Hey everybody. Welcome to Retell Seller, an ephemera podcast where I uncover forgotten stories and the ephemera people leave behind. I’m Angie a reseller of 10 years, and I’ll share one of those snippets with you. Let’s see what today’s find has to say.

I’m gonna start off with an extremely short newspaper clipping dated January 7th, 1930. It’s from what I believe to be the Peoria Transcript, which eventually became the Peoria Journal Star, AKA, the PJ Star out of Peoria, Illinois.

It reads: “Seven Footer in Peoria, MIT Show, Primo Carnero and Vittorio Compolo, giants of the ring take heed. James Easte, a 20-year-old truck driver who stands seven feet in his hosiery and weighs slightly more than 200 pounds, aspires to boxing accomplishment and has taken his first step by entering an amateur tournament.”

So when I found this article, of course I tried searching for James Easte and I wasn’t able to find anything. Not in Illinois, not as a boxer. Nothing. Since I have the actual clipping, I did scan it in, threw it into image search, and it pulled up the very same article, except that it was from the Evening Star out of Washington, D.C. The title was called Carnero and Compolo have American Rival. So since it’s an AP article, any paper associated with the AP can incorporate AP News into their own local papers. I did use chat GPT and the first thing suggested after saying nothing could be found on him was the spelling could be incorrect.

I absolutely thought the spelling could be off because when it came to Carnero and Compolo, the various articles I found on them had their names spelled differently among all of the various articles. I did decide to sign up for newspapers.com, which I know will be so beneficial and I’ve wanted to do it before I don’t know what took me so long, and I typed in James Easte. Easte is spelled E-A-S-T-E and since it was an AP article, hundreds of this exact snippet showed up from papers across the country. So the only difference for the most part, like I said, was the title given.

And here are some of those titles.

Another giant in boxing arena.

And he’s only a truck driver.

Giant truck driver to try for pugilistic fame.

On the newspapers’ website. It was only showing me a closeup of the already small little snippet with my search of James Easte highlighted in yellow. And after a while, I decided not to click on them anymore because outside of the title being different, it was all the same.

So instead of clicking on each one, I would just brush by and that is until I noticed in my scrolling an article that looked a little different. I click on it and lo and behold, I’m looking at James Easte, an actual photograph of him. It was an amazing moment for me.

The image shows James standing with his, left arm outstretched with the palm of his hand, resting on another man’s head, obviously to show the difference in height.

He’s wearing shorts and the left leg of the shorts has the letters J.E. The snippet of the article says James Easte Light Heavyweight of Peoria, Illinois, who is six feet, eight and a half inches tall and weighs 170 pounds, is shown with Jerry Reichert also of Peoria.

Not that it’s a huge difference, but was he seven foot or was he six foot eight and a half inches tall? Was he 200 pounds or was he 170? In sports, that would make a difference as far as a weight class or division, right? But that’s what it said. So they didn’t match.

There was another article I found, which just makes you think, like back in the thirties, the gregarious, outgoing reporter, and they wanted to, you know, exaggerate and use slang to entertain.

With that, back in the thirties also came some stereotyping and caricatures of the people involved. It talks about Carnero and, how he was so big and he himself was from Italy…here’s how the article goes.

“The flies gather around the honey. As soon as Carnera’s large frame began to get him publicity and a chance for fights in the United States along came others with other claims to fame, also attempting to garner in a few nickels. James Easte, seven foot tall, who drives a truck in Peoria, has left his truck parked outside a local arena where he’s trying out as an amateur heavyweight. He’s 20. Still Time.

Also Domenico Bernasconi, who is the flightiest bantam in Italy, except Mussolini, has tied up his clothes with a few strands of spaghetti, with intentions of perfuming New York arenas with the Italian national vegetable. He missed his chance by not slipping over in Carnera’s hip pocket.”

It’s interesting to see. The excitement that was had about the fact that Carnero was coming over to America and then that was, bringing other people over, they were staking their claim that they wanted to fight just as well as him.

My next question is, did he end up following through with everything? And the one last thing I did find was from a website that appeared to have stats and a James East spelled E-A-S-T did show up. It says that his career was from 1938 to 1938, so just one year, which would’ve made him 28 years old by then.

And then a debut of fighting, which was on August 22nd, 1938. He had three bouts, 13 rounds. It also states that he was in Beaumont, Texas, which absolutely could be the case given it had been eight years after the 1930 article came out and the fact that he was a truck driver.

So that is the James East story. As of right now, I’ll keep him in the back of my mind and maybe I’ll find out some more about him down the road. But I really just love the spark that he had to take a chance and the spark that we get almost a hundred years later when we haven’t yet learned all of the reasons not to try something, it’s the kind of confidence, half hope, half curiosity, and this is where I am right now.

I’m starting out with this one because to me, it captures what I’m doing right now. I’m stepping out of my comfort zone, what I’m used to, what I think I’m good at to do a podcast I know nothing about, about ephemera, which I love. So I can only study up for so long though, before you just let another dream pass you by and it makes me think, what is that moment for you? The one where you looked at something and thought I could do that, even if it seemed a little farfetched. Did you give it a shot? Are you giving it a shot or is it still sitting quietly in the back of your mind waiting? Which is okay too, I might add.

Thank you for joining me as I shared a snippet of the past, I’d love to know if it connected with you in some way. Did it spark a memory or make you see something differently? If so, consider sharing it. Be sure to check out the show notes for additional info, links and ways to connect. It’s not nostalgia, it’s human.

Until next time, may you find something worth holding onto.

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