SOUTH BEND – On a rainy Tuesday morning at Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library, George Rugg reaches into a cardboard file box and carefully retrieves another timeless treasure.
It’s a telegram from Jack Dempsey to Gene Tunney, his heavyweight boxing rival during the Roaring Twenties, aka the Golden Age of American Sports.
“Happy to know you’re on the road to recovery,” the Manassa Mauler’s missive reads. “Good luck."
The telegram is dated Jan. 14 but a year is not listed.
Each manila folder is marked with the name of a different celebrity from a bygone era. Each piece of correspondence is addressed to Tunney, the dashing figure known as the Fighting Marine whose circle of friends and admirers stretched from coast to coast.
Presidents Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge wrote to Tunney, as did literary giants such as George Bernard Shaw, Thornton Wilder and Indianapolis’ own Booth Tarkington.
Actors, tycoons, comedians, fellow sportsmen, even Ed Sullivan, then a New York sportswriter decades from becoming America’s most popular television talk-show host. All are represented in the Gene Tunney Papers, the latest nationally significant acquisition for the Joyce Sports Research Collection, which Rugg has curated for the past quarter century.
“It’s amazing who he knew,” Rugg says of Tunney.
Rugg reaches back into the cardboard box and pulls out another letter. This one, typed on White House stationery, is from May 14, 1940, courtesy of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
Originally published by the Indianapolis Star.