They Never Come Back

Hope flared last week among viewers who may have longed to see a subject of This Is Your Life poke M.C. Ralph Edwards in the nose that he sticks weekly into a private past. The week's subject: Jack Dempsey. The ex-heavyweight champion, now 61, was the prize catch so far among celebrities whom Edwards has tricked unsuspecting into TV camera range for exposure to a parade of memory-rattling acquaintances, some of whom they have forgotten (or would just as soon forget). But the Manassa Mauler was caught with his guard down in the middle of the ring in a packed Hollywood Legion Stadium, and he never laid a finger on Edwards.

Gamely he tried to roll with each blow in the M.C.'s unctuous volley. The first guest was a Utah farmer who reminded Dempsey that they had sparred as boys. Dempsey stared in blank dismay as the man climbed into the ring, then went into a friendly clinch and clung as if for the bell. Next he was asked to recall the maxim his religious mother taught him. "Go to church and believe in God?" he guessed desperately. "Live by the golden rule and keep goin'," prompted Edwards firmly. "Keep goin'," repeated Dempsey. He kept goin'. Only once, with obvious inadvertence, did he throw a verbal counterpunch. "Now they say you were a hobo," droned Edwards, "but you were never really a hobo, were you?" Dempsey groped, then murmured gently: "I think I was a hobo." The audience howled, and Edwards grinned through clenched teeth.

As old ring foes piled through the ropes, Dempsey engaged each in a heavyweight exchange of compliments. Said towering Fred Fulton, whom the Mauler knocked out in 18 seconds of the first round in 1918: "If I had to lose, I was glad it was to Jack Dempsey." Replied Dempsey: "It was you fellows who made me." From France came Georges Carpentier, a dandy of 63, who plugged not only Dempsey but his own Paris restaurant. From the Argentine came Luis Angel Firpo, 62, once the Wild Bull of the Pampas, now a lumbering giant whose dignity shone somehow through his confusion with the alien nonsense around him. Gene Tunney, anticlimactically absent, sent a message of homage to "the noblest Roman of them all." In turn, Dempsey thought that Tunney was a fine fellow and a great champion, "regardless of what anybody says." Soon afterward, Edwards danced away unscathed, and as they read the closing commercial over Dempsey, it sounded dimly like the count.

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