Live Fast, Die Young: The Life and Times of Harry Greb

My late mother, an extremely well-read and highly educated woman, knew very little about boxing history or Harry Greb, but was amused when learning that some people thought that Greb was Jewish even though his father's first name was Pius!

- Chuck Johnston

 

I asked Klompton this question. Tunney said Greb as Jewish, and I believe Greb was honored by the Jews for something as well.

Klompton says it is not true, and did not give the topic any ink in the book. Perhaps it was the times. Back then fighters would be given an identity to promote the ethic battles.

 

About forty years ago, I was reading a book about Jewish athletes, which certainly wasn't a first edition. For one thing, the forward or introduction of the book said Harry Greb was mistakenly included in first edition.

Along with the rumors of Greb being Jewish, there was some talk about his real last name being "Berg," or "Greb" spelled backwards. Of course, even a very brief search through various documents would put such talk to rest.

I wonder if the fact that Greb was of German descent caused some confusion about his religion. If he was of Irish or Italian descent, I doubt if there would be such confusion at the time.

- Chuck Johnston

 

:stir

 

Very interesting. I somehow (for whatever reason) expected that they didn't know that much about Greb even though he was a relative of them.

 

If I may ask - did you talk to Greb's relatives on the phone or did you travel to talk to them face to face?
I always imagined that would be one of the big factors if somebody writes a book: some people only talk to you if you pay them, then you have to travel to them, sleep in a hotel for a few days when you interview them and so on. So all of that costs a lot of money. But since I have never done it myself, I don't know how it looks in reality.
I think Ted Kluck mentioned that part of writing in his book "Facing Tyson".

 

I have an old book, Esquire's First Sports Readers, which contains a number of sports articles which appeared in Esquire Magazine over a period of ten years starting in the middle 1930s. One of the articles in the book, The Iron City Express, was about certain events in Harry Greb's boxing career and appeared in the December 1936 issue of Esquire Magazine. The author of the article was none other than James R. Fair, who later wrote the Greb biography, Give Him to the Angels. The article, like the biography, contain a number of errors.

About forty years ago, I was looking at the boxing books in the main library of the University of California, Los Angeles (better known as UCLA) when I found a copy of Give Him to the Angels. It was a yellow-colored hardback book which was cheaply produced and had coarse, thin pages. As I recall, the publisher was some outfit called Smith and Durant. During a lifetime of reading quite a few books, I don't think that I have seen another book published by the same outfit.

The book contained a quite a number of hilarious anecdotes. But it seemed that Fair was much more interested in writing about Greb's *** life than producing a serious overview of Greb's great career. At the time, I didn't know much about Greb's career, but I later came to believe that Fair's description of the events surrounding Greb's bout with Fay Keiser were inaccurate. For one thing, I later was looking for boxing results in the San Francisco Chronicle on microfilm when I read about the events surrounding Greb's bout with Jack Reeves, which took place in Oakland shortly before the bout with Keiser. There wasn't any indication about Greb being out-of-shape for the bout with Reeves, which makes it very unlikely that he was grossly out-of-shape for the bout with Keiser.

- Chuck Johnston

 

Steve, how many books did you sell yet? Do you get weekly updates from barnes&noble, bookstores etc or only monthly updates?

 

I just alerted the family of Whitey Wenzel about the book. So there should be a few more sales there. :smoke Hopefully a good pic of Whitey that we've never seen will come out of this connection. I'll keep you posted.