I used to drink at Dale’s Bar on Broadway in Camden. I’d just gotten out of the army and was working as an interviewer at the state unemployment office up the street.
It was a dead end job; I could see the very desk I’d be sitting at in ten years, so most days I’d drink my lunch at Dale’s and come back half loaded.
Dale senior was a short, stocky dude, and as soon as he opened his mouth you knew he didn’t take any shit, which was the proper attitude for a guy who owned a bar in Camden.
I’d gone to high school out in the burbs with Dale junior, a very pleasant dude who spoke with a small lisp.
Dale’s star patron was Dean Cavello, the doctor at New York Shipyard in Camden who made a lot of money selling disability papers for phony injuries. Doc Cavello’s henchman was a small black guy named Warren, and they also ran an abortion mill in Camden and some black whores who were their best customers. I heard later there was even some heroin involved.
Doc didn’t spend much time at the shipyard, and one of his favorite things was to take some guys from Dale’s and go down into the Italian neighborhoods in Camden where they had bars that could have been in Hell’s Kitchen and buy everybody drinks and sing along with the operas on the juke box. He could sing pretty good, it seemed to me, but then again I was at least half drunk on most of Doc’s soirees.
Another Dale’s regular was a skinny alkie named Roscoe, who worked as a mess boy on dredges until he had enough time in to collect unemployment. He supplemented this waffle, as we called it, by doing slip and falls on the buses that ran on Broadway. He’d go to get on just as the bus was pulling away and then fall into the street, screaming in feigned pain, and most of the time the drivers would give him a fin or ten bucks rather than go through all the paperwork for an accident like that. I remember one day Roscoe pulled his scam on the same driver twice and got his ass tuned.
My favorite Dale’s guy, though, was Danny the Flower Man, an ex-boxer who had a good retail floral business. I never did know Danny’s last name.
Whenever Gypsy Joe Harris was fighting in Philly, Danny would use his connections to get ringside seats and he and I and Dale junior would have a steak dinner at the Pub Tiki off Rittenhouse Square and then go out to the Arena on Market Street, which was home then to the old Philadelphia Warriors pro basketball team and the Ramblers, the hockey team that came before the Flyers.
Now everybody knew Danny the Flower Man so he’d take us backstage to where Gypsy Joe would be sitting at one end of a bench lacing up his boxing boots while his opponent would be doing the same thing at the other end of the bench. Most of Gypsy Joe’s foes were Spanish kids from New York who could box like devils. He beat them all.
Gypsy Joe Harris was from Camden originally but came up in North Philadelphia where he honed his fighting skills on the streets and later in the dingy, bustout boxing gyms there. He was a smallish welterweight, but that didn’t really matter because nobody could hit him.
He was all about red, as he thought befitted a gypsy: red robe, red trunks, red shoes, probably a red jock. I knew a guy named Rundle Hallowell, who was actually named after a toilet. His father worked at Universal Rundle in Camden, which made toilets, and he loved his workplace so much he named his son Rundle. He had another son named Basket.
Anyhow, Rundle was selling used cars out on Admiral Wilson Boulevard in Camden and Gypsy Joe showed up to buy a car. When Rundle asked him what kind of a car he wanted, Gypsy Joe just said, “Red.”
He was stone bald, too, long before that became a fashion statement. For a long time, Gypsy Joe wore bells in the laces of his ring shoes, and it sounded like Santa Claus had taken up boxing. Then the boxing commission got all snotty and banned the bells.
Gypsy Joe Harris made the Ali Shuffle, which came later, look like some kind of feeble dance move with his antics in the ring: twisting his body into crazy contortions, all the while throwing punches with both hands from every conceivable angle. When he was in full flight, he’d even throw punches behind his back. Every round was showtime. He made the cover of Sports Illustrated.
God, how they loved him in the streets of North Philly. He couldn’t go a block on Diamond Street without countless handshakes and back slaps. He trained mainly in the bars and clubs. He couldn’t get rid of his money fast enough.
Gypsy Joe beat Curtis Cokes in the Garden and was 24-0 when he ran into the great Emile Griffith. After he killed Benny Paret, Emile never let it all hang out again and became a master boxer. He came down to Philly and gave our hero, Bennie Briscoe, a ten-round boxing lesson, fighting him left-handed, right-handed, inside, outside, turning Bennie every which way but loose. Pure poetry in motion.
Griffith was just too big and strong for Gypsy Joe, and got the unanimous duke. It was August 6, 1968.
It turned out he had beaten a one-eyed boxer. Gypsy Joe had lost the sight in his right eye in a street fight when he was 11 and had memorized the eye chart and fooled the Pennsylvania Boxing Commission all those years until they changed the eye chart and found him out and barred him for life.
That life was short and tragic, marred by addictions and poverty. He burned the red candle at both ends until his abused heart gave out on March 6, 1990. He was 44.
The streets were a little emptier that day.