I went back to 125th Street and asked for Pollard and was told "Oh, sure, he's a booking agent. He books Negro acts into all the Negro theaters"
I found Pollard and said "Look, I want to find Sam Langford. Do you know anything about him?" - He didn't. But I figured he could still help me. I wrote a piece about him, as a matter of fact, to butter him up. It wasn't really one of the series because there wasn't much to write about him. Anyhow, one day he said, "Let's go to the ration office" This was during the war and he meant the place where you get your ration books to buy a pound of meat and so on. We went down there. They had never heard of Langford.
"Well," Pollard said, "let's go over to the welfare office." - At welfare they said "Yes, Langford used to come in. He used to be on welfare."
This was the first lead I had, after almost a month. So we knew Langford was somewhere in the area. We left, and as I was walking with Pollard down Lenox Avenue, he said "Let's go in here" It was a butcher shop. Pollard said, "I know this fellow. He's a great sports fan."
The butcher was a white man. Pollard asked him if he had ever heard of Sam Langford. The man said "Sure, he comes in here every day. I give him pig's feet. He lives around the corner."
That's where we found him, in a terrible, terrible old room. He was blind of course. I knocked on his door, this rickety old door, and I said "Sam?"...and this voice says "Yes, c'mon in"
We went in. I could see by the light through the door that he was reaching for a string to turn on the light above him. He was sitting on this bed, the only thing in the room. There was a tiny little window facing on to the courtyard.
I sat and talked with him. The stench in the place was awful. He was so cheerful, laughing all the time. Of course, he didn't know me from Adam. I told him who I was. He asked if I knew all the old people he used to know. We talked and talked. He told me he had been on and off welfare so much the welfare office had lost track of him.
I went back to the office and wrote a piece that night. It ran the next morning. It was quite a short piece, no more than a thousand words. When I saw it in the paper I said to myself, "My God, what a terrible job I've done."
But then I was deluged with money. Every day came dozens and dozens of letters with postage stamps and dollar bills and two-dollar bills, and quaters wrapped in bits of paper. The piece had been picked up by the Associated Press and put on the wire. So this stuff was coming in from all over the country.
This was early in December, and at Christmas I went back to see him again and do another piece. I neglected my family to go up there. By this time we had all this money, and I bought him a guitar, a box of cigars, a bottle of gin, all that stuff. He loved to take a slug of gin. He never took much.
Sam was wonderful, and there was this one wonderful touch. He was blind, remember, but he said, "I got a little money now. Buy me a couple of candles, will you?"
He fished into his pocket and gave me a quarter. "I want you to light the candles. I can't see them. But I want the candles lit for Christmas."
The christmas story turned out to be better than the other. In anthologies they put the two stories together because they supplement one another. They put a title on it, "A dark man laughs" It's in a dozen or so anthologies.
I wrote five pieces on Sam altogether, and we raised twelve thousand dollars. We got a lot of pleasure out of the Langford story and the organization of the fund.
Sam was such a wonderful person. There was no evil in him. Nothing but sweetness. He had no grudge against anybody. The only person he didn't like was Harry Wills. He kept telling me, "Don't you accept nothing from Harry Wills. I don't want anything from Harry Wills."
Sam had fought Wills nineteen times, but he couldn't fight for the title. No Negroes were fighting for titles back then. By the time Jack Johnson was champion and Negroes were beginning to be accepted for big bouts, Sam was practically blind. He got that lime stuff in one eye, and the eye was gone. But he still fought on. He fought at 160 pounds. Fought the heavyweights too.
Sam and I were friends until he died. We got about a hundred dollars a month for him, which was plenty at the time. He got more and more feeble and then he got diabetes very bad. He kept telling me "I'm going back to Boston". He had a friend up there, a fellow who ran a pub. He finally came down and got Sam and put him in a nursing home. There was enough money to pay his way up there. That's where Sam died.
There was one thing I forgot. Sam is noted for calling everyone "Chief" and I forgot to put that in the story. The first thing I heard him say was "C'mon in, Chief."
The story was not a straight job of reporting. For the facts about Sam, you could say "There he is. He's forgotten. He's blind. He hasn't got any money. And he's very cheerful about it." That's all there is to it, that would be the whole story, if you were just using facts. But this kind of feature reporting is different.
By Al Laney
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From The New York Times - Feb 3rd 1992...
"Al Laney, a sportswriter for more than four decades, died last Sunday at his retirement home, the Fellowship Community, in Spring Valley. He was 92 years old.
In 1924, Mr. Laney went to Paris for the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune and worked there until 1930, when he went to New York to work for The Herald Tribune. In New York, he covered baseball, tennis and golf.
He is survived by a son, Michael Laney of Spring Valley."
