Why Holocaust survivor ... was proudest of photo taken with Ali
They might have appeared an odd couple -- Muhammad Ali and the Holocaust survivor; citizen of the world and German refugee who escaped to China before finally making a life in Dallas -- Muslim and Jew.
Heavyweight and welterweight.
Odder still, Ali called the survivor, 22 years his senior, "Kid."
Harry "Kid" Ruckenstein met thousands of guests in his years of service at the downtown Sheraton and Fairmont hotels. Had his picture taken with the likes of Elvis and John Wayne and Jimmy Carter. But no photo made his chest swell and his face light up like the one that boasted him posing alongside Ali. Not the ones with Sinatra and Bob Hope and Richard Nixon, either.
"First one you could see when he opened his wallet," recalls his daughter, Johanna Hamons. "Then came the one of Elvis Presley, some of the others, my mother, and finally us kids."
Maybe that's because Ruckenstein had more in common with the boxer than he did with iconic singers, actors, comedians and former presidents of the United States. Ruckenstein had been a boxer in Shanghai, where his parents shipped him in 1939 to avoid the horrors that Hitler's Germany already had begun perpetrating against Jews.
Ruckenstein died on the final day of 2014 at age 95. Ali died last week at 74. His funeral was held in his hometown of Louisville on Thursday. A memorial service will be held there on Friday.
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