24 June—Jack Dempsey, the Manassa Mauler, was born on this day in 1895. He died on 31 May 1983. A heavyweight boxing champion in the early days of Prohibition, he owned a restaurant in the Brill Building at 1619 Broadway in New York City when I knew him. Would you guess the eatery was called Jack Dempsey’s Restaurant? That’s where I’d meet him in the fifties when my uncle the lawyer took me there for lunch.

It was usually Dempsey’s for lunch. But it was sometimes Lindy’s, on the next block on Broadway, as I recall. My uncle, who had lots of clients in music and entertainment, had an office in the Brill Building. I don’t recall ever having met Lindy, but Jack (as he insisted I call him, though other people called him Champ) would join us and never let my uncle pay the tab.

That’s doubtless why Uncle Pete preferred lunches at Jack Dempsey’s. I have no idea if Jack was a client, but Pete must have known when the Champ would be at the restaurant. Otherwise, why would Pete choose to pay at Lindy’s? For starters, Lindy’s legendary cheesecake wasn’t as good as people made it out to be. To me, anyway. It was cheesecake. Period. On the other hand, I was impressed by the mere presence—let alone the personal attention—of the Champ.

Pete, while a presumably successful lawyer, was also a schnorrer. That’s Latin for chiseler. Okay, it’s Greek. But that’s a whole nother story, as is the one about him being my very first memory when, having come back from the Pacific in 1945, he put me on his knee and gave me a cigar to smoke and lit it. I was two years old.

As Rudyard Kipling wrote, “A woman is only a woman, but good Cigar is a Smoke.” Even to a two-year-old . . .