Description

Harkess Publishing [Published Date: 1982]. Hardcover, 371 pp. Inscribed (personalized) and signed by Harry Kessler on title page dated March, 1985. Very good in acceptable dust jacket. Red cloth covered boards with gold lettering on front and spine. Light bumping and scuffing to edges of covers. Binding tight. Pages lightly aged but otherwise clean and unmarked. Dust jacket has several 1" or less chips and tears and creasing along edges. Moderate overall scuffing to jacket as well with a bit of the color scuffed off along edges. NOT price clipped Now in an archival-quality (removable) Brodart Cover. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. Black and white illustrations. [From jacket flaps] Harry H. Kessler is a man who has gone the distance in two very diverse worlds. "Gone the distance" as a boxing term means that a fighter has weathered not only everything his opponent could bestow upon him but has also withstood the clock for 15 rounds. It is apropos in Harry Kessler's case; one of the worlds he conquered was in the sport of boxing, where he was the third man in the ring in a refereeing career that spanned more than half a century through more than 6,000 fights, 13 of them world championship encounters. Kessler never made a dime at boxing; whatever fees he earned in the ring, he gave to charity. Specifically, to children's charities, usually in the city where the bout took place. In his other sphere of accomplishment - the world of metallurgical engineering - Harry Kessler made a fortune. Some say millions. Harry will say only that he has "always managed to pay my bills." The two worlds are paradoxical but so intertwined in this man that the truth is never self-contradictory throughout his life. As one of the world's leading consulting metallurgical engineers, his foundries, and those of his clients, contributed substantially to that historic moment when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. Together they manufactured more than 100 components for the spacecraft and the landing module which got them there. As a Big Time boxing referee, he has watched champions dispatch challengers to the same place. As a poor Jewish kid growing up in Kerry Patch, a tough Irish neighborhood of St. Louis, Harry Kessler and his brothers got into the fight game for a simple reason: survival. After he had learned to fight, Harry learned to love boxing as he also learned to love the science of metallurgy. The latter became his life's work, the world in which he was destined to succeed beyond dreams; boxing became a passionate avocation. Neither path was smooth; the yellow brick road was mighty bumpy. The phrase self-made does not apply to him; the description self-applied seems made for him alone. As a success story, Harry Kessler's evidently is pure Horatio Alger-whose books influenced him as a youngster. But when he begins spinning the ups and downs of a fabulous tale, we laugh, cry, worry and triumph with him. It is an incredible story, filled with high humor and deep sorrow, warmth and pathos, temporary defeats and ultimate victory.