GALENA’S BATTLING “BULLDOG” BRAY AND BOXING IN SOUTHEAST KANSAS AT TURN OF CENTURY
by Bryce Martin
Guy Aaron Bray was born February 3, 1902, in Crestline, Kansas, in Cherokee County.
When he opened up a training gym for boxing in the dusky interior of a formerly empty building on Main Street in my hometown of Galena, Kansas, back in the 1950s, I learned, not surprisingly, that he had been a boxer himself. So, that was why he was nicknamed “Bulldog” and had a boxer’s flat nose and cauliflower ears.
Bray came from a large family and grew up with five older brothers (five sisters, too)
His father, Earl Deward Bray, attended Rolla School of Mines in Rolla, Mo., and died around 1933 from injuries sustained from a lead mine cave-in. A brother, Marion Webster Bray, was a U.S. Marshall in Oklahoma who was killed in the line of duty in 1936 by a Pretty Boy Floyd gang member.
kicked, butted, eye-thumbed, and generally abused
Bray began his professional boxing career just over the Kansas state line in Joplin, Missouri, in the early 1920s. His pro career lasted several years. He acquired his nickname after a brawler from St. Louis kicked, butted, eye-thumbed, and generally abused him to the point that Bray retaliated by biting the mauler and holding on.
He fought in Fort Smith, Detroit, Las Vegas, Kansas City, and many other stops. Popular, a top draw as evidenced by newspaper write-ups. He recalled defeating Pepper Martin in Detroit by a KO, and how when Martin was carried from the ring, a string band struck up the tune “Listen to the Mocking Bird” and its “tweet-tweet-tweet” refrain filled the arena.
In early ring encounters in Galena he had bouts under referee Joe Becker, a legendary sports figure from Joplin.
After boxing, he worked construction, in the lead mines, and in his final years for Vickers Corp. in Joplin. He lived in Galena, near his Crestline birthplace, all those years where he raised a family with wife Thelma and operated a boxing gym to train young fighters.
The small-framed Bray fought in the big and small towns largely of the Midwest and all over the U.S., taking on names such as James “Red” Herring, Jim Lanning (from Wichita), Joe Carranza, Harry Welch, and Sailor Murphy. Details are sketchy on ring records for those days.
I was the beneficiary of Bray’s coaching for a short time. Being one of the first, things were a little slow. I got involved with pickup baseball games in my neighborhood and forgot about the boxing. I saw Bulldog around town over the years. I always liked him and his goodwill attitude. He started some pretty fair Golden Glovers on their way.
Bray was for many a small boy in the area a real-life hero, not someone you read about or admired from a distance, but a sports figure with a colorful nickname and past and who lived right down the street. His stories of his days in the boxing ring often held a message: to defend oneself in a manly sport was good preparation to defend oneself in life’s daily struggles. In both, it took heart, desire, and knowledge. He died after I had moved away, December 18, 1969.
Besides wanting to prove himself, Bray could have been inspired to take up boxing from stories he had heard at home about “the sweet science.”
Such as when on April 1, 1898, James “Rube” Ferns, a future world welterweight boxing champion, knocked out Frank “Dutch” Neal in the sixth round in a match held in Galena.
Ferns fought twice more in Galena before the year was out. The “Kansas Rube,” who was born 25 miles from Galena in Pittsburg in 1874, again knocked out Neal, this time in seven rounds, on June 8. On November 9 he floored Paddy Purtell. Ferns won the world welterweight title in 1900, lost it and won it again in 1901.
In a manner of speaking, the first Ferns-Neal encounter in Galena was barely legal.
New York in 1896 was the first state to make professional boxing legal. Most all other states fell in line shortly thereafter, freeing the sport from the primarily free-for-all, no-holds barred spectacle it was. Even then, however, on occasion bouts were fought as close as possible to rules established by the Marquess of Queensbury in 1867.
Boxing matches, though considered low-brow on the meager entertainment scale of the times, were welcome entertainment to the working men of southeast Kansas and nearby environs. Ferns came from the coal camps of Crawford County. Galena was more noted for its lead and zinc industry.
brawls were a dime a dozen
As rough as it was in the boxing ring, life in the numerous mining camps in Cherokee and Crawford counties was often rougher. Brawls were a dime a dozen and killings were commonplace. When the name for the city street with the most amoral activity was dubbed Red Hot Street, as it was in Galena, the word was out.
It may even have been safer in the ring.
Ferns died in 1952 in his hometown of Pittsburg at the ripe old age of 78. His brother, Owen, however, was shot and killed in 1905 in Harry Wilson’s chili parlor near Galena in Scammon, Kansas over an argument. He was 24 years of age. He was shot by a coal boss who had received a black eye in a skirmish the night before. When Owen Ferns remarked that if he hand another black eye to go with it, he’d have a match, the coal man took extreme exception.
It’s likely that the first true sports star in America was John L. Sullivan, the great bare-knuckle blaster who blazed his way to a heavyweight title in 1888 and nationwide and international glory.
Old-timers in the 1950s still talked glowingly of Sullivan. My Cherokee County, Kansas, lead-mining grandfather knew the story well and related it fondly in his later years how Sullivan offered anyone―anyone at all―$500 if they could stay on their feet against him for just one round. That was in 1879, the year my grandfather was born. Sullivan was still repeating the offer years later when my grandfather was a tad, and at a time when $500 was still a good amount of money, tempting to the tough of mind and body who inhabited the various mining camps and towns.
Bulldog Bray would have taken him on. I’m sure of it. Being the battler he was, he would have been hard-bitten not to.