his way to a career in boxing.
Not all of Doolittle’s pugilism was confined to the ring, however. From time to time he would engage in street brawls, which scandalized his mother, who was trying to steer him toward a respectable life. He was cured of his pugnaciousness once and for all after landing in jail for fighting a truck driver who had insulted a girl. Rosa Doolittle let him sweat it out in a cell for the rest of the weekend. “I’ll be around Monday morning and get him out in time for school,” she told the desk sergeant when he called. After getting a good look at the inside of a hoosegow, Jimmy decided that street fighting was a dead-end form of recreation.
It was also about this time that Doolittle met the love of his life, Josephine Daniels, an attractive A-student classmate with a biting humor and seductive smile whom everyone called “Joe.” One of Jimmy’s friends described Joe as a “Sunday girl,” meaning that you could have your Friday and Saturday night flings, but the girl you took out on Sunday was one of those types to be treated special.
At first Joe Daniels wanted little to do with the motorcycle-riding, C-student brawler, but in time she apparently saw something in him, and he, in turn, started combing his hair, dressing up with a necktie, and minding his language around her. By the end of high school they were talking about marriage, but both wanted to go to college. Jimmy had no money and turned pro in his boxing career in order to earn his tuition. Fighting under the name “Jimmy Pierce” so his mother and the amateur authorities wouldn’t know, he motorcycled up and down the Pacific coast to fight clubs on the weekends, earning about thirty dollars a bout—all either wins or draws.
Because Joe had no desire to marry someone whose only skill was fighting, Doolittle entered Los Angeles Junior College in 1914, where he studied mining engineering. In 1916 he transferred to the Engineering School at the University of California, Berkeley, where he joined the boxing team and never lost a match. He joined the college varsity gymnastics team as well and received high praise for his acrobatics.
His boxing career came to an end the following year when a tough promoter overmatched him against a seasoned pro named “Spider” Reilly, who danced all over the ring with Jimmy chasing and never laying a glove on him. After that Doolittle concluded that he had best stick to engineering.
By the spring of 1917 Doolittle was well on his way to a degree at the University of California when the United States declared war on Germany. That autumn, when he returned to Berkeley for his senior year, Doolittle was caught up in war fever and instead enrolled for pilot training in the U.S. Signal Corps aviation section.
J OE HAD GONE TO WORK for a large insurance company and became expert in a type of filing system that was a forerunner to computerized filing. By the time World War I came along she had moved to work in a shipyard and, employing the revolutionary filing system, had several hundred girls under her. The two were married, over the objections of Joe’s mother, on Christmas Eve, 1917.
Jimmy was still awaiting the army orders that would send him to ground school and didn’t have a cent, so Joe had to pay for the marriage license. They honeymooned in San Diego on her last twenty dollars, eating in cafeterias where servicemen were given free meals.
After graduating ground school in January of 1918, Jimmy went to San Diego for flight training at Rockwell Field. On the first day, as he and his instructor taxied out in a Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny,” they heard the shocking boom of wood and metal followed by an eerie quiet. Two of the trainers had crashed and the wreckage fell only yards from Jimmy’s plane. He and his instructor rushed over to the nearest Jenny, which was being flown solo by a student. He was dead. The other plane contained a student and his instructor, both mangled but alive. Jimmy
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