boxing Archives - Pennsylvania Heritage Magazine

Fighter’s Heaven: Muhammad Ali’s Training Camp in the Pennsylvania Wilderness

Posted by Todd Mealy on Dec 28, 2020 in | Comments Off On a mountainside overlooking Deer Lake, in Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill County, is a restored boxers’ training camp called Fighter’s Heaven, originally built by Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) in 1972. The Champ, as he boastfully called himself, designed the boxing haven during the early phase of his post-three-year-suspension comeback tour in order to escape the hullabaloo of civilization as he trained...
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Tommy Loughran, Boxing’s “Philly Phantom”

Posted by Karen Galle on Dec 28, 2020 in | Comments Off The sport of boxing emerged in America in the 1800s, and by the early 20th century it had become one of the country’s most popular spectator sports. Philadelphia was a leading center of boxing at the time, and many of the best fighters hailed from the city. Thomas Patrick “Tommy” Loughran (1902–82) was born in Philadelphia to Irish Catholic immigrants during the heyday of boxing. He began in the...
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Editor’s Letter

Posted by Kyle Weaver on Dec 24, 2020 in | Comments Off In 2016 the Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office (PA SHPO) presented its first Community Initiative Awards to recognize organizations, agencies, municipalities and individuals throughout the commonwealth for their historic preservation successes. The program has become a key component of PA SHPO’s statewide historic preservation plan, #PreservationHappensHere, encouraging...
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Penitentiary Pugilism

Posted by Tyler Stump on Apr 15, 2020 in | Comments Off On a rainy night in 1978 in Lewisburg, Union County, 1,400 men crowded into a boxing arena. In the ring they watched Clarence Miller take on the reigning 125-pound state champ, Ronald “Bartender” Barr. Of the 10 matches that Saturday, this was the only championship matchup, and the crowd was dazzled by the thrilling fight. Barr narrowly defeated Miller and was voted outstanding boxer of the...
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Joe Palooka, Wilkes-Barre Boxing Legend with a National Punch

Posted by William Kashatus on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off In 1921, Hammond Fisher (1900-1955), a young staff artist for the Wilkes-Barre Record, was conversing with a local boxer, Joe Hardy, on Wilkes-Barre’s Public Square. The two were comparing their childhoods in the rough neighborhoods of the anthracite region community where they had learned to fight at an early age. Some, like Hardy, took their street skills to the local gymnasiums and...
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Radio Station KDKA

Posted by PA Heritage Staff on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off On Tuesday evening, November 2, 1920, about one thousand people in the Pittsburgh area listened to the results of the presidential election of candidates Warren G. Harding and James M. Cox on “wireless” receivers. Transmitted by a one hundred-watt station that would become KDKA, this was something new-radio broadcasting. And radio would revolutionize communication just as the...
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Nellie Bly (1864-1922)

Posted by PA Heritage Staff on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off When Nellie Bly died January 27, 1922, at the age of fifty-eight, New York’s Evening Journal eulogized her as “the best reporter in America.” A rebellious child of Michael Cochran and his second wife, widow Mary Jane Kennedy Cummings, she channeled her nonconformjty and fire into becoming one of the most notable journalists of all time. At a time when most female reporters...
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Bookshelf

Posted by PA Heritage Staff on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off Sweet William: The Life of Billy Conn by Andrew O’Toole published by the University of Illinois Press, 2008; 253 pages, cloth, $32.95 An Irish working-class hero of Pittsburgh, William David “Billy” Conn (1917–1993) captured the hearts of his contemporaries with his stellar boxing record, ebullient personality, and good looks. A lightweight boxing champion, Conn had defeated nine current or...
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