When the champ, Rocky Marciano, came to Calistoga
CALISTOGA - The champ came to town at a slow roll. He sat in the rear seat of a long, wax-shined convertible, followed by more than a dozen cars, their horns honking, and preceded by police cars and fire trucks with sirens ringing. He smiled and waved, as champions do.
A grammar-school band serenaded the famous man as he turned onto the main drag. People ascended to rooftops and clung to poles to see him, to get a glimpse of that granite chin, the surgically repaired nose. It was only slight exaggeration to say the whole town was there. A 30-foot banner had been tacked around the marquee of the Ritz Theater, and local bar owners Al Triglia and Louis Carlenzoli had painted a big sign that read “To Your Health, Rocky” in Italian.
The caravan stopped for a ceremony at the corner of Lincoln Avenue and Washington Street, and the champion waded through the crowd to a temporary stage, shaking hands along the way. The mayor orated, and the local Catholic priest offered a blessing.
“I was running the gas station on the corner,” said Jack Smith, a lad of 15 at the time. “I shut it down to go watch, and everybody else did, too. Everything was shut down.”
It was Calistoga, it was April of 1955, and Rocky Marciano had arrived.
The Rock was not the first boxer to train for a prizefight in the North Bay. Light-heavyweight champion Joey Maxim set up camp in Santa Rosa in 1952, and middleweight champion Carl “Bobo” Olson had opened training at a lodge in Nice, on the shores of Clear Lake, about a month before Marciano came to Calistoga.
But this was Rocky Marciano. When he came to Calistoga for a six-week training camp, four fights into his stint as heavyweight champion of the world, he may have been the most revered athlete in America. Only a handful of baseball players - Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, Stan Musial - might have vied for the title.
When Marciano’s team scheduled a May 16, 1955, match against the Englishman Don Cockell at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco, several towns jockeyed to host the champion’s training. Calistoga wanted in the game. The special events committee of the town’s chamber of commerce raised $4,500 to make an offer that Al Weill, Marciano’s manager, couldn’t refuse.
“This is it,” Weill said on his visit to the site, according to a Press Democrat account. “There’s only one thing disturbs me. Where is Calistoga and how do you spell it?”
Marciano left his East Coast camp - at Grossinger’s Catskill Resort Hotel near Liberty, N.Y. - on March 26, stopped for appearances in Scranton and Carbondale, Pa., and in Chicago, and arrived in San Francisco five days later.
Marciano and his entourage set off for Calistoga at noon on April 2, and the reception was presidential. Napa County Sheriff’s Department cruisers met him at the county line and escorted him into the town of Napa, where he was given a key to the city. Marciano snaked up the valley to St. Helena, where he stopped to receive another oversized key. He got a key to Calistoga as well. Marciano must have had one whopper of a key chain.
Upon arrival in Calistoga, he retired to the Silverado Motel, a compound of low-slung cottages at the intersection of Lincoln/Highway 29 and the Silverado Trail. The motel’s owner, Mel Avila - who happened to head the chamber of commerce’s special events committee - offered up 20 free rooms to the Rock and his camp, plus a personal chef and private dining area.
The retinue would soon be joined by Marciano’s father, Peter Marchegiano (it was the boxer who changed the spelling of the family name), Rocky’s wife Barbara and their 2-year-old daughter, Mary Anne. Six Calistoga police officers guarded the champion for most of the day, frequently led by chief Ken Hively, who also headed the chamber of commerce. Hively planted himself so deeply in Marciano’s camp that he would wind up working the boxer’s corner during the fight in San Francisco.
Gino Birleffi, who owned the local Ford dealership, loaned the champion a brand-new two-door sedan for his local ramblings.
Marciano’s training base would be the Napa County Fairgrounds, where organizers had constructed two boxing rings, one outdoors in the middle of the ¾-mile oval raceway, and one in the site’s main pavilion, now known as the Tubbs Building. It was assumed the outside ring would be used when the weather was nice, but fearing the Rock would catch a cold, trainer Charley Goldman seems to have used the indoor space exclusively.
Marciano boxed five days a week, generally four to six rounds per day between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. He took Mondays and Fridays off.
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