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At Rockaway Beach a fight promoter admired his compact little build, put him in the ring, and he won eight bouts before the ninth opponent according to Fritz, it was Tony Canzoneri, later featherweight champion of the world knocked him out after three seconds of the first round. He taught riding at a resort in New Hampshire, worked as a mail rider packing the post into a gold mine near Cooke City, Mont. He played tinkly-tonk piano in little bins in Greenwich Village, Third Avenue bars, beer halls in Manhattan's German quarter. He took three weeks to learn the organ, played at Keith's Albee in Brooklyn. He also played the piano on a cruise ship that commuted between Miami and Havana. "I was a bad sailor," he says, "and had to throw up after every chorus."
The Meeting. During the Depression, Fritz recalls, he was so broke that he could not pay $12 due on his rented piano. When three moving men appeared at his furnished room to take the piano away, Fritz sat down to play for the last time Herbert, then Liszt. Beethoven. "Finally I was covered with sweat and I looked around. It was dark out. The three men were sitting on the floor. One called the others aside, and they talked for a few minutes. Then each man took out $2 and gave it to me. This could only happen in America."
About then, Fritz swore off wild oats, in 1931 married Ernestine Zwerleine, later a John Frederics millinery model, daughter of a Viennese architect. He also teamed up with Lyricist Earle Crooker, wrote Salute to Spring (1937), which did moderately well in St. Louis but never moved East, and Great Lady (1938), which opened as will Camelot in Broadway's Majestic Theater, and closed after 17 performances. For four years, Fritz wrote almost nothing but sketches and songs for the Lambs Club Gambols, the intramural games of Broadway. Then a friend in Detroit asked him to do a show for a new theater there. With awe, Fritz Loewe, who has enormous respect for the power of coincidence, recalls how at the Lambs one day he took an unaccustomed route to the men's room: "I always went through the main hall, but just that time, for no reason, I turned left in the grill room." On his way he passed the table of a thin young man who, he knew, had written some good sketches for the Gambols. "You write good lyrics," said Loewe. "Would you like to do a musical with me?" "Yes," replied Alan Jay Lerner, 'T happen to have two weeks off."