This story starts on the other side of the world from Spokane, when the emperor of Russia was assassinated by revolutionaries in 1881. The attack was unjustly blamed on a Jewish conspiracy and resulted in brutal pogroms being unleashed on the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. Millions left their homes behind to escape the violence, knowing they would never return. Many came to America, and most landed in New York City.
Among that wave of Russian Jewish immigrants were Alfred “Al” Morse and Sarah “Sadie” Brandvein. Sadie was just seven years old when her family came to America, while Al was only two. As young twentysomethings, they married in New York City. By 1905, they were living with Sadie’s sister Bessie in a tenement apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. It was a neighborhood just as crowded and tough as the Lower East Side, but they stood out among their neighbors now rather than blending in – most people living in Hell’s Kitchen at the time were working-class immigrants from Germany, Italy, and Ireland.
Their next move would take them into even more unfamiliar territory: Al and Sadie Morse arrived in Spokane, Washington around 1909. Al worked as a kitchen steward at the Davenport and held various jobs over the years, including hotel clerk and salesman. The Morses also operated the Gardner Apartments (W. 217 Third) and the Sharon Apartments (S. 625 Stevens). Around this time, both Al and Sadie began claiming to be natural-born United States citizens of Russian immigrant parents. They would maintain this fiction in public records until their deaths, although we do not know whether it extended to their private lives.
Sadie's sister, Bessie, also came to Spokane around this time with her husband, Charles M. Lewis. The sisters’ husbands went into business together, operating a combination employment agency, cigar store, soft drink shop, and "working men's club" at N. 221 Stevens. Sources indicate that the club had originally served alcohol, but had made the mistake of opening in 1915, just one year before Washington State implemented statewide prohibition.
The two couples lived and worked closely together until 1932, when Charles’s health declined. He and Bessie went to Los Angeles, in the hopes that the gentler climate would help Charles to recover. Instead, Charles died in 1933. He left his share of their business to Al and the rest of his estate to Bessie.
The Morses had lived relatively quiet lives in Spokane for decades at this point. They worked hard, they saved their money, they volunteered, they occasionally donated to fundraisers for Jewish causes. They were now in their early fifties. Most people in this chapter of life wouldn't consider starting a career as a nightlife impresario and boxing promoter. But most people aren't Al Morse.
For many years, Al Morse had dreamed of running a proper club. More than just some soft drinks and cigars at the back of an office, he wanted his club to have "a barber shop, cafe and card tables [...] a reading room, a picture show, pool room, and everything that goes in a club atmosphere." Now, not only did he have the means to open a club, but nationwide prohibition was about to be repealed. It was finally time for his dream to become a reality.
In 1934, Al Morse opened the Workingman's Athletic Club and the Lewis Card Room at 425 W. Main. The reading room and picture show proposed in Al's original plan were now a boxing ring, wrestling mats, showers, and sports equipment. The card tables and pool tables stayed, and of course, there was a bar.
The Workingman's Athletic Club was soon hailed as one of the best gyms in the Northwest. Sportswriter Jimmy Bolin enthused, "What Spokane needs is a first-class gym where fighters can work out. That statement has been made to the writer by every fight manager that has appeared here over a long period. And at last it has come to pass."
Of course, a boxing gym's reputation is built on the boxers who train there. Fortunately for Morse, a boxer named John Lynwood Fox – better known as “Tiger Jack Fox” - visited Spokane for a bout in late 1934. Fox, a man of murky background but unquestioned skill in the ring, agreed to let Morse be his manager. It's unclear how Morse won Fox over, given that he’d never managed a boxer before, but Fox was later noted as saying that Spokane was "the first place he ever found where he got all the money that was coming to him."
Thanks to the pairing of Morse and Fox, Spokane was soon a first-rate “fight town.” Sportswriter Jimmie Hungate said, "The public in Spokane owes [something] to Al Morse and the battle he has put up to make Spokane the fight center of the northwest. He has accomplished this feat. Spokane is right now the best fight town on the Pacific Coast, with the possible exception of Hollywood." As Tiger Jack Fox's star rose and Al Morse's rose with it, the Lewis Card Room and the Workingman's Athletic Club became simply the Al Morse Club and Gym.
While the gym side of the business was praised, the card room’s reputation was checkered. It was regularly raided by law enforcement as a haven of illegal gambling. Al gamely denied these allegations and claimed that his card room operated much like a Chuck E. Cheese does today: he only let his customers play with in-house tokens or "hickeys,” for amusement purposes only. His tokens were never supposed to be exchanged for cash, alcohol, or tobacco. Law enforcement was unconvinced by his protests, and continued to descend on the card room at regular intervals. At least one raid turned up locked drawers of real cash concealed inside the card tables, right where the dealers could reach them.
In 1938, a sore loser sued Morse for the return of $2803.50 that he had lost over a three-year span gambling in the card room. Under Washington State law, if it could be shown that Morse had taken that money through illegal gambling, it was possible that Morse could be forced to repay it in full. Morse, however, had bigger things to worry about that winter. Four years into their partnership, Tiger Jack Fox was now recognized as one of the best boxers in the country. John Henry Lewis had abandoned his light-heavyweight belt in order to move up a class and try to take the heavyweight title from Joe Louis. A tournament had ensued to find the new light-heavyweight champion, and Fox was only one fight away from the title. He and Melio Bettina were set to battle in New York City in December of 1938.
In typically chaotic fashion, the potential light-heavyweight champion spent his December in a hospital bed instead of the ring. Fox had taken a woman named Edna Boyd to his hotel room in Harlem, and Edna had stabbed him in the chest with a ten inch blade. According to him, she did it when he was sleeping for no reason. According to her, it was a necessary act of self-defense. Fox was taken to the hospital in critical condition, having suffered severe blood loss. The doctors said that his boxing career was over. Fox and Morse disagreed.
By February of 1939, Tiger was back on his feet and back in the ring, boxing Bettina in Madison Square Garden for the light-heavyweight title. After eight thrilling rounds, Tiger succumbed to a technical knockout in the ninth. For the rest of his life, Fox attributed the loss to the effects of an "evil eye" placed on him by Bettina's manager, a Las Vegas hypnotist and magician named Jimmy Grippo.
The championship fight was the high point of the partnership between Fox and Morse, and it also was the beginning of the end. By 1940, Al Morse was ready to leave the boxing world behind. He continued to own the gym and card room, but he no longer managed boxers. Details from intermittent raids on the card room seem to suggest that Morse relied on a manager to run the place in this era (and that it continued to skirt the gambling regulations).
Tiger Jack Fox announced his retirement many times, but seemed to find it impossible to stay out of the ring, even as his hair turned gray. (Fox's actual age was unknown, but he was widely thought to be older than he claimed.) In 1950, he abruptly collapsed in a Twin Falls, Idaho boxing ring. It was later found that he had suffered a hernia after a blow to his abdomen. His boxing days were over, but it soon became clear that John Lynwood Fox had never made a plan for what to do once he wasn’t “Tiger Jack.” He had no money saved and no post-boxing plans. In 1951, only months after his retirement, he was found near death in his hotel room after a severe stroke. He was taken to Sacred Heart in critical condition.
Al Morse had been out of the boxing game for years, but in ’51, he came out of retirement and helped arrange one last bout: a benefit fight to raise funds for Tiger. That August, Kid Riviera of Chicago and Willie Bean of Los Angeles went ten rounds in the outdoor arena at Ferris Field. Nearly 4,800 people were in attendance, including Tiger Jack Fox himself, seated ringside between two hospital attendants. While the win went to Riviera, the match failed to live up to expectations. The Spokesman-Review lamented that while the match was "a topnotch smasheroo on paper, [it] turned out to be no more than a half-hearted dancing exhibition, reminiscent of a ballroom class at Miss Pringle’s school for young ladies."
As well as being a disappointing fight, it was a disappointing fundraiser. Although the event raised nearly $10,000 at the gate, most of the money went to taxes and the costs of putting on the fight. Only about $1300 was left for Tiger’s use. It was put into a trust fund and managed by Carl Maxey. While Maxey has gone down in history as a groundbreaking civil rights leader and attorney, Spokanites in 1951 knew him as the undefeated NCAA boxing champion “King Carl.”
If nothing else, the match helped keep Fox’s name in the news, which in turn helped let his fans know where to find him: in the nursing home, slowly recovering. In December 1951, a newspaper article mentioned that he had asked his nurse to convey his thanks to the dozens of people who had sent Christmas cards and gifts. In February 1952, he was well enough to attend a boxing match at the Armory, where the crowd gave him “the biggest cheer of the night.”
Fox eventually recovered enough to leave the nursing home. He spent his remaining years at the home of Mrs. Alice Freeman, a North Carolinian by birth who moved here in 1904 and became the matriarch of one of Spokane’s largest and most accomplished Black families. “Mother Freeman” had often provided room and board for Fox during his twenty years in Spokane, and he could not have found a better home base. The Chronicle described her as Fox’s biggest booster.
On April 6 of 1954, the end came for Tiger Jack Fox. He was living a quiet life now, looked after by Mrs. Freeman and reliably seen in attendance at every boxing match in town. While his step was slow and he used a cane, he often walked to a nearby budget movie theater to pay his quarter and enjoy the triple feature. That morning, Tiger had just bought his ticket when a heart attack struck and ended his life on the spot. “He stalked his foes like a panther and he swung like lightning from half way to his knees,” the Chronicle said in its eulogy. “Spokane liked the old tiger, and many an eye dimmed in present months to see him dragging along the street with the aid of a cane while fame and fortune took the crowds to see other fighters, some of whom were not fit to have climbed into the same ring with him when he was going strong. Old fighters have no standing, save in the record books, and by that measure Fox stood up with the best of them.”
Fox had died penniless, but Spokane’s boxing community wasn't going to abandon him to a pauper’s grave. Naturally, they organized a benefit boxing match in his honor to raise funeral expenses. His funeral was held at Our Lady of Lourdes Cathedral and he was laid to rest in Spokane’s Holy Cross Cemetery. Famed boxer Joe Louis later visited Mrs. Freeman at her home and thanked her for looking after Fox, “tucking a $100 bill in her pocket as he left.” In 2023, Tiger Jack Fox was posthumously inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
Al Morse’s name was missing from the ranks of those who organized Fox’s funeral and carried his coffin. Like his old fighter, Morse had also suffered a stroke and was partially paralyzed. He finally sold off the business for good in 1955 and died three years later. Sadie would live on until 1972. They are buried together in Fairmount Cemetery in Spokane.
On the surface, Fox and Morse could hardly have been more different: a Black American light-heavyweight who “carried his fists like suitcases” and an Eastern European Jewish immigrant who stood all of 5’4” tall. But at the moment in 1934 that their paths first crossed, they shared some important similarities. Both men had reinvented key parts of their biographies – Tiger spent decades concealing his real date of birth, and Al spent decades concealing his immigrant origins. Both had big dreams, and both were considered a little too old to be dreaming so big. Yet somehow, together, they made those dreams come true. Al Morse turned Spokane into a first-rate fight town, and he managed Tiger Jack Fox all the way to Madison Square Garden for a championship bout. It was a short but unforgettable run that changed both their lives.
The two men also shared another important thing: while neither began his life anywhere near here, both of them ended up calling Spokane their home.
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