Childhood
Davis grew up in the rough and tough, then-predominantly Jewish Brownsville section of Brooklyn. His father owned a candy store during the 1920s, Prohibition days. Davis' job, as a young boy, was to keep lookout for the police and give the alert to his father to hide bottles of whiskey being sold on the sly.
Davis developed into a tough, street-smart young man, and became well known in a neighborhood that was famed as the home of Murder Incorporated. His two brothers were affiliated with the notorious gang, acting as collectors. However, because of Al's toughness and fierce independence, he was able to steer clear of the temptations of the mobster life and concentrate on his boxing instead. In fact, he was one of the few young men in the neighborhood who was unafraid to stand up to feared local hoodlums like Abe Reles.
His mother called him "Vroomeleh," an affectionate diminutive of his Hebrew name, Avrum (Hebrew for his middle name, Abraham), and he was known to friends and family in his neighborhood as "Vroomy." When Al was a teenager, a boxing promoter convinced him to change his nickname to "Bummy;" the promoter felt that it sounded tougher and would draw a larger crowd. Davis originally objected to his boxing name.
Read more about this topic: Al Davis (boxer)
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“[Children] do not yet lie to themselves and therefore have not entered upon that important tacit agreement which marks admission into the adult world, to wit, that I will respect your lies if you will agree to let mine alone. That unwritten contract is one of the clear dividing lines between the world of childhood and the world of adulthood.”
—Leontine Young (20th century)
“It is as if, to every period of history, there corresponded a privileged age and a particular division of human life: “youth” is the privileged age of the seventeenth century, childhood of the nineteenth, adolescence of the twentieth.”
—Philippe Ariés (20th century)
“Most childhood problems don’t result from “bad” parenting, but are the inevitable result of the growing that parents and children do together. The point isn’t to head off these problems or find ways around them, but rather to work through them together and in doing so to develop a relationship of mutual trust to rely on when the next problem comes along.”
—Fred Rogers (20th century)