnati was that I am always too fair. See, some guys, if they want $100,000, they ask for $500,000. If they want $50,000, they ask for $80,000. You know, one year, I wanted $100,000, I got $92,000. Another year, I wanted $85,000 I got $75,000. I asked for $50,000 and I got $36,000. I never went over my head and then compromised. That’s the way it should’ve been done.

PLAYBOY: The president of the Cincinnati Reds, Dick Wagner, seems to have been a thorn in your side during negotiations with the Reds. If he had come through, would you still be a Red?

ROSE: I looked at Dick Wagner last year and I said, “Dick, what do you negotiate a contract on?” “All right,” he said, “it’s consistency. Years of experience. Popularity and statistics.” And I said, “What the hell do I lack in? On those four categories, what do I lack in as far as being number one in America? Who’s been more consistent over a 16-year period than me? Don’t say Rod Carew, because he’s only been there 12 years. And stats. Who’s got the stats? Now, if you say stats and a guy looks at me and says, well, you’ve only got 150 home runs. That’s more than anybody in the history of the National League for a switch-hitter.”

PLAYBOY: What did Wagner say to that?

ROSE: He didn’t say nothing. What could he say?

PLAYBOY: Does he have something against you?

ROSE: Evidently. Maybe it’s the flamboyant style I have off the field. But he should realize that all that does is sell tickets.

PLAYBOY: Let us play the devil’s advocate for a moment.

ROSE: All right. You give me what you think he’s saying and I’ll answer it.

PLAYBOY: He’s got you under contract. He’s paying you $400,000 and you’re busting your ass and he knows it. You’re the big draw. Let’s say 40,000 people come to a game. Now, if he doubles your salary, you’re not going to double attendance for him.

ROSE: That’s probably right.

PLAYBOY: You might not even add 10,000 more people a game.

ROSE: Well, look at it like this. Just like the Phillies said. They sold 5000 more seats in tickets per game this year.

PLAYBOY: But the Phillies didn’t have you.

ROSE: No, you’re misleading yourself. Because the Reds were not going to take me from $400,000 to $800,000. The Reds could’ve had me for $450,000. Four-five-oh for the rest of my career. They would not do it. Not $550,000 not $650,000, not $750,000–$450,000.

PLAYBOY: And you would have been happy with that figure?

ROSE: When I got my 3000th hit on May fifth, the Reds decided to have a Pete Rose Day, and my attorney, Reuven Katz, said, “Mr. Wagner, why don’t you give Pete–for the fans on Pete Rose Day–a career, nonguaranteed contract of $450,000 a year?” Career nonguaranteed contract. Wagner said, “Well, we don’t want to negotiate during the season.” But a week before, he was negotiating with Mike Lumm and his attorney and he had a meeting set up for two weeks after that. Which was later canceled because we found out about it. So those are the double standards I’m telling you about.

PLAYBOY: When was your next meeting with Wagner?

ROSE: After the season was over, we go in to see him and he says, “Well, that’s just a little bit too much.” I said, “Well, OK, if that’s the way you feel, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t just go through the free-agent draft to see what other teams think I’m worth.” Then we went to Japan for exhibition games and the draft took place. At no time in Japan did the Reds ever try to negotiate with me. So, finally, two days before Wagner leaves to come back to the United States, he says he’d like to have a meeting with me when he gets back. I said, “Don’t worry about it. I will never sign another contract before I talk to the Cincinnati Reds.” We get back and we go down and have a meeting with him. Now, this is almost two months after the season is over, right? And we go in there and we sit down, and he has an idea what these other teams have offered. We say, “Well, Dick, have you come up with anything? What do you think?” You know what he says? He says, “I haven’t had time to think about it.” Been two months. It’s a Friday. He says he’ll get back to us Sunday. He gets back to us Sunday. He calls me and says, “I don’t think we have any common ground to negotiate with.” And that was it. He’s still on the $400,000 figure. Which is less money than he’s paying a couple other players on the team. Now, is there any way possible you can see it to be fair for me to be the third-highest-paid player on Cincinnati’s team? They even had polls on TV in Cincy. Should Pete Rose be the highest-paid player on the Reds? You know, should he make the most money? More than any other player on the Reds? I mean, that’s a stupid question for anybody to ask anybody.

PLAYBOY: Did Wagner realize he could have gotten you for $50,000 more?

ROSE: Well, what happened, Wagner knew that he could’ve had me for $430,000, $440,000 of $450,000 way back in June. And he probably told his bosses that. Now, all of a sudden, it’s up to $650,000. What’s he gonna do, tell his people he can get me for $650,000? Well, they’ll say, “Hey, you could’ve gotten him for $450,000 three months ago. What the hell happened?” It makes him look bad. So he just said, “The hell with it. Take a chance.” Wagner took the chance that I wouldn’t have a good year. Do you think he knew I was going to go on a 44-game hitting streak? He took a chance and he lost.

PLAYBOY: How did that make you feel? Hurt, pissed off?

ROSE: No, I can’t be hurt because one guy didn’t like me. How can I be hurt?

PLAYBOY: Because he prevented you from having what could have been a continuous career–hometown boy, sticking with one uniform….

ROSE: Well, that’s another thing that was awful peculiar, as far as I’m concerned. Here’s a guy, Wagner, that’s an outsider. I’m 16 years a Cincinnati Red. Louis Nippert is a grand gentleman who owns the Cincinnati Reds, 89 percent, or something like that. I negotiate with all these guys I’m just telling you about. They pick me up at the airport, they drive me to their house, they negotiate and they drive me back to the airport. Mr. Busch, I negotiated with him four hours in the hospital where he was in for a hernia operation. So, finally, I asked Mr. Wagner, I said, “Mr. Wagner, why don’t you let me sit down and talk to Mr. Nippert? He owns the team. He’s from Cincinnati.” You know what he says? “You can talk to him but not about money.” Then doesn’t it seem strange here that at no time did I ever get to talk to the Cincinnati Reds’ owner? I spent 16 years, starting headfirst and playing anywhere they wanted me to play.

PLAYBOY: Did Nippert try to contact you?

ROSE: Mr. Nippert made a quote in the paper that no one ever asked him if I could talk to him. I never once got to negotiate about my contract. And I used to sit with him on the bus in Japan on the way to the ball park and talk to him. Nice fellow, great. But that just goes to show you that in Cincinnati, Mr. Nippert has nothing to do with what goes on with the ball club. It’s all Mr. Wagner.

PLAYBOY: Did you really want to finish out your career in Cincinnati?

ROSE: Sure. I used to think, especially when I went to St. Louis, I used to walk to the ball park there. I used to dream about having a statue like they’ve got of Stan Musial down at the Red’s stadium. I probably screwed that up now.

PLAYBOY: How has all the fuss affected your wife? What is Karolyn like?

ROSE: Crazy. Funny personality. She’s got a better personality than I got. She gets along better with people than anybody I’ve ever seen. Very outgoing. She’ll go to a banquet, a baseball banquet, and before we leave, she’ll have already kissed ten guys goodbye. I mean, nice to see you again and you know. She’s like a Jewish person. You know, all they do is kiss and shake hands.

PLAYBOY: Is that right?

ROSE: Yeah, you know it’s true.

PLAYBOY: How do you keep your marriage together? Obviously, there have been rocky times.

ROSE: I don’t worry about it. Nothing bothers me. If I’m home in bed, I sleep. If I’m at the ball park, I play baseball. If I’m on my way to the ball park, I worry about how I’m going to drive. Just whatever is going on, that’s what I do. I don’t worry about a bunch of things.

PLAYBOY: Is Karolyn a good baseball wife?

ROSE: She’s a perfect baseball player’s wife. Yeah. She went to a Cincinnati wrestling match and refereed the match between the Sheik and Bobo Brazil, and she came home, I swear to God–she had a sweat suit on, and she had, on one side, all the way down one side, nothing but blood on her pants. I mean, real blood.

PLAYBOY: She really got into it?

ROSE: Oh, man, they threw a chair and it just missed her. She had blood all over the damn place. She had fun.

Karolyn is understanding. She knows I go on road trips. She knows I am going to be away from home half the time. And she is a great mother, great housekeeper. She has got her own personality. She is outgoing, with a great personality. I guess marriagewise, her best enemies are her friends.

PLAYBOY: Why? Do they tattle on you?

ROSE: Because a lot of people have a tendency to think they know everything that goes on about me. They don’t know nothing. So a lot of people always talk about hearsay. And they can’t wait to tell her about hearsay. And hearsay can start more trouble than anything.

PLAYBOY: Karolyn told us that she has called you on the road and not been able to find you; she said she presumes you are screwing around. She seems to make a joke out of it.

ROSE: Well, she wouldn’t make a joke about it. But she will take it. She won’t say nothin’. She knows what I like for her to say or not to say.

PLAYBOY: Doesn’t sound like much of an example as far as equality goes. What about kids? Do you think much about the example you set for them?

ROSE: You mean in baseball?

PLAYBOY: Not necessarily. How about other areas–such as drugs?

ROSE: I have never been on drugs.

PLAYBOY: No one ever passed a joint at a party?

ROSE: I have been around where there has been, but I never did. I always worry too much if I do, something like that and some guy with a camera takes my picture or they arrest me. I have got too much to lose for something like that.

PLAYBOY: Cocaine has become the playtime drug of the major leagues, according to a Playboy poll. What do you think about your teammates’ using it?

ROSE: It is OK with me. You know all of my teammates don’t do it. I hope the guys who I play against do it. I don’t give a shit. It is just going to make my job easier.

PLAYBOY: What if you found out that particular teammates were doing it?

ROSE: I’d try to straighten them out. And I would try to make them see the light. I mean, I am no Elmer Gantry. Even though I don’t hang in bars and drink or nothin’. I mean, I’d try to make them see the light. In everything you do, there is a right way to do something and a wrong way to do something. And just explain it to them the right way without . . . I forgot the word . . . you know I’m not–I don’t disagree with every thing–I am not a pure person.

I guess I heard some of the guys I used to play with did cocaine or marijuana and I tried to talk to them, but, you know, I can think of a couple of guys that should have listened to me. ‘Cause they are under 30 and they are out, they are gone now, looking for jobs.

PLAYBOY: A lot of guys say they need an amphetamine, or two or three before a game. What do you think?

ROSE: Well, a lot of guys might think that there are certain days you might need a greenie, an upper.

PLAYBOY: Would you take one?

ROSE: I might. I have taken stuff before.

PLAYBOY: What stuff?

ROSE: A painkiller when I had a bad arm. You know, just, it’s not against the law to do that.

PLAYBOY: No. We mean something to pick you up.

ROSE: Well, that would get you up.

PLAYBOY: Have you taken greenies?

ROSE: Well, I might have taken a greenie last week. I mean, if you want to call it a greenie. I mean, if a doctor gives me a prescription of 30 diet pills, because I want to curb my appetite, so I can lose five pounds before I go to spring training, I mean, is that bad? I mean, a doctor is not going to write a prescription that is going to be harmful to my body. “A lot of guys might think there are days you might need a greenie, an upper. . . . I might have taken a greenie last week.”

PLAYBOY: It depends on your body.

ROSE: So a greenie can be a diet pill. That’s all a greenie is, is a diet pill. Am I right or wrong? I know I am right. An upper is nothing but a diet pill.

PLAYBOY: But would you use them for anything other than dieting?

ROSE: There might be some day when you played a double-header the night before and you go to the ball park for a Sunday game and you just want to take a diet pill, just to mentally think you are up. You won’t be up, but mentally you might think you are up.

PLAYBOY: Does that help your game?

ROSE: It won’t help the game, but it will help you mentally. When you help yourself mentally, it might help your game.

PLAYBOY: You keep saying you might take a greenie. Would you? Have you?

ROSE: Yeah, I’d do it. I’ve done it.

PLAYBOY: Have you ever found homosexuality among baseball players?

ROSE: I have never heard anything mentioned about any homosexual in baseball. Either on my team or on the opposing team. So I know nothing about it. I read about it on football teams, but I don’t know.

PLAYBOY: Psychologists have claimed that there are homosexual tendencies in everything athletes do–patting and hugging. Do you agree?

ROSE: I disagree with it. When the shot is from under the butt, it is just a good place to slap because of the way your hand is. Your hand is right there, I mean. In hockey, they do that, too. They also hit each other on the head. Well, most guys pat guys on the butt because they already passed them. We always hit each other on the hand. But you can’t hit a guy on the hand if he has already walked by you, so the only place to hit–there is only one place to hit him. I disagree with that stuff. They want me to be that way, that is why they say that. You can’t tell me. Because I hit more guys on the butt than anybody. They’re going to say that I have homosexual ways. I just scream at them. I just say that is stupid.

PLAYBOY: There’s just one more topic to talk about, and that’s the paternity suit filed against you by Terryl Rubio, the young woman in Florida who says she had your baby.

ROSE: I ain’t gonna say nothin’ about that. You’re wastin’ your time even askin’ me.

PLAYBOY: Why won’t you talk about it?

ROSE: It’s nobody’s business. It’s private.

PLAYBOY: Private? It’s been on national television and in every newspaper in the country. And there are a lot of people in baseball who’ve told us that you spent much of last season traveling around with the girl while she was pregnant. You didn’t seem to be hiding it then. How can it be so private? Do you deny the allegation now?

ROSE: Look, you can say anything you want, ’cause you ain’t gonna get nothin’ from me.

PLAYBOY: Then let’s go on and finish the interview. There are still a couple of things we’d like to clear up.

ROSE: What the hell more do you need? I’ve already talked to you for weeks.

PLAYBOY: We know that; we made that clear to you from the outset. You’re the one who has canceled appointments and stood us up.

ROSE: Well, it’s finished. I don’t want to talk to fuckin’ reporters anymore.

PLAYBOY: Why? You made such a point of how you always cooperate with the press.

ROSE: Look, I know what you’re gonna ask me and I ain’t gonna talk about that shit. So why bother me? That’s personal shit, man.

PLAYBOY: So the interview’s over?

ROSE: Fuckin’ right it is.

copyright playboy enterprises, inc.

[Maury Z. Levy: author’s note: In 1975, Muhammad Ali had been the king of the world for a long time. He was always surrounded by press people fighting for interviews. He talked a lot, but never let anyone get really close to him. Then a strange thing happened. He lost a fight to Joe Frazier. Reporters did a 180 and started following Frazier. Ali was alone. He wasn’t used to that. So, I got a call one morning from Ali’s press guy. He said Ali liked a Philadelphia magazine cover story I’d done on hockey flash Derek Sanderson. He said Ali wanted me to come up to his Deer Lake, PA training camp and spend a couple hours with him. The couple hours turned into a couple days. I got to train with him, I got unlimited access to him. Here’s the story…]

THE FORMER CASSIUS CLAY remembers when he was “just another nigger.” “It started back in Louisville. That’s where I was born. I was riding a bus one day. Didn’t have no Cadillacs yet. I was riding this bus and I was reading in this newspaper about Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johansson. This was just when I had decided to turn professional, right after I won the Olympic gold medal in Rome. I was sure I could beat either one of them if I had the chance. But I was just as sure that I wouldn’t get the chance because nobody had ever heard of me. So I sat there thinking. How was I ever going to get a shot at the title? Well, it was right on that bus I decided. If I ever wanted to get noticed, I’d have to start talking it up. I’d have to do better than that. I’d have to start screaming and yelling and acting like some kind of a nut.

“You see, I figured if I did that, pretty soon people would get tired of hearing from me and they’d be insisting that I put my fists where my mouth was and fight who­ever the champ was. They’d watch me fight. And I would float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. That saying has stuck with me to this day—float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

“I started off pretty slow because I had to sort of feel my way around, find out what the folks, the reporters especially, wanted to hear. I told this one reporter I was going to knock this boy down in the sixth round, and he printed it and then I did it. That’s the first time I said I am the greatest. I figured if I didn’t say it, nobody else was going to say it for me.

“First the people were saying, ‘What’s that bigmouth talking about?’ But I kept fighting and talking and pretty soon people were saying I was the greatest. And I just said, ‘I told you so, didn’t I?’

“Now where do you think I’d be right now if I didn’t use all that shouting and hollering to get the public to notice me? Do you think I’d be sitting here in some $250,000 house in Cherry Hill? Hell, no. I’d be back down there in Louisville washing cars or running some elevator and saying ‘yes suh’ and ‘no suh’ and knowing my place. Instead of that, I’m the highest-paid athlete in the world and I’m the greatest fighter in the world. And that’s just the way I planned it.”

Like all things with Muhammad Ali, the former Cassius Clay, the explanation is a little oversimplified. But it’s very basically true. People around Philadelphia tend to take Ali for granted. Maybe it’s because he’s lived around here for the past five or six years, because he’s trained and done most of his talking around here. People just tend to see him as part of the local color. You lose perspective.  

Well, Ali put it all into perspective right after another transplanted Philadelphian, Joe Frazier, had his heavy­weight title beaten out of him a few weeks back. “I’m greater than boxing,” Ali said. “I am boxing. Muhammad Ali is the biggest thing in the history of all sports. I’m bigger than the Rose Bowl, the Super Bowl, the Kentucky Derby, all of them.”He wasn’t always this modest.

BACK IN 1960, before all his public pronouncements, before anybody ever really heard of him, he sat around a New York hotel with the rest of the U.S. Olympic team waiting to go to Rome. He was a promising light-heavyweight, having some casual conversation within ear­shot of a couple of writers. “I’m great, I’m beautiful. I’m going to Rome and I’m going to whip all those cats and then I’m coming back and turning pro and becoming the cham­pion of the world.” His teammates just humored him.

In spite of what he said, he went to Rome a very scared 18-year-old, his only real confidence being in his feet and his fists, which he used to dance around foreign chal­lengers and batter them with speed and grace and power. The then-Cassius Clay showed a sporting class that made him the talk of the games and the unofficial mayor of the Olympic Village.

Yet that was only one side of the man-child. It was the side that everybody wrote about and talked about. But it was only the surface. The greatest story never told was of Clay’s crush on Wilma Rudolph. Wilma Rudolph was a sprinter from the States. At that time she was the best in the world, garnering all that marked-down auxiliary publicity that goes with being on the women’s team. Clay was getting all the best ink. And Clay had this love-athirst-sight crush on Wilma Rudolph. But he was afraid to tell her. He was afraid even to make a move. She was, after all, the greatest woman athlete of her day. And Clay was just some humble young kid from Louisville who was good with his hands. He never even approached her. This was the real Cassius Clay. And 13 years after, it’s the real Muhammad Ali.

It’s the Muhammad Ali who almost let his wife talk him into leaving Cherry Hill and moving back to Chicago because she was homesick. The Ali everybody thinks they know just isn’t like this. Disregard the fact that Ali might be the greatest sports name of all time, that he’s made millions with his mouth, that he’s beaten the strongest of men. Forget all that. Ali is a Muslim. And in a Muslim house women are supposed to be subservient. How could Ali beat up all those mean men and then be bullied by a woman half his size? On the outside, Muhammad Ali has come a very long way from the Olympics. Inside he has gone nowhere.

IT’S A TWO-HOUR DRIVE from his home in the gardens of Cherry Hill to his new training camp in the woods of Deer Lake, a little bump in the road between Pottsville and Reading. Ali is building a whole training camp here that might even cost more than his house. It’s put together like a set of light Lincoln Logs. The big building has a boxing ring, some punching bags and a workout area. A mess hall is on its way up, along with some dormitory-type accommodations for his entourage.

Until that all gets up. they stay at a place on Route 61 called the Deer Lake Motel, where all the rooms smell from overdoses of Shell No-Pest Strips, and the business cards say “discreet lodging” under the name of the place. For excitement in Deer Lake, you go down to the local truck stop, open the broken screen door to the men’s room, put a quarter in the machine and get a little pack of naked women from 1950.

Ali doesn’t stay in the motel himself. He sleeps on the grounds of the camp in a $43,000 trailer with gold shag carpeting. He sits there and rests from roadwork, talks forever on the telephone and watches a strange parade of people come and go. Late at night, when most of them are gone, he sits around and talks about what was and what will be and what really is. He sits and does imitations of his life.

“I am the GREATEST! He’s going to fall in five! He falls in five. See, I backed up all that brashness. But like now I’ve changed as far as talking a lot. It’s just not the time. That was the style then—big mouth. That was my image. `I don’t talk jive, I’ll get you in five. I am the GREATEST! Let me get him! Don’t hold me back!’ Hell, that was all an act.

“I used to want to buy nothing but cars all the time. Cars and mink coats. Now I’m buying a farm.

“The world is a storehouse, you see, where all sorts of wines are collected.

“At that time I was boasting, I was drinking the wine of being flamboyant, of fame, of showing off. And now I’m out of that stage. I’m intoxicated with security. I’m intoxicated with doing something and ending up having something to show for all my time and my work. And so this isn’t the time for joking or talking. It’s not the time for playing.

“A man’s life is not that much different from the life of a child. A child takes a liking to a toy or a doll. Then the child gets tired of the doll. But at the moment the child took the liking to the doll, the child thought the doll was the most valuable thing in the world. But there comes a time when the child destroys the doll or throws away the toy. The same with man.

“Everything in America’s not real. It’s built on sports and entertainment. A train crashes in Chicago. It kills all those people. All that money. And they’re more worried about who’s going to win this basketball game.

“And since we’ve got a system that’s pleased to be puz­zled, I puzzle them. I mystify them. See, a wise man can act a fool, but a fool cannot act a wise man.”

IN WISDOM, OF COURSE, there is strength. And only the strong survive. It is the strong will of Muhammad Ali that has outlasted everything. His punches might not be as strong as they used to, his footwork just a hair slower. But it’s surprising that the bumpy road he’s been on hasn’t taken more out of him.

Ali started boxing because he figured it was the quickest way for somebody who was black to make any kind of money in this country. He wasn’t very smart in school. He wasn’t even smart enough to be carried through to a basketball or football scholarship. It was just a lot easier to jump into the gym, learn the ropes and then turn professional. “If a fighter is good enough to be champ,” Ali says, “he can make more money in one fight than most ballplayers make in their careers.”

Ali was 12 years old when he first stepped into a gym. Six weeks later, he won his first amateur fight. By the time he was 13, he was fighting on television and gaining a pretty good following through his own advertising. When he knew he was going to be on TV, he’d run around knocking on all the doors in the neighborhood and tell everybody to tune in.

By the time he got to the Olympic trials in San Francisco’s Cow Palace, he’d had 180 amateur fights, winning most of them. He won those trials by beating the hell out of the champ of the U.S. Army, the organization that eventually knocked him out. Before the Olympics, he went back to finish school. He ended up number 367 out of 391 at Louisville’s Central High.

In Rome, he conquered Belgium, Russia, Australia and Poland. He returned to the States a hero, put himself up at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria eating five $8.50 steaks a day, and waited for things to start happening.

His first call came from a group of 11 wealthy white Louisville businessmen who offered to set up a syndicate to back their local hero’s professional career. In return for this, they would get half his profits and he would get a nice weekly salary and a tangerine-colored Cadillac.

His first pro fight was a win over a guy named Tunney Hunsaker, a tough white sheriff, and the first of a fairly long list of unknowns. “The important thing,” Ali says, “is that I was fighting and winning. I know I wasn’t fighting the greatest guys in the beginning. In fact, they were a bunch of bums. But every fighter does the same thing starting out. Liston did it, Frazier did it and Fore­man did it.

“The only difference with me is every time I won a fight I made more enemies. Folks just didn’t like my mouthing off all the time. The more I kept mouthing’, the more folks would come out and root against me. They’d hope the other guy would bash my face in so I couldn’t talk no more and I couldn’t tell them how pretty I was. They’d yell things like, ‘Take away his pink Cadillac, the bum.’ Well, I don’t really care what people think about me or say about me as long as they buy a ticket to see me. Because that’s what it’s all about.

“I never really liked to fight that much, you see. It’s a hell of a way to make a living. But while I got to do it, I might as well make some good money out of it. Look, I’ve been boxing for almost twenty years now, since I was 12 years old, and I’m getting pretty tired of all this talking and all these people who want to do me in. But I don’t guess I’ll ever get tired of the money. It’s really the one thing that keeps me going.”

Early on, Ali was jumping at every chance to make a buck. He even cut a record. And this was way before Joe Frazier and the Knockouts. On one side of the record was a pretty tolerable version of an old Ben E. King song. But the other side was the one that sold. It was one of the famous Ali poems set to music:

This is the legend of Cassius Clay

The most beautiful fighter in the world today

He talks a great deal and brags indeed

Of a muscular punch that’s incredibly speedy The fistic world was dull and weary

With a champ like Liston, things had to be dreary Then someone with color, someone with dash Brought fight fans a-runnin’ with cash

This brash young boxer is something to see

And the heavyweight championship is his destiny.

OBVIOUSLY, HIS POETRY wasn’t going to win him any championships. And neither was his mouth. Certainly they would help him, but when it got down to the real natty gritty, when he got into the ring with another man who was out to bust his pretty little head in, there was just no way he was going to talk him down to the canvas.

Behind the mouth is a fighter, one of the best who ever lived. It’s not easy to describe Ali’s style or technique. In fact, if you looked at it closely, removed from the man, it’s hard to figure how he won all he did. Jose Torres, former middleweight champion turned writer, comes up with an inside description of Ali the fighter.

“Ali is not a great fighter in the conventional sense that Sugar Ray Robinson, Willie Pep and Joe Louis were,” Torres says. “Each of these fighters knew every punch and every move and added some tricks to the book, that unwritten book whose teachings are passed on from gym to gym and are the nearest thing we have to our own culture.

“Ali doesn’t have the power Robinson had. Unlike Louis, Ali doesn’t use his punching for defense and he doesn’t move like Pep. Nevertheless, Ali is the superior fighter of his time. We have a man who does not have the physical greatness of the greatest men of other times, yet his fists remind us that Robinson, Louis and Pep used to get hit with many more punches in one fight than Ali received in 20 fights. The explanation is simple.

“Muhammad Ali is a genius. He has a power that great fighters never had. Don’t watch Ali’s gloves, arms or legs when he’s fighting. Watch his brains.”

It’s a part of his brain they never developed in school. It’s the part that defies all logic and wins. From the outside, Ali is a dumb fighter. If you wanted to teach your kid how to fight, you wouldn’t tell him to watch Muhammad Ali. The guy does everything wrong. Anybody who’s ever been in a good schoolyard fight can tell you that.

He pulls away from a punch. You’re not supposed to do that. You roll with it, you duck it, but you don’t pull away. He carries his hands low. The first thing they tell you in a gym is get your hands up, protect your face, pro­tect your body. You keep your hands down and you’re just inviting the other guy to clobber you, which is what Ali does. But just as the punch comes in, he pulls away like a cat, throwing his chin up in the air just to rub in the fact that you missed him.

He doesn’t penetrate you with his eyes. The best fighters will do that. They’ll stare you scared. You stand with Ali in the ring and his eyes look at you and look right past you. They’re glassy. They’re not so much the eyes of a man deep in thought. You don’t have time to do much thinking in the ring. They’re the eyes of a machine, a machine with a very precise movement, a machine whose body and feet work from the head, but whose hands work off of some sixth sense. Nobody’s mind could ever be as fast as that man’s hands. You can’t anticipate them. They move so quickly, you never see the punch. There’s no time for your eyes to send a message to your brain that you’re going to get hit and that you should move out of the way. It’s not so much the strength behind the punch that gets you, it’s the surprise that it came at all. And a quick punch you’re not prepared for will always hurt you more than a harder one you see coming and can roll with.

It was this kind of punch that got Sonny Liston in the second Liston-Ali fight. A lot of people watched that punch over and over again on instant replay and swore that Liston must have taken a dive, that a punch like that couldn’t have knocked him out, that it just wasn’t strong enough. Half of that is true.

Through the years, Ali’s fighting genius has allowed him to control his fight better than any other fighter of recent memory. He had such control that he could pretty much pick the round he would put his opponent away. This became a very big part of the Ali pre-fight circus. The press always pushed him for a poetic prediction. “He’ll fall in five. And that’s no jive.” And those predictions came through at a rate that had to beat coincidence.

With ten wins behind him, Ali moved into 1962 with some fights against people you might have heard of. He came to New York to knock out Sonny Banks and Billy Daniels, both in the predicted round. He went to Los Angeles to knock out an aged Archie Moore, also in the right round. He came back to New York in 1963 to miss his first prediction in a very brutal battle with a highly respected Doug Jones. Ali won a decision and gained the respect of a lot of people who didn’t like the circus. He went on to London to knock out British heavyweight champ Henry Cooper, as predicted. Now there was only one champ left, the heavyweight champion of the world, Sonny Liston. But first Liston had to take care of the only man standing in Ali’s way, Floyd Patterson.

IT’S BEEN ALMOST ten years. Las Vegas, as it always is, was very hot in July of 1963. The weather was about the only thing that wouldn’t change in the next few months. Muhammad Ali was still Cassius Marcellus Clay. John Kennedy was still safely in the White House. And some 15,000 U.S. Army noncombatant “advisors” were in Vietnam.

Ali, still pretty fresh from his slaughter of Henry Cooper, manages to get as much ink out of the Liston-Patterson match as either of the participants. He invades a casino where Liston is playing blackjack and calls him an ugly bear and challenges him to fight it out right there. He drives the old red and white bus into Liston’s camp with big signs all over it: Bear Hunting Season. Liston Will Fall in Eight. Big Ugly Bear.

Ali offers to fight the winner. It’s an offer that Sonny Liston can’t refuse. He makes duck soup of Patterson and goes into training to take on this brash 21-year-old kid, hopefully to shut him up for good.

Ali’s trainer and manager is Angelo Dundee, who’s been in his corner from the first fight. Dundee, an old and wise fight man, says he was in awe of Ali when he first saw him fight.

“There was always something special about him,” Dundee says, “something you couldn’t learn in books. He learned from people instead. Every place we went he picked up something else. He never forgets a fight, he never forgets a punch. The guy’s not just a great fighter, he’s an unbelievable human being.”

Dundee has been the main man in Ali’s corner. He was the one who tried to calm Ali down from all the hysterics and get him concentrating on boxing. Dundee was one of the few people who believed Ali could really beat Liston.

There were two other men always present in Ali’s corner in preparation for the Liston fight. One was Drew “Bundini” Brown, a well-traveled saloon-keeper who talked almost as much as Ali. Bundini’s title was assistant trainer, but he was really resident guru.

The third man you normally wouldn’t expect to see around a boxer. He was a lean black man with glasses and a very pensive look about him. He was an ex-hood, dope peddler and pimp who had worked his way up to become a chief spokesman for the new black consciousness in Harlem. He had been shown the light by the teachings of one Elijah Muhammad. His real name was Malcolm Little. On the streets of Harlem he was known as “Big Red.” To the rest of the world, he was Malcolm X.

THE LISTON-ALI FIGHT was set for February 25, 1964, in Miami. The weigh-in was the usual All circus. Ali was running around bragging, “I float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.” When Liston showed up, Ali begged Bundini to let him go, to let him fight right there. “You’re too ugly,” he yelled. “You’re not the champ, you’re the chump!” Ali got so worked up, the fight was almost called off. His normal pulse rate is 54 beats a minute. The fight physician clocked him at 120. “Clay is nervous and scared to death and he is burning a lot of energy,” the doctor said. The papers picked it right up and threw it into head­lines: “Clay Scared.”

“Scared, hell,” Angelo Dundee protested. “With that kind of fear, I’d face a cage of lions. Liston was the scared one. He was so shook up he didn’t know what to make of the kid.”

The fight went on. There were people who thought the kid would be killed. After the first round, there was wild cheering at closed-circuit theaters all over the country. It wasn’t so much that Ali had won the round, it was just that he had made it through at all.

All kept dancing, moving, sliding in left hooks, sliding out of trouble. He was super-confident. He was cocky. The left kept coming. The right crossed over and hit Liston’s head. Liston began to become unglued. Like the big ugly bear Ali had called him, he rushed the kid heavily, trying to bully him down. Ali just danced away. By the middle of the third round Ali was in command. Liston could see the end coming. At the end of the seventh round, Liston sat down in his corner and didn’t come out again. He said he had hurt his shoulder and couldn’t continue. The truth was, according to his confidants, that Liston just plain gave up. He was an old and tired and beaten man. And the kid who had been yelling all these years that he was the greatest, finally was. Muhammad Ali, then Cassius Clay, was the heavyweight champion of the world.

After all the hoopla that went with it, Ali was driven from the arena to a black motel in Miami where he sat and ate vanilla ice cream from a dish and hammed it up for the tall man in the glasses who was taking pictures with a 35mm Japanese camera. The man was Malcolm X.

Around 8 o’clock the next morning, the two of them had breakfast together at the motel. They talked about Elijah Muhammad, the top Black Muslim leader. Malcolm said that Elijah and his god, Allah, had been rooting for Ali.

“Clay is the finest Negro athlete I have ever known,” Malcolm X said, “the man who will mean more to his people than any athlete before him. He is more than Jackie Robinson was, because Robinson is the white man’s hero. But Cassius is the black man’s hero. Do you know why? Because the white press wanted him to lose. They wanted him to lose because he is a Muslim. You notice nobody cares about the religion of other athletes. But their prejudice against Clay blinded them to his ability.”

It was the first real public mention of Ali’s Muslim leaning. The day became filled with a lot of questions from the press, almost none of them about the fight. Ali had said some pro-Muslim things in the few years that pre­ceded, but this was the first time he publicly identified himself with the Muslims.

“I am not a black Muslim,” he said, “because that is a word made up by the white press. I am a black man who has adopted Islam. I want peace, and I do not find peace in an integrated world. I love to be black, and I love to be with my people. I am a very intelligent boxer, you know, and people don’t ask me about my muscles the way they would ask Liston or Patterson. They ask me about Zanzi­bar and Panama and Cuba, and I tell them what I think.”

All told reporters that Allah was in the ring with him against Sonny Liston, that he prayed to Allah five times a day, including once in his dressing room shower before the fight. He did, however, draw the line at subscribing to certain things associated with the Muslim movement. He said he did not hate the white man “because I would be nowhere today without the white man’s money.”

Ali had met Malcolm, who was not much of a fight fan, at a Detroit mosque a few years before. Ali was there with his younger brother Rudy, who was somewhat of a fighter but more of a Muslim. Malcolm had seen the Liston fight as a way to prove to the world the superiority of Islam over a white Christianity that had brainwashed the black community into accepting inferior status. Ali, fighting against another black man, had become the Great Black Hope.

Ali also announced to the press that day after the fight that he was giving up his “slave name.” From now on he would be known as Cassius X. The name didn’t last long, as Elijah Muhammad bestowed on him his new Islamic name. And Cassius X became Muhammad Ali.

THE EXTENT OF Ali’s tie-ins with the Muslims has been his best-kept secret. You ask him about the Muslims and he goes into one of his rehearsed lectures (he’s got 75 of them) . He starts throwing parables at you about wise men and fools. He says that Elijah Muhammad has come from God to teach us all a truth that has been hidden for 400 years. He says he is a Muslim minister. That’s when all his troubles with the draft started.

All of that is dogma. There is a very definite, if not sinister, relationship between Ali and Elijah Muhammad’s Muslims. There is good reason to believe that Elijah and his messengers have called the shots for Ali for the past ten years. There is certainly a financial tie-in.

Suddenly, Ali got a new manager. He is Herbert Mu­hammad, son of Elijah. And Herbert Muhammad’s cut of Ali’s purse is 50%. It’s strange, the Muslims never did dabble in sports. Elijah Muhammad doesn’t like them. But when Ali made the nine successful defenses of his heavyweight title, Elijah was right up there with him, in spirit anyway. Those fights paid a lot of money. But when Ali lost his title and his boxing license over his Muslim-supported avoidance of the draft, the love affair seemed to cool off.

Ali made most of his pocket money during that period from the lecture and talk show circuit while other people, certainly not the Muslims, tried to arrange for him to box again. Some three years later, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor and Ali was given back his li­cense, Elijah Muhammad suspended him, saying fighting wasn’t a fit thing for a Muslim to do. To this day, he’s still technically “suspended.” But his relationship with Elijah is still good.

This is the same Elijah Muhammad who suspended Malcolm X after his infamous “chickens come home to roost” comment on John Kennedy’s assassination. Malcolm then started his own faction of the Muslims and Ali turned his back on Malcolm and stuck with Elijah Mu­hammad. To this day, the whole situation is very em­barrassing to Ali, who quite probably didn’t have much of a choice when it came to the Elijah-Malcolm split. Malcolm X, of course, was killed shortly thereafter in a seeming assassination by members of the rival Muslim sect.

Through it all, even his own suspension, Muhammad Ali remained spiritually and financially faithful to Elijah Muhammad. There is no telling why and Ali won’t say. People who know Ali well say he has always been easily manipulated. But no one is quite sure how deeply he’s into this whole thing. At least no one is willing to talk about the Muslim’s hold on him.

Other top black athletes have been lured by the Muslims since Ali. One of them is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the former Lew Alcindor, the basketball player. Recently, a house he owns in Washington was the scene of seven slaughters in what seemed like another Muslim factional dispute. A witness to the massacre said one of the killers fleeing the scene yelled back, “Don’t mess with Elijah.”

There are people around who still insist that poor Sonny Liston was intimidated by the Black Muslims into dumping two fights to Ali. Meanwhile, Ali is playing the whole thing as coolly as he can. And evidently he is playing it right, because he is still alive and well and living in Cherry Hill.

ALI’S BEEN LIVING in the area for most of his exile, right on through his return to the ring. The man most re­sponsible for bringing him here is Major Benjamin Coxson, who is the furthest thing you could find from a Black Muslim. Coxson is a colorful local black businessman. No one is quite sure just what business it is he’s in, but he’s doing very well at it, when he isn’t in trouble with the law. Coxson is now in the process of running for mayor of Camden, something he considers a necessary step on the road to the governorship. Coxson says he is running on his record. “Most poli­ticians end up in jail anyway,” he says, “so I’ve got a head start.”

Coxson met Ali somewhere around 1968, when Ali couldn’t get a fight. “I wanted to see if I could take on the challenge of getting him a fight,” the Major says. “I called every governor in the country. I got a lot of bullshit. I figured I’d go down south. At least I’d get a straight answer. I contacted John Williams, the governor of Mississippi. He had one arm. He didn’t know if I was black or white. I went down there with Gene Kilroy. Gene is white. He was selling telephones in briefcases. He sold one to me and I later got him a job with Ali.

“Well, we went down to Mississippi and we got into the governor’s office because they thought Gene was me. Anyway, we set up a fight and came back to Philadelphia and called a press conference at the Bellevue to announce it. But the U.S. government stepped in and said if Mississippi let the fight go on, they’d withdraw all their funds. So that killed that.” It didn’t quite happen that way, but the Major has al­ways been good at embellishing stories.

Coxson met Ali driving one of his fleet of fancy cars down 52nd Street when Coxson was still living in Philadelphia. There was a lot of hell being raised by the Black Coalition, led by Jeremiah X, a minister and former classmate of Coxson’s at Ben Franklin High. Ali saw Coxson’s car and told him he admired it. Coxson invited him out to his house at 72nd and City Avenue to see the rest of the collection.

“I had the proper things,” Coxson says. “You just can’t overlook them. We saw more of each other. We’ve become closer than friends. We’re like brothers now.”

It wasn’t only Coxson’s cars that Ali admired. He ended up buying his house. It’s not every house that has carpets and chandeliers in the garage. Coxson, who had demonstrated his dexterity with money matters, became somewhat of an advisor for Ali.

“When he was getting ready to fight Frazier,” the Major says, “I saw where the City of Philadelphia was going to take 90-some thousand dollars in city wage tax off his purse because he lived in Philadelphia. So I saw a way to move him to New Jersey to beat the City out of their money.

“I was just finishing up a house in Cherry Hill and it was perfect for him. He’s such an unbelievable man. I should be Muhammad Ali for a week. There’s nothing he couldn’t do or nothing he couldn’t be if he made his mind up about it. And he’s such a good-natured guy, you’ve got to watch out for him. A lot of people will show him things and think he’ll go along.”

Is he that easily manipulated?

“No,” Coxson says. “I said he was good-natured. I didn’t say he was an idiot.”

THE COXSON-ALI fondness is mu­tual. Ali kiddingly refers to Coxson as “the gangster.” At least I think he’s kidding. “The Major made me move to Philadelphia,” Ali says. “At least his house did. I bought the place with money I made from college lectures and TV appearances. And I was really getting set never to fight again. So this was a nice home, nice neighborhood, prosperous-looking, to reside in for­ever.

“Philadelphia was a good town. I wanted to get out of Chicago because I was in New York twice a week and I found myself living in airplanes, which I hate. New York was too busy. And Newark and Trenton, I looked in those places but there was nothing I liked. So I stayed with Philly.

“But after I started to fight again, the house got small. We had another child or two. So then the Major showed me another house, this big, beautiful Spanish hacienda. I went and looked at it and didn’t like it because I figured it was too far from Philly. I like to live around people and everything. But I got to start hanging around with the Major a lot over there—he lives down the block—and I got to like the peace and serenity of it, being away from the people.

“The house needed a lot of work done to it, so I put another $150,000 into it. Plus I paid $115,000. And I made a little mansion out of it. I’ve got a lot of land. There’s an acre-and‑a-half around it. And now I’ve got that house up for sale.

“We’re working on another deal. Still around Cherry Hill. A 65-acre farm with a house on it, horses, barns and everything. My wife Belinda likes horses and I’d like to have a couple of milk cows. A little garden for my­self, maybe. Probably grow cabbage, corn, string beans, tomatoes. Just a hobby like. Maybe the Major’ll teach me how to grow money.

“The Major’s some man, I tell you. I get on Johnny Carson and talk about him. I tell Howard Cosell about him after my fights. My telephone! Gene, where’s my telephone? Let me show you something else the Major got me for nothing.”

Gene Kilroy brings over one of his briefcase telephones. Ali opens it up like a kid unwrapping a Christmas present. He starts pushing some buttons and yelling, “Mobile operator! Mobile operator!”

“You can be in your car or just walking around and you can talk to anybody in the world. Major Coxson. I run into him, he had one, he got me one. He’s somethin’.”

ALI HAS TURNED OUT TO be a pretty good transplanted Philadelphian. At least he’s tried to get involved in some local things. When there were serious racial problems in South Philadelphia’s Tasker Homes a couple years back, Ali went down there with the Major and Stanley Branche to try to calm things down. He thought that as a hero to the young, he could talk some sense into them. It was the first real knockout of Ali.

The kids saw him come down there in a fancy car. They figured he must have been doing the whole thing for the publicity. They got very mad about it. There were a lot of bad words thrown at Muhammad Ali. The last were, “Get out of here, you white nigger.”

All left. He was very hurt. He was, after all, the champion of the people. And these were the people. Ali was not out for publicity. Inside, he is really too shy to know how to play that publicity right. He continues do­ing things around Philadelphia, things you never hear of because Ali doesn’t call press conferences and go shooting his mouth off about them.

He’ll spend hours in a Shriners’ hospital talking with the kids in the wards. One day he got into training camp late because he heard a thing on the news about this little kid who had gotten his legs cut off by a train. He went to the hospital, unannounced, and held the kid in his arms and started dancing around. “This,” he said, “is the Ali shuffle. And one day you’re gonna be doing it yourself.”

The three-year layoff gave Ali a lot of time for this sort of thing. He had scored in the 16th percentile in his pre-induction written test for the Army. He says the questions were too tough.

“A vendor was selling apples for $10 a basket. How much would you pay for a dozen bas­kets if one-third of the apples have been removed from the basket?” “(a)$10 (b)$30 (c)$40 (d)$80″

“I didn’t learn none of that stuff in school,” Ali says. “I was a fighter, not a mathematician. I just looked at those questions and I didn’t even know where to start.”

The Army decided to give him a break. A month later they called him back for another test. The results were the same. So when Muhammad wouldn’t come to the Army, the Army went to Muhammad. They lowered their standards. All of a sudden, the 16th percentile was made the passing grade.

Ali refused to go, citing his new­found status as a Muslim preacher and the Islamic teachings against war. “Anyway,” he said, “I ain’t got no quarrels with the Viet Congs.”

His draft resistance cost him his title and his right to fight. He had taken the hard way out. There was no way Muhammad Ali would have ever seen combat. The Army would have done with him what they did with another heavyweight champ, Joe Louis. They would have hired a special plane to take him around to different bases to put on exhibitions for the guys. They’d ask him to tell a few stories, throw a few punches and leave. He would have been a black Bob Hope. It became a matter of princi­ples. Ali kept his principles but lost the fight.

IN THE YEARS of the layoff, the bottom almost fell out. There’s a story around about a plumber who had done a job at Ali’s house in Philadelphia. One day the plumber came knocking at the door holding Ali’s check in his fist. The check had bounced. “I’m sorry,” Ali told him, “that’s the way it is. I have no money.”

Whatever money he did have over those years was drawn from personal appearances. “I spent a lot of time on the Johnny Carson show,” he says. “I hated every minute of it. What a bunch of bullshit. All that kissin’ and laughin’. All them actresses with the funny accents talkin’ about their poodles.”

All even tried his mouth at the Broadway stage. He starred in a play called Big Time Buck White. It lasted seven performances before closing.

And then finally, in 1970, just when everybody was counting him out, he won his case against the Army. His boxing license was restored. There was immediately talk of the fight of the century, an undefeated Ali against the then-undefeated champ Joe Frazier. Frazier was in no hurry for such a fight. But Ali hounded him.

Both Ali and Frazier were doing their training in Philadelphia. And both were doing some running in Fairmount Park. One day they almost ran into each other. Ali threw up his fists and started making like he wanted to fight it out right there.

“You really think you can whup me?” Ali asked.

“I’ll whup Mamma if she try to take my title,” Frazier said.

“I think you mean that, Frazier.” “You doggone right I do.”

“Well, let’s get it on right here.” Ali put up his fists and started flicking his left. Frazier got unnerved. That’s just what Ali wanted.

“Not here,” Frazier said, “not in private. You show up at the PAL gym and we’ll see who the real champ is.”

Ali showed up. So did 1,000 fans and the police. The police suggested they take it outside, back to Fairmount Park. By now the crowd had doubled. Ali had a pretty good audience.

“He wants to show he can whup me,” Ali shouted. “He says he’s the champ. Let him prove it here in the ghetto where the colored folks can see it.”

Frazier never showed. Ali seemed very mad.

“Here I am,” he yelled. “I haven’t had a fight in three years, I’m 25 pounds overweight, and Joe Frazier won’t show up. What kind of a champ can he be?”

In the months that followed, Ali would find that out. But first he had a couple of warmups to fight against some pretty fair fighters, Jerry Quarry and Oscar Bonavena. Quarry went easily. Bonavena lasted 15 rounds. It was a good test for Ali. Many people were amazed that after a three-year layoff he could come back that strongly. The really amazing thing, though, is that he came back at all.

His fights became spectacles again, full of stars and cars and fancy clothes. The champ was back and so were all of the Beautiful People. Everything was like it was before. Now all he had to do was beat Joe Frazier.

Cus D’Amato, a legendary fight manager who’s been seen around the Ali camp more and more since the comeback, summed it all up. “Boxing,” he said, “isn’t a sport of skill. It’s a sport of will. Joe Frazier can punch good. He can come hard. But he’s dumb. He’s got the skill, but not the will. Eventually he’s just going to give up. Ali’s got skill and will, but mostly will. It’s just a matter of who wants to win the most and that’s Ali. I’m telling you, there’s going to come a time when Frazier’s just going to give it up.”

D’Amato was prophetic, only not for this fight. The Ali-Frazier fight was the biggest money match in his­tory, each fighter guaranteed $2.5 mil­lion. It was a meeting of undefeated champions. It would answer the question everyone had been asking for years: Did Ali still have it in him?

The answer was yes. Except on that night in Madison Square Garden, he didn’t have quite enough. A more conditioned Frazier wore him down. By the late rounds, Ali’s legs started to give out. He was just plain tired. And that’s where he lost the fight, in those late rounds. On most people’s scorecards it was a very close fight. There are those who say that Ali won. Unfortunately, none of them were judges for the fight.

Frazier, still the champ, went into the hospital right after the fight. He won but he had paid for it. No one was saying just what was wrong with Frazier. There was some talk of a blood circulation problem caused by Ali’s punches. Was Frazier really all right? The answer wasn’t to come until almost two years later.

MEANWHILE, Ali went back to camp, having to face still another comeback. This time things were a little different. Somehow the beauti­ful people were gone. And all those stories about Ali that kept popping up just about stopped. He was over 30 and, some people thought, over the hill. Right before the Frazier fight, there had been 600 newsmen hounding Ali for interviews. Now, in the deserted pines of his Deer Lake training camp, Ali was alone. He missed the people and he missed the publicity. The idea to start this story came from Ali’s camp. It was the first time, as far as anybody knows, that Muhammad Ali had to ask for a story to be written about him.

The phone call came from Gene Kilroy, the Major’s old friend. “Listen,” Kilroy said, “Muhammad was just looking at this story you did on this hockey player who’s making all that money. You put that guy on the cover. Muhammad wants to be on the cover too. Hell, he makes more in one fight than that guy’ll make in ten years. Come on up, Muhammad wants to see you.”

Ali was happy to see anybody. We sat in his trailer and talked a lot. He did most of the talking. It was getting very late and I started to leave to go back to the motel. I told him we’d have plenty of time to talk the next day. I was afraid of wearing out my welcome. “Stay where you are,” Ali said. “I’ve got no place to go.”

We sat in the trailer and watched a videotape of the Frazier fight. Ali must have seen it a dozen times. It’s almost like he’s hoping the ending will turn out differently. He moves with the punches. He yells encouragement to himself, as if the little man on the screen were somebody else. We watch all 15 rounds. There is a lot of hollering, a lot of second-guessing. And at the end they announce the winner. It is still Joe Frazier.

All the while, Rahaman Ali, the former Rudy Clay, the kid brother, is sitting at the kitchen table eating bean soup. I have quickly grown to dislike Rudy. It all started when I was introduced to him. I extended my hand. Rudy just stared at it and then looked up at me and said, “I’m sorry, I’m eating. It’s unsanitary to shake hands while you’re eating.”

Rudy is the red-hot Muslim. He got into it more quickly and more deeply than his brother and, some people sus­pect, probably pulled Muhammad down with him. Rudy is much more militant, though. For one thing, he hates white people.

Rudy keeps coming on strong. Muhammad tries to shut him up. Finally he just pulls me outside. “You’ve got to come look at my new bus,” Ali says, taking me around back to see his latest toy. “Just look at this,” he beams, “it’s got toilets and a bedroom and everything. I even drive it sometimes. What do you think?”

“I think maybe I’ll give up writing and become heavyweight champ,” I tell him.

“My man,” he says, slapping me on the back, “you be the fighter and I be the writer.”

I’ve made a friend. We make plans to meet early the next day. “You know,” he says, “most of the guys who come up here to interview me, they don’t really want to hear what I have to say. They just want to have their picture taken with me or get in the ring and spar a little bit so they can tell their friends they fought the champ. But you don’t want to do that, do you?”

“No,” I say, lying.

“You’re all right,” he says, slapping me on the back again. “You’re not as dumb as you look.”

WE GO TO THE GYM the next morning to set up some pictures. Ali puts on his best pair of boxing trunks. His belly is hanging over the waistband a little. He knows he’s not in the best of shape. You can see it the most from the back. That once beautifully formed back is just so much jelly now.

Elizabeth Richter, who’s taking the pictures, asks him to climb into the ring. He climbs in and leans on the ropes. Gene Kilroy comes over to Elizabeth and whispers. “Try not to shoot from that angle,” he says, grabbing the fat around his own waist. “You’re getting too much of his roll.”

The formal pictures over, Ali starts his workout. He toys with the speed bag and then goes over to the heavy bag, making believe it’s Joe Frazier. Every punch has a sound. “FFFFTT. FFFFTT, FFFFTT, FFFFTT.” He pushes the sounds through his clenched teeth. The 100-pound bag is moving. The punches come long, from an 82-inch reach. And then he moves in for some close work, keeping his hands in on his 42-inch chest, his head bobbing around his 17-inch neck. At 6’3″, he’s almost punching down.

When he’s finished on the bag, he picks up a jump rope and starts skipping in front of a large mirror. On one side of the mirror is a blowup of him when he was 12 years old, a lanky kid in boxing gloves. On the other side is a cardboard poster announcing the Frazier fight that is now history. Ali stares straight into the mirror. Even with the added weight, even with the flabbing of some muscles, the loss of a little speed, he is still a handsome specimen of a man. He really hasn’t lost that much. But in boxing, just a little bit is often too much.

All moves to the ring with the red, white and blue ropes. He spars a few rounds with three different guys. Ray Anderson is a defector from Frazier’s camp. He knows Frazier better than anybody. Eddie “Bossman” Jones is shorter and stockier, built more like Frazier. Ali just does a little dancing around with the two of them. Throwing very few punches. Ali doesn’t like to punch when he’s sparring. He likes to be punched. That was his problem against Frazier. He didn’t have much trouble landing punches. He never does. But he got worn down by the punches he took. If he’s going to come back, he’s got to get used to the punishment.

The last man in with him is Billy Daniels. Billy Daniels was once a promising heavyweight. On the night of May 19th, 1962, Muhammad Ali knocked him cold. Daniels was never the same. He is here at camp because he needs a payday. Ali will give him $1,000 for two weeks work. Daniels is a pathetic sight in the ring. He can hardly get his punches off. Ali tries to make him look good. He drops his hands and invites Daniels to lay one on him. Daniels comes through with a shot that couldn’t have rung a bell. Ali goes into one of his better acts, making like the punch dazed him and dropping to the canvas for the count. He gets up laughing.

“Ain’t nobody gonna hurt me,” he says, “I’m too pretty.”

The workout is over. He showers and goes back to the trailer to rest. He leans back and sips some freshly squeezed juice.

“See,” he says, “you gotta be black to appreciate just how pretty I am. The people all know that. Look at my skin. Look at how nice and bronze it is. Not Frazier. Frazier is real dark, real black. He’s just an ugly nigger. His face is all cut up. Me, I’m too pretty. I never been cut, ever.”

ALICOULDN’T SAY that for long. Two weeks later he was in Stateline, Nevada, knocking the hell out of light-heavyweight champ Bob Foster. Ali commanded the fight. It seemed like he could have easily put Foster away early, but he toyed with him. Foster was on an elevator, up and down through the whole fight. Ali waited until the eighth round to put him away. The fight was costly, if nothing else, to Ali’s pride. He got cut. He came out of it with a two-inch slice at the corner of his left eye.

“He got that cut because he played around too much,” Bundini Brown said. “He just can’t play around with important things. The man has got to stop that.”

Why did Ali play around so much? Why did he carry Foster so long? The answer might have come two weeks before in the trailer at Deer Lake.

“Now I’m gonna fight Bobby Foster,” he said. “He must fall in eight! I’m predicting. He’s goin’ in eight! People like that. You’d be surprised at the excitement and drama. Now I’ll try to do it. If I don’t do it, I don’t. But I’m gonna try. But, see, that’s not me. I got over that. But you got to please a lot of people because that’s what they pay to see.

“Gorgeous George was a wrassler. He entertained them. ‘I’m pretty.’ He knew what they wanted. ‘I can’t lose.’ And he got everybody going his way. Now who’s the fool? Them. He’s the wise one. He’s leading the whole world. He knows just what to take, just what to give.

“And I know what I’m doing. I have a goal. And I’m determined. I’ve drunk the wine of success. The government can take away my title. And they did. Jail was right on me. The money was gone. I couldn’t fight no real fights. No commissions. Couldn’t box exhibitions. I still didn’t give up, man. I’ve been too successful.

“From 12 years old, I’ve been the U.S. Golden Gloves champ twice, world AAU champ, Olympic champ, Pan American. I don’t know failure. And they said, ‘You can’t fight.’ And I said I’m not worried about it. And Ijust kept going. I knew something was gonna happen. Wise men know all. And that’s me.

“Did you know the wisest men in history were illiterates? Men like Jesus, Moses, Lot and Noah. They were illiterates. Now why did God come to Moses, who couldn’t read or write? Why did God come to Moses, who couldn’t even talk? Aaron had to talk for him. Check history.

“Who is Elijah Muhammad? How is he converting whores and faggots and sissies? Buying airplanes and fac­tories and uniting black people. Teaching them the language, the culture. Who is Elijah Muhammad? He’s never been to school.

“See, who is Muhammad Ali? I barely got out of school in Louisville. It’s on the record that they put me out because I was gonna ^•be the Olympic champion. I can’t read and write now.

“Then where is this stuff coming from that I challenge anybody to match with his wisdom? It didn’t come from no libraries. It didn’t come from no schools.

“Now people say I done a lot of things besides boxing. Stood up to the draft and all. Helped kids in hospitals. I don’t boast about that. Wise men never boast. You never forget where you came from. The house I was raised in cost $4,000. I got a motor scooter that took me all through school, all through my amateur career. That motor scooter cost $35 and we never had enough money to pay for it.

“I never bought mink coats or drove around in limousines with chauf­feurs because I remember who I was. I remember my people. I only have one suit now. I can afford to buy the store. But the greatest men in history were humble.

“If Jesus came to town tonight, he wouldn’t be staying at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. He’d be up in Harlem somewhere trying to get somebody off drugs. Wise men are humble. They don’t boast. Elijah Muhammad told me that. Never forget where you came from.”

MUHAMMAD ALI has never forgotten where he came from. Now he’s trying to figure out where he’s going. Up until a few weeks ago that wasn’t so hard to figure out. He was going to fight Joe Frazier for the title again and earn a $3 million guarantee. That was until Joe Frazier blew it.

Looking like the Goodyear blimp, Frazier went to Jamaica to defend his title against another former Olympic champion, George Foreman. Not since Ali’s second knockout of Sonny Liston has a top heavyweight looked so bad. Foreman all but killed him. Frazier was down six times in four-and-a-half minutes and they stopped the fight. Foreman was the new champ.

Ali didn’t go to the fight. He stayed in Deer Lake and sent Angelo Dundee with instructions: “Make sure nothin’ happens to Frazier.” Dundee was noticeably nervous before the fight. “Frazier loses and there’s no fight with Ali,” he said. “He’s throwing away millions. Believe me, the kid Foreman can punch. What’s Frazier trying to prove?”

Joe Frazier proved that even though he had beaten Ali, he couldn’t come back from the beating he suffered. Frazier looked finished. Back in Deer Lake, All was livid.

“Frazier was dumb, dumb, dumb,” he said. “Frazier is washed up. If he’d been smart, he’d have fought me again first to get the big money. But he didn’t want no parts of me after what I did to him in the first fight.

“George Foreman should pay me because I’m the one that beat Frazier down. He’s been hurt ever since. That’s why he’s been fighting no­bodies. Foreman was the first decent fighter he fought and Foreman beat him.”

What happens next? Well, you can bet George Foreman will duck Muhammad Ali as long as he can. Foreman is a flat-footed puncher. And Ali is a more classic boxer. On percentage, a boxer will always beat a puncher. But all Foreman has to do is stall. Ali gets older every day.

IT’S JUST ANOTHER MORNING in Deer Lake. The orange sun crawls up over the hills and burns off the deep purple haze. Down the dirt roads that surround Pollack’s Mink Farm, Ali is running alone. Three miles with the wind in his face. He is trying to keep in shape. For what, now he is not quite sure. But he is running. He doesn’t talk. He shows no emotion, no fatigue. He is a machine. He finishes his three miles and stops next to a big rock in the grass and takes a few swings at his shadow. He stops and lifts up the waistband of his plastic sweatshirt. Four pounds of water fall out and splash the ground. He sits down on the rock to rest.

“I don’t need no world championship,” he says. “Everybody knows I’m the number one attraction in the world. I’m the champion of the people. You go into the ghettos and ask them who the champ is. You go anyplace in the world and ask them who the champ is. They’ll tell you Muhammad Ali. It don’t matter what happens anymore. I’m still the champ.”

He sat there alone on the rock. There was nobody there to hear him. He walked up to the highway, Route 61, where the cars were going by at 60 miles an hour. “You hear that,” he shouted, “I am the champ! I am the greatest!” Nobody even slowed down. His face got mean. “Can’t you fools hear me?” he yelled.

By Maury Z. Levy

IT WAS RAINING NOW. It was Monday morning and the thick gray air was chilly and damp and it was raining now. The skies had been holding it in for a week and now they had 
burst open to soak the streets and break the promise of 
an early summer. People walked along quickly under black umbrellas with their collars up and their faces down and 
automobiles with snow tires still on made a whirring sound as they moved up Susquehanna Avenue, heading 
for the Mansion and the Park, never stopping.

For a week, it had been summer again. For a week, the 
kids with bandanas around their heads roamed the streets in shirtsleeves, while men stood together on corners and 
drank the contents of brown paper bags and women in 
housedresses pushed strollers up and down 17th Street looking for bargains.

For a week, the desperation of North Philadelphia was no longer quiet. For one great week of Indian spring North Philadelphia was alive and ticking with anticipation of the warmth ahead and some memories of some heat behind.

But the Monday morning rain put things back to normal. It was trash day and the beginning of another week.

The flat-red pushcart of the 15th Street Junk Shop 
made its way up French Street toward 17th. The man behind it was old and black and he was wearing a dark 
plastic raincoat with the hood up over his head and the drawstring knotted around his chin so that all that could 
be seen were the slits of eyes that stalked the curbside cans for salvage.

He pushed his way between the cars parked on one  side of the narrow street of ancient brownstones. It was the side of the street with the signs that read “NO PARKING 
MONDAY 7 AM TO 7 PM-PARK OTHER SIDE.” It was 7:20 
a.m. and French Street was asleep.

Bucking traffic, he turned right on 17th and pushed past 
the cozy old James L. Claghorn Elementary School. The rain made the gray 84-year-old building wetgray.

Claghorn takes up less than a third of the block. It is 
surrounded by a big black iron fence that comes to within a few feet of the tiny building. Pressing against one side 
of the fence—in what is supposed to be a schoolyard—is a black iron pole that holds a slightly bent basketball 
backboard. There isn’t even enough room in the yard for a half-court game and even less room to hang the blame, because back in 1884 outdoor sports were not exactly national pastimes.

Claghorn sticks out—an ancient school in a procession of old stores. The building was supposed to be torn down 
back in 1944, when it had reached its 60th birthday, but 
that was a war year and people had more important 
things to do than break up little old schools. Somehow it 
never got back on the demolition list and so for the past 
24 years Claghorn has been living on borrowed time.

Across the street from Claghorn is a luncheonette, the 
hub of what little activity there is at 7:30 on a Monday 
morning. There is a bus stop on the corner there and a 
handful of people were huddled in the doorway of the 
luncheonette to avoid the downpour and wait for their 
bus.

It was 7:40 now and the bus hadn’t come yet and the 
doorway was filled to capacity. As they craned their necks 
to watch for the bus, none of the people in the doorway 
seemed to take notice of the scattering of kids who 
made their way down 17th Street toward Claghorn, 
soggy brown lunch bags firmly in hand.

It was 7:40 and classes at Claghorn, like most other 
schools in the city, don’t start until 9 o’clock. But these 
kids weren’t getting there an hour and twenty minutes 
ahead of time because they wanted to shoot up some 
baskets in their schoolyard.

In fact, it isn’t even their schoolyard. For these kids, 
Claghorn is nothing more than a bus terminal. Their real 
school is Gilbert Spruance Elementary School, which is 
located a mere 9-mile bus ride away at Levick and Horrocks Streets, which, for the information of anyone not 
completely familiar with the territory, is located in Oxford 
Circle.

The bus leaves Claghorn at 8:05 on the nose. It’s been 
leaving at 8:05 for three years now, ever since some guys 
down at 21st and the Parkway decided that to relieve over­
crowding and to help integration, it would be nice to 
take a bunch of black kids and plop them on a bus every morning and give them a joyride from their ancient elementary school in the North Philly slums to a sparkling 
physical plant in the heart of the bustling, lily-white Northeast.

And so the kids came, unheralded and unescorted on 
this dripping Monday, to catch the 8:05 for Fun Circle.

They came and gathered in clusters, some in the foyer 
of the school, others in the green, wood-soaked doorway 
of a boarded-up grocery store on the corner of 17th and 
French. The store, like many others in the neighborhood, 
used to belong to a Jewish couple back in the days when 
nearby Strawberry Mansion was Jewish turf. But the 
Jews are gone now, gone for the greenfields of the Northeast. There are no Jewish kids on the 8:05.

AT FIVE OF EIGHT, the bright orange school bus makes a 
right on Broad Street at Susquehanna and sways its way, 
like a giant metal mule, up to 17th Street.

The driver stops the bus at the side of Claghorn and 
while the kids file out into the rain he mechanically wipes 
the fog off the windows, methodically pulls the lever that 
opens the door that lets the kids get out of the rain and 
onto the bus, and sinks back into his seat as he opens up the 
morning paper.

The kids file onto the bus quiet and orderly, each to 
his assigned seat, each barely acknowledging the matron, 
who stands sternly at the front and stares straight ahead 
with the poise of a Nazi submarine captain scanning his 
periscope.

She runs a tight bus.

BUS REGULATIONS: ENTER AND LEAVE BUS IN 
ORDERLY MANNER. BE QUIET-NO LOUD TALKING 
OR SINGING. REMAIN IN YOUR SEATS UNTIL BUS 
STOPS. KEEP ARMS, HANDS AND HEAD INSIDE BUS. KEEP BUS CLEAN. NO EATING PERMITTED.

The rules are tight, and after a two-day weekend back 
home, the kids are pretty much uptight. They are facing 
the prospect of a new week and another five days on 
the 8:05.

They come with their spitdown hair and spitdown manners and they sit and they stare straight ahead, never looking out. There is really nothing to look out on. No mothers there for a warm send-off, no fathers in parked 
cars waiting for them to leave. The kids range in age 
from seven to twelve and they are old enough to take care of themselves. If not, they’ll learn soon enough. They have to.

On a full day, there are 55 of them. A hundred and ten eyes staring straight ahead at the bus regulations sign. Many of them can’t read it, but they all know what
it says. They aren’t allowed to forget. The matron makes 
sure of that.

She is a big, black, unsmiling overseer who is paid by 
the Board of Education to make sure that the kids don’t forget what the sign says. She sits in her command seat, the first one by the door, eyes trained on her underlings.

And the kids sit passively. Today, most of them are 
wearing their winter wrappings again. Last week it was 
warm and they came in short sleeves and cotton dresses. But now the damp chill of early spring was back and so 
were their winter clothes. A mother named Nature had 
given them four seasons every year, but many of their 
own mothers just can’t afford the luxury. So it’s either hot 
or it’s cold and today it was cold.

The matron is wearing a black spring raincoat and the 
bus driver is wearing a bus driver’s suit with the hat 
cocked back on his head.

The bus driver is short and on rare occasions he speaks. 
He is paid to drive the bus, not to keep order. That’s what 
the matron is there for. But somewhere along the way, 
somebody must have reminded him that he is white and 
that everyone behind him is black and that it would be 
nice if he would try to make his bus a nice place to live.

And so he comes up with such gems as, “We’re gonna be 
good little girls and boys, aren’t we?” Most of the time, 
intentionally or not, he is talking to himself.

The matron is not so subtle.

“Siddown and shuddup, Eugene,” she shoots at an older kid in the next-to-last seat who is standing and talking 
and wearing a heavy brown coat and a sheepish grin.

IT IS 8:04 NOW and the bus driver is reaching for his 
gearshift as he spots a thin figure running down the 
patent leather street, directly at him. He opens the door 
again and a woman leaps onto the first step. She is young and wet and worried. Her large pleading eyes meet those 
of the matron just a few inches away. The matron stares back at her with immovable pellets. Nothing had been 
said, but the conversation was already over.

“Won’t you let Cal ride?” the young woman begs.

“He can’t,” the matron starts almost before the question 
is finished. “He blocks up the aisle. He won’t behave. He 
carries on.”

The matron clicks her heels under her seat and turns her back, spitting another “siddown” to the kids in the back.

“Steven, get in your seat,” she orders. Steven, wearing 
the remains of an oversized yellow canvas raincoat, settles 
onto the edge of his seat and stares impassively through 
the hazy windows and the driving rain at Claghorn.

8:05 and the bus starts to roll. Steven half turns in his 
seat and his eyes follow Cal’s mother back into the rain.

“Steven, turn around.”

The ride takes 25 minutes. It always takes 25 minutes. 
The bus driver takes the side streets, the back streets, the 
front streets, anything he needs to speed him up or slow 
him down to make sure that the ride takes exactly 25 
minutes.

The bus grunts its way down 17th Street to funky, funky Diamond Street, where something called the Tanner Duckrey Elementary School is being pieced together. It is big 
and brick and new and one day it might even put the 
8:05 into retirement. The Duckrey School will relieve 
overcrowding and it will be all black. But right now it’s 
only another promise to the kids on the 8:05 as they zip 
past Duckrey, up Diamond to Broad.

It gets pretty stuffy in a big orange school bus when there are fifty-some kids with heavy coats and the windows are closed to keep out the rain. It gets pretty stuffy 
and the kids get pretty restless. Steven gets the word again as the bus weaves in and out of the Broad Street 
traffic. The matron now has her eyes fixed on the back 
of the bus because her instinct tells her that’s where 
today’s hotspot is.

As the bus passes under the fleeting darkness of a 
bridge near North Philly station, a little girl in the first seat behind the matron slips into her lunch bag and comes 
out with a handful of cheese twists. Her eyes point up to the matron in caution. The matron is staring at the back. The girl quickly clops her hand against her mouth and 
shoves all the cheese twists in at once. She looks again at 
the matron, who is still on a fixed focus to the rear, and 
madly starts to chomp away. Breakfast at last.

THE BUS HAS CUT ITS WAY through the mist and onto Roosevelt Boulevard, where the rain is little more than a 
moderate drizzle. The kids are quiet now, their eyes transfixed on the first real signs of another country. The houses 
are bigger and newer and the streets are wider. The bus 
takes the Oxford Circle underpass to Large Street, right past colonial Temple Shalom to Robbins Avenue and 
down the lumpy block to Horrocks.

Spruance is just a block away and the kids in the bus 
can look out to see some of their classmates walking to
school under brightly colored umbrellas. The kids under the umbrellas aren’t looking back.

It is not really an upsetting factor for anyone in Oxford Circle to see somebody with a black face riding a bus 
into their all-white bastion. It’s been going on for years on the PTC. The only differences this time are the ages 
of the riders, the color of the bus, and the fact that when 
they leave, they don’t collect ten bucks and carfare.

Oxford Circle, though, is changing. It used to be that 
when you spoke of Oxford Circle, you were talking of 
two things—both a geographic location and a way of life.

Physically, Oxford Circle is actually a triangle bounded
by Roosevelt Boulevard, Castor Avenue and Cottman 
Avenue. But since the mass migration to Oxford Circle, 
which began in the late ’40s and peaked in the early ’50s, 
the influence of the way of life far exceeded the geographic boundaries.

Unless you count noses, there is really no telling how 
many Jews there are in Oxford Circle. They came from 
Strawberry Mansion and South Philly to build a monolithic 
and prosperous Jewish community. And they managed to 
keep it this way for a good twenty years.

But now, Oxford Circle is starting to harden at its 
arteries. Its face is changing, most visibly by a nose job. 
Most of the generation of kids who moved in with their 
parents a couple decades ago have now grown up and gotten married and have gone to set up house in the 
farther reaches of the so-called Greater Northeast.

And left behind are parents with empty houses, many of 
whom end up following the same route as their children and pulling up stakes in favor of a cozy little apartment 
with a swimming pool, just a bit farther out.

The original Oxford Circle way of life is alive and 
thriving just a few miles up the road. Today Oxford Circle, the neighborhood, just ain’t what it used to be. Now you 
need more than one hand to count the Christmas lights. 
So it is not very surprising that the people of Oxford Circle 
now can sit back in their nice little brick row houses with 
the cement patios and the grassy hills in the front and not 
blink when they see a busload of black kids rolling past 
their curbs.

And the kids on the 8:05 have sort of gotten used to 
not being noticed. And as they coast down Horrocks to 
Levick and see the nice new Impalas and Le Sabres stopping in front of Spruance to let off their classmates, it really doesn’t matter much that they have reached the promised land on an orange bus.

IT IS 8:30 on the dot and there is the cocky satisfaction 
of punctuality on the face of the bus driver as he pulls 
his machine to a stop at the side of the school.

For an elementary school, Spruance is massive. The 
school grounds encompass a very large city block. The 
building itself, constructed for the most part in 1950, is 
made of an uncommon-looking yellow brick and there is 
a nice green lawn in the front and a giant cement school-
yard in the back, surrounded by a huge cyclone fence.

The school is right next to the Max Meyers playground, which is owned by the city and has a nice big swimming pool and a whole bunch of basketball courts and grassy baseball fields.

The rain, which had all but stopped now, was good for 
the grass.

The kids are shepherded off the bus, through a big gate 
in the fence and around to one of the back doors and into 
the school, crossing paths along the way with some of the white Spruance kids.

As they enter the neatly scrubbed building, the first thing 
they see is a nicely framed reproduction of Marc Chagall’s 
”The Rabbi.” The painting is there by irony, not design. It’s one of over a hundred pieces of art that hang on the walls of the school. The idea for the display is that of Joseph Agin, the school’s principal. Collecting reproductions of famous paintings is one of his few vices and they are strategically hung all over the place. Right across from Agin’s office is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, who freed the slaves and helped make this country what it is today.

On this Monday morning, Agin stands right next to his 
portrait of Abe Lincoln as he watches his children, black 
and white together, file by. He is wearing his permanent-
press smile. Some of the kids smile back, some say hello and 
others just giggle and walk on by. And once he is sure that all of his children are soundly tucked away in their classrooms, Agin walks confidently back to his office to begin another week of principaling. But as he nears the 
office door he is beckoned by a fast-walking, fast-talking 
man in a gray coat and a gray hat who is carrying a black 
attaché case.

“What happened Friday? Why didn’t you do something? 
My kid was afraid to come to school.”

The man in gray was white and he was talking about a 
knifing incident that never happened. There was this 
rumor that spread very quickly that some black kids had 
planned to do some cutting on Friday. It turned out to be 
only a rumor, but it did shake a lot of people up. It shook 
up the man in gray enough for him to stop at school on 
his way to work to try to get to the nitty-gritty of it.

Agin assured him that there was nothing to worry about 
and that it was nothing more than a rumor. They exchanged a few uncertainties and the man in gray started 
to leave and Agin turned and walked past a portrait of John Kennedy and into his office.

Safely inside, he sat down, lit his first cigarette of the 
day and took a large drag.

Agin’s office, furnished in Early Elementary School, is 
fairly large and has a nice view of the neighborhood.

Joe Agin is a middle-aged Jewish man, which is not 
necessarily an indication of his age or religion. It’s just the 
way you get to look when you work in Oxford Circle for 
so long. And Joe Agin has that look about him. After 
eight years at Spruance he looks like the guy who never 
let you read the magazines at the stand in his drugstore.

He leaned back in his chair, took the cigarette from his 
mouth and mused about the knifing rumor. “That’s a big 
problem here—communication—because the parents are 
so far away.”

Agin’s statement was the first of many indications that 
the street of communication between black and white is a 
narrow one paved with eggshells.

When Agin spoke, it was from Levick and Horrocks 
Streets, not from 17th and Susquehanna. “The initial reaction to the busing program was excellent in this neighborhood and still is,” Agin said.

He stopped for another puff on his cigarette as he 
looked out his window. It was still very cloudy as he 
watched the man in gray hustle down the rain-soaked 
walk and into his car.

Agin readily admitted that reaction to the busing from 
the sending end was much harder to gauge since participation by the Negro parents of bused-in children in the Home 
and School Association is nearly negligible.

But together with the Home and School Association, 
Agin is trying everything he can think of to make both 
the parents and the kids feel welcome.

Just this past Christmas, they gave a ball-point pen to 
every kid in the school, regardless of race, creed or means 
of transportation. And engraved on each pen was a two-
word message of brotherhood and peace on earth and 
goodwill to men. It said “Spruance School.”

Agin said that in allocating funds for school use, there is never any question for whom the money is being used. 
”They are definitely Spruance children,” he said with all 
the benign condescension he could muster. “If there is any 
animosity, it is because kids from a lower economic level 
have been bused into an area where the economic level is 
higher. The sending school doesn’t sense any resentment 
among those left behind.”

In the past year, the composition of those left behind 
has changed drastically. When the program first started, 
if they wanted to bus fifty kids, they sent the top fifty. 
Now, they take a random sampling. If there are 200 kids 
at a school and fifty are to be bused, they pick every 
fourth one. “Of course, we’d prefer it the old way,” Agin 
said. “To take the cream of the crop.”

FACT SHEET-HISTORY OF BUSING

To Relieve Overcrowding and Foster Integration School District of Philadelphia, Pa.

•   January, 1964: Board of Education adopts policy calling for redrawing of school boundary lines and busing—to stop double shifts, relieve overcrowding and to foster integration.

•     February, 1964: Busing program begins with 110 pupils bused from all-Negro school to a 95% white school.

•    August, 1964: School District announces plans to expand its busing program (for overcrowding and integration) to some 3000 pupils in September.

•    August, 1964: Parents and Taxpayers Association (all-
white anti-busing group) files suit to stop busing, charging School Board with acting against State School Code and against best interests of city’s school children.

•     September, 1964: School Board buses 3831 children to 
relieve overcrowding and foster integration. Of this number, approximately 1900 are Negro children going to predominantly white schools.

•     December, 1964: Judge Ethan Allen Doty, of Common Pleas Court, dismisses busing suit after one-day court hearing.

•     June, 1965: Busing total has risen to 4527, of which 
2228 are Negroes going to predominantly white schools.

•    September, 1965: School Board buses 7039 children, including 4988 Negroes to predominantly white schools. Ninety-seven schools involved.

•     September, 1966: Busing program expands to 9150 pupils, including about 7000 Negroes to predominantly white schools. Schools involved: 116.

•     September, 1967: Busing program up to 11,664, including about 9000 Negroes to predominantly white 
schools. Schools involved: 130.

“SURPRISINGLY,” Agin said, “it didn’t take too much time for the 
kids to adjust to coming here—only 
getting to the bus a little earlier. 
Children can adjust,” he said.

If she could afford it, Cal’s mother 
would probably have that statement laminated for her wallet. Evidently, 
Cal couldn’t adjust. Cal is the kid 
who wasn’t allowed to ride the bus, 
and the real reason Cal couldn’t ride 
the bus is that he is under suspension. He won’t be back unless his mother comes to school to iron out everything and to assure everyone that Cal won’t make any more waves.

The people at Spruance are very wave-conscious and they want to make 
sure that everyone fits in as perfectly
and smoothly as possible. The bused-in 
kids are balanced into classrooms very 
carefully. There are 55 from Claghorn 
and if they go into five classes, that 
means 11 in each class. Only special arithmetic and reading classes are structured and kids are placed according to their ability. “We have 
found that quite a number of the children from the sending schools
were behind,” Agin said.

GEORGIE IS ONE OF THE KIDS On the 
8:05. He lives on one floor of a crumbling brownstone, along with his 
mother and 13 brothers and sisters.

Georgie can’t read very well. He is 
in the fifth grade at Spruance and he 
is reading at a third-grade level.

The people at Spruance have been trying to help Georgie, but they
haven’t had much effect because they only have him for a few hours a day, and when Georgie gets back home he finds it a little hard to practice his reading in a nice quiet place with 14 other people around.

Conditions at Georgie’s house have 
gotten a little better though. He used to share one bed with six of his 
brothers. But a couple of months ago someone was nice enough to give Georgie’s mother a slightly used mattress, which she plopped on the floor and now four of the kids are sleeping on it—to relieve overcrowding and foster public health.

But the new mattress hasn’t helped 
Georgie’s reading problem any. What Georgie and his family need is real help and that help is not about to 
come from anyone at Spruance because when Georgie leaves school at 3:15 and goes back home, he is no longer their problem. There has been 
little effort by anyone at Spruance to try to help the home situation. The
farthest they go is to give the teacher the option of writing a note on Georgie’s report card alluding to the problem. Something like “Please include a study when you get around to building the new wing on your house.”

“IT TAKES UP a lot of the faculty’s 
time, trying to raise their level,” Agin 
said. And the faculty has enough 
things to do to keep it busy. Things
like maintaining the cool.

Agin admitted that there are minor disciplinary problems, and that the 
handling of such problems is complicated by the fact that the bused-in child can’t be kept after school. The

bus must leave promptly and everyone must be on it.

There has been a definite increase 
in certain disciplinary problems since 
the busing program started. Agin attributes this to the fact that “there are certain standards of behavior that some of these kids need to learn—
their behavior is probably based on their background.”

One of the problems is the use of 
profanity. There have been many complaints from Spruance parents that 
their kids come home from school using words that warrant mouthwashing. The picking up of profanity has 
long been one of the evergreen arguments against busing. And it does have a basis in fact because the kids do pick up some bad words at an early age in school. Under normal circumstances, it would probably be another year or two before the kids picked these words up at home and brought them to school.

“Kids adapt to a situation,” Agin said. “There is some fighting here but 
it is mostly among the colored children 
themselves, not among colored and 
white children. I would like to say it’s a way of life for them. They’re taught to take care of themselves, and their differences are settled by fighting.”

They have tried to promote the 
right attitudes at Spruance by means 
of special programs. There is one 
where they try to teach the kids to be 
very tolerant of others. It is called “The Green Circle Brotherhood Program,” which is really the name of a bi-racial rock group. They feel that antagonism can be eliminated by programs like this. “That is why there 
is fighting only in their own groups,” 
said Agin. “There is a tendency for 
the 11- and 12-year-old children to 
segregate much more so than the 
younger ones,” he said.

Agin was on his third cigarette now 
and he was starting to turn on. “With three or four schools represented here [currently, there are 280 kids bused-in 
to Spruance from three schools in 
North Philadelphia, and they make up 
about one-third of the school's present 
population], there is more of a tendency for areas to compete, but we haven’t had any white versus colored 
business.”

There have been some manifestations of economic resentment among the “richer” and “poorer” kids at Spruance. It has turned up most in 
the lunchroom where there have been 
incidents of stealing that were not 
sensed before. “Petty thievery,” Agin 
calls it, “like pencils, books and 
lunches.”

But most of the kids come to school 
with something in their stomach. And 
if they don’t there is a program that 
allows them two pints of milk a day, 
free of charge. Also, most of the 
bused-in kids either carry their lunches 
to school or come with enough money 
to buy one. (For about 35¢ you can get 
a pretty good gut-full from the 
Spruance lunchroom.) “And if they 
don’t have the money, we will buy 
them lunch from our own pockets,” 
Agin said.

He explained that the help program 
goes even farther than lunches. “If we spot a person who needs clothing, we have clothing from residents in the area. In providing clothing, we take from other schools so that a child can’t point to a dress a little girl is wearing and say, ‘That used to 
be mine.’ “

Agin took another puff on his cigarette and half-smiled as he turned to look out upon the benevolent citizens of Horrocks Street. Outside, the sun was trying to burn its way through the clouds and women with baby strollers and shopping carts had begun to appear, going about their delayed daily business. It got Joe Agin to thinking about how Oxford Circle 
is changing and talking about the area that Spruance services. It was obvious 
that he was thinking more than he 
was talking. “We have few gentiles,” 
he said, of a school that never even 
thought seriously about them. “But
more than we used to. Someday, this 
may be a problem. Previously, this neighborhood was the next step up 
from Strawberry Mansion. Now 
they’re moving in from all over—
Kensington and all over the city.” Agin seemed to be talking almost to himself now as a somewhat puzzled 
look crossed his face as he thought 
of the past and future of Oxford Circle.

“The reason kids were bused in 
here was that we had room,” he went 
on. “People with school-age children started to move away. At one time 
the population of this school was two 
thousand, but that was a few years 
back when this neighborhood was 
booming with kids. Now we’re down to about eight or nine hundred, and 
we’ve got plenty of room. So I’ve become the vulnerable one.”

Agin reiterated that those families
left in the neighborhood have taken the whole thing very well—at least 
there hasn’t been any sign of mass exodus since the busing started, and 
property values have remained about the same.

Acceptance has been both passive and active. Some of the bused-in kids 
have been invited home for lunch by
some of the kids in the neighborhood. 
They are not allowed to miss the bus 
to go to parties after school, though.

Agin admitted that it took some time for the invitations to start coming. “They had to wait for the formation of friendships.” He feels that the neighborhood kids shouldn’t be actively encouraged to take a Claghorn kid to lunch. Official encouragement might 
lead to neighborhood criticism. And criticism is one thing that Joe Aging doesn’t want to encourage.

From the start, he has tried to make sure that everyone involved knew exactly what was going on. He tried, the best he could, to have the neighborhood parents recognize the need for busing and become better informed about it. “Right from the beginning, 
we gave them the whole picture,” he 
said. “And by arranging them heterogeneously, we avoided having a presaid.

When the program first began, Agin 
spent quite a bit of time trying to 
indoctrinate the parents of the bused-in kids. He attended meetings with 
them down at the Claghorn School 
and spoke to them and invited them to 
visit Spruance. But that was three 
years ago, and he hasn’t seen very 
many of them since.

Some of the parents do come up when they are invited for such special occasions as teacher visitation, but few of them ever make it for regular Home and School Association meetings. Those who have come expressed concern mostly over the facilities at Spruance, the lunchroom in particular. Since their kids would be eating 
there every day, they had a natural concern over what was being served. 
Most of the parents were pleased with 
the facilities and pleased with what 
they saw and pleased that they had 
come. And at least one of them kept 
coming. And coming and coming.

THERE IS A LITTLE ROOM just down the hallway from the principal’s office 
that has a sign on it that says “HOME 
& SCHOOL ASSOCIATION.” Actually it’s not really a room, it’s a converted 
book closet, and really, if you took 
all of the active members of the 
Spruance Home and School Association and put them all together at one 
time, they would quite easily fit into a book closet, with plenty of room left over for a couple of pinball machines.

Seated in the barely furnished room 
this morning for an impromptu meeting were five members of the Association. One of them was black and she dominated the meeting. Her name was Earthilee Gray and she was the neatly 
scrubbed mother of an equally neatly scrubbed bused-in son, and somewhat of a new breed of cat.

Earthilee is an honest-to-goodness
black yenta with Della Reese intonations and Eartha Kitt tendencies. She 
sat at a wooden table with some papers in front of her and, with one 
profound pronouncement, she brought 
the informal conversation to a halt and 
got down to the business at hand.

“I’d like to make a statement,” she 
said, as if to give fair warning to all 
the hypothetical news cameras present to start rolling. “I have visited 
this school as much as any other 
mother, if not more,” she said, and you just knew it was more. “Not because of integration, although I’m for freedom and equal rights and all the things people are fighting for, but because I’m interested in my son getting a good education. I’ve sacrificed hours to get here, and I’ve eaten lunch here with the kids. The general picture I’ve gotten here is that there is 
no direct adverseness on anyone’s 
part.”

She did admit, however, that at 
meetings some people did refuse to 
even say hello to her, but she did 
not consider this adverseness. “I’d 
rather just leave it up to their own 
intelligence,” she said.

What she’s interested in primarily, 
she reiterated, not for the last time, 
was that her child was getting a well-
rounded education, regardless of integration. Although she admitted that her child had never told her that he had been abused or had seen the staring eyes of hate, Earthilee Gray said she felt sure that Oxford Circle parents are telling their kids not to play with black kids.

“We need more involvement at 
home as well as with teachers, principals and administrators,” she said. “I 
have talked with parents in my neighborhood. Some feel that the teachers at Spruance are very prejudiced. I’ve 
been given statements that have said so, but I never told anyone here because I thought they were too petty.”

Somehow, Joe Agin had squeezed 
his way into the closet to give Earthilee Gray a verbal pat on the head: “I 
value your opinion more than the opinion of a parent whose kid is a 
disciplinary problem, who tends to be 
more prejudiced. You are more unbiased than other parents who pass judgment in a biased way.”

Everyone at Spruance knows Earthilee Gray. She is in such close contact 
with the teachers that when she talks of her son’s education, she says, “I 
had a wonderful teacher last term,” or, “We have a real gem this term.”

Earthilee Gray is not at all typical of her community and she knows it. 
But she is perhaps very typical of a new breed of outspoken leader with bootstraps whose influence can and 
will be felt by anyone she comes in contact with, and the people at 
Spruance know that well.

She is part of a black middle class 
that has suddenly become militant in this country over the past few years. She owns her own beauty parlor and makes enough money from it to comfortably and smartly furnish her house and herself. She is the first to tell you what a helping hand she has been to her neighborhood and how she takes other mothers’ kids to ball games and
gives them lunches and new shirts when their own become too tattered.

Earthilee Gray makes her kid wear a necktie to school even though she 
knows that he gets beaten up on the
bus a lot because of it. And she is 
the first one to respond with a kneejerk 
defense, usually in the form of a letter, a phone call or a visit, when her 
kid is in any danger of having his 
tie stepped on. The tie serves more as 
a status symbol than an adornment. Earthilee Gray knows where she’s at. 
She’s the first to scorn a lot of the people in her neighborhood who “don’t want to work.”

And she is well aware of what the
people in her neighborhood think 
about her. “You think you’re scared in that neighborhood,” she tells her white soul sisters. “Well, I’m doubly 
scared. I can’t leave a window or door unlocked.”

Earthilee Gray’s minor confession 
of weakness gave the white mothers present an opportunity to jump in.

First, there was the president of 
the Home and School Association, Ruth MacAndrew (MacAndrew!? There goes the neighborhood). Yet despite her looks and her name, she 
too had definite yenta tendencies. “Look, let’s face it, we don’t want reverse busing,” she said, as though someone had brought the subject up. 
”All we want is a good education for our kids.”

Also there were three Jewish mothers. There was Gloria Richman, a well-dressed woman with a giant opal ring and a puffed-up hairdo. With her were Jeannette Toman and Gilda Dunoff.

Jeannette Toman looks like the 
kind of mother who would probably make her kids wear earmuffs in April. Gilda Dunoff was later to be affectionately described by Joe Agin as “the quiet one.” The three of them 
chimed in almost in unison with Ruth MacAndrew.

“We just don’t want reverse busing.”

This, Ruth MacAndrew said, was 
the initial reaction of most of the 
parents when they learned of the 
busing program. Busing was a good 
idea for relieving overcrowding and 
fostering integration, just so long as 
it didn’t inconvenience their kids.

She felt that the parents hadn’t 
been “informed right” about the busing when it first started. “A lot gets 
blown up, you know,” she said. “At 
first, many parents got the impression that the busing was simply to promote integration and not primarily for the sake of education.”

Earthilee Gray was alive and stirring again now, and saying that the only disadvantage of the busing program was that she had to get up at 
six o’clock in the morning to have breakfast with her son. “If there is 
any prejudice between children, it is 
taught in the homes,” she said from 
her seat in left field.

Ruth MacAndrew said that there 
has been a “slowdown” in the learning 
pace in classrooms that have bused-in 
kids. “Not everyone is ready to go 
on.”

Everyone was getting into the fray 
now and all kinds of things were 
starting to bounce off of the walls, in 
no particular direction Earthilee Gray said that another problem with busing 
was the fact that if a Claghorn kid 
gets sick in school, it is too far for 
the parent to come get him. She grabbed at the opportunity of having the floor again to get in a word about discipline: “If my child needs slapping, slap him, I always say.”

Gilda Dunoff turned to Earthilee Gray and said, “If all Negro mothers were like you, there would be no problems.”

Jeannette Toman said that the language coming home with the kids has changed since the busing began. “It has put the parents a little more on the ball,” she said.

“It’s a real eye-opener, eh?” chimed 
in Joe Agin from somewhere.

Gloria Richman told how her son 
has been ridiculed for his friendship with “a lovely little colored boy.”

Earthilee Gray said that the black kids from Spruance come home to a 
segregated neighborhood and that when they do, some of their parents 
think that they are “too good to go out and play with the other kids.” 
She doesn’t consider herself to be one of those parents, because every day, 
weather permitting, when her kid
comes home, she lets him take off his 
tie and get on his bike and ride around the neighborhood for forty-five minutes. Exactly forty-five minutes.

Jeannette Toman said to Earthilee Gray “there are not many of your people at the Home and School 
meetings.”

“They feel they’re outcasts,” Earthilee Gray said. “They feel they may 
be out of place or not accepted.” She felt that the teas that were held 
before the busing started were helpful 
for the parents at the different schools 
to get to know what was going on, but that the next step is for the teachers to get involved in the home life. 
She also cited a need for “more 
meaningful parental involvement.”

Ruth MacAndrew, who schedules 
all of her Home and School meetings during the day, when most of the 
black parents couldn’t come if they wanted to, said that white parents feel education is falling behind because 
there are too many discipline problems in the classrooms. This was Joe 
Agin’s bag and he was quick to blame 
whatever lag there has been in the 
classrooms on the teachers.

Everyone present agreed that they 
are walking on eggshells and that communication is not what it should 
be because of what Joe Agin called “the Black Power thing.”

“Sometimes you just don’t know 
what to say or how to say it so that 
it doesn’t come out sounding wrong,” 
Gloria Richman said.

Earthilee Gray said that she even 
felt shaky about what she said in her own neighborhood because she thinks 
that many people resent the fact that 
her kid goes to Spruance.

“Education of the parents in that 
neighborhood can only come from 
their own people,” Jeannette Toman 
said. “What is needed is more people 
like Earthilee. But see, they resent 
her too.”

Yes, everyone there was convinced 
that if all black people were like 
Earthilee Gray, there would be no 
problems and that everyone could live 
together in harmony. They all looked 
at Earthilee Gray and the air reeked 
with brotherhood as smiles crossed 
their faces and bells rang.

IT WAS RECESS.

Out in the schoolyard, the sun had broken all the way through and except for a heavy and chilly breeze it was turning out to be not too bad a day after all.

Out in the schoolyard was where it 
was really happening. It was where the kids were all on their own and didn’t have to listen to the bigoted
garbage from their parents or swallow any of the brotherhood bullshit that was stuffed down their throats in school.

Out in the schoolyard was where 
kids could be kids. And it is here that
the ultimate test of integration is being 
taken. It is here where there is no supervision and nobody to tell the 
kids what to do or not to do. It is 
the things that happen in the schoolyard that these kids are going to remember ten, twenty, thirty years from now, and not anything that is told to them in a classroom about race relations. Most of them don’t even know what race relations are. All they know 
is that they are kids. They are kids and 
they are beautiful.

While their mothers are inside for a session of para-liberal mutual back-patting, the kids are out in the sun, black and white together, with their arms around each other.

In one corner of the yard was a gaggle of girls jumping rope, and there was a black girl holding one end of 
the rope and a white girl holding the other. And nobody had to tell them 
to do that, because it just happened 
and none of them even thought about 
it.

Across the yard, there was a softball 
game going on and it was the same
scene.

It was a choose-up game, which 
means that you start out with two captains and they alternately pick kids to be on their team. And when you’re playing baseball in a schoolyard you’re playing to win, and so the selections of
team members are made with all the 
calculation of a professional draft. When your pick comes up, you don’t take a buddy, you take the best available ballplayer. And that’s just what 
the kids did. It was an integrated game, but nobody had to tell them to make it one.

Just past center field, there was a 
fight going on. The fight was between 
a white kid and a black kid. One was 
calling himself Jerry Quarry and the 
other was Jimmy Ellis and they were 
jabbing away at each other’s hands. 
It could have been nothing but a draw.

A little crowd had gathered around them and some were rooting for Jerry Quarry and some of them were rooting 
for Jimmy Ellis Their rooting got so 
hot that a small skirmish broke out
in the crowd and pretty soon three 
black kids and one white kid were on 
the ground laughing their heads off.

Right in back of them, a group of 
girls was looking on. One of them was named April and she was a chubby little fifth-grader with a long blonde braid and she was white. She said she didn’t like it because the black kids fight too much.

“That ain’t true,” one of the black girls said.

“It is too,” April yelled as she sent 
the black girl flying with a quick 
karate chop to the chest.

At the far end of the yard, on one of the basketball courts, a long semi-
set shot by one of the kids from Claghorn was just bouncing its way through the iron hoop when the buzzer went off.

Recess was over now and a school-
yard full of color-blind kids slowly made their way back into the building. Back to their heterogeneously-placed classes and the teachers who would tell them what a great world this would be if only people could learn to live together.

So back into the building they went, 
black and white together, to wait for the next recess when they could go 
outside and just be kids again. Waiting for the next recess when they could go outside and, for fifteen minutes in a concrete yard surrounded by a big cyclone fence, solve all the world’s problems.

Funny how kids start out with the answer and end up with the question.

BACK INSIDE, Ann Lichterman sits 
by her window, wearing the face that 
she keeps in a jar by the door. Ann 
Lichterman is the school’s guidance 
counselor and her nice little office 
with a view is filled with psychology 
books and potted plants. On the top shelf of the small bookcase across 
from her desk are two almost identical 
dolls. One has yellow hair and blue 
eyes and a peachy complexion. The other one has black frizzy hair and 
brown eyes and brown skin. The dolls make nice bookends.

Ann Lichterman was reading a note from a mother whose kid had been given some clothes to wear because the ones he had had been condemned. “Isn’t it heartbreaking? They don’t have all we take for granted,” she said piously.

She wiped a near-tear and went on. “The parents are so far away and it’s difficult to have communication with them. They are physically far away and it’s a long ride.

“We haven’t kept any hostility on race,” she said. “From the day a bused-in child enters this school, he is 
reminded constantly, ‘You are a Spruance child.’ ” (Many of the kids 
found this a bit hard to swallow. When asked what school they went to, most of them gave the name of their sending school. And the few who said Spruance, did so with some hesitation.)

“Busing has been going on for 
years, and will continue to go on,” 
she said.

THE POLICY OF the Board of Education states that a more extensive use of busing to foster integration is part of its current general plans. How long the busing will continue depends on how rapidly new schools
are built and antiquated buildings replaced. In an effort to determine what effects the program is having scholastically, the Board has put out an achievement study or two, filled with
means and medians and modes.

When you put it all together, though, the results are fairly inconclusive. Some kids have done better 
with the busing while others have 
stayed about the same. The Board is 
quick to point out, though, that no 
one, at either the sending or receiving 
schools, has suffered scholastically as 
a result of the program.

There is one major hitch in these 
findings. The latest study the Board 
has to offer is dated December 1966, 
and in those days the kids who were being bused were still pretty much 
from the cream of the sending school’s crop. Now that the selection is basically a random one, the situation quite possibly may have changed. The Board is now in the midst of giving it
another long, hard look.

Ann Lichterman says that children are not prejudiced and that any hostility among them on the issue of 
race comes from the family She spoke of the two black teachers among Spruance’s faculty of forty as a case
in point.

On parent visitation day in November, many of the Oxford Circle parents were a little shocked to find out that their kids had a black teacher. Somehow, it just hadn’t occurred to the kids to mention something as significant as color when talking about
their teacher.

On the subject of the faculty, Ann 
Lichterman noted that inexperience 
is the key factor in any difficulties in 
handling the bused-in kids. “If we 
know a child is a problem child, we 
will place him with an experienced 
teacher,” she said. “We’ll assign him 
to a teacher we feel can handle him.”

She doesn’t think that the black 
kids have any trouble reacting to 
white authority figures. “They respect 
people,” she said, “not for their color.”

JOE AGIN HAD JUST finished making 
one of his frequent tours of the build

ing. He visited the science rooms and 
the reading rooms and the classrooms. 
Everyone is used to Agin’s popping 
in, and things just go on as usual. It was late in the day now though, and you’d think even the teachers
would be getting sick of the brotherhood bit.

In one third-grade class, the teacher 
asked the kids what the most wonderful thing in the world was.

A white girl in the front row said 
”money.”

The question was repeated.

A black girl three rows back said 
”people.”

AGIN SMILED AS he closed the door 
and hustled down the hallway to the 
now vacant faculty dining room. There, he was to meet with Reba
Hoffman, his assistant, a matronly 
professional educator who keeps all 
her pencils sharpened.

In addition to being assistant to the 
principal, Reba Hoffman is in charge of the reading program at Spruance. She and Agin sat at separate tables and spoke of some more of their problems. One of the answers, Reba Hoffman feels, is to have smaller classes, 
to be able to show the kids that someone is interested in them, to form closer relationships and, hopefully, get through to them.

“Their home life affects them a lot,” 
she said. “In most cases, there is so 
much to be done—too much. And if 
the child is too far behind, we can 
only bring him up one or two levels. 
The earlier we get them, the more 
we can save,” she said, as outside, the 
heavens rumbled with thunder.

Reba Hoffman underscored the need for experienced teachers, and
the fact that getting them to work 
with underprivileged kids is difficult with the system’s policy of voluntary 
transfers, which doesn’t allow the placing of experienced teachers where they are most needed.

“As room becomes available here, the amount of busing to the Northeast will increase,” Agin said. “Because of overcrowding, ghetto schools
are always going to need relief.” Agin 
added that it is hard to get more Negro teachers to come to the Northeast, mostly because of distance from the neighborhoods where they live.

In many ways, Agin would like to 
see more Negro people and more 
Negro life brought into the school. He has gone so far as to set up a display right outside of the school 
library, including in it such books as 
”The Negro Heritage Library,” “Playtime in Africa,” and a variety of novels and biographies of the George Washington Carver-Booker T. Washington ilk.

But both he and Reba Hoffman agree that the kids at Spruance are really too young to relate to the teaching of Negro history.

“Maybe integration is not as important as it was first thought to be,” Agin said. “Maybe what we need is smaller classes and more quality education.”

THE DOOR OPENED NOW, as one of 
the school’s non-teaching assistants came in. And as the door opened, the room became flooded with the sounds from the auditorium, just across the way.

Agin got up and walked across the hall to see what was going on. It was 
an assembly of the sixth-grade graduating class, some of whom had taken more than six years to make it. Many of them were white and some of them were black.

At the podium was a woman named 
Mrs. Flinker, who, if she weren’t leading the meeting, would make a 
good dowager in an English drawing room comedy.

Mrs. Flinker was telling the kids 
some of the great things in store for 
them at graduation. Things like a banquet and a full-length feature movie, 
and more. And as she mentioned 
each of them, the kids cheered and shrieked with delight.

And after the last hurrah had died, Mrs. Flinker led them all in a song they would be singing at graduation. 
The song is called “Good Neighbor”
 and it comes from the Southwest and 
it’s all about extending a friendly hand
 to the people across the Rio Grande. The words go, “Show we belong to one big happy family; good, good neighbors that are free.”

And when they finished singing the 
song, Mrs. Flinker was nice enough to 
point out the moral. “But we can’t be 
good neighbors to our friends across 
the Rio Grande until we are good 
friends with each other, now can we 
boys and girls?” she asked.

The boys and girls agreed.

And so this month, on graduation day, they will all stand on the stage 
as one, black and white together, and 
they will sing “Good Neighbor” and other songs of friendship and brotherhood.

And when it is all over, they will 
say good-bye, and the white kids will 
get their hugs and their presents from 
parents and grandparents, and the black kids will all get on the bus and 
go back where they came from.

A BLOODY INQUEST INTO THE MUTILATION CAPITAL OF THE COUNTRY
By Maury Z. Levy

ON SUNDAY THE TURKEY BUZZARDS flew low to the pines. You could hear their wings flapping a few hundred 
yards away as they swooped down into the garbage that 
hid in the trees. They are big, lazy birds, the turkey 
buzzards.

They were not an unusual sight to the people who lived 
in the dirty white cottages on Oakwood Drive or to the 
people in the wooden piney shacks on Crescent Avenue. 
Oakwood is a straight arrow off Route 571, a dead-end 
turn from the Phillips 66 station. Crescent is a big loop 
from 571. You pass the shacks first, the ones with the 
Russian names out front in this strange settlement called 
Rova Farms, where the people are peasants who live off 
the land, eating from little vegetable gardens fertilized by 
the dust of the road that passes a few feet from their 
doors.

It’s a very insular community that revolves around the 
big church around the corner on the Cassville-Freehold 
Road, a stately structure topped with big golden onion 
domes. Behind the church is a nice clean cemetery where 
the Russian peasants have buried their dead for almost 
100 years.

You can see the tips of the golden onions from the 
point where Oakwood and Crescent run into each other 
and end. There are traces of a crude dirt road leading off 
that intersection into a hole in the woods. It’s a street 
with no name, a road that’s the width of one car, if you’re 
crazy enough to try to drive it. It’s murder on your wheels.

You curve past old beer cans and rubbish and you wind 
around the giant worn-out truck tires to the blond wood 
Emerson television set with the busted picture tube that 
sits two blocks back in the middle of the road that goes 
nowhere. Dead end.

These woods have been the dumping ground for a lot of things. The trees are very tall and very thick. So most 
people didn’t give a second thought to the turkey buzzards. 
Maybe an early season hunter had left his prey to rot or 
maybe there was something edible in the roadside trash.

But by Wednesday in what had been a very hot and 
humid week, things began to get a little strange. The 
humidity put a heavy lock on the air and a terrible smell 
started coming from the woods. The radio dispatch room 
in the Jackson Township police station got a couple calls 
about it. They sent a man out in a car. He drove up 
Crescent and down Oakwood. He smelled it too.

ON SATURDAY Steve Soltys brought the family down 
from Jersey City. Soltys finished work at 5:00 and came 
home and changed to get the blood off his clothes. He and 
Helene put the two kids and the dog in the car and drove 
to their summer cottage on Oakwood Drive, about eight 
miles west of Lakewood and a short holler from Toms 
River, the Ocean County seat.

While the family unpacked, Soltys let the collie out. 
But Yukee started charging through the woods after rabbits. Steve Soltys, 34, had to run out and get him. He got 
close enough to see the dog had something in his mouth. 
It wasn’t a rabbit. He came up closer and it looked like 
an arm, it had fingers and everything. First he thought it 
was part of a doll. And then he saw the fingernails. They 
were long and well-manicured and were covered with very 
bright red polish. It was a human arm.

He followed the dog another few yards and found the 
other arm. Steve Soltys was getting very sick in his 
stomach. He went about ten yards more and saw what 
the newspaper would later describe as the torso.

At one time it had been a torso, the headless, limbless 
body of a human female. But now it was a carcass, little 
more than a bunch of bones wrapped around a spine. 
There was a hole at the top and a hole at the bottom and 
nothing in between. It was like something Steve Soltys had 
seen in a slaughterhouse. All of the insides had been taken 
out and the body had been skinned.

Soltys started to shake and he turned white and he ran 
back to the house and called the police. Lt. Frank Hughes had been on these cases before, bodies in the woods. He’s a graying veteran of the Jackson police. But he’d never 
seen anything like this before.

“Look at the sockets of the arms,” he said. “The holes 
are clean. Usually when you mutilate somebody you just 
cut the arms off and some of the bone is left in the socket. 
This thing wasn’t a mutilation. The sockets are clean, the 
arms are perfect. No, this wasn’t a mutilation, this was a 
carving. The guy who did this knew how to carve meat.

Look at the fingertips. He cut off the under layers of skin 
so there’d be no way we could get prints. And he took 
the head with him so we couldn’t get anything from bone 
structure or teeth X rays. This son of a bitch knew what 
he was doing, all right.”

The Jackson police called in the Ocean County detectives from Toms River. They were quickly followed by 
state police and the FBI. And some people came over from 
Philadelphia, some detectives who’d been working on the 
case of a missing girl from Tacony. With them on the 
60-some-mile due-east ride was Dr. Marvin Aronson, the 
Philadelphia medical examiner. Aronson had called ahead, 
and he knew there was next to nothing for identification. 
So he took a long shot, the only shot he had. He brought 
with him some Xrays of the spine. The killer hadn’t taken 
the spine, just the flesh that covered it. The picture 
matched.

DELORES DELLA PENNA WAS 17. She was a pretty girl 
who liked to wear faded jeans and halter tops and very 
bright red nail polish. She had just graduated from St. Hubert’s High School on Cottman Avenue. She had just 
returned with her folks from a trip to Disney World. Two weeks before they found her, she was packing her bags to 
go down the shore for the summer, down Wildwood.

On the night of July 11th, somebody grabbed her on 
Rawle Street, 25 steps away from her house. There was a 
struggle into a car and then a very long ride down some 
lonesome back roads. She ended up at the seashore, but 
about 100 miles north of where she was supposed to be. 
She ended up, what was left of her, in the wild woods 
near a very strange place called Toms River, a place 
where murder has become a way of life.

As in most crimes of this sort, a lot of people who never 
knew the victim got very deeply involved. Steve Soltys 
will never be the same. It was Sunday and the turkey 
buzzards had left. But the area around his summer cottage 
was crawling with dogs this time, dogs and detectives, 
each looking for other pieces of the girl and for any clues 
to the identity of the person who carved her up.

Steve Soltys couldn’t take it any more. He packed the 
family up and they drove back to Jersey City. The vacation was over. The next day Steve Soltys went back to 
work. He was a butcher.

THE SEARCH DRAGGED ON. About a week later an old 
man walking along a dirt road about eight miles away 
found the legs. Positive identification was made when the 
bright red polish on the toenails matched bright red polish 
on the fingernails. The legs were found in Manchester 
Township, off Route 571 about three miles from Route 70.

Under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t have taken 
very much to figure out who the arm belonged to. But 
then, Toms River isn’t a very normal place. Unofficially, 
Toms River is the murder and mutilation capital of the 
world. The chamber of commerce and the cops really 
don’t like it when people, especially outsiders, say things 
like that, but it’s true. When they find an arm or a leg 
just lying around, there’s no telling who it might belong 
to. Despite the nice weather, it’s not been a very pleasant 
summer in Toms River and the dozens of little beach communities that spin out from it. Really, it’s not been a very 
pleasant decade.

A week before they found the girl from Philadelphia, a 
fisherman was casting along the surf at nearby Island 
Beach. He reeled in a human leg.

Police thought the leg belonged to a white female. It 
was not very badly decomposed, so it couldn’t have been 
there too long. The state police brought in a helicopter to 
search the ocean for other parts of the body but it started 
to get dark and the tides changed, so they gave it up.

The leg, which was separated below the knee, was sent 
to Toms River Community Memorial Hospital, which 
seems to specialize in this sort of thing. While tests 
were being run, investigators checked all the missing persons alarms in Ocean and Monmouth Counties. It was a 
big job.

A week later they matched things up. The leg was identified as part of a dismembered body found a month earlier 
in parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan. It belonged to a 
James Sweet of Brooklyn.

A New York sewer worker found the torso, minus head 
and arms, wrapped in a sheet not far from Sweet’s Brooklyn home. A few days later, a head, believed to belong to 
Sweet, was found in a Manhattan garbage can.

No one in Toms River has been able to figure out how 
the leg got down there. There are two schools of thought. 
Either somebody murdered Sweet in New York and 
brought the leg down or somebody murdered him in Toms 
River and brought the rest of the body up. No one is 
quite sure, so now it’s just another routine case on the 
Toms River books.

YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND a little bit about Toms River 
itself before you can even start to understand why things 
like this are so commonplace. Toms River is almost half­
way between New York and Philadelphia on the road to 
Seaside Heights. A lot of New York vacationers pass that 
way, which might help explain the piece of the man from 
New York. There are also a good number of people from 
Philadelphia.

The best that police can figure is that the killer of the 
latest Philadelphia girl took a hack route down, probably 
571. That way he would have missed the police patrols 
and speed traps on Route 70.

It’s a long, lonesome drive east on 70. There is almost 
nothing but tall pines from Medford Lakes to the ocean. 
Not even a gas station if you get stuck. You just have to 
sit there on the side of the road arid hope that the first 
person who stops for you is a cop.

The drive is like the scenario from a bad dream. You 
know you’re getting close when you pass Mount Misery. 
You start watching for the turnoff to Toms River. Most 
roads in New Jersey just have numbers. This one has a 
name. It is called Double Trouble Road. If you take it 
straight, you end up in a town called Double Trouble. The 
first fork goes to Toms River. There’s not much difference.

There are more pines and every once in a while there is 
a clearing and a dirt path that goes into the woods. God 
knows what’s back there. Some homes are being built 
along the road, mostly one-story slab types for older folks. 
The area is very big on retirement communities for people 
who come down and wait to die.

You pass a lot of pineys, a lot of strange, dirty-looking 
People who look like they belong in Appalachia. Many of 
them live in shacks, some in log cabins. None of them 
ever look up at you.

You follow the signs to Toms River and you know 
you’re there because the final direction sign says, “Dead 
End.” There is a small marina facing you as you conic in. 
It’s filled with fishing boats, some of them nice-sized, so 
you know that some people there have some money.

The main drag only runs for a couple blocks as a commercial area. There are a few clusters of small shops, a 
clothes store that’s a little behind the times, a nice new 
bank and an old-fashioned drugstore on the corner of Washington Street. There is a poster that greets you in the 
window of the drugstore. It’s one of those movie billboard 
things that tells you what’s playing at the local theater. In 
this case it’s the Toms River Drive-In. The movie is called 
Now You See Him, Now You Don’t.

If you continue on, you pass some small, old, nicely-shrubbed two-story houses as the street becomes tree-lined 
on the way out to a big highway where things are building 
up around a Two Guys shopping center and a Gino’s and 
a McDonald’s, all of this to serve a permanent population 
of about 44,000 and a transient population, especially in 
warm weather, of several times more.

But if you take that first turn down Washington Street 
by the drugstore you miss all of the commercialism. The 
buildings here have colonial pillars and clean red brick. 
They are official buildings. Toms River is the seat of 
Ocean County. They have little cannons and things out on 
the front lawns to memorialize battles from the Revolutionary War.

It’s an old town, Toms River. It got its name in 1727 
from a Captain William Tom, who was put in charge of 
things there by the English. Some say the town was really 
named after an Indian, one Thomas Pumha, who had a 
whole tribe here once. This used to be very much Indian 
country, but the locals don’t cotton much to Indians or 
any other outsiders.

Toms River is very much a hick town. Many of the 
women still wear their hair in buns, looking like they 
should be working in the library. And many of the men, 
never having heard the wet head was dead, look like they 
belong in a gas station.

There are a lot of quaint little flower beds outside the 
main county building, where you can still park for a 
penny. Not all of the people inside are so quaint.

CALVIN WOOLLEY is chief of county detectives. He looks 
like the southern cop in the Dodge commercials. But he’s 
in plain clothes. He sits behind an old desk chomping a 
cheap cigar, waiting a good three seconds before answering each question. You can hear his mind working through 
the sounds of silence. He’s not sure whether to lie to you 
or to just boot you out on your ass.

He’s fingering the file of his latest case. Traces of arsenic 
had been found in the blood of the wife of a reputed 
underworld leader and also in a soda bottle she drank 
from just before her death. This happened at her summer 
home in Toms River. The woman’s name was Carolyn 
Lardiere. She was 52.

Her husband John, 65, has been in prison for a year on 
a contempt charge because he refused to answer questions 
of a state commission investigating the Mob. The commission had tied him in with the organization of the late Vito 
Genovese. He was a reputed lieutenant of a North Jersey 
rackets boss. The investigating commissions say Lardiere 
was involved in organizing Teamsters Union locals.

Calvin Woolley has been having a rough time with this 
murder because none of the relatives have been willing to 
talk. It runs in the Family. And when they told Lardiere 
that his wife had been killed, he refused to believe them. 
He still thinks she’s alive, that the story of her death is a 
plot to trap him into talking.

Calvin Woolley holds to the line of every other local official we spoke to. He says there is no Mob presence in 
Toms River. Sources inside the FBI say differently, much 
differently. They say the area from Toms River to Asbury 
Park is a summer haven for the Mob, not to mention a 
dumping ground for its victims, which is something that 
Calvin Woolley didn’t want to mention.

“Yeah,” he says, “the old Celso farm in Jackson Township. I think they found a body out there once.”

The 1967 FBI investigation in Jackson Township is 
one of the better-kept local secrets. A source in the Jackson police department says he knows of at least three 
bodies that were found, but his department doesn’t have 
any names or any proof because the FBI took the whole 
thing over and wouldn’t let the local lawmen in.

“The reds sealed off the whole area,” the Jackson man 
says. “We knew there was something big going on there. 
Christ, they had at least 300 men in the area.”

FBI sources say only that two bodies were found. They 
were found out on rural Cook Road, both the victims of 
Mafia enforcers. Neither of the bodies was ever positively 
identified, but one was believed to be Kenneth Later, 50, a 
New York stockbroker who had vanished four years 
earlier.

The body was found in a 55-gallon drum of acid. The 
drum had been buried beneath the concrete floor of a 
chicken coop across Cook Road from the 100-acre, weed-
infested Celso farm.

The other body was found in a pit that had been filled with mash from an old bootleg still. The property was 
owned by Joseph Celso, 49, a convicted bootlegger, and 
his wife Rosa. Both were taken into custody and then 
released.

Meanwhile, the FBI kept digging. They were looking 
for the body of a missing gangland playgirl named 
Barbara Delmar. Mrs. Delmar also had disappeared four 
years earlier after leaving her home in Danbury, Connecticut. Authorities there say a reputed lieutenant in the 
Genovese family telephoned her and, after the call, she 
packed her suitcase and left. She told a niece she was going to New York City and that she wouldn’t be back for 
four or five days.

When police questioned her husband about his missing 
wife, he didn’t seem too concerned. “Oh,” he said, “she’s probably with Ken Later.”

Only the FBI seems to know whether Barbara Delmar’s 
body was ever found, or how many more along with it. 
”We expect to find more bodies, though not necessarily 
on the same farm,” an FBI spokesman said at the time.

Local officials say they don’t know how many bodies 
were eventually found, but they’ve got enough of their 
own problems to worry about. Calvin Woolley says there 
have been over 40 murders around Toms River just in the 
past six or seven years, many of them mutilations. He 
seemed hard-pressed to remember any of the details.

“Let’s see,” he said, scratching his head rather unconvincingly, “there was the Girardi case. This guy stabbed 
some woman 40 times. Not much else I can remember, though. Give me 
some time to think.”

We told him we’d be back later on, 
that there were a few things we 
wanted to check out, but that we 
wanted to grab a cup of coffee 
first. We went back to the main drag 
and drove down Route 35 a few 
blocks to the Driftwood Diner. A few 
trucks and cars were parked outside. 
We went in and got a booth and 
ordered.

We figured we’d get some local 
color with our coffee. We asked the 
waitress if she remembered any local 
murders. She turned green. “Hey, 
that’s a pretty sick joke,” she said. 
When we finally convinced her we 
didn’t know what she was talking 
about, she told us the whole story. 
”Right here,” she said, kicking the 
floor, “it happened right here. They 
just found part of him last month.”

JOHN BELL WAS 36. He was supposed to have taken over the diner 
from John Lynch, a father of five. It 
was the summer of ’71. Late one night 
they got into an argument over the 
financial arrangement. The argument 
became very heated. Lynch pulled 
out a gun and shot Bell to death. It 
was a while, though, before anyone 
ever figured out Bell was missing. 
They picked it up in bits and pieces.

Somebody found a big bag along 
a highway in Virginia. Inside were 
the head and torso of John Bell. A 
short time later, a camper found two 
arms and one leg in Shawnee State 
Park in Western Pennsylvania. The 
gun used to shoot him was found in 
Neshaminy Creek in Bristol. And the 
last part wasn’t found until over a 
year later. A fisherman in Schnellsburg, Pennsylvania, found the left leg.

We never did finish the coffee. On 
an empty stomach we drove back to 
see Calvin Woolley. Ah yes, now he 
remembered the case at the diner. 
John Lynch is now serving 20 years 
for second-degree murder.

We asked Woolley why. Why in 
Toms River was mutilation so common, so popular? Certainly every 
town has its share of murders, but 
why the little pieces?

“Yeah,” Woolley said, “well, you 
know we asked Lynch about that. 
We asked him why he cut this Bell 
guy up in all those pieces. And he 
came up with a pretty good answer. 
He said he wanted to get rid of the 
body and it was easier to carry that 
way.”

The crazy thing is that if you hang 
around Toms River long enough, stuff 
like that starts to make sense. It’s 
weird. The people there just seem to 
take these things very matter-of­
factly .

Like we were in the local library 
trying to find some information they 
didn’t have and we started talking to 
the librarian, a nice family lady, about 
the area.

“There sure are an awful lot of 
woods around here,” she said. “I went 
with my husband last week to one of 
the state parks nearby here. It was a 
really deserted place. There weren’t 
any other people around. There was 
nothing there but trees. ‘Gee,’ I said 
to my husband, ‘wouldn’t this be a 
great place to dump a body?” She 
was still giggling when we left.

Calvin Woolley blames the woods 
for many of the bodies. “It’s so open 
here, so barren,” he says, “this whole 
area is just a natural dumping ground. 
Nobody but hunters ever goes in. We 
certainly can’t get police cars in there 
to patrol. We’re right between New 
York and Philly, so we get it from 
both ends. Who knows how many 
bodies are out there in the woods, 
bodies nobody will ever find. You 
could look forever.”

Some historian made a survey 
about that once, over 100 years ago. 
A small boy named Warren Conklin, 
age six, the son of a hunter, went 
into the woods back in the summer 
of 1860 to bring dinner to his father. 
The boy got lost. Hundreds of people 
searched for him for three months. 
His decayed body was found close 
to a spot that the searchers had passed 
many times, the woods were that 
thick. They still are. The historian 
who recorded the case did some interesting mathematics involving the 
number of people who searched, the 
amount of time and the amount of 
ground. He figured it would have 
taken one man 17 years to cover as 
much ground.

Warren Conklin was the first recorded death of that sort in the Toms 
River area. He certainly wouldn’t be 
the last. In the century that followed, 
Toms River would know death better than any town around. The bodies 
just keep popping up.

On our last visit to Calvin Woolley’s office, the chief was trying to 
think of numbers. “A lot of people,” 
he said, “just a lot of people. Hell, 
there are eight of ‘em right here in 
this room.” We didn’t understand.

“Right over here,” he said, pointing to a cardboard box that said 
Kendall Motor Oil on it. We walked 
over and looked in and there in little 
plastic bags and Dixie cups were the 
remains of eight people. Parts of bones. Pieces of skulls. “You mean 
there are eight human beings in this 
box?” we asked.

“Naw,” Calvin Wooley said, “we 
thought they were human beings at 
first. Turns out they were Indians. 
Somebody found them in a park. 
Guess they must be a couple hundred 
years old. We’ll probably give them 
away to a museum or something. They 
don’t do me no good sittin’ around 
here. They just clutter up the office. 
I’ve got enough bodies to worry about 
without having to worry about Indians.”

THE BODIES I UST KEEP popping up. 
Nobody would give us an official 
count. No one’s really sure if there is 
one. By Calvin Woolley’s top-of-the­head count, there’s been between 40 
and 50 discovered since 1965—but 
there’re probably a lot more than that.

On August 19th, 1972, a group of 
surveyors found the decomposed body 
of a young man in a wooded area 
near Route 72. The body, though 
fully clothed, bore no identifying 
papers. The county medical examiner 
estimated the man had been dead 
from one to two months. The dead 
male was between 17 and 25 years 
old, medium height, slight build. He 
was found behind a drive-in movie 
about 100 yards from a gravel pit.

On May 23rd, 1972, Mrs. Margaret 
Lyon, 74, was beaten to death with 
a grub hoe. She lived in a local senior citizens’ housing project.

On March 20th, 1972, state police 
announced a body had been found 
by a man walking his dog in nearby 
Lebanon State Forest, the third body 
found there since August, 1971. All 
three bodies had been shot with .32 
caliber guns and all had their throats 
slit. All three bodies were male, all 
in their 20s. In August, 1971 a torso 
was found in the forest. A complete 
body in the same area in October.

On December 26th, 1971, the Rev. 
John L. Wessell, 33, was walking out 
of Toms River Community Memorial 
Hospital when he was shot to pieces 
by a 24-year-old Vietnam veteran 
with a shotgun. Wessell had just 
come from a counseling session with 
his attacker.

On June 6th; 1969, Paul Sass, 56, 
owner of a dry goods store in Freehold, was gunned down with a shotgun near his home in Lakewood. A 
motive was never established, a suspect never found.

On August 10th, 1966, local residents became concerned over three 
killings in the space of a week. Mrs. 
Dorothy McKenzie, 45, of Toms River 
was shot to death in a car in back 
of the Regent Diner. Two days before, 18-year-old Ronald Sandlin, a 
gas station attendant in Lakewood, 
was kidnapped and killed. Five days 
earlier, the nude body of 18-year-old 
Donna DeRier, a Hawthorne coed, was found near Allaire State Park. 
She had been bludgeoned to death.

On May 14th, 1966, three teenaged 
boys bicycling along Cooks Bridge 
Road in Jackson Township saw something floating in a branch of the Metedeconk River. The object turned 
out to be 17-year-old Catherine Baker of Edison Township, who had been missing for two months. Police arrested a suspect who was found 
hanged in jail the next day. After Miss 
Baker’s body was discovered, local 
police logged about 100 reports of 
bodies being found in one section of 
town or another. There were reports of bodies on the beach and in a Toms 
River shopping center.

On February 5th, 1965, Irwin C. 
Brown sold a tavern in Philadelphia. That day he was seen smiling and 
flashing a large roll of bills. He was 
never seen alive again. His body was 
found, minus the bankroll, in the 
woods off Route 539 in Stafford Township. He had been dead three 
days.

On October 3rd, 1964, hunters 
found the body of Anthony Scanella 
Jr. of Trenton in the woods of Jackson Township. His killer made the 
mistake of picking the first day of 
deer hunting season to dump the bullet-riddled body. Some hunters got a 
make on the car and the killer was 
caught and sentenced to life.

On August 26th, 1963, a passerby 
found the body of a teenage girl in 
the woods off Route 70 in Manchester Township. The body had been tied with an electric cord, strangled and 
burned. It took investigators two months to identify it as that of Leola Jones, 18, a babysitter from Neptune. 
The body was identified through use 
of a dental chart.

On September 15th, 1965, Mary Ann Klinsky, 18, of West Keansburg was found on a slope of the Garden State Parkway. Her nude body had 
been raped and beaten. Her clothing was never found, leading police to 
believe she was killed elsewhere and 
dumped on the parkway.

On June 9th, 1962, Phyllis Jones, 
an attractive student at the Hedgerow 
Acting School in Philadelphia, disappeared from the beach at Barnegat 
Light. A passerby found her body in 
a desolate area of Lacey Township 
near the pit where the state dumps 
illegally-killed deer.

The list goes on and on. And the 
further back you go the more bodies 
and pieces of bodies you find. Some 
people around Toms River would 
have you believe that all of this is 
just coincidence. Maybe.

But we very carefully, just as the 
police probably have, traced the 
route of the latest killer, picking it up 
in Tacony and following it all the 
way down the back roads to Jackson Township. And it was no coincidence. He had to have been in that area before to know those back roads so 
well. He knew where he was going. 
It was an almost perfect crime. The 
cops around Toms River were impressed by that.

The girl from Tacony with the 
bright red nail polish had never been 
to Toms River before. She had never 
seen the people from New York and 
Philadelphia sail their boats out of 
the marina toward Seaside Heights. She had never seen the wooden 
shacks or the little white cottages or 
the big brown pines. But like so 
many before her she ended up here.

The summer was ending when we 
left Toms River, the air had a nice 
nip and a lot of people started going 
home. For most of them it had been 
a very nice summer. Many of them 
never even knew about the girl from 
Tacony. The papers here really didn’t 
play it up much. They only play up 
unusual things in Toms River.

By Maury Z. Levy

“BAR MITZVAH,” the rabbi shouted, “is not a verb.” Eddie Golden, who is the leader of Eddie Golden and his Band of Gold, is blowing his horn so loud into the microphone that the rabbi can hardly hear himself, which is an important thing for rabbis since they are usually the only ones who listen.

The people behind him are dancing a freylach, which is something like a hora, which is something like insanity. To do this you need at least 20 people holding hands in a circle going at top speed in different directions around a 70-year-old grandmother doing a Russian Cossack dance on the floor.

Bubby Katz, in her strapless, floor-length, scarlet gown by Eva Melnick, head of Eva Melnick Creations, is shaking a leg or two. “Let’s hear it for Bubby Katz!” Eddie Golden yells. The cousins cheer.

“Bar Mitzvah,” the rabbi shouts, “is a noun. You do not get Bar Mitzvahed. You become a Bar Mitzvah, or you
celebrate a Bar Mitzvah. You do not get Bar Mitzvahed.”

“Hey, get a load of the rabbi here,” Uncle Meyer says. “Hey, Lil, look at this. He got all fapitzed. Look at this 
suit, Lil, it’s just like our Eric’s. Where’s Eric? Eric, the rabbi’s wearing your suit. Where’d you get it, 
Rabbi? You got it at Diamond’s, right? That’s where we 
got Eric’s. Where the hell is that kid? Lil, where’s Eric? I want the rabbi to see his suit.”

“I think he’s in the bathroom,” Aunt Lil says.”I think he’s throwing up.”

“Damn kid. It’s not even his Bar Mitzvah. I’d better go 
find him. Here, Rabbi, have a Seven and Seven. Lil, talk to the rabbi until I get back.”

“I don’t think we’ve met formally, Rabbi. I’m Lil 
Moskowitz, Mark’s aunt. And that was my husband Meyer 
Moskowitz, Mark’s uncle. We both enjoyed your speech 
today at the Temple, especially when you talked about teaching Jewish heritage to these young kids today, Rabbi. 
You don’t know how important that is.

“When we were their age our parents taught us what 
it was to be a Jew. They taught us all the important things about the religion—like how it was a sin to go out 
with Gentiles. But these kids today, you think they 
listen? My own Eric even. Rabbi, last month my Eric 
brought home a girl to us. Rabbi, I’m ashamed to tell you 
this, her name was Carmella. Carmella! Can you believe 
it, Rabbi? You try to teach a kid about Judaism. What would you do, Rabbi?”

Meyer is back. “Lil, I’m gonna kill that kid. I swear I’m gonna kill him. Eric, I tell him, stay away from the bar. You know your stomach. Don’t look for trouble. Drink ginger ale. But no, three whiskey sours he has and now it’s all over his goddamn suit and we’re goin’ home. Lil, I’ll kill him, I swear I will. Oh, excuse us, Rabbi. Something’s come up. We’ve got to go. Nice meeting you,
I’m sure.”

“THE AGE OF THE Bar Mitzvah has varied a little through the centuries,” the rabbi tells a sympathetic listener. “Jesus became a Bar Mitzvah when he was 12. Translated literally, the term means ‘son of the commandment’ 
or ‘man of duty.’ And, although it’s mentioned a couple 
times, there’s really no Biblical background for it. It 
didn’t really become a custom until about the 14th century. The term used then was `gadol,’ which means `adult,’ or ‘bar onshin,’ which means ‘son of punishment.’ This means the boy is liable for punishment for his own misdoings. It started as a simple religious rite. The elders then picked the fourteenth year, the year of puberty. The 
boy, for the first time, was allowed to read from the Torah, 
from the sacred scrolls. And the father gave a benediction: `Blessed be He who has taken the responsibility for this 
child’s going from me.’

“The idea of offering presents to the Bar Mitzvah boy 
came along later. It was a very simple thing at first, a few 
coins. And a very modest meal followed the ceremony. But it soon got out of hand. The religious meal went to such excess that in Krakow, Poland, in 1595 a communal tax was placed upon it to discourage extravagance. Am I 
boring you with this? I know you came here for a good time.

“Look, I don’t like to put down my own people. And maybe it isn’t the best idea in the world to hang out our 
dirty linen in public. I mean, I’m assuming you’re going 
to print this. Maybe you could suggest that we adopt 
another extravagance tax. Mind you, I’m not against having a good time, but there are limits.

“I don’t want to make it sound like all Jews are so extravagant. No, there are many who still have a simple luncheon after the 
ceremony. It serves the 
same purpose. And even 
the big affairs, it wouldn’t be right for me to condemn them with such a blanket. Many of them are in very 
good taste. Take this one 
right here. . . .”

THERE’S A DRUM ROLL. Eddie Golden approaches the microphone. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, a very splendid surprise courtesy of Harry the Caterer, caterers for all occasions. Could we bring the Bar Mitzvah boy up here? Where’s Mark? There we go. Come on up here, Markie. Let’s have a big hand for him, ladies and gentlemen—our Bar Mitzvah boy Mark Moskowitz. And where’s 
Mom and Dad? Myrna? Morris? Here they come. And 
how about another big hand for mom and dad. Yessiree, the people who made this all possible. God bless you, folks.

“And now, let’s bring in the surprise.” The doors to 
the kitchen open and two waiters wheel in a large cart. A red satin cloth is covering the big bumps underneath. There is another drumroll as Eddie Golden pulls off the cloth. First there are “ooohs” and then there are “aaahs” and then there is wild applause.

“And there it is, ladies and gentlemen, a life-sized bust 
of Mark Moskowitz made entirely out of chopped liver. Let’s hear it for the chopped liver.”

Across the room, the rabbi is turning as green as the 
olives they used for eyes. The boy and his parents are 
admiring the wonderful likeness. They made him turn all different ways to make sure all the angles are right.

“That’s my boy,” Morris Moskowitz says proudly. “Well, time to dig in.” He picks up a fork and a plate. “Okay, who wants the nose?”

IT WASN’T ALWAYS this way. Back when Mark Moskowitz’s father became a Bar Mitzvah, thrills were cheaper. A man who celebrated Bar Mitzvah the same month in the 
same Strawberry Mansion synagogue as Morris Moskowitz remembers:

“Then it was really a turning point in life,” he says. “It meant a lot of things. It meant you were old enough
to be listened to and it meant you were old enough to get 
a job to help out the family. But most of all, to the kid, 
it meant one thing. It was the only big thrill to look forward to. It was the day your father took you down to 
South Street to buy you your first pair of long pants.

“I remember leaving my knickers at the tailors. I never 
wanted to see those things again. I was a man now. I was fitted for the pants on Friday and on Saturday we went to 
the synagogue. There was me and my brother Phil and my father and my grandfather and my Uncle Abe. I 
remember it was snowing 
very hard when we got there 
and there were only four old 
men in the whole place. That wasn’t enough. You 
need ten adult males to 
have an official service. We 
waited for almost an hour and nobody else showed 
up. I was heartbroken. I 
thought I would have to turn in my long pants.

“Finally, my Uncle Abe 
put his coat back on and 
went out into the snow to
find the tenth man. Fifteen minutes later he came back 
with an old black man who was carrying a carton full of groceries. ‘Listen,’ Uncle 
Abe said, ‘we’re going to have to make it fast. He’s got 
some dairy products in there. If he doesn’t deliver them 
soon, they’re going to go bad and smell up the whole place. 
God would frown on this.’

” ‘But, Abe’ my father said, `he’s a shvartzah. “Look: Abe said, ‘I had to give the guy a buck to come in here for ten minutes. For that kind of money, he’s got to be
a Jew.’

“We went ahead, and I was called to the Torah for the first time. The men all shook my hand and said, `Mazel 
tov’ because now I was one of them. The delivery man picked up his carton and left. The rest of us went back to the house, where the women were waiting. My mother 
had baked a sponge cake and my Aunt Bessie brought 
some honey bread. My father gave me my first shot of whiskey that day. It tasted like poison, but I drank it 
like a man.

“There were presents too. I got a woolen scarf and 
three fountain pens. People don’t give fountain pens anymore. I don’t even think most people remember what 
they stood for.

“When you gave a fountain pen to a Jewish boy, it was like you were making a contract with him. Some day he would be expected to fulfill his end of it by becoming a professional man, using the fountain pen to write life­saving prescriptions or great legal decisions. I still have those fountain pens. None of them work very well anymore. But I wouldn’t give them up for all the money in the world.”

“I THINK THE WORLD Of these people,” Eddie Golden says during a break in the music. “Look, I guess it would 
be easy to poke fun at them, easy to laugh at them for all 
the extravagance. But don’t get the wrong impression. Sure there are loudmouths and showoffs. You find them anywhere. But look around this room. Stop looking at the chopped liver bust for a minute.

“Look at the bubby, God bless her. You can see a tear coming through the gleam in her eye. She thanks God she’s lived to see the day when her grandson becomes a man.

“And the parents. Sure they’re putting on the ritz. But they’ve waited years for this. They’ve been planning for 13 years. It’s worth every penny to them. The father looks 
like a callous guy, doesn’t he? Well, he’s the same guy 
who was crying with happiness to me before this started. Today, that little boy he’s slaved for all these years is a 
man. And the mother. A typical Jewish mother. She’ll love 
and protect you to death if you let her. This is one of the biggest days in her life. Her son is coming out of the shell. And she’s so proud of it she wants to show the world.

“Maybe that’s why they spend all this money. Look, to a lot of people it’s worth the money just to have the family 
together. When else do they see each other, at funerals? 
It gives me a warm feeling to be up there playing the music for these people and watching them have such a 
good time together.

“I play dozens of these things every year. Some are big 
and fancy like this and some are very plain and simple, more religious maybe. The size doesn’t matter. When you 
take away all the razzle-dazzle, you’re left with the very 
simple feeling of pride these people have. Up until a short time back, you know, the Jews had it very rough in this 
country. So now they have cause to celebrate. It’s not just 
the Bar Mitzvah of a boy. It’s a celebration of the freedom 
of the people. And there is a very deep ethnic and religious meaning in that. It’s something you just can’t put a 
price on.”

MOST PEOPLE DON’T LIKE to talk money anymore, especially when it comes to the cost of Bar Mitzvah celebrations. But there have been Bar Mitzvah affairs in 
this city that have cost over $50,000. That includes flying 
people in from all over the country and putting them up for a non-stop weekend of champagne breakfasts, lavish luncheons and formal dinner dances.

One local food store chain executive made his son’s affair so lavish that a national magazine came down to photograph it. A local meatpacking mogul served nothing but steaks—little filets for appetizers, big ones for 
the main course and bigger ones yet for dessert.

Bar Mitzvahs in tents have become pretty popular in recent years, especially among people who have enough ground to put up a big enough tent. Sometimes, of course, it gets a little chilly for that sort of stuff. It doesn’t 
matter, though. There have been many tent Bar Mitzvahs indoors, the most memorable in the main ballroom of the 
Bellevue, with the tent made of satin.

In a weird sort of way, the tent Bar Mitzvah reverts to 
a rather primitive time in local Judaism. Before many 
local Jewish communities became affluent enough to put 
up ornate synagogues, members of the congregation would 
erect large canvas tents in open fields. Important services would be held in them, many times with the rabbi competing with the pounding rain for the audience’s attention. The tents were just pragmatic ways of temporarily 
housing large numbers of people, many more than could
ever fit into the synagogue proper.

There have been other apparent returns to the more 
primitive, the most current and popular of which is the Israeli Bar Mitzvah. This is a return to the homeland, usually for a ceremony at the Wailing Wall, followed by a pilgrimage to holy shrines and maybe a side visit to a kibbutz or two.

This kind of thing is very in now. Recently, three families from the same block in Wynnefield, all with Bar Mitzvah boys, made the trip together. They chartered the 
better part of a plane, took along about 50 relatives and friends, including their very own rabbi, and watched the kids become men up 
against the wall.

“We figured out what it would cost 
us to have a large affair at a very posh 
place,” one of the fathers says. “We 
would have all had separate affairs and it would have cost us a fortune. And what would we have had to 
show for it? For the same money, we all went to Israel, to the Holy Land. 
In a few years, all that most people will have to remember about their 
son’s Bar Mitzvah are some corny pictures in a banquet hall. But Israel, none of us will ever forget Israel.”

Some people, a few outspoken rabbis in particular, would just as soon forget the whole Israeli trip. “It’s an 
abuse,” a local reform rabbi says. “A 
place is not holy. The thing you have to look at are the intentions of the 
people involved. I don’t want to criticize my colleagues who have gone over there with them. I’m sure their 
intentions are good. We are all working for a return to a real interest in Judaism, a rejuvenation. But those 
people are no closer to Judaism than when they left. What they sought wasn’t a repatriation. It was a vacation.”

The desire to “do something different” is something that has crept down from the well-to-do to the mass middle class. A couple out in the Northeast recently joined the ranks of those who’ve taken to the seas for a floating Bar Mitzvah.

Actually, it was the Delaware River, and the luxury liner was the Showboat. They rented it for a Saturday night cruise. The boat was decked out 
in a baseball motif. About 150 people came along. The kids all had bats and 
gloves with the Bar Mitzvah boy’s name on them. The cake was a baseball diamond.

The mother (“I always had this 
talent”) decorated the boat herself, 
making her own paper flowers. To 
carry off half of the double-play
theme, the invitations were shaped 
like boats. And the return cards were addressed to Captain Scott Mellman.

There was dinner and dancing on the four-hour cruise. Captain Mellman’s mother said it cost her and her husband as much ‘as a dinner dance would have cost. “We just wanted to 
make something for the kid better than we had for ourselves,” she said.

YOU’D THINK that people would 
start to run out of ideas after awhile, but they don’t. They just compound 
them. One Bar Mitzvah that people are still talking about started out 
small. First there was a ten-piece band. Then the ten-piece band took a break and they brought in two rock and roll 
bands. Then the rock and roll bands 
took a break and they brought in a 
string band, a full-dress string band straight out of the Mummers Parade. All the time, there were go-go girls 
dancing in raised cages. And when the go-go girls took a break, they put 
a pair of fat twin sisters up there.

All of this was only a warmup for 
the final crusher. They opened the doors and in pranced this giant trained elephant from a circus in Florida. They had all the guests line up on one 
side with the elephant and the Bar Mitzvah boy on the other side, and 
every time the boy would nudge the 
elephant he would bow to the next 
guest.

The affair ran the whole weekend. 
And the circus part alone, which accounted for only about half of the 
festivities, cost $35,000.

TO QUALIFY for such sweepstakes, a boy has to put in several years of 
schooling. Usually, this means going 
to a Hebrew school about three times 
a week, two hours a day for around 
four years. It is a trying experience, 
becoming a man. Mark Moskowitz 
remembers.

“The worst thing about it, I think,” he says, “was that I couldn’t play Wiffle-ball on Tuesdays or Thursdays
or Sundays.

“Some of the boys used to cut classes a lot and go to the shopping 
center and smoke cigarettes. One day I went with them and they made me smoke but I started to cough and choke because I’m allergic to smoke. That’s what my mother told me.

“From then on, I went to class every day and I studied very hard. 
When I was 12, I started going to Bar Mitzvah class.

“My parents had hired the hall 
even before I started class. I went 
with them when they met with the 
caterer. He was a funny-looking man and I couldn’t understand what he 
said because he kept talking with this big cigar in his mouth. Something about package deals. First he said 
the chicken deal would be $8.50 a 
person. ‘No chicken,’ my mother said. 
’Chicken’s not good enough for my Markie.’ So they got the prime ribs. I think that was $12.50.

“Then we got the band. This Eddie 
Golden guy had an office right in the 
caterer’s place. The caterer said he was the best. So my parents hired him. He sat down with me and asked me 
what kind of music I liked. I told 
him I liked Grand Funk. My mother made me apologize.

“Next they went looking for invitations. At about the fifth place, my mother finally found what she liked. The invitations were supposed to have a blue-and-white-striped border around 
them because those are the colors of 
Israel. But when they came back, they
were missing the blue stripe. The printer said my mother talked so much he never heard her say anything about a blue stripe. So my mother had to sit down with a blue 
pen and a ruler and make all the 
borders herself. All the time, she kept cursing the printer, but my Uncle 
Meyer told her not to worry because he knew a good lawyer and they could 
probably get enough money out of the 
guy to pay for the whole Bar Mitzvah.

“After the invitations, they went to order the flowers. This time my mother didn’t take me with her because I have rose fever. She told me the florist was going to spray them with something special so that I wouldn’t sneeze when I was making 
my speech.

“While my parents were picking 
the flowers, I had to make up a list of 
kids I wanted to invite. My mother told me I could invite 25 kids. All together, they were inviting 200 people. But they kept having arguments 
about cutting down the list. That’s 
why the invitations went out a week 
late.

“When it was time to have the dresses made, my mother and my grandmother and my aunts and everybody all went to Eva Melnick’s because my mother plays cards with her.

“Me and my father went to Fleet’s. First he wanted to take me to Krass Brothers. He said if it was good 
enough for him, it was good enough for me. But my mother wanted us to 
go to Fleet’s because she wanted me 
to get my picture in the paper.

“Fleet’s, you know, up on Castor Avenue, has this ad every week in the Jewish Exponent, and they show pictures in the ad of the kids who buy their Bar Mitzvah suits there, and they
give them a whole little write-up and everything. My mother said it wasn’t
such a great picture. She said I should 
have smiled more. She said it cost 
her $2,000 at the orthodontist for my 
braces, so I should smile more.

“The man who painted my official 
portrait, the one that’s hanging up in 
the living room now, says I smiled allright. My mother is mad at him too, 
though, because he painted my eyes 
brown, and when you look real close, they’re really hazel. Uncle Meyer says the lawyer can handle two cases.

“Anyway, we had to go to the party 
place next. That’s the place where 
they make the, what do you call 
them, favors. The place was owned 
by these two ladies. One of them was 
in my mother’s Jewish war veterans chapter. My mother had everything made with my name on it—the matchbooks, the napkins, the cake bags.

“Everybody was really so busy when it came time for the Bar Mitzvah. I had to go to Friday night services to say a prayer. My father was the 
only one who went with me. And the 
next day in synagogue for the Bar 
Mitzvah service, there were about 40 or 50 people I knew.

“The rabbi said I did real good 
reading from the Torah, so then the 
pressure was off me. The only thing I had to do at night was make a speech at the affair. And I didn’t have to worry about that because my 
mother had already written it.”

EDDIE GOLDEN CALLS for another 
drum roll. “And now, ladies and 
gentleman, a most solemn part of this most happy occasion. Right now, we’d like to call up none other than our Bar Mitzvah boy himself, so he can 
say a few words to you all straight
from his heart. Ladies and gentlemen, Mark Moskowitz.”

Mark takes the words straight from 
his pocket and when the applause dies down he starts to read. “I would like 
to thank all of you for coming to my Bar Mitzvah and helping to make it 
the great success that it is. And I want 
to thank each and every one of you 
for your wonderful gifts. But most 
of all, I want to thank my wonderful 
parents, without whom none of this 
could be possible.”

“Beautiful, Mark, just beautiful,” 
Eddie Golden says, taking out his silk handkerchief to brush a tear 
away. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, if we can bring the cake in, we’ll 
start the candle-lighting ceremonies. 
As you know, this is the highest honor the Bar Mitzvah boy can bestow on those near and dear to him, to ask them to light one of the 13 candles on 
his Bar Mitzvah cake.

“And now, all the way from Miami Beach to light the first candle, here 
they are, cousins Ben and Bessie Berkowitz.” Rat-tat-tat tat-tat-tat rat-tat-tat.

“And the second candle goes to 
. . . great aunt and uncle, Burt and Gert Goldstein.” Rat-tat-tat tat-ta-da­
rat-tat-tatta-da-da rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. 
Boom.

It goes on. Each candle brings up 
another group of long-lost relatives, most of whom Mark won’t see again until the next Bar Mitzvah or wedding 
or funeral. And each relative and 
friend brings with him an envelope. The ever present envelope. They come in many sizes and many shapes and 
many colors, but they all have the 
same thing inside. The only real difference is in the denomination.

THE CANDLELIGHTING CEREMONY is over now.Eddie Golden strikes up the band and everybody forms a long line like 
a snake and starts dancing through the hall with Bubby Katz in the lead, shaking a finger in the air and throwing up a tangle of varicose veins every three steps. Just about the only one not dancing is the rabbi, who’s sitting in the corner finishing his baked Alaska.

“They’re not really bad people,” he 
says.”In fact, they’re good people. They mean well by all of this. Maybe I just see too many of these things. To 
them, a Bar Mitzvah is something that comes along once or twice in the 
lifetime of a family. But me, last year alone my synagogue had 75. That’s a
lot of baked Alaska.

“I don’t know, maybe I’m just a 
deadhead. Maybe I’m just not, how do 
you say, ‘with it.’ But somewhere along the way, this whole thing has lost its religious significance.

“I’ve seen this coming since World 
War II. It’s been a parallel development to Jews becoming more comfortable and more stable economically.

“I just find it wasteful. Of course, these people are entitled to do what 
they want with their money. And not all Jews are like this. I hope I’m not 
leaving you with that impression. But
it’s very hard to pinpoint the blame.

“You see, the Jewish community 
suffers from what I call a 13-year-old syndrome. Parents have helped set up the Bar Mitzvah as the ultimate achievement in a young man’s religious life. So the boy reaches Bar Mitzvah and he stops. He stops learning and he stops being anything more than a token Jew. Certainly this is 
nothing to celebrate. It’s no wonder people don’t come back to synagogue.
At age 13, all they’ve got is a Mickey 
Mouse impression of religion. What’s
to celebrate?

“Our synagogues have become little 
more than Bar Mitzvah mills. In fact, you don’t even have to study in Hebrew school any more. You can literally buy a Bar Mitzvah now. You can go to someone and pay him to teach your son just enough to get by on his Bar Mitzvah day. It might take 
only a few weeks.

“Why do the synagogues go along 
with all this? It’s simple. They need the money. While their child is studying, the parents pay a membership fee. And that helps keep the synagogue going.

“But I look at some of these affairs 
and I wonder if we’re not better off 
going broke. I mean, some of these 
things are pretty sick.

“I tell you, you just don’t know what to expect next. Last week in my own synagogue there was a Bar Mitzvah. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it 
as long as I live. It was one of those 
theme affairs. The parents didn’t tell 
me what it was going to be. They said they wanted it to be a surprise.

“I came down from my vestry to 
hear a lot of strange music. The 
mother of the boy met me at the door. All I could see were a lot of little tents and people in sheets and a big chopped liver camel.

” ‘How do you like it?’ the mother 
beamed.

” ‘I’m afraid I don’t know what it 
is,’ I said.

” ‘Why, Rabbi,’ she said, ‘it’s an 
Arab bazaar!’ “

THE PARTY’S OVER. His family and friends say good-bye to Mark Moskowitz, the man. At home, finally, Mark 
Moskowitz slumps on the couch and unloosens his tie.

“I think now that it was all worth
it,” he says. “It used to bother me 
going to Hebrew school all those years learning some funny language that I knew I was never going to use. But 
now I feel different. I’m not sure what 
it is. But something has happened to me.

“You know, while I was making 
my speech today, I kept thinking of this story from the Bible that my Hebrew school teacher taught me. 
It’s a story about a father passing down all of the things he has to his 
son. But the most important things, the story said, weren’t the things you could buy with money.

“Today was one of the weirdest days of my life. A lot of that stuff was 
pretty gross, but I know my parents meant well. It’s funny, they thought they were doing it all for me, but I was doing it for them. For the first time in my life I realized what it really means. To be a man.”