Max Baer and the Star of David (15 page)

I also continued, though at greater intervals, to accompany him to some of his out-of-town engagements, which usually took place on weekends, though if one of his engagements required that I be away from the YMCA for a day or two during the week, grateful for the publicity generated by Max’s visits (and for his generous donations to the scholarship fund), the YMCA would grant me time off to be with him.

The stated mission of the Golden Gloves of America, posted on a wall of a large room the YMCA put aside for the use of our teams, was to provide an active and safe environment that protected and enhanced the physical and emotional well-being and social development of young men by developing their athletic skills, sense of good sportsmanship, self-respect, work ethic, and pride, while also providing wholesome entertainment for the community. The possibility that any of the young men I worked with would become professional prizefighters was minimal, and so I devoted myself to inculcating in them a sense of self-discipline—a work ethic they could apply to other realms of their lives—and to perfecting their defensive skills, which could, in those chance encounters that might occur throughout their lives, prove useful in insuring their safety, as well as the safety of others.

Within a few months, improvements in the skill levels of the boys were such that, after doing well in local tournaments against teams sponsored by the police and fire departments, we entered our first regional event. It took place an hour away, in the Stanford University gymnasium (Stanford University did not itself officially sponsor a boxing team, but it did have a first-rate boxing “club” that included several members of their nationally ranked football team), and at this event we came away with two champions in the Silver Gloves categories, at weights of 135 and 160, and three Golden Gloves winners, at weights of 112, 118, and 160. The team was ecstatic, as were their families and the larger YMCA community, and we received excellent press in both the
San Francisco Chronicle
and the
San Francisco Examiner.

I never sparred with boxers on our teams, but I would shadow-box alongside them, and I’d put on punch mitts and have them go at me, and—how I came to acknowledge the degree to which my eyesight had been failing—one afternoon in April I challenged our best heavyweight, a young Negro boy named Billy Pidgeon (he had been defeated at Stanford by a young man who would go on to become an All-American linebacker), to throw everything he had at me. He did so with enthusiasm and, while drilling me with lefts and rights in patterns I had taught him—one two slip; two two slip; one two one two slip slip; one two one two slip slip slip—he suddenly faked a left to my right mitt, and swung a roundhouse right that caught me by surprise and hit me so hard on the side of my head—I was not wearing protective headgear—that, though I did not fall, I became aware, immediately, of a dead cushion of air to the right of me that meant I had lost hearing there.

To my relief, my hearing returned several minutes later. Billy apologized, insisting he had not meant to hurt me but had been carried away by my command to give me all he had, and while members of our team gathered around, I praised Billy for the strength and swiftness of his blow, but reminded him that power without discipline was as useless as discipline without power. I urged him to stick to the routines, and only the routines, until he was ready to go it on his own in a free-style manner informed by what he did not yet possess: a sure knowledge of essentials and, equally important, control
of
those essentials.

On my walk home that day, I realized that, though my hearing seemed fine, my vision was not. I was squinting in order to see things—boats in the bay, cars along the highway leading to the bridge, signs on storefronts—and, at times, though not in a consistent manner, I was repeating a habit that had, in recent months, become second nature: turning my head slightly to the right or to the left in the hope this would enable me to see things directly in my line of vision more clearly. Had Billy’s blow dislodged something critical to my vision, I wondered—a temporary loss such as those I had suffered in earlier years during and after several bouts—or had his blow aggravated a condition that had been there, on and off, for nearly a year but that I had been choosing to ignore?

Two days later, when Joleen and I were sitting on our front porch after dinner—it had rained heavily the night before and into the early afternoon, and the air seemed to have been vacuumed clean so that when one stood at the far end of our porch, one could see farther than ever into the Bay and across the Bay to Marin County, to the sailboats anchored there, and to the houses on low rising hills beyond—I told her about the blow I had taken to the head, and also about my vision—that objects in front of me had been becoming more and more severely blurred, as if smudged, with each passing day.

Rather than chastise me for having kept this information from her, she put me through some simple tests: standing first to one side of me and then to the other, and moving several steps backwards and forward while I kept my eyes fixed on a point in front of me so that we could determine when I began to lose sight of her. When we had established that my peripheral vision had not been compromised in a significant way, Joleen had me compare what she could see at various distances—a particular boat at rest along the Embarcadero shoreline, or moving out to sea, a chimney or television antenna on a nearby rooftop—and the results led her to an obvious conclusion: I should make an appointment to see our family doctor as soon as possible.

“Not an eye doctor?” I said.

“Not an eye doctor,” she said, and she said no more, but it was clear she already suspected my failing eyesight was a result, not of an accumulation of blows to the head, or to a loss of vision that might normally accompany aging (Joleen had begun wearing eyeglasses several years before), but was a consequence of something more commonly lethal, especially, as I would learn, for Negro men: diabetes.

Our family physician, Doctor Martin Baskin, gave me a thoroughgoing examination. After the examination, he asked me when I had last seen an eye doctor, and I replied that I had
never
been to an eye doctor because I had never, until recent months, experienced any problems with my eyesight. He said he was going to refer me to a colleague, Doctor Simeon Levitzky, an ophthalmologist, and expected Doctor Levitzky to concur with the preliminary diagnosis he had arrived at: that my problems with vision were caused by diabetes.

He made this diagnosis not only because of the significant loss of visual acuity shown by my difficulties in reading an eye chart, but because of what he saw when he looked into my eyes with his ophthalmoscope: the presence of apparently new and fragile blood vessels covering the surface of the clear, vitreous gel that filled the visible part of the eye. He expected that Doctor Levitzky would find similar blood vessels growing
within
the eye, along the retina, that some of the blood vessels would be found to have been leaking blood—hemorrhaging—and that it was this ongoing process that was causing vision loss and could eventually lead to blindness.

This initial diagnosis was based on several other factors: my telling him that I had been losing weight though I had not changed my diet in any way, and my report of symptoms that commonly accompanied the onset of diabetes: increased appetite and thirst, and greater frequency of urination. He predicted that when results from blood tests arrived, they would show high levels of blood sugar, and that this would be an indication that my body either was not producing enough insulin, or that it was not able to metabolize the insulin being produced. In addition—what had informed Joleen’s diagnosis—diabetes was a disease with a higher than average prevalence among Negro men, and occurred with increasing frequency as Negro men aged.

I saw Doctor Levitzky two days later, and he confirmed Doctor Baskin’s diagnosis. I had diabetic retinopathy, and had, he believed, been suffering from it for some time. The fact that I had failed to inform Joleen or anyone else about my blurred vision or—another telltale symptom I had been ignoring—the persistent flights across my line of vision of red specks (blood!) had not been helpful, and only the fact that I had remained fit, and had not gained excessive weight (and had not, thus, driven my blood sugar to even higher levels), had kept my condition from becoming worse. At the same time, however, being in excellent physical shape had masked the gravity of my condition, and had kept me from acknowledging that there was cause for alarm.

To complicate an already grave situation, Doctor Levitzky concluded I was also suffering from what was called macular edema, which resulted when fluid created by abnormal blood vessels, along with fatty deposits, leaked into the center of the macula—the part of the eye responsible for straight-ahead vision. Alas, he said, macula edema was rarely reversible.

The prospects, he said, both literally and figuratively, were not—apt word—bright. There were no surgical treatments he trusted that were capable of reversing what was happening. It was his opinion that cauterization, for example, which some ophthalmologists might recommend, would do more harm than good (laser surgery was still decades away), though he thought insulin could slow down the course of the diabetes. He suggested that Joleen and I come in together so that his nurse could teach us how to administer injections. He prescribed a minimal daily dosage that he would increase gradually as needed, and as my condition became more grave.

The most important advice he could give me, however, was to prepare for the possibility that my loss of vision would be progressive and that I might, within a few years, lose my eyesight entirely. “By vocation and character,” he said then, “you are a fighter, Mister Littlejohn. But against the natural course of illness and disease, being a fighter who battles an adversary has little relevance for a condition such as yours.”

He strongly advised that I do no boxing whatsoever, and that I limit weight lifting and other exercises that might prove jarring to my system and could thereby induce hemorrhaging. Most of all, he urged me to visit the offices of the San Francisco Lighthouse for the Blind in order to educate myself about future eventualities.

And then—this was the first and only time this rather severe man, whose mien was itself defined by the very word he repeatedly used to describe my situation—“grave”—smiled at me. He wanted me to be sure that the person I saw at the Lighthouse for the Blind was Miss Marie-Anne Hémon, to whom he had previously referred several patients. She was highly knowledgeable about services available to individuals with vision loss, and this was due in part to the fact that she was herself the mother of a boy who suffered from a significant visual impairment. In addition, she had a daughter who, though not completely deaf, suffered from substantial hearing loss. He believed these unhappy facts of her life enabled her to be unusually empathic to the people with whom she worked. She was, also, a woman of color, and he thought this fact would put me at ease when I conferred with her about my condition.

Joleen accompanied me to the doctor’s office the next day, and on the following day she began administering the insulin injections. Two days after that, I began administering them myself. That week I was also fitted for eyeglasses, which helped enormously, and which, when I wore them to the YMCA, caused many comments and much teasing. Although I did not inform anyone there of the seriousness of my condition, I did reduce my levels of physical activity, and when a member of my teams would ask why I was doing so, I would simply make use of the old line about my adversaries surely not wanting to hit a man who wore glasses. I also said I believed in granting my young boxers the increasing autonomy that came with their growing mastery of the skills I had been endeavoring to teach them.

The boys sometimes laughed among themselves at what they thought of as my old-fashioned way of expressing things, and in this they were no different, of course, than Max had been at the start of our friendship, and so I took to exaggerating my fanciful use of language in order that they would continue to laugh at me and, thus, not suspect the real reasons for my diminishing involvement in their workouts.

A week after I had begun daily injections, I took the Market Street Cable Car to the city’s civic center, and walked from there to the building on Van Ness Street that housed the San Francisco Lighthouse for the Blind. A few minutes after I told the receptionist that I had a one o’clock appointment with Miss Marie-Anne Hémon, a tall, youthful-looking woman whose skin was of a color we had, in Louisiana, and not in a flattering way, called high yellow, came toward me, extending her hand and saying, warmly, but with a mischievous sparkle in her eyes, “You must be the famous—or shall I say
in
famous—Horace Littlejohn.” I shook her hand, and affirmed that I was one and the same, and it was in that swiftly passing moment that I sensed—that I
knew
—my life was about to change as profoundly as it had on the evening nearly three decades before when Max Baer had first taken my hand in his.

Miss Hémon led me upstairs to her second-floor office, chatting with me all the way, telling me of the letter she had received from Doctor Levitzky, and about how she had gone to her local library—she lived in the Portero Hill section of town, not far from the school in the Mission Hill section where Joleen taught—and found newspaper articles about me and my work at the YMCA.

She also told me she had mentioned that I would be coming in for an interview to one of the men who worked as a porter at the Lighthouse, and whom she knew to be an avid boxing fan. Hawkins Johnson was his name—he had come to the Lighthouse four years before, after he had lost the use of his left eye—and she said he claimed to have seen me fight several times, and also to have seen me at some of Max Baer’s fights when I was working with Max.

He was counting on me to arrange a meeting for him with Max Baer himself. Hawkins was not, Miss Hémon noted, known for his shyness. In fact, he had knocked on her door earlier in the day, said he remembered that today would be the day I would be there, and reminded her that she had promised to introduce him to me. She then asked if it was true, as both Hawkins Johnson and the newspaper articles maintained, that I had been an exceptionally gifted boxer, and I replied that I had been, perhaps, a bit more than merely competent, and I deflected more talk about my career by talking about Max Baer, and about what it had been like to be with him before and after he became heavyweight champion of the world.