After the Bell

There is no heaven for broken-down prize fighters. But after the last bell has clanged for his last fight, many a boxer has turned barkeep. Joe Madden, onetime lightweight, is probably the only ex-pug who can trace his clicking cash register to his ability to write rather than fight. One night last week 500 of Madden's loyal customers jammed his Manhattan-cafe. Tennist Alice Marble sang, Sportswriter Richards Vidmer helped wait on table. They rang up $1,500 in his cash register--not for Joe Madden but for New York City's needy kids.

Joe Madden's "poor party" is a New York institution. So is Joe Madden. Born Joseph Augustin Penzo, son of an Italian baker "who was O.K. except all his life he never possessed change of a quarter," Joe grew up on Manhattan's tough West Side. When he was in the fourth grade, he hit his teacher "on the francis" with an eraser because she laughed at the way he spelled Philadelphia. When the truant officers found him, ten days later, he was sent to reform school. There he met an Irish kid named Frankie Madden, leader of the Itch Mob. Madden wised him up to the prize ring, persuaded him to become a fighter, let him pose as his kid brother. In 1917, after 131 fights. Battling Joe Madden quit the ring.

Joe Madden might still have been a stumblebum had he not won 200 "clams" shooting craps one night in a waterfront dive. Determined "to quit being a uncouth bum," he bought a case of whiskey and a second-hand cash register, opened a speakeasy in Manhattan's famed Fifties. One night, after some of his customers had got into a skull-cracking brawl that brought the cops swarming in. Barkeep Madden, plenty irate, took his pencil from behind his ear. poured out a piece of his mind, pasted it on the mirror behind his bar: "Just for your information we run a respectful joint in here we dont allow no blows struck some people do not have the manners of a dog if you are a fighter go to the garden they are looking for you we aint if anything aint right dont throw things holler for the boss act like you had some sense if possible."

Among his customers the following day were a couple of Yale students. Amused, they copied Madden's scrawly rebuke, showed it to their friends. Madden became a "character." His joint was on the map for Yalemen, Park Avenue debs, Long Island's polo crowd. Encouraged by his customers, Joe began to write weekly essays--hard-earned wisdom couched in his own lingo. He had his pieces punctuated by a race-track handicapper with a high-school education, mailed them to his clientele. In ivy-clad Eastern dormitories, Madden's essays had a wider circulation than those of Lamb, Addison or Steele. Today Joe Madden sends his weekly bulletins to 3,000 customers, a select fraternity he fondly calls "the mob." He has published three books: What'll You Have, Boys?; The Back Room; Set 'Em Up! He does an $85,000-a-year business, "is wined and dined in homes that some social climbers would give no less than their right arm to even get in the kitchen of." Yet he still tends bar, never takes a drink. "You represent a whole period of American history," a college professor recently told him. "Jeez," mused Madden, "maybe they'll stuff me and put me in a museum."

Madden's pet hate is Manhattan's cafe-society crowd. "The whole racket," he once wrote, "is nothing but a Show-Off Handicap. It's a good thing it aint a weight for age race or some of them fillies could never lift a foot. Everything, clothes and talk, is loud and cheap and I'm convinced that most of them, if they could get two more people to turn around and look at them, or could get their kisser in another toothpaste ad, a mention by a columnist or their picture in a tab, they'd do it naked."

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