Jack Raleigh leans back in the chair at his Ryan Hotel office, a single light from a floorlamp of the era illuminates the desk in front of him. The phone is cradled on his shoulder as he hastily scribbles on a notepad in front of him.
"We want someone who can fight. No ham and eggers,'' he growls into the receiver. "No, not him. He fought here two years ago and stunk out the joint. Who? Never heard of him. Can he go four hard rounds? Okay, then, he's on the card.''
Raleigh's ample girth makes it hard for him to get any nearer the desk than he already is and he drops the second half of a sandwich onto the floor trying to take a bite. The clock says 11:15 p.m. and the kids are still up the street at the theater. They've been there watching movies the last four hours. Too late to return to Somerset. The little ones will double up on a mattress near their father's desk for the night. They always seem to enjoy staying over. Alice will understand. It gets them out from under her feet for a while.
Welcome to St. Paul, Minnesota, the 1950s, an era when boxing was at the top of everyone's list of sports to watch throughout the nation. The Gibbons brothers and now their descendants and extended family were prominent names on the city streets. The name O'Dowd still resonated with real boxing fans. St. Paul was as good as anyplace for producing contenders, even world champions, with Irish names. Now, it's 'Flanagan' that is all the rage. Those Irish names sell around here. Wholesome names of hard-working, God-fearing blue collar folks who struggle all week and go to St. Patrick's or to the Cathedral on Sunday mornings. Wasn't the priest who founded the place an Irishman himself, became a bishop or something... yeah, of course, he was.
Raleigh, an Irishman himself, was an icon of promotion in an era when boxing was king. He boxed some himself as a youngster, but was more highly regarded as a wrestler who would take on all comers at the small fairs that dotted the Wisconsin and Minnesota farm country. He was as strong as a bear.
He and his wife, Alice, owned the River's Edge Restaurant in Somerset. Their eight kids went to parochial school there. Jack always had a knack for promoting. He could talk you into believing that a possum tasted much better than it sounded, that to miss giving it a try was cheating yourself.
He was proud of his restaurant and proud of the fights he brought to St. Paul.
"He worked as hard on the undercard as he did the main event,'' said former St. Paul Pioneer Press columnist Don Riley. "He wanted good bouts on the undercard, too, and he was good at matching contrasting styles. Everybody liked Jack. He had an ingratiating personality.''
He brought in the big names, primarily for fights against Del Flanagan: Kid Gavilan, Ralph Tiger Jones, Virgil Akins, Ralph Dupas, Joey Giardello, Joey Maxim, all world champions. He was a promoter, in two different reigns, for 25 years, selling the Flanagan's, Del and Glen, among a host of names from the era.
Jack's son Pat was eight years old at the time of the Gavilan-Flanagan fight, which set a state record gate at the time, $43,653. "Some of the fighters on that card were in their first fights and they were scared,'' Pat said. "Dad walked around that dressing room and held the hands of each fighter. He told them to pray with him that everything would be just fine.''
That story was told later in a letter that Gavilan sent to Alice Raleigh at the time of Jack's death in 1983. He talked about how Raleigh had held the hand of every fighter in the room: white, black, hispanic, and told them to pray that all the fights turned out good and that nobody got hurt.
Six weeks before the fight, Gavilan nearly backed out. Tickets were not selling and Flanagan supposedly called him a racial name in the gym. Gavilan threatened to quit the fight. Details of the argument appeared in Riley's column the next day. A gimmick, a selling tool of the time?
Ahhh...probably.
Ticket sales took off and the fight sold out. The fireworks were not over yet. Gavilan's backers (the denizens who stayed out of the limelight but controlled the sport at the time) approached Raleigh and wanted half of the gate, too. "My dad made what was probably a mistake at the time,' said Pat. "He went to the boxing commission and they held up the purses.''
When Jack returned to his River's Edge Restaurant, he returned to devastation. "The front door had been pulled out and was hanging there. I remember dad swearing,'' Pat recalled. "We got inside and the restaurant was totally wrecked. It was a professional job. They had used sledge hammers.''
The mirrors above the bar and the restaurant's large picture windows were all smashed. The stoves had been demolished. There wasn't adequate insurance on the restaurant.
"Dad went berserk. He was never able to get a good name fighter after that,'' Pat said.
With the arrival of the Minnesota Twins and the Vikings in the early 1960s, Raleigh got out of the fight game...but he was not entirely finished with this sport he loved dearly.
There was another Irish name on the horizon just a few years later. Pat O'Connor would be a hit in St. Paul, Raleigh reasoned. In addition, closed circuit fights were selling big and Muhammad Ali was huge. So, Raleigh took another stab at promoting. "Pat O'Connor...dad knew he could sell that in St. Paul,'' Pat Raleigh recalled.
Jack, who received the George Barton Award in 1958 for his contributions to the sport, also figured that St. Paul would become a home base for the charismatic Irish kid, but that never happened. O'Connor was a product of the state and fought in Rochester and Minneapolis as much as he did anyplace else.
Nonetheless, Jack Raleigh left a boxing legacy in the capital city that is now part of boxing history, a legacy recognized now and hereafter by the Minnesota Boxing Hall of Fame.
