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.

The doors were thrown open to the public, at a charge of $1 for adults and 50 cents for children aged 6 to 12, and people converged on Calistoga from all over Northern California to watch the world’s greatest fighter throwing combinations. Greyhound Lines added extra buses from terminals around the Bay Area.

Weekday attendance was generally in the 400-600 range, but it swelled on weekends. Marciano’s workout on Sunday, May 1, drew a standing-room-only crowd of more than 2,300, including a man who led songs with an accordion. A week later, the Mother’s Day count was 2,100. Considering Calistoga’s population at the time was about 1,400, these were throngs.

Hively collected tickets, fair director Roy Schoepf announced the fighters, Weill kept time and Calistoga mayor Howard “Boots” Butler tended bar.

After sparring, Marciano would work out publicly for an hour, hitting the speed bag and the heavy bag and skipping rope before a rapt audience. Despite his Frigidaire-icebox build, Marciano also ran at least six miles each morning, sometimes more than twice that, and he became a familiar sight around town and on the Silverado Trail.

Early on, kids would try to run behind the champ. They soon stopped trying to keep up.

“The story I remember that always impressed me, he used to run from downtown Calistoga up to Hanly’s (tavern and restaurant) on the mountain, probably four or five miles up Mount St. Helena,” said Dan Bazzoli, who was 8 at the time. “He’d have breakfast, then run back.”

For the most part, the townsfolk let Marciano go about his business.

“Joe Montana comes around quite a bit now,” said Sylvia Marciano, no relation to the boxer; as a 17-year-old newlywed, her celebrated last name was a recent acquisition in April of ’55. “And Dick Vermeil - I grew up with Dick Vermeil. These people are famous in sports, and everybody points and whispers when they see them, won’t leave ’em alone. There was none of that. Everyone seemed happy he was here, but they kind of respected him.”

Yet Rocky’s presence immediately turned the sleepy town into the center of the boxing universe. Bay Area reporters who showed up on the first workout day were thrilled to find a fully outfitted press box at the fairgrounds - eight typewriters and two Western Union sending machines. As the camp wore on, the local scribes were joined by others from the wire services, New York papers and even British sportswriters dispatched to cover Cockell. Newsreel teams shot footage downtown.

If the city fathers had schemed to put Calistoga on the map, it was working to perfection.

Lou Costello, half of the Abbott and Costello comedy team, dropped by. So did former boxing champions Max Baer and Henry Armstrong, California lieutenant governor Harold Powers and reputed mobster Elmer “Bones” Remmer, who owned the Cal Neva resort and casino near Lake Tahoe.

Local hotels had agreed not to raise prices and gouge customers, and they were packed for much of the training camp. So were the restaurants and, especially, the saloons.

“Calistoga was controlled by bars in those days,” said Martin Van der Kamp, who was 12 during Marciano’s stay. “When Rocky was there, I think there were 13 in town. … People came to Calistoga to drink, or stopped there on the way to Lake County to drink. And the fight fans were two-fisted drinkers for the most part.”

Calistoga, bucolic spa town, was experiencing its moment in the sun, and the natives knew it.

“The entire Napa Valley considers the appearance of the heavyweight champion in our area the greatest thing that’s ever happened,” Hively pronounced, as quoted in Russell Sullivan’s book “Rocky Marciano: The Rock of His Times.”

Marciano’s camp had nothing but kind words for Calistoga. They had good reason. Weill had secured a 75-percent cut of all admission to his fighter’s workouts, along with sales of souvenirs and signed photos.

The champ hadn’t defended his title in eight months, and news reports described his early efforts in Calistoga as rusty. The consensus was that his footwork got nimbler, his punches quicker as April turned into May.

“He rocketed lefts and rights off the bags with such speed and atomic-like blasts,” The Press Democrat wrote at one point, “that it seemed as though the bags would be torn loose from their moorings.”

And so they were - twice. The fans roared with delight when one bag flew eight rows into the seats, Rocky grinning sheepishly at his display of brute power.

If Marciano was by far the big draw, his sparring partners were attracting attention, too. Two of them, Toxie Hall and Keene Simmons, had come with Marciano from New York. A third, Howard King, was recruited from Reno. When King injured his ribs, he was replaced by Sergeant J.B. Reed from Travis Air Force Base near Fairfield.

It wasn’t just their bravery in the ring that drew interested looks from the locals. All four sparring partners were African-American, a novelty in 1955 Calistoga.

“At that age, I had never talked to a black man,” Smith admitted. “In fact, it was not until I went into the Navy at 18 that I did.”

Hall, Simmons and King all would fight on the undercard at Kezar Stadium.

Though none of the newspapers mentioned it, several long-time Calistogans insist that Marciano had an additional sparring partner: Mel Avila’s son Donnie, who had a reputation as a barroom brawler.

The pre-fight publicity began to boil on April 12 when Cockell opened his camp at the Bermuda Palms Motel in San Rafael. His handlers scheduled his workouts for 1 p.m., allowing the more energetic reporters and photographers to catch both fighters in action.

The British champion wasn’t as toned as Marciano, and American papers were unkind to him. They referred to him as “awkwardly plump” and “Chunky Cockell” and “the roly-poly Battersea Blimp.” A pig-and-poultry farmer back home in England, Cockell drove up to Petaluma on May 2 to take a peek at local chicken farms.

The gamesmanship began almost immediately. Cockell’s manager, John Simpson, accused Marciano of being a dirty fighter, imploring the referee to watch for rough stuff. Simpson urged the California Boxing Commission to ban a blood thickener called Monsel’s Solution that Marciano liked to use, demanded at least one English judge or referee, and complained that the gloves they’d use were too big and the ring (borrowed from the Cow Palace) too small. His agitation fell mostly upon deaf ears.

Through it all, Marciano shrugged and grinned and let Weill and Goldman do his talking.

Then came the headline, the only real news to emerge from Marciano’s camp: Toxie Hall had knocked down the champion during a sparring session on May 5. Not a big deal - Hall didn’t hurt him - except that it was only the second time Rocky had ever hit the canvas. The other came against Jersey Joe Walcott in 1952, the fight in which Marciano claimed the heavyweight crown.

Someone had snapped a photo of Marciano on his backside in Calistoga; Weill bought the film and, presumably, destroyed it.

That tempest died down, though, and the fighters readied for their confrontation. Marciano left Napa Valley on May 15 and spent a night in San Francisco. By then, according to the fair director, 15,360 adults and 1,406 children had paid to see him spar.

Calistoga’s townsfolk seemed genuinely sad to see him leave.

The fight was broadcast on the radio, but not televised (though it was shown in 83 movie theaters throughout the country, outside of California, on closed-circuit TV). Attendance at open-air Kezar, where temperatures in the 50s had spectators in coats, was about 20,000. It was considered a disappointing gate.

The champion entered the ring wearing the orange-and-black silk robe that had been presented upon his arrival in Wine Country. It read “Rocky Marciano, Calistoga’s Adopted Son” on the back.

The fight held few surprises. Cockell, who had 16 pounds and three inches of reach on Marciano, fought gamely but did little damage. The champion hurt Cockell in the third round, nearly put him through the ropes in the eighth and knocked him down twice in the ninth to earn a technical knockout. Rocky’s record ran to 48-0.

Marciano then began a month-long vacation in California. Though few guessed it at the time, his boxing career was almost finished. He would fight just once more, against Archie Moore that September, before retiring undefeated the following April.

Back in Calistoga, the men who had reeled in Marciano envisioned the training camp as a turning point for their small town. Once people got a good look at the vineyards and the bubbling hot springs and the friendly accommodations, they figured, the tourist dollars would come rolling in.

It didn’t happen that way. Calistoga would indeed become the destination they envisioned, with white-tablecloth restaurants and luxury spas. But the change would come gradually, most of it decades beyond 1955.

Really, it didn’t take long for the town to return to its languid pace after Marciano broke camp - and that was just fine with a lot of Calistogans.

“As a child growing up here, we were all concerned about our community, but we weren’t thinking about the businesses and all that,” Sylvia Marciano said. “All we could think of was that on May 31 the tourists came, and on Labor Day they went home. And thank God.”

You can reach Staff Writer Phil Barber at phil.barber@press democrat.com. Follow him on Twitter @Skinny_Post.