Adam Schneider, Featherweight Boxer

Adam Schneider, born in 1917, was interviewed in March 1989 by volunteers from the Washakie Museum in Worland, Wyo. This excerpt was prepared for the museum’s summer 2012 exhibit about early settlers in Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin, Voices of the Basin: History in their Own Words. Schneider was a featherweight boxer in his youth.

Transcript:

We hadn’t ever heard anything about amateur boxing at that time. Whenever you boxed, you got money for boxing. So, anybody that was boxing got money, he was a professional.

Sherman Pitt weighed a hundred and forty-two pounds.  He was a welterweight champ in Wyoming at the time.  I was a featherweight, weighed a hundred-eighteen pounds.  So we fought him for ten rounds to a draw.  The next night I had to go to Riverton, box an Indian boy over there that night and I knocked him out in the fourth round.  I got hit one time, didn’t hurt me.

Now, we had to do a lot of road work, done a lot of running early of a morning, done a lot of running and then of a evening we done a lot of working out, boxing.  And the gloves that we used at that time for sparring, what they call sparring, boxing with hitting fellows.  We used sixteen-ounce gloves. Now that’s a big glove.  In competition we used eight-ounce gloves, and we used to train every day, every day, every day.  We never did quit.  We just kept training all the time.

Transcription by Washakie Museum and Cultural Center, Worland, Wyo.