Mercury's Luck

"On the morning of July 7, 1889, John L. Sullivan rose from a creaking bed in a Rampart Street boarding house in New Orleans and ate for breakfast a seven-pound sea bass, five soft-boiled eggs, a half-loaf of graham bread, a half-dozen tomatoes, and drank a cup of tea. For lunch he had a small steak, two slices of stale bread, and a bottle of Bass' ale. For dinner he ate three chickens with rice, Creole style, and another half-loaf of graham bread dunked in chicken broth.

"The next afternoon, under a broiling Mississippi sun with the temperature at 107, in the forty-fourth round of a prizefight John L. began to vomit. 'Will you draw the fight?' asked his opponent, Jake Kilrain, as they came up to scratch. 'No, you son of a bitch,' said Sullivan, heaving fluidly in the general direction of Jake. 'Stand up and fight!' Jake stood up, and stepped on John's foot with his 1/8-inch spikes, and Sullivan sent him sprawling with a chopping, sledgehammer blow on the jugular vein. John L. went on to win--in the seventy-fifth round."

Last week Jake Kilrain, lately a night-watchman, died of cancer, heart disease and gangrene on the exact day the American Mercury appeared with this robust account of the almost incredibly titanic Kilrain-Sullivan battle. The story was the work of Oland D. Russell. Few ringside sportsmen 49 years ago would have wagered that the stumbling, blotched pulp of Jake Kilrain would serve him to a ripe age of 78. Almost as astonishing as his longevity was the Mercury's luck in timing Contributor Russell's story with Jake Kilrain's unpredictable death last week, the first display of editorial prescience the monthly has made since Henry L. Mencken & George Jean Nathan started Mercury for Alfred A. Knopf 14 years ago; the most noteworthy editorial happening in the Mercury since Paul Palmer bought it in 1935 and shrank it to pocket size.

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