Joe Louis "The Brown Bomber"
Joe Louis was born and raised in Detroit Michigan. Although throughout his life he lived in many places including Las Vegas and Chicago, he still always considered Detroit home.
Officially Joe Louis Barrow, Joe was born in the foothills of Alabama to his mother Lillie and father Muroe Barrow on May 13, 1914. Munroe was a sharecropper, but was committed to an asylum when Joe was only two, and died when he was four. Following this his mother got a job doing washing to support her eight children, but eventually married Patrick Brooks when Joe was seven. Their large family, Lillie's eight children and Patrick's eight children, moved into an eight room house on Detroit's Macomb street in 1926. Here Joe began to go to school at first Duffield and then Bronson, two vocational schools, until he was seventeen.
While he was going to school, Joe also held two jobs, one before class and one after. Before school he worked at Detroit's Eastern Market, and after at Pickman and Dean an ice company. Joe credited much of his upper body strength and muscularity to this job saying that carrying the ice blocks (up to fifty pounds a piece) developed him.
When he was sixteen, his mother would give him money for violin lessons, which he would turn around and use to rent a locker at an amateur boxing club. Although not happy when she found out what he had been using the violin lesson money on, Lillie simply encouraged Joe to do his best. His abbreviated name of Joe Louis began when he filled out his first set of paperwork to fight and did not have enough room for Barrow. Thus, Joe Louis became a legend instead of Joe Louis Barrow.
After being defeated early on in his career, Joe got a job working at Ford, but soon quit when his amateur boxing career took off. After being trained for a while his coaches encouraged him to pair up with a more experienced, connected coach so Joe found George Slayton who was manager of the Detroit Athletic Club. Under his direction, Joe made it to Detroit's Golden Gloves competition in 1933, but was defeated by Max Merak, a Notre Dam football star. Three months after winning his next decisive victory, the National AAU light-weight championship in St. Louis, Joe went pro. In his 54 amateur fights, Joe had won fourty-three by knock-out, seven by decision and lost four by decision.
After a friend introduced Joseph to boxing at Brewster's East Side Gymnasium, he fell in love with it. To keep his mom from finding out about his boxing, he shortened his name to Joe Louis, eventually she found out. A couple years later with his success in the amatuer boxing scene, Joseph met John Roxborough who became his lifelong manager. As a result of joining forces with John Roxborough, Julian Black was hired as a fight promoter and Jack Blackburn as Joseph’s trainer. His first fight was scheduled on July 4, 1934, where he kayoed his opponent Jack Kracken. Hereafter until the end of 1935, Joseph had already been in 14 fights. Those 14 fights helped Joseph rack up nearly $370,000 in prize money.
At the age of thirteen he began working in order to earn money for college. He was a shoe shiner, an elevator boy, and a paper boy. He attended the all-black Armstrong High School, where he acted in plays, was a sergeant in the Cadet Corps, and earned good grades, graduating at the age of 16.
In the first fight, he knocked out George LaRocco in the 4th round. In May of 1926 he knocked out Phil Weisberger, Jack O’ Day, and Willie Daily. A few fights later, he defeated Tony Griffiths; this was a big deal because Tony Griffiths beat all the light heavyweights at the time. Then in October of 1928 Braddock took out Pete Latzo in the tenth round and broke his opponent’s jaw. Braddock did very well until the year of 1929 when all his luck began to change. James Braddock fought Tommy Loughran for the name of the light heavyweight champion, but he lost in a 15 round decision. After that fight things went downhill, he had lost and fought a total of 16 out of 22 fights w...
Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City on September 7, 1917. His parents Jacob Armstead Lawrence and Rose Lee were part of the Great Migration of Black Americans (1916-1930). One million people left the rural South for the urban North during this period. He moved with his family for Easton, Pennsylvania. After his parents separated, he moved with his mother to Philadelphia. In 1927, his mother moved to New York and placed Lawrence and his siblings in foster homes. In 1930, Lawrence, age 13, and his brother and sister moved to Harlem to live with his mother.
	Joe began a profitable business of raising chickens after borrowing a plot of land from his father. Unfortunately, Joe became very ill and his business perished. Joe decided that he would go to work. At age 19 he became the manager of a grocery store in Manawa, a town thirty miles away. Some friends of his convinced him to go back to high school. He was a very smart man and, at the age of 20, managed to finish four years of high school in just one year. In 1930 he enrolled in Marquette University in Milwaukee where he soon succeeded in getting his law degree in 1935. He ended up moving north to Waupaca. There he ran and won the judgeship for the Tenth District of the Wisconsin Curcuit Court.
Throughout his life Johnny Cash had many experiences that he had to learn to cope with. You can see this in his behaviors at an early age and on and off throughout his life. In the beginning of his life Johnny Cash was born the fourth of seven children. He was raised in the backwoods of Arkansas on 20 acres of land in a small shack for a house. He had to work very hard as a boy. He plowed the land, and picked cotton all day long. They lived in poverty and often had very little money to afford anything (Cash, Johnny, 1987).
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... drunk. He received his nickname in 1908, he bought a new set of spikes for his shoes that wore right through his shoes and gave him blisters, and he played the game in his socks. In the seventh inning, Joe hit a triple and was running to third base when a fan jumped up and yelled, “You shoeless son of a gun.” He only played that one game in his stockings, but the nickname stuck with him forever. He openly admitted to not liking the nickname.
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