By Ed Staskus
The first time I went to Maxim’s Deli was in 1964, the year my parents bought a house in the North Collinwood neighborhood of Cleveland on a street southeast of E. 185th St. The deli had opened in 1949. It was on the corner of Cornwall Rd. and E. 185th St. It was opened by Emanuel “Manny” Berardinelli and his brother Giuseppe “Joey” Berardinelli. The next year, 1950, Joey Maxim, the name Giuseppe went by in the boxing ring, won the light heavyweight championship of the world by beating Freddie Mills for the title.
He knocked him out in the 10th round. After the fight three of his adversary’s teeth were discovered stuck in his left glove. Joey Maxim had a left jab to die for. Freddie Mills never fought again after that. Boxing goes back to ancient Egypt. The word pugilism comes from the Greek word “pyx” which means “with clenched fist.” Boxing has since been called the “Sweet Science.”
Lennox Lewis, one of the best heavyweight boxers ever, said, “In boxing, you create a strategy to beat each new opponent. It’s just like chess.” Boxing may be tactical and calculating, but it always comes down to knocking somebody’s teeth out when everything is on the line.
Joey Maxim ran the streets of North Collinwood when training. He got the idea to open a baked goods and pizza shop during one of his runs. The start-up money came from his boxing wins, of which there were plenty. During his career he won 82 fights while losing only 29. By the time he stopped boxing in 1958 the walls of the delicatessen were chock full of his memorabilia.
At first I went to Maxim’s Deli with my mother. It was just down the end of our street. She bought bread there. I carried it home. It was better than anything from the supermarket and better than the Eastern European black bread we often ate. The aroma in the delicatessen was pleasing, even though I wasn’t overly interested in the bread. What I was interested in was the pizza. It was made in an old-fashioned stone oven. They made their own secret sauce. They sold their pizza by the pie and by the slice. The crust was slightly crispy and just right chewy. I started stopping into the deli by myself and getting it by the slice whenever I had the means.
Pizza to me was like the entire food pyramid in one bite. I only ever got one slice but it was plenty. The slices at Maxim’s Deli were large. When I saw the boxes whole pies came in I wondered why round pizzas were packaged in square boxes. On top of that, before they were put in the boxes they were sliced into triangles. I thought there must be some kind of higher math in play.
Joey Maxim was a big boy growing up. He started boxing at the age of 12. He won the Cleveland Plain Dealer Golden Gloves Tournament, the Chicago Tribune Tournament of Champions, and the 1940 AAU National Tournament in Boston. He was 17 years old when he won the AAU National Tournament in his weight class. He turned pro in January 1941 when he was 18 years old. He took the name Joey Maxim after his manager said he threw punches faster than a Maxim gun. The Maxim gun is a recoil-operated machine gun. It was the first fully automatic machine gun in the world. Joey Maxim won his first professional fight in no time, pummeling his opponent. Then World War Two happened. He served as a military policeman in the U. S. Army, occasionally fighting in exhibition matches to entertain the troops.
Live professional boxing was a major spectator sport in Cleveland in the 1950s and 1960s. Matches at the Cleveland Arena drew upwards of 10, 000 fans. I was no slouch at roughhousing but not fighting with my fists, although I was good at shadow boxing. The shadows always lost. I never took lessons. Most of the gyms, like the Old Angle, were on the near west side, too far to go. Our father didn’t let us watch the fights on TV. He frowned on boxing. He said it was a cruel sport.
“Two young men beating the sense out of each other for a dollar,” he said. He was an accountant. He needed his mind in good working order to understand dollars and cents. “When you’ve got your dollar but your brain doesn’t work anymore, that is not good.”
Everybody in the neighborhood knew all about Joey Maxin although nobody ever saw him. He was always somewhere else. After his boxing career was over and done with he worked for a casino in the Bahamas and later appeared in a few small parts in the movies. In 1963 he appeared in “Goldilocks and the Three Bares.” The movie was billed as the “first nudist musical.” He played himself playing a nightclub owner. He was featured on the movie poster. “It’s me, Joey Maxim, the former world’s light heavyweight champion! I’m one of the stars! My first screen appearance!” He tried his hand at stand-up comedy but didn’t kill on stage and gave it up.
He moved to Las Vegas and worked for several casinos like the Frontier and the Ambassador as a greeter. He did it for twenty years before retiring. He was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1994. He had beaten fighters like Jersey Joe Walcott, Floyd Patterson, and Sugar Ray Robinson. He fought Sugar Ray Robinson at sold-out Yankee Stadium in New York City in 1952. The bout was the first to be shown on closed circuit television in movie theaters.
Sugar Ray Robinson was the best fighter of all time the day before the fight. The next day he was the second best fighter of all time, at least for one day. He was the middleweight champion, but moved up a classification to light heavyweight to fight Joey Maxim. He gained some weight but still gave up almost 20 pounds to his opponent.
A monsoon soaked New York City for two days before the fight. The day of the championship bout it was very humid and the temperature reached 105 degrees. Some spectators in the stands passed out from the heat. Bright tungsten lights lit up the ring for the TV cameras. Joey Maxim lost 10 pounds during the fight. Sugar Ray Robinson lost 16 pounds. The referee collapsed hallway through from heat exhaustion and had to be replaced. Doc Kearns, Jack Dempsey’s ex-manager, was in Joey Maxim’s corner, but Sugar Ray Robinson was ahead on the judges’ scorecards going into the 13th round. By the end of the round he was worn out. His legs were like rubber. He unleashed a wild haymaker, came up with nothing but air, and off balance fell flat on his face. He staggered back to his corner. He couldn’t come out for the 14th round. The contest in New York City was the only one he never finished.
After the victory Joey Maxim capitalized on his momentum, fighting coast to coast, and in Italy, England, and Germany, as well. He won more than he lost. But when he lost his last six fights in a row he hung it up. He knew he was washed up.
His brother Manny was the day-to-day man at Maxim’s Deli. He was always behind the counter. He seemed to know everybody’s names. He even knew mine. His son Gene started working there on weekends from when he was 13 years old. After he finished high school he decided to go full time and joined his father in the business. Manny’s daughter Loretta worked at the deli, too. After she got married and had children, she continued to work there part-time.
After I started my four years of higher education at St. Joseph’s High School, within walking distance of where we lived, I stopped at Maxim’s Deli for slices of pizza less and less often. It wasn’t out of the way but I had to get home after school, do whatever chores my parents told me to do, eat dinner, do my homework, and get ready for the next day. One day, standing in the hallway after my Monday through Friday religion class, I happened to mention to my teacher that I liked the pizza at Maxim’s Deli. Our teachers were Marianists, members of the Society of Mary. They were sober and serious men. They told us they were caretakers of our souls and we were to never forget it.
My teacher, like all of the Marianist brothers, was dressed in black from tip to toe. He was a tall man with a square jaw and thick wavy hair. He looked down at me and said, “Pizza is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”
One day when I was a sophomore I heard two seniors were going to fight after school in the alley behind Maxim’s Deli. There was a gravel and dirt parking lot there. The Marianists frowned on fights anywhere on school grounds. It was grounds for expulsion, something everybody knew they would never be able to explain to their parents.
“You did what?” is what everybody knew would be the beginning of the beat-down.
When I got to the alley behind Maxim’s Deli there were twenty-or-so of us from school and the two adversaries. I almost went home when I got a look at them. They were jocks. I thought they were going to be greasers. The student body at Joseph’s High School was made up of jocks, greasers, true believers, the clean-cut, and honor students. Everybody stuck to their own for the most part, especially the honor students, who knew they were going to rule the world sooner or later. Dennis Eckart got a law degree and served five terms in Congress. John Skardis was on the same career path until he joined the SDS, got arrested for revolutionary terrorism, skipped bail and disappeared, but was finally apprehended and sent to a dungeon somewhere. Nobody ever heard of him after that.
Jocks knew all about organized violence on the football field, which meant everything at our school, but nothing about fist fights on a gravel and dirt field. Greasers, on the other hand, were best avoided unless you were one of them. They toned down their slicked back hair when they were in school, but outside of school they wore leather jackets and carried sharpened church keys, which were sharpened punch can openers. Their leather jackets weren’t just for show. The leather buffered punches.
The fighting was hapless, which was one swing and a miss after another. They finally grabbed each other, grappling while going around in circles, and fell down in the dust, where they wrestled furiously for a few minutes. It didn’t amount to anything. Manny Berardinelli came out the back door of the deli with a green-colored bag of garbage and told us to beat it, or else. All of us left, including the two jocks making a mockery of the “Sweet Science.”
Joey Maxim had a heart attack in 1999 while visiting his mother in Euclid, not far from where he grew up. He suffered a major stroke two years later and died in West Palm Beach. He is buried in the Memorial Gardens in Hollywood, Florida.
We moved out of North Collinwood after I graduated from high school. Maxim’s Deli moved fifteen miles east to Mentor in 2004. Gene Berardinelli and his wife Kathy took over the business after the relocation. Manny continued to work at the deli, retiring in 2014 at the age of 93. Every so often I thought about taking a drive there and having s slice of pizza but never did. I knew without thinking about it that it wouldn’t be the same. The watermill wasn’t going to be grinding any more wheat for pizza dough with flow water that was long gone.
Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”
“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus
“A police procedural when the Rust Belt was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books
Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. Nothing goes according to plan.
A Crying of Lot 49 Publication
Made in Cleveland 