History of my uncle’s name, James Joseph Dean

When I was born in 1935,  my father named me after the current Heavyweight Boxing Champion that year, James Joseph Braddock.

 

Five years ago a dental assistant asked me, “What was your mother thinking about, naming you after the actor, James Dean?”  I replied, “I was 15-years-old when the actor came on the scene, but my father was a professional boxer, who named me after a fighter.”

 

It turns out I was named after the world-heavyweight boxing champion. (Braddock lost his title to Joe Louis two years later.)

 

Braddock, son of poor Irish immigrants, broke both his wrists, and returned to beat Max Baer for the world title. Braddock was then called, “The Comeback Kid,” or “Cinderella Man,”  (Thus, the title of the new movie starring Australian actor Russell Crowe.)

 

My father became a policeman and fingerprint expert in Kirkwood, outside St. Louis, Missouri.  Ora Dean was a professional boxer in his youth, also fighting Heavyweight Champion Jack Dempsey in two exhibition bouts in the 1920s.  (Dad was only 19, already married to Ruth, my mother, and a machinist at a factory at the time he turned  Light Heavyweight.) When the St. Louis area owner of the plant he worked at heard he had just fought the new world champ, he arranged to reschedule a match for my Dad of two rounds with Dempsey, and bought tickets for all his factory workers!

 

My mother had no desire for me to follow in the footsteps of my father or older brother (the latter, an amateur boxer and wrestler in high school who also played football there.)  I played softball in school and swam individually, but otherwise concentrated on education and writing, as a newspaper reporter, publications editor, and professional writer. I also majored in American Diplomatic History and taught several History and American Government college courses, after retiring from the Federal Government.