By 1920 Tiger had a mortage on his brunswick home and was meeting the payments from his wages as a boilmaker at a oil refinery, pre-sumably manufacturing turpentine.
With him was Willie May Spellers, his childhood sweetheart and perhaps the ultimate reason why his stay in the North was temopporary. With a father hailng from ******ia and a mother from Georgia, Willie May became Tiger's wife on November 22, 1915, when they married in Glynn County by the Reverend M. A Davis.
For the previous three years, Willie May had taken classes at Tuskegee Institute, the vocational training school founded by Booker T. Washington in Alabama. Alumni of Tuskegee reassured all but the most radical of whites, who felt any education of blacks was undesirable.
The marriage certidicate confirms that Flowers returned from Philadelphia in 1915, but he may have headed to Pennsylvania once more, with or without his bride, for another spell in the shipyards.
Tiger worked as a day laborer, a precarious existence that may have encouraged him to look toward professional boxing (though similarly unstable) as a way of achieving greater financial security.
According to Edney and other boxing scribes, Flowers first received some training at the gym of Jack O'Brien in Philadelphia, where he also worked out at the YMCA.
On Tiger's return to Brunswick, Rufus Cameron became his mentor, a black professional fighter who had previously featured in a number of bouts in Los Angeles. Flowers apparently enjoyed the physical exercise invovled in Pugilism, but it was Willie who saw his fists as means to make a living.
When Cameron first arrived on the Georgian coast, she urged her husband to challage him to a contest, which Tiger won.
During another fight soon after, however Flowers right hand was badly injured. Forced by circumstance to adopt to a southpaw, he found that it suited his style and kept it thereafter, retaining the ability to switch to leading with his left glove at will.
With him was Willie May Spellers, his childhood sweetheart and perhaps the ultimate reason why his stay in the North was temopporary. With a father hailng from ******ia and a mother from Georgia, Willie May became Tiger's wife on November 22, 1915, when they married in Glynn County by the Reverend M. A Davis.
For the previous three years, Willie May had taken classes at Tuskegee Institute, the vocational training school founded by Booker T. Washington in Alabama. Alumni of Tuskegee reassured all but the most radical of whites, who felt any education of blacks was undesirable.
The marriage certidicate confirms that Flowers returned from Philadelphia in 1915, but he may have headed to Pennsylvania once more, with or without his bride, for another spell in the shipyards.
Tiger worked as a day laborer, a precarious existence that may have encouraged him to look toward professional boxing (though similarly unstable) as a way of achieving greater financial security.
According to Edney and other boxing scribes, Flowers first received some training at the gym of Jack O'Brien in Philadelphia, where he also worked out at the YMCA.
On Tiger's return to Brunswick, Rufus Cameron became his mentor, a black professional fighter who had previously featured in a number of bouts in Los Angeles. Flowers apparently enjoyed the physical exercise invovled in Pugilism, but it was Willie who saw his fists as means to make a living.
When Cameron first arrived on the Georgian coast, she urged her husband to challage him to a contest, which Tiger won.
During another fight soon after, however Flowers right hand was badly injured. Forced by circumstance to adopt to a southpaw, he found that it suited his style and kept it thereafter, retaining the ability to switch to leading with his left glove at will.
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