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While Marva likes to hobnob with the Negro upper crust in Manager Roxborough's palatial French Provincial house, Joe prefers the company of his old pals. A few days after he won the world's championship from Jim Braddock in 1937—while Negro society was burning wires to get him to their salons—Joe was in Detroit, sitting on a dirty curbstone, eating apples and arguing with the boys about his prowess as a softball player.
Joe's loyalty to his old gang was a rock on which his marriage nearly foundered. To please one pal, he sank $30,000 in the Brown Bomber softball team; to please another, he sank $42,000 in the Brown Bomber Chicken Shack, a Detroit eatery. He has been known to pay a check for $1,000 after his "secretary" (another pal) entertained some frisky friends in a Har lem cabaret.
Loyalty has also kept Joe in the ring. He wanted to quit three years ago, after he had his revenge on Max Schmeling for the humiliating licking the German gave him two years before. He didn't, because he felt he owed something to Roxborough, Black, Blackburn and Jacobs, the men who made him. But after the. Nova fight, with a uniform on his big, supple back, Joe may let the title go and be satisfied to defend his country.
*Except for President Roosevelt's last two broadcasts, Joe Louis' prize fights have attracted the largest audiences in U.S. radio history. For his second Schmeling fight in 1938, 63.6% of U.S. radio owners turned in. For President Roosevelt's last radio talk, 72.5% tuned in.