Gallup's raging bull
Brothers dominated boxing at Kitchen's
during the 1930s

By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — The whole town was talking about the Chiaramonte boys some 75 years ago.

Bring up the 1930s to anyone in Gallup who was alive then, and it’s almost guaranteed that the names of one or more of the Chiaramonte brothers will be mentioned.

That’s what happened recently when interviews were made about the early history of Kitchen’s Opera House. As soon as the topic was mentioned, local Indian trader Bill Richardson started talking about Boni, Nardine and Julio Chiaramonte and how they dominated boxing at the Opera House during the 1930s.

Any time you had any of them on the bill, Richardson said, you were guaranteed to have a good crowd.

The only one of the brothers still around is Nardine, who was in Gallup on Saturday. He was being interviewed by Roger Zimmerman, who wrote a book several years ago on the history of the opera house, which his family owned for many years. He was in town doing further interviews after five years with the idea of possibility adding to his book on Gallup’s history.

At 94, Nardine Chiaramonte looks 25 years younger and is still active and enjoying life, especially when he has a chance to talk about the good old days.

He said he fought 10 fights at Kitchen’s Opera House, all of them amateur, so he didn’t get any pay, which brought up the subject of his brother Julio.

Guido Zecca, who was the boxing promoter at the opera house in the 1930s, offered Julio, then 15 years old, a chance to “earn part of his school expenses” by fighting at the opera house, one day in August 1931. He offered to turn over the proceeds of the match that night to Julio to pay for his tuition at the New Mexico Military Institute.

Local newspapers, however, reported a few days later that Julio had to turn down the offer in order to keep his amateur status so he could participate in sports at his school.

Nardine Chiaramonte’s youth and early adult life was spent in Gallup, and much of that time was spent at the opera house and the Strand, the local movie theater — which later became the Chief Theater and now houses City Electric.

Talking about the boxing, he remembers that most of he people who came to the fights were miners. Very few were Navajos. Women came and so did children at times.

“It wasn’t rowdy,” he said, adding that while smoking was allowed before the matches began, Zecca would make a statement before each boxing match to the men to quit their smoking.

Chiaramonte also recalled when he was young and wanting to go to events at the Opera House and not having the 50 cents or $1 to get in, going with his friends and climbing a ladder that was located next to the building and sneaking in through the windows.

“No one ever checked the windows to make sure no one could sneak in,” he said.

He and other kids in Gallup had another method of getting into the Strand Theater when they couldn’t afford the 10 cents for admission.

“We all knew that C.N. Cotton (one of Gallup’s wealthiest businessmen) would attend a matinee at the Strand every Saturday, so we would make sure we were there when he arrived at the theater.”

Cotton knew what was going on but he didn’t seem to mind, each week paying the admission costs for the 10 to 15 kids who showed up hoping to get into the theater without paying.

The opera house was also used for political rallies during those days and Nardine Chiaramonte used his name recognition from boxing to make a bid to get elected to county supervisor and then later for sheriff. He would resign from the race for supervisor and would be defeated for sheriff.

Nardine Chiaramonte said that of all of the brothers, the one that was best known, not only in Gallup but throughout the Southwest, was his brother Boni, who also went by the name of Bonney. Zimmerman said that Boni was on the way to becoming a major force in the amateur boxing field in his attempt to be selected to represent the United States in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

But he lost his last fight in the selection process.

In his book, Zimmerman also provided some later history for Julio, reporting that he entered the Army during World War II and became a major, distinguishing himself “as a hero earning both the Silver and Bronze Stars in separate battles.”

By 1940, the boxing era at the Opera House was ending and Nardine Chiaramonte said so was his amateur boxing career.
He would work in the mines for many years, before quitting to work for the Montgomery Ward store here. He left Gallup in 1956 to go to Farmington where he worked for 24 years for El Paso Natural Gas.

[Courtesy photo]