was born on this date in 1895 in Manassa, Colorado, which makes him about the most famous native-son of the San Luis Valley. As Red Smith wrote in Dempsey’s obituary for The New York Times in 1983 —
Jack Dempsey was one of the last of a dwindling company whose exploits distinguished the 1920’s as ”the golden age of sports.” His contemporaries were Babe Ruth in baseball, Red Grange and the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame in football, Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen in golf, Bill Tilden, Helen Wills Moody and Suzanne Lenglen in tennis, Johnny Weissmuller and Gertrude Ederle in swimming, Paavo Nurmi in track, Man o’ War, the racehorse, and Earl Sande, the jockey. But none of the others enjoyed more lasting popularity than the man who ruled boxing between 1919 and 1926.
The obituary is worth reading.