D. Man: My Life and Boxing: Based on a Memoir by Richard Paul Westcott

By Dr. John White and Grene Kilroy

Richie was the real deal. He knew how to work a corner. Yet, his book isnt a run-of-the-mill boxing story. Its a record of a time when a guy from the streets would fi nd a place like Mack Lewiss in Baltimore, not to learn a sport, but to survive. The fact that he spent time in two of the toughest gyms in America, Mr. Macks place and Johnny Toccos in Vegas, gives him a unique angle on the game. He knew the greats. Oh yeah. And he could write as well as he could throw a left hook.

Gene Kilroy, trusted confidante and business manager for Muhammad Ali

My friend John White digs deep into the typewritten reminiscences of a troubled man, Richie Westcott, and pulls forth a story much richer than any of us who knew him could ever have expected.

Amazing Layla McCarter,
Six-time world champion & female boxing pioneer

I bought Richie a computer when I took over the gym. Of course, I had no idea he was turning out such a story. I really liked the guy. He worked hard to help the young fighters.

Luis Tapia, highly successful boxing manager and trainer,
and former owner of Johnny Toccos Ringside Gym

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504911092

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© 2015 Dr. John White. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/07/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-1110-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-1109-2 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Cover art by Richard Paul Westcott

CONTENTS

Foreword

MY LIFE

Chapter One

Chapter Two

BOXING

Chapter Three

Epilogue

Special thanks to Mary Frances Dale for her assistance with this book.

FOREWORD

More than a dozen years ago, I walked into the Tocco gym to visit Mike Tyson. I’ve been to many gyms in my long association with Muhammad Ali and, I’ll tell you, in a gym like Johnny Tocco’s you always run into the perfect opponents – the guys who fight the up and comers, guys who always make the promoter look good. They fight their hearts out. They’re called the also-rans. Because they never had a chance to be champion.

While waiting for Mike, I looked around. The gym was full of these fellows. A man whose been around the game can spot a few things – a little slowness in the footwork, a loud grunt when a guy gets hit.

As I watched two young fighters in the ring, I took note of a gentleman who stood nearby observing. He was a guy in his fifties, a couple of inches under 6 feet and on the high end of the middleweight scale – about 160. He had wispy, sandy-colored hair which was a little long for a guy his age, and he wore blue and gray sweats. His face looked like tanned leather. I don’t know how to put it, but he looked like a guy used to the sun yet denied it for awhile.

I knew he was a boxer by the way he leaned into the ropes and followed the action. I noticed he would look where a guy was going to be hit before he got it. He knew these guys’ weaknesses. He knew one was slow with the combination, leaving himself open, while the other had just one punch.

I followed the man’s eyes. They were cold yet there was something extraordinary about them. From my angle, they showed compassion, sadness, maybe recognition. There was a brain working behind those eyes. This guy was a thinker.

When the bell rang, the Thinker picked up a towel and threw it to the guy with no combo. As the young man sat on a stool, the Thinker talked quietly to him. I couldn’t hear what he was saying but I could tell there was no B.S. There was no sympathy, yet there was no scolding. The Thinker was telling the fighter straight out what he saw. He was passing along knowledge.

Tyrone Boone came over. He was the guy who ran the gym after Johnny sold out. Johnny didn’t last long, by the way. He died shortly after he sold the gym.

I asked, Who’s that man?

That’s Richie, said Boone. Richie Westcott. He’s the janitor.

Janitor? I said.

Yeah. But I let him work with some of the amateurs.

He knows boxing, I said.

Yeah. He’s good, said Boone. But, he’s a little nuts.

I asked him to explain.

He lives here. He sleeps here at night… and he says Johnny’s in the rafters.

I know I looked confused.

He says he hears him at night, said Boone. He hears him walking around in the rafters.

I looked back at Westcott. He was still talking to the kid fighter. He didn’t look nuts to me. But, if he was eccentric, he wouldn’t be the first in this game.

Oh, yeah, added Boone. And he worships Johnny.

Worships? I asked.

He asks every old timer about him. It’s like he’s writing a book. He can’t know enough about Johnny Tocco.

Why? I asked.

I don’t know. There’s just something about Johnny Tocco that he really… I guess, admires.

Tyson was an hour late for our appointment, but I didn’t mind. I like a gym and I had met an interesting character. I struck up a conversation with Richie that day – the first of many.

After that, I saw him every time I dropped by. We struck up a friendship. We talked boxing. He validated my first impression. He was a very smart man, well-read and articulate, and he knew everything, every aspect of what it takes to be a pro. It turns out, he learned from one of the best – Mr. Mack Lewis in Baltimore.

And, yes, Boone was right. The subject Richie and I discussed most… was Johnny Tocco. Johnny was a dear friend of mine. I knew him for many years, and that’s how Richie Westcott also became a dear friend. Richie allowed me to reminisce about Johnny and to recall the many experiences we had together – and here was a guy, Richie Westcott, who truly cared and wanted to listen.

Was he perfect guy? No. A lot of things happened to him before I met him. Again, those eyes. Terrible emotional pain had been inflicted – some caused by outside forces and many caused by his own doing. He had a real problem with drugs and alcohol.

It should be noted that the memoir that follows is written from this perspective – by a man who fights powerful demons. His point of view is not always valid or maybe even sober.

Because of circumstances you will read about, he came to vehemently hate authority – even when the authority figure was a brother keeping a roof over his head or a man like Tyrone Boone who gave him an opportunity to make something of himself. I make note of this because I know Boone and he is a good man. I also know of occasions which are not documented in this book that illustrate a terrible affliction of Richie’s. He consistently bit the hand feeding him.

What I’m saying is, in the book he talks bad about Boone and I don’t believe it.

Nevertheless, at his core, Richie Westcott was a good, sensitive kind of man. He deeply cared about young fighters, and he absolutely loved and worshiped Johnny Tocco, a guy he never knew in the flesh.

A year or so after first meeting Richie, the gym sold, then it sold again. One day, Richie was gone. He moved on and I never saw him again. I wasn’t surprised he didn’t say goodbye or say he was going. He was rootless. A guy who lives year-round in a gym with no heat or air conditioning, isn’t the kind of guy who settles.

Years passed. Then, a couple of months ago, another Westcott -- Bruce Westcott -- called. Bruce and I go back many years to the days when he used to run the Dunes. Before that, he was an A-List band leader and pianist in Vegas. He played for Sinatra and all the greats who came through. The guy is a class act. Strictly Armani.

Bruce invited me to his home in Vegas. He said he wanted to show me something. He told me his brother was deceased and had left behind a wealth of artwork and writing that should be published. He wanted my advice.

Normally I decline invitations of this kind and, believe me, I get them all the time. Usually, there’s a business proposition that follows or a plea to help somebody find an investor. I tell a lot of people I don’t get involved. But my friendship with Bruce is built on many years of mutual respect. I knew he wouldn’t waste my time if he thought the art and the writing were bush league.

I opened my door and my heart and went to see him. What a pleasant and beautiful surprise to discover that one dear friend, from the glamorous world of entertainment, and another, from the dirty cinder block walls of a fight gym, were brothers. Bruce and Richie were brothers. What’s more, Richie didn’t end up on the streets as I assumed, but had lived on Bruce’s property in Vegas after the gym sold. He had lived in a caring, family environment until the day he died.

Then Bruce showed me the art.

I didn’t speak for half an hour until I finally said, Richie Westcott was the Picasso of boxing.

I was spellbound – the color, the passion, the power that came from his slick-muscled fighters. His brush was dipped in blood, sweat, and anger and thrown into the canvas with a driving left hook.

Then, the writing – one thousand pages of tiny, single-spaced, typewriter-written memoir, not only about boxing but about his life as a street gangster on the mean streets of Baltimore. The revelations about a guy who I thought I knew were staggering.

There also was poetry and a massive historical saga, The End of War. Who was this guy Richie Westcott?

What follows is his edited memoir. It tells the story of an ordinary kid whose simple world begins to spin extraordinarily haywire. For fifty years, Richie walked through a nightmare.

Now the nightmare has passed. I like to think my two old friends, Johnny Tocco and Richie Westcott, are united. They are talking about fighters, about Sugar Ray’s back-peddling left jab and hook, about the rock-solid Joey Giardello, or Ringo Bonavena’s haircut. Who knows?

Whatever they talk about. I know they’re friends. Johnny has a son he never knew about, and Richie has the dad he always wanted.

I just hope they save me a seat ringside.

Gene Kilroy

September 27, 2012

Las Vegas, Nevada

MY LIFE

CHAPTER ONE

On January 2, 1956, an article appeared in Baltimore newspapers:

COLLEGE YOUTH IS MURDERED:

Street Gang Members Arrested for the Slaying of Western Maryland Student.

Police arrested two teenage street gang members today and charged them with the murder of a 19-year-old Western Maryland College freshman, Gaither Lee Fischbach, Jr.

The teenagers were members of a gang called The Drapes. Officers called it a case of drapes getting even with a square.

Last June, young Fischbach graduated from City College and had enrolled at Western Maryland with plans to enter the Methodist Ministry.

Seventeen—year-old Charles Orem, a store clerk, and 16-year-old Richard P. Westcott, were arrested and charged with killing him.

About 2:10 a.m. Sunday, Fischbach stumbled into his home in southwest Baltimore and called for his mother. Mrs. Rheba Fischbach, stirred from sleep, heard her son’s call, rushed downstairs, and found him bleeding from a chest wound.

A boy stabbed me, he told her before losing consciousness. The family called an ambulance but the young man died before arriving at St. Agnes Hospital…

*   *   *

At ten, o’clock, New Year’s Eve, 1955, we’d been standing in line at the rec center with a hundred other kids, waiting to get in. The old brick building, like a lot of the row houses on the block, still wore bright colored Christmas lights. The temperature was in the twenties, but with the wind, it felt like zero. We were freezing.

Finally, my buddies and me got to the door.

No pegs, he said.

The doorman was talking about our black zaks with the narrow cuffs. He could see we were Drapes by our pants and our Ducktails. The flash of crazy pink shirts showed above our winter coat collars.

He said it in front of a bunch of kids.

I’m tired of the persecution! I shouted. It’s New Year’s!

No pegs, he said blankly.

Sonny and Eddie pulled me away to keep me from slugging him. He was a foot taller and looked about thirty but I didn’t care. At 16, I was a boxer and, especially after downing three beers, I was afraid of nobody.

Punk! I yelled, and the boys drug me away into the black street.

The old Greek who ran the center had told the doorman, No Drapes. No gang boys. They just cause trouble. They fight.

It was a Drapes vs. Squares thing. Tommy Fales was a square and he had a date with a beautiful, blond, stacked majorette named Debbie Wetlaufer. Tommy played in the band at Baltimore City College -- some kind of horn – and he looked like Pat Boone down to the perfect hair.

When the jukebox played Baby, You’re Too Much, I wanted to go inside and steal Debbie away from that loser Tommy. It’s a fact. My brother Brucie and I owned that rec center -- the same at Sloppy Joe’s.

At Joe’s, and Arundel Ice Cream, we used to dance to colored music -- Ray Charles, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, the Coasters – the real music, not white boy covers.

Every time we’d take the floor with some cute little girl, all the kids moved back to see us swing our moves – the jitterbug, the stroll, the bop -- we could do them all. We were better than anybody on the Buddy Deane Show or in some lame Bill Haley flick. Pretty soon there would be a circle of kids around us, just watching.

But the doorman didn’t like my pants. There were extreme.

Extreme dress leads to poor behavior, said Governor Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin. He spoke in a deep, flowery baritone like a sort of a lantern-jaw Dave Garroway. He loved to be on T.V.

He looked like the Dudley Do-Right cartoon, only older, heavier and with thinning, greasy black hair. In fact, he sort of talked like Dudley Do-Right.

Delinquency is a disease more powerfully resistant to treatment than tuberculosis! And, more deadly! We have got to find a cure!

Street kids are worse than the clap was the message.

Every year since the early 1940s when he was Mayor of Baltimore, one of his top political planks was the teenager problem -- herds of teenagers were running wild in the streets! The summer of ’55, he even convened a big conference on juvenile delinquency to follow up a national conference Senator Estes Kefauver put together in D.C. the year before.

My mother thought Marlon Brando was to blame. He got all the grown-ups fired up about street gangs with The Wild One, and now Blackboard Jungle had come out and moms and dads were afraid their kids were going to turn into Vic Morrow.

Where did they think Vic Morrow got it? Drapes had been around for a long time – the hair, the clothes, the talk, even the switchblade.

On our black and white television, Douglas Edwards reported the bad news:

Teenagers now commit more car thefts than adults….

A huge map of the world hung behind him as telegraph keys clicked away.

He quoted J. Edgar Hoover and an F.B.I. report, Persons under 18 now commit 53.6 % of all car thefts, 49.3% of all burglaries, 18% of all robberies, and 16.2% of all rapes…

It was the war, explained Mom.

She was my North Carolina grandmother and she lived with us. She loved Douglas Edwards, also a Southerner, and she never missed the CBS news.

By the way, we called Mom, Mom, because our own mother did. On the other hand, I never called my mother Mom. She was always mother.

Mom continued: All us country people come to town for defense jobs and good pay. Then all the men went away…Mommas was working – millions of ’em. And there weren’t nobody to look after the kids… Then the men got killed or didn’t come home or, if they did, they come back drunk or mean and crazy as a sawmill rat.

Her own husband, David Seaton Hill, also was gone – not a casualty of an enemy bullet but of the rolling pin. She kicked him out. As sweet as he was, he was also a drunk and she got tired of it. When they moved north, he took a job at a Baltimore car body shop but after a few years he quit and went to work as a hotel night watchman in D.C.

After Seaton, Mom married Charlie F. Harris. We called him Pop. I was a grown man until I knew Mom had lived next door to him, years ago in Wake County, North Carolina. In fact, back home, she worked for his wholesale sausage company as a sausage maker. He was married with children then and it was one of the other times Mom had kicked Seaton out. I never knew if Pop Harris was a widower or if he was divorced, or what, when he married Mom.

Once they married, Pop got the idea to get back into the food business. This time, instead of sausage, he tried another old-time North Carolina favorite -- country-style buttermilk biscuits. Pop and Mom would cook up a batch and share them with their neighbors in the 1500 block of West Fayette. Pretty soon they had a mass of true believers raving about their biscuits.

Charlie, your wife and you need to sell these biscuits in stores! they said.

So, Pop and Mom started baking biscuits for the public. Only, instead of selling wholesale to grocery stores, they baked big batches, wrapped them up, put them in a little wagon, and went up and down the streets selling straight to the public. They made a small fortune. Enough for Charlie to invest in real estate. Pretty soon he owned row houses all over Fayette.

Later, he made a second, much bigger fortune from the row houses, which he then invested in his one true dream, the Tip Top Motor Court. Tip Top was a collection of small white clapboard tourist cabins he built on Washington Boulevard near Elkridge. He had a restaurant and a little office building (both painted white) with a tall flag pole out front flying the American flag. It was great. He was so proud of it. He even printed color post cards so tourists could send home pictures of the Tip Top to their friends.

Then the State of Maryland, after 23 years of talking about it, decided to build the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, completely wiping out Washington Boulevard (or Highway 1) as the route between Baltimore and D.C. In no time, Pop lost everything. All the hard work, the sausage making, the biscuit baking, all the real estate deals, even the little red wagon. It killed him. The road was completed in 1950 and he died the next year. He was only 59. Mom was tougher. She moved in with us.

So it was an odd family unit for the mid-1950s. Two divorced women, Mother and Mom, and three teenagers – my older brother Bruce, my younger brother Alan, and me – living on the colored side of Baltimore.

I was born at Franklin Square Hospital May 3, 1939. Mom was there when my mother delivered me into the hands of Dr. Milton Siscovic who, according to Mom, came out the delivery room to say I was a boy. He spread his hands wide and said, He’s got shoulders like this!

Poor Mother. I weighed ten pounds, six ounces. For the rest of my life, whenever Mom talked about my birth she would always have a proud smile on her face and end the conversation by spreading her hands wide and repeating Dr. Siscovic’s words.

I was the second son of Nathaniel Julius Nat and Dorothy Valworth Hill Westcott (my older brother David Bruce was only 17 months at the time), and I think they gave me a great name, Richard Paul Westcott; but, when I was a kid everybody called me Dickie.

We lived in a nice neighborhood of immaculately-kept red brick row houses at 2121 Walbrook Avenue. It was an all-white neighborhood then, including a few Jewish families. The house was a wedding present from Nat’s mother, Emma Shifflet Westcott, a very successful business woman.

richie%20art%207.jpg

DOROTHY AND NAT WESTCOTT

Emma was born in Greene County, Virginia to Rufus and Lena Shifflet in 1887. The Shifflets were originally Hessian soldiers, German mercenaries fighting for the British during the Revolution. Some of them deserted the British army and hid out in the Virginia mountains until the war was over. Rufus, my great-grandfather, was at least the third generation to live in Greene County.

About 1909, Emma had a kid out of wedlock, my uncle Claude. No one ever spoke about the father but he must have been Cherokee because the boy looked like he fell off a buffalo nickel.

Five years later, Emma married my grandfather Julius Westcott in nearby Rappahannock County, Virginia where she very soon gave birth to my father.

Several generations of Westcotts had lived in Rappahannock County. Julius’s grandfather Gideon was a minister and a Civil War veteran from Company G of the 46th Virginia Infantry. Gideon’s son Nathaniel was a carpenter and his son Julius, my grandfather, was a house painter when he married Emma. He also was a drunk. So, some time in the 1920s, when Emma was in her mid-thirties and the boys were teenagers, she finally had enough of Julius’s abuse and called it quits on the marriage.

I gathered my two sons and we left Piedmont, Virginia, she told me once. When we arrived in Baltimore, I didn’t have a cent to my name.

Somehow she managed to get work and save enough to buy a home which she turned into a boarding house. By 1930, when she was 43, she was living in a house with her two boys (ages 21 and 16) and four male boarders. One was a Russian musician named Bill Klosky, who may have given my father music lessons, because Nat grew up to be a professional musician. When Nat married mother in 1936, he played upright bass and sometimes sang for Dick Hot Cha Gardner’s Orchestra in Urbana.

Along the way, as she prospered, Emma rose above her hard-scrabble country roots. She cultivated a dignified persona and spoke with a soft, placid Tidewater accent. I declare…, was a common exclamation.

About the time the boys were leaving home, Emma decided to branch out. She determined there was more money in renting rooms by the hour than by the month. So, on Fayette Avenue, instead of setting up another boarding house, she established a whore house with a basement bar. It was less than a block from the historic Westminster Presbyterian Church, where Edgar Allan Poe is buried, yet near enough to the harbor and the railroad station to accommodate all manner of lonely-hearted pilgrims.

richie%20art%205.jpg

CLAUDE AND NATHANIEL WESTCOTT

Incidentally, she was one of the biggest contributors to the coffers of Westminster Presbyterian. I don’t know if this was a business decision to keep the church off her back (she certainly made contributions to policemen and politicians, as well), but I kind of doubt it. Her family and extended families – about 40 of us – were all baptized there and attended every Sunday. My brother Bruce was even named after the Reverend Bruce McDonald. However, Emma never attended one service that I can remember.

She made a fortune from the cathouse and, like Pop Harris, Emma had an eye for real estate. She bought several row houses on Fayette, even property in Severna Park, and, for herself,she bought an attractive home on 20th Street, far north of her former address.

My earliest recollections of 2121 Walbrook, the home she bought Nat, are of my father being absent. By the time I was five, he was in Germany fighting the war. So just the three of us -- mother, Bruce and I -- lived together. As the baby, I received lots of love and attention.

Often I would sit in my toy plane with the white stars on the wings and pretend to shoot down Jap planes as the living room radio played, Attaboy give ’em the gun, or As those Caissons go rolling along. Sometimes, I would let a red stream spill from the side of my mouth (from red gumballs) and slouch over whenever hit by a Jap plane –like John Garfield on the big screen in Air Force.

I was a very patriotic kid. I even listened to Gabriel Heatter (There’s good news tonight…) and Walter Winchell with his sign-on, Mr. and Mrs. America and all ships at sea…

We had nice neighbors