MANASSA, COLO. : Even to This Day, It’s Jack Dempsey’s Town . . . and It Has Been for Last 92 Years

Driving north on a farm-country highway across the cattle and alfalfa country of southern Colorado’s flatlands, you catch only a fleeting glimpse of the little green sign.

“Manassa,” it says, and an arrow points down a two-lane road to the east.

“Manassa,” you think, driving on. “Manassa, Manassa . . . Manassa! Of course--Jack Dempsey, ‘The Manassa Mauler.’ ”

You pull over, make a U-turn, and drive back--back into the so-called golden age of sports, back to one of the best known little-town names in American sports.

Jack Dempsey, a lean, grim-faced brawler, came fighting out of America’s western gold mining camps in the World War I years, fighting for $2 and $3 a fight in Saturday night saloon bouts.

Later, in 1921, he attracted boxing’s first million-dollar gate, when he met Georges Carpentier. In America, the 1920s were called the golden age of sports, and two names towered over all others: Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth.

For Dempsey, it started here, in 1895. He was the ninth of 11 children born to his Mormon parents, Hyrum and Celia Dempsey. He was christened William Harrison Dempsey, but later began calling himself Jack Dempsey, after a famous 1880s middleweight.

The Manassa Dempseys lived on the poverty line, but in those days they probably just called themselves dirt poor. Hyrum Dempsey did a little farming, a little school teaching, a little carpentry, and a little manual labor.

When he learned he could make $1.50 to $2 a day shoveling ore in gold mining camps at Cripple Creek and Deadville, he packed up his big family and left. Jack Dempsey was about 10.

In 1966, Dempsey returned to Manassa--population today, 875--for a special occasion. The city park was renamed Dempsey Park, and the old champion’s boyhood home was moved two blocks to the park, and converted into a Jack Dempsey museum.

“He had a wonderful time here,” said Stanley Holman, who in 1966 was Manassa’s mayor. “It was his last visit.

“All of us who’d lived here all or most of our lives enjoyed his recollections of life in Manassa. I can remember him telling us his mom would cook up a big pot of beans with just a piece of pork in it for flavor, and try to stretch it out for four or five days. They didn’t have it easy.”

The first clue a visitor is offered that this is Jack Dempsey’s town is a corner gas station. On its white wall, someone has painted a 25-foot-wide mural, a replica of George Bellows’ boxing masterpiece, “Dempsey and Firpo.” It depicts Dempsey being knocked through the ropes in their epic 1923 New York fight.

Downtown Manassa is roughly three blocks. Dempsey Park occupies the south side of the middle block. The tiny log house where Dempsey was born, two blocks away, is about 75 feet off the sidewalk. Across the street is the post office, the Family Video store and the Manassa Town Hall, where one dirty police car is parked.

Inside the little log house, Mrs. Lavern King, born and raised in Manassa, rises quickly from a rocking chair, startled to see a visitor. The museum is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Saturday.

Racks displaying newspaper clippings of Dempsey’s ring wars are shown. One article from an area newspaper was written in 1966 during Dempsey’s visit by an interviewer who’d asked the old champion about his boyhood in Manassa.

“I was a mom’s boy,” he told the reporter. “I helped Mom with the washing and the cooking. I was raised like a girl.

“There were 11 of us kids. We were just working people, drifting around the west. I did everything, to help make money. I thinned beets, pitched hay, worked a threshing machine.

“After we left Manassa, Dad and my older brothers were getting $1.50 to $2 a day shoveling ore. In a few years, so was I.”

Dempsey, in a 1950s interview with Associated Press sportswriter Jack Hand, described his early days as a prizefighter in Colorado’s rough and tumble gold towns:

“Most of the camps and towns had bare-knuckle fights in the saloons on Saturday nights. Then they’d pass the hat for the fighters and maybe you’d get two or three dollars in pennies, nickels and dimes.

“I was a 135-pounder when I started fighting for money. I was always matched against some great big guy, most often someone who was fat and in terrible shape. It didn’t take me long to learn that if I stayed away from those guys for a while, they tired out pretty fast, and it wasn’t hard to beat them.”

In the little museum, under a glass countertop, lie two old, wrinkled boxing gloves--said to be the pair Dempsey used the night he crawled back into the ring to knock out Firpo. Next to them, a pair of boxing shoes--said to have been worn by Dempsey on the night of his first fight with Gene Tunney. The shoes are in suspiciously good condition, unmarked and well-shined.

Always, Jack Dempsey had friends, back home.

“All those years when Jack ran his restaurant in New York, he always went out of his way to make sure anyone from Manassa coming to New York got special treatment at the restaurant,” Holman said. “He was never too busy to visit with folks from Manassa.”

As recently as the 1960s, Manassa old-timers could recall their fellow barefoot, turn-of-the-century street urchin, Jack Dempsey, riding a horse named Topsy to the old swimming hole near Dead Man’s Gulch, on the Conejos River. Kids swim in the same place today but now they ride dirt bikes.

And the old-timers remembered Dempsey, the boy, at another natural playground, where Manassa kids still frolic. It’s called the Devil’s Kitchen, a formation of rocks near the Little River that look like ovens, tables and chairs.

On the occasion of Dempsey’s final visit to Manassa, the old-timers recalled Dempsey hanging out at Rogers blacksmith shop, or the time he got in big trouble by tossing a shotgun shell wrapped in paper into the school’s pot-belly stove. The shell exploded, nearly sending the teacher into cardiac arrest.

Recollections had it that Dempsey took his “willowing” without complaint.

And yes, he fought a lot. And he could whip every kid in Manassa but one. Yep, the one guy, besides Gene Tunney, Jack Dempsey could never beat.

On a 1930s visit to Manassa, Dempsey asked a couple of old friends, “Is Mooney Daniels still around here? I liked that guy! He was the only boy in town I couldn’t lick.”

Where have you gone, Mooney Daniels?

Mooney Daniels had a brother named Frank, who later hoboed around the west with Dempsey.

“One time, we went to Salt Lake City where we lived for a week in a saloon,” Daniels told a writer in 1966. “See, in those days we could get free food and an occasional five-cent beer. Jack carried an old pair of gloves with him and often picked up a buck fighting anyone. It was on this trip that I saw him KOd by Jim Flynn in the first round in Murray, Utah.”

Fireman Jim Flynn achieved lifelong notoriety by knocking out the 21-year-old Dempsey in the first round, in 1917. When Flynn died, in 1935, he went to his grave hailed as the only man ever to have knocked out Jack Dempsey.

Flynn is buried in Cavalry Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Dempsey, the old Manassa Mauler, was 87 when he died in 1983. He’s buried in Southampton Cemetery, Southampton, N.Y.