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10/04/2007 Archived Entry: "Milwaukee Fighter Joey Speigel Passes"
Milwaukee Fighter Joey Speigel Passes
By Pete Ehrmann
Boxing can be a tortuously beguiling mistress, and when Joey Speigel broke it off with her in 1940 he did the only thing he could think of to tune out the siren song he feared would lure him back into the ring. He shipped out on a Great Lakes freighter for a year.
“It almost broke my heart,” Speigel recalled in a 1997 interview, when he was 80 years old. “But I just didn’t want to be near (boxing) because I’d get the temptation to go back to the gym.”
After working in the galley of The Frank Williams, which carried iron ore around the Great Lakes, Speigel returned to his native Milwaukee, Wisconsin, married and raised a family. He worked for 30 years as an electrical mechanic for the Wisconsin Electric Power Company.
Joey Speigel died on September 28, at age 90.
Born on June 7, 1917, Speigel attended Gesu School and graduated from Boys Tech high school. Always fascinated by trains – “I liked the big engines, and was intrigued by them,” he said in 1997 – Speigel spent the summer of 1935 hopping freights and traveling around the country.
“I almost got killed once or twice,” he recalled; and he spent a week in a West Virginia jail after he got caught climbing into a boxcar.
Speigel started boxing at the Forest Home Social Center because he admired a Milwaukee amateur fighter called Frankie Kramer. Speigel had 40 amateur bouts himself, and in 1939 he turned pro, winning a five-round decision over Bob Wilson.
At 5’7” tall, Speigel was too small for other sports. But boxing “gave me something to do and kept me off the streets,” he said. And even though some opponents outweighed him by 20 pounds, “I felt like I could tear a house down.”
The trouble was, Speigel said, “I didn’t have the killer instinct. I never meant to kill anyone, and some of them try, you know.”
In his second pro fight, Speigel’s opponent “hit me in the midriff and both of my arms dropped to my side. I thought the guy drove a telephone pole into me. But I beat him.”
When they matched him on December 3, 1939 against Bobby McIntire of Chicago, in Speigel’s eighth pro match, McIntire was a veteran of 56 fights and was the 10th ranked lightweight in the world.
“In those days, anything that came along you grabbed it,” Speigel explained. “I almost got knocked out. In the third round, he hit me with a right hand and I was walking on eggs. It was almost curtains. If he would’ve caught me again, that would have been it.”
But instead Speigel caught McIntire and knocked him across the ring, and went on to win the decision in a huge upset.
A couple fights later, Speigel’s nose and Young Kid McCoy’s head had a nasty collision during a fight at Marigold Gardens in Chicago. “After that, my nose hurt all the time and I wasn’t the same guy anymore,” Speigel said. “I kept boxing and it got worse and worse, and I wasn’t intelligent enough to let it heal.
“It got to the point where I had surgery on it, and after that I quit fighting and got a job on the ore carrier because I didn’t want to be enticed to go back to fighting.”
Sailing the Great Lakes was only a little less dangerous. There was constant seasickness, and once the captain of The Frank Williams misjudged the break wall entering the Chicago harbor and scraped off part of the hull. Another time, the ship nearly capsized in a gale on Lake Superior.
When Speigel returned to Milwaukee he tried to enlist in the US Army to fight in World War II. But the ex-boxer was declared 4-F because of scar tissue on his lungs from a case of childhood tuberculosis he knew nothing about till the military doc told him about it.
Upon his retirement from the Wisconsin Electric Power Company in 1978, Speigel was diagnosed with spinal cancer and spent 45 days in the hospital undergoing radiation treatments.
“They knocked the hell out of me,” he said in 1997. But like tuberculosis, railroad bulls, Billy McIntire and the roiling waters of the Great Lakes, cancer was no match for him.
“Life is a continual fight,” he told newspaper columnist Bill Janz in 1998. “You’re always fighting.”
