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Appalachia, Aracoma Hotel, boxing, Cecelia Dempsey, Charleston, Estelle Taylor, Gene Tunney, Jack Dempsey, Kenneth Stoltz, Logan, Logan Banner, Salt Lake City, Sharples, Sports, Utah, West Virginia
On September 27, 1927, the Logan Banner of Logan, WV, profiled Jack Dempsey’s mother:
MRS. DEMPSEY LEAVES FOR HOME; EXPRESSES HOPE FOR FINISH FIGHT BETWEEN HER SON AND GENE TUNNEY
Mrs. Cecelia Dempsey, mother of Jack, concluded her visit here yesterday and left that afternoon with her traveling companions, Mr. and Mrs. J. Kenneth Stoltz, for Charleston, thence to points east. They had motored here from their home in Salt Lake City and were quartered at the Aracoma during their six days’ stay in the city. Mrs. Dempsey called on many relatives and old friends and had originally planned to spend several days in Mingo county.
By the time they reached Sharples Mrs. Dempsey missed a hatbox containing a $3500 watch, a gift from her famous son, and two valuable rings. They returned at once to Logan and after an anxious search found the missing box with contents undisturbed alongside the Washington apartments. Evidently it had fallen into the street and some passerby had placed it against the building, presumably without knowledge or curiousity as to the nature of its contents.
“As far as I am concerned,” Mrs. Dempsey told a Charleston reporter last night, “I am satisfied with the way the fight went, but as long as the people feel the way they do, I hope there will be another fight arranged. Mr. Tunney is a fine man, and I suppose the judges did what they thought was right in awarding him the decision, but the people who have talked to me think it should at least have been a draw. It was, perhaps, Jack’s fault that he lost, because he did not know the Illinois rules, or forgot them if he lost his head in the excitement, and forgot what he should have done when he knocked Tunney down in the seventh round.
“I believe the people should cheer the champion,” she went on to say, “and yet I would like to see them better satisfied. I hope if Jack and Tunney fight again that they will not have to stop at ten rounds but will keep on until one or the other is knocked out. I want to see Jack either lick his man or get a good licking himself, and quit. But I want him to quit the game clean and with a good name.”
While Mrs. Dempsey seemed to have enjoyed her visit in West Virginia and expressed a hope that she could come back next year for a longer stay, she said she wouldn’t want to live back here again because of the difference in climate. However, the people are more sociable here, she added, and are much more friendly upon first acquaintance.
Mrs. Dempsey indicated she and companions would leave today for their home in Salt Lake City instead of going farther east. She has had to cut her visit in West Virginia a little short for fear of being unable to get through the snow in the passes of Utah, since the first storms often begin early in October, she said, and keep the roads blocked until spring. She expects Jack and his wife, the screen actress Estelle Taylor, to meet her in Salt Lake City, about October 10, and she is hurrying back to see her son.
Brandon Ray Kirk 