Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that can help answer the question.
Query: How tall was Abe "The Newsboy" Hollandersky?
The 5' 4" welterweight Hollandersky lost to Panama Joe, the younger and stronger Panamanian Light and Middleweight champion, and the accomplished middleweight Connors of Scranton, Pennsylvania, who had a five-inch height advantage. But he gave a closer fight to the Seattle welterweight Ryan before an impressive crowd of 1500 at the Savannah Club in Ancon, Panama on February 23, 1914. The Panamanian fans voiced their disapproval of the referee's Draw ruling as Hollandersky appeared to have landed more blows.[82] The Norwich Bulletin felt Hollandersky had the edge in the Ryan bout which they referred to as a "Welterweight Championship of the Isthmus." Perhaps as a result, Abe's fight records at the end of his autobiography and Nat Fleischer's 1944 Ring Record Book referred to Hollandersky as a Welterweight Champion of Panama, though his actual title was heavyweight champion.[83]
On October 9, 1937 Callahan was scheduled to box in a benefit exhibition at Legion Stadium in Los Angeles for Wad Wadheim, a fight promoter who had suffered a stroke. Among the fifty or so boxers that participated were triple World Champion Henry Armstrong, Callahan's opponents Jackie Fields, Ace Hudkins, and Jack Silver as well as Young Jack Thompson, Abe 'The Newsboy" Hollandersky, Fidel La Barba, ex-Middleweight champion Al McCoy, Jim Jeffries, and Maxie Rosenbloom.
By the age of seventeen, Hollandersky was wrestling professionally in New London, and at sixteen, in September 1904, was found guilty of trespassing on the New York, New Haven, and New London Railroad. The New London judge found Abe was the "ringleader of a gang of boys who made themselves a nuisance by hanging around the station," and they may have hitched the occasional ride on the boxcars.[25] For a boy who chose boxing as a profession, this was a minor offense, but Hollandersky may have suffered from a lack of adult supervision having never attended public school, and having a blind father who was limited in the role he could take in his upbringing. The following month, according to The Day, Hollandersky headed Southwest to Louisville, Kentucky where he had family.[26]
Falk Hollandersky's wife Sarah and Abe's mother Celia were sisters, daughters of assistant Rabbi Mowza (Moses) Finkielsztejn (born c. 1812). The two sisters in turn married the Hollandersky brothers Falk and Charles.[19][21][22][19]
On September 6, 1915, Palitz fought Abe Hollandersky in Aborn Hall in New London, in a dominating twenty round victory. New London's "The Day" gave only one round to Hollandersky in their newspaper decision. Palitz fought New London welterweight Hollandersky four times in paid bouts, and several more times in exhibitions.
During one of Abe's few White House visits on November 8, 1929, just a few weeks after the great stock market crash, Hollandersky met briefly with President Herbert Hoover who signed a photograph for Abe's autobiography. Hollandersky may have received rights of passage for travel from the Presidential staff, campaigned for other signed photographs, and asked for book endorsements from Navy brass who advised the President. He soon would return to his home and newspaper shop in Los Angeles. Abe had traveled to the East Coast and New York to complete his biography, as it was first published only four months after his White House visit.[139][140]
Memories of Hollandersky would linger in the mind of some of boxing's greatest. In March 1911, in an interview with the Hartford Courant, Abe claimed to have once sold a paper to Jack Johnson, America's first Black world heavyweight champion. No less a boxer than Mohammad Ali compared himself to Johnson, as they both felt unjustly stripped of their heavyweight titles. Bob Johnston, of Johnston's Sport's Palace in San Diego, where both Hollandersky and Jack Johnson would live and visit, claimed to have once hired a down and out Johnson in 1929 to shadowbox at his adjacent Liberty Theatre. According to Johnson, the amiable champion often told patrons as he entertained them with shadow boxing that his opponent was Abe the Newsboy.[164][165]
Hollandersky was reputed to have fought an unprecedented 1,039 boxing matches between 1905–18, as well as 387 wrestling matches.[3][4] The record of 1039 bouts from Hollandersky's autobiography was featured for decades in the Guinness Book of World Records, Ripley's Believe it or Not, The Ring Record Book, and hundreds of short newspaper articles made available as Associated Press fillers, appearing most frequently between 1930 and 1970. The most common fight total cited by Hollandersky was 1039, but as Abe fought additional exhibitions he increased the count, thus a few sources that interviewed him after the publication of his book quote higher totals.[5][6]
His historic first bout for the Panamanian Heavyweight Title with Californian Jack Ortega on May 30, 1913, featured an audience of nearly two thousand and included most of the members of an American congressional party in Panama, there to view the final stages of the building of the Panama Canal. According to Abe, the congressmen had sailed there on the Presidential yacht Mayflower. Ortega, the reigning Panamanian heavyweight champion, was known to deliver knockout punches and his size made him a formidable opponent. Abe entered the ring to an ovation and a hearty round of applause, as Ortega was not a friend of the Panamanian crowd who knew him from previous fights. The match ended in an eighth round foul when, by most accounts, Abe was having the better of the bout, landing more frequent and strategic blows, if less powerful than his opponent's. Hollandersky was around twenty-five and in the prime of his boxing career, while Ortega was around thirty-six, and outweighed Hollandersky by at least thirty-five or forty pounds.[63]
On October 9, 1937 Silver was scheduled to box in a benefit exhibition at Legion Stadium in Los Angeles for Wad Wadheim, a fight promoter who had suffered a stroke. Among the fifty or so boxing greats that participated were triple World Champion Henry Armstrong, Silver's opponents' Jackie Fields, Mushy Callahan, and Young Jack Thompson, Abe 'The Newsboy" Hollandersky, Fidel La Barba, ex-Middleweight champion Al McCoy, Jim Jeffries, and Maxie Rosenbloom.
After he tried to sell a newspaper to Teddy Roosevelt aboard the presidential yacht USS Mayflower in September 1906, Roosevelt had Admiral Robley D. Evans, Commander of the North Atlantic Fleet, create the official unpaid title "Newsboy of the Navy," for Hollandersky, giving him the right to sell papers to any Navy ship and travel to any destination on U. S. Naval vessels. According to Hollandersky's autobiography, their meeting took place during Roosevelt's Presidential review of the Naval fleet in New York's Oyster Bay, off Long Island, September 2–4, 1906, and was a pivotal point in Abe's career. Hollandersky had a busy boxing schedule in New York that year, and Roosevelt had likely come from his home off Oyster Bay. Hollandersky and the President engaged in a brief and friendly exchange of light blows after Roosevelt waved off his Secret Service bodyguards. Their brief exchange took place on the Starboard deck of the Presidential yacht after Roosevelt saw Abe's cauliflower ear, and asked if he was a boxer. The President had boxed competitively at Harvard, and took a sincere interest in the eighteen year old newsboy who was keen on selling his papers to the fleet.[27]
Perhaps the single fight that most influenced the "Newsboy" to retire was his brutal loss to welterweight Dave "KO" Palitz on September 6, 1915, in Lawrence Hall in New London. An accomplished welterweight, Palitz would unsuccessfully challenge Lou Holtz for the Connecticut State Welterweight Championship in 1920. During a boxing and wrestling tour in the Southwest and Mexico in the first half of 1915, Hollandersky had suffered from an illness of several weeks which may have contributed to his lack of conditioning for the bout.[87] The Springfield Courier said of the twenty round battle that "K. O. Palitz of this city handed Abe the worst trimming a man ever received in a local ring, though the newsboy was on his feet at the end of the bout". New London's The Day, noticing Abe's puffy face, swollen ears, and blackened eye after the fight, wrote "he looked as if his demise were near at hand."[88][89] The following February Palitz defeated Abe again in a less brutal ten-round match which Hollandersky had staged and promoted. The day of boxing featured boxers Joe Azevedo, an exceptional lightweight, Young Terry, and Charley Curley. A glance at Abe's personal tally of fights at the back of his autobiography indicates he may have sparred with both Curley and Young Terry.[90] Though Hollandersky continued to find matches, and even returned to Panama for several lucrative bouts in 1916, he may have sensed his days as a competitive prize fighter fighting top talent were numbered.
Hollandersky was born to Jewish parents Charles and Celia Hollandersky in the small town of Berżniki, in Northeastern Poland bordering on Lithuania, then in the province of Suwałki, Russia. Like many Jewish families in their part of the world, the Hollanderskys struggled to survive in the grips of poverty with little opportunity to improve their fate. Abe held memories of his mother washing clothes barefoot in the snow of Berzniki.
He became a professional wrestler under the name of Bull Montana. He gravitated to films in 1917, appearing first in several of the vehicles of his close pal Douglas Fairbanks. In 1919 he appeared as a gruesome villain in Maurice Tourneur's masterpiece "Victory" alongside Lon Chaney. Numbered among his many friends was Abe "The Newsboy" Hollandersky, boxer, wrestler, and movie extra, who claimed Montagna offered to help him finance his 1930 autobiography.
Four of Abe's siblings, two boys and two girls, died of malnutrition in Berzniki prior to Abe's departure. Departing Russia as a young child, Hollandersky headed to Berlin, Germany and than Manchester, England with his mother Celia and older brother Sol. In Manchester, Celia worked in the textile industry to raise money for passage to America. Manchester was a natural choice as her relative Solomon Hollandersky, son of Falk, had already emigrated there before coming to America.[20] Hollandersky's father Charles, a tailor, had preceded him to America around 1886 to find work, at some point plying his trade with his brother Falk in New England. Charles sent money from New England to Abe's mother so his family could eventually afford passage to America, but became blind before they were able to leave Berzniki. Uncle Falk and his wife Sarah Feyga provided parental support to Abe at times in his youth.[19]
Blady, Ken, The Jewish Boxers' Hall of Fame, (1988). Shapolsky Publishers, Inc, New York, ISBN0-933503-87-3, pp.71–76. Hollandersky, Abe, The Life Story of Abe the Newsboy, Hero of a Thousand Fights with U. S. Navy, (1958). Published by Abraham Hollandersky, Los Angeles. Hoffman, Abe (Fall, 2007). "Going a Few Rounds with Abe the Newsboy", Western States Jewish History, Volume 36, pgs 3–33.
Hollandersky fought fellow New Londoner Austin Rice and Connecticut welterweight Dave Palitz on more than five occasions each. Rice had shown enormous boxing promise at age thirty as a contender for the Featherweight Championship of the World against Young Corbett II on January 14, 1903. Hollandersky fought Rice, who was twelve years older and sidelined as a carpenter, in both paid and exhibition bouts until the end of Rice's boxing career. Fellow New Londoner Mosey King, an early New England Lightweight Champion and Yale boxing coach for forty years, is included in Hollandersky's list of fights in the back of his autobiography as a "Win". King, who like Abe was of Jewish ancestry and raised in a close family, was Connecticut's first boxing commissioner from 1921–23, and reputed to have given tips to any boxer looking to improve his game. He was a likely opponent of Hollandersky at least in a sparring or exhibition match, as he grew up in New London with Abe. According to at least one source, Rice, King, and Hollandersky shared Jimmy Nelson as an early coach and sparring partner as youths in New London. The legend goes that Nelson had worked as a corner man for undefeated World Lightweight Champion Jack McAuliffe before coming to New London.[47][48]
Hollandersky had a busy boxing schedule throughout 1910 and 1911. He used his naval privileges in combination with commercial vessels between 1912 and 1914, to sail south from his hometown of New London, selling newspapers to the fleet while stopping to fight boxing matches in Cuba, Jamaica, Panama, Chile, and later Mexico. In January and February 1912, taking a commercial vessel South, he fought several bouts and wrestled at or near the base in Guantanamo, Cuba, while the fleet was on maneuvers. He served briefly as newsboy for the USS<i>Delaware while she was in Cuba in January.[58] The New York Tribune of March, 1912, reported "Abe has been with the fleet at Guantanamo all winter and has won several bouts with ease against the best the island affords." The Reverend W. H. "Ironsides" Reaney was a boxing mentor to Abe while he was in Cuba, and helped arrange his Cuban bouts during morning breakfasts aboard the ill-fated battleship USS Utah. Reaney helped referee a few shipboard fights, and had boxed in his earlier days. The USS Utah had been constructed the previous August, 1911, and was on a shakedown cruise ending in Guantanamo. Though obsolete by 1941, she would become one of the first ships lost at Pearl Harbor.
According to one newspaper, after Ortega pushed him onto the ropes in the final round, "Abe was partly in the ring and partly out of it, spectators in the crowd trying to prevent his falling from the platform and Ortega, without really realizing what he was doing but fighting madly, swung low and landed on Abe's groin". The article continues, "Abe, who did not fall when the blow was delivered, walked to his corner across the ring and then laid down on the floor to recover from the effects of the punch. The injury he received was apparent to all who were close to see him when he was undressed by his seconds. It was some fifteen minutes before he was able to leave the ring." Hollandersky inferred in his autobiography the foul was probably intentional, particularly the one that ended his rematch with Ortega later in August. The foul ended the bout, and made Hollandersky Heavyweight Champion of Panama.
Facing another well known opponent in an exhibition match on November 16, 1918, Hollandersky met the former light and welterweight world champion Joe Walcott in New London for a four-round match to benefit the United War Workers of America. The bout showcased intense boxing strategy, though Walcott was well past his prime. Appearing as the headliner for the benefit was Larry Williams, a light heavyweight of considerable skill, who would act as a sparring partner for Jack Dempsey in 1921 and later for Dempsey's successor as world heavyweight champion Gene Tunney.[99] Williams would appear with Abe in MGM's The Crowd Roars (1938). A photograph of Hollandersky with Williams and Gene Tunney, likely taken at a boxing benefit or training match, appear in most editions of Abe's book.[100][101]
That night, Hollandersky was promised a Heavyweight Championship belt at a banquet in his honor in Panama City, and was invited to meet with the President of Panama, Belisario Porras Barahona. Abe spoke to the group of dignitaries, gamblers, and fellow boxers about his victory.[66]
He died in San Diego in early November 1966, and was buried in Greenwood Memorial Park, as was his wife Freda in 1988. He had had no children. At his request, his tombstone was headed with his ring name, Abe the Newsboy, the name used almost exclusively by the newspapers that covered his boxing and wrestling career.
In 1938, Glick played an extra in MGM's "The Crowd Roars". In this successful boxing movie with Robert Taylor as the lead, Glick briefly appeared in a background gymnasium scene with boxers Larry Williams, Maxie Rosenbloom, Jimmy McLarnin, Abie Bain, Frankie Grandetta, Jack Roper, Tommy Herman, Larry Williams, and Abe "The Newsboy" Hollandersky.
During his cruises, Abe often boxed and wrestled matches for both the training and entertainment of the troops and often fought professional bouts as well. His primary function was acting as a newsboy to the crew.
On March 28, 1897, Connolly met fringe world welterweight contender Paddy Fenton at the Suffolk Athletic Club in Boston, Massachusetts, losing in a fifteenth round disqualification. Connolly was disqualified for a punch to the groin of Fenton two minutes and thirty seconds into the fifteenth round. The victory for Fenton over a future Welterweight Champion, even if it was the result of a foul, may have been one of his most notable. Around September 1911, around the age of thirty-eight, Fenton would perform an exhibition bout with the young welterweight Abe "The Newsboy" Hollandersky, a future Panamanian Heavyweight Champion, at the New London County Fair.