Appalachian Figure
From Appalachian boyhood to Denver rings and Hollywood lots
If you know Richard “Fighting Dick” Gilbert at all, you probably know him as the burly cop or henchman in Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang shorts, forever being tripped, drenched, or humiliated for a laugh. For decades he was part of the Hal Roach stock company, the dependable heavy in the background of other people’s jokes.
Look a little earlier in his life, though, and a very different picture appears. Before he ever stepped onto a Culver City soundstage, Gilbert spent a decade taking punches from some of the best fighters of his era. Contemporary newspapers call him “Fighting Dick” Gilbert of Denver, a light heavyweight who went rounds with Jack Dillon and shared a ring with the young Jack Dempsey.
His story runs from Knox County, Kentucky to the mining camps and boxing clubs of the Mountain West, then on to Hollywood and finally a lonely Nevada boomtown cemetery. It is an Appalachian story about how one man carried a mountain identity into two very different working worlds: the ring and the studio lot.
Born in Kentucky, with two paper trails
Every account agrees that Dick Gilbert was born on 12 July 1889 and that his legal name was Richard Lewis Gilbert. Where in Kentucky he was born depends on which paper trail you follow. An early boxing record book, the sort of near primary reference compiled for fans and matchmakers, lists “Richard L. Gilbert” as “born near Lexington, Ky., July 12, 1889,” and gives his height and fighting weight. Modern boxing databases such as BoxRec follow that lead and give his birthplace simply as Lexington.
Film and genealogical sources, however, point firmly toward the Appalachian side of Kentucky. The Swedish Film Database, a national film archive, describes him as an American actor and boxer “born Richard Lewis Gilbert in Knox County, Kentucky, [and] died in Goldfield, Nevada.” A detailed fan maintained biography at LordHeath.com, built around studio paperwork and a large family photo collection, gives the same birth date and identifies Knox County as his birthplace.
Regional writers have followed that Appalachian trail. An essay on “Appalachians in Moving Pictures” at Appalachia Bare profiles Gilbert as “born Richard Lewis Gilbert in Knox County, Kentucky on July 12, 1889,” emphasizes his boxing nickname, and then traces his later film work.
No single record settles the question beyond doubt, but taken together the film archives and family linked sources make a strong case that our “Fighting Dick” came out of Knox County rather than the Bluegrass streets of Lexington. The older boxing annual may simply have used the nearest big city as a convenient locator, a common habit when promoters wrote up fighters from rural backgrounds. Either way, he was a Kentuckian born in 1889 whose life soon bent toward the road.
For Appalachian readers, that matters. Knox County sits in the Cumberland Plateau belt, part of the same upland world that would send miners, labor organizers, and later soldiers far from home. If Gilbert’s childhood began there, his boxing and film careers become one more example of Appalachian outmigration in the early twentieth century.
“Fighting Dick” in the sporting pages
By the early 1910s, Richard Gilbert had become “Fighting Dick” in the sports columns. An International Boxing Research Organization article, drawing on the 1943 All Time Ring Record Book, notes that he had been fighting professionally since 1907 and that his long resume included bouts with some of the best known light heavyweights of his day.
Denver emerges as an important base. On 25 November 1914 the Atlanta Georgian carried a short item under the header “Dillon Gets Verdict Over Dick Gilbert.” Datelined Denver, it reports that Jack Dillon of Indianapolis “was given the decision over ‘Fighting Dick’ Gilbert, of Denver, in their fifteen round fight” before the Colorado Athletic Club. A South Bend News Times notice a few weeks earlier had already told readers that Dillon and “‘Fighting Dick’ Gilbert, Denver lightweight” were matched for a twenty round bout, evidence that Gilbert’s name traveled widely in the sporting press.
Gilbert did not only lose to top men. In February 1915 the Los Angeles Herald told California readers that “‘Fighting’ Dick Gilbert of this city was awarded the decision over Sailor Ed Petroskey, the San Francisco middleweight,” in a Denver bout that went the distance. At other moments he was the featured attraction himself. An advertisement in the Western Liberal of Clayton, New Mexico, touting “the largest arena ever erected” in the region, promised “Fighting Dick Gilbert 10 rounds” on a local card.
Not all the coverage was flattering. Later reports describe nights when opponents “made a punching bag” out of him or when rising contenders like Billy Miske took clear decisions at his expense, the sort of battering that older boxers endured when their reflexes slowed but they still needed a payday.
If we treat these scattered items together, a picture emerges. Gilbert was not a world champion, but he was a known quantity in the light heavyweight and middleweight ranks, tough enough to share rings with Jack Dillon and other serious contenders, durable enough to headline in mining towns and resort cities across the Mountain West, and colorful enough that promoters happily billed him as “Fighting Dick.”
Did he really beat Jack Dempsey
The most repeated line in short biographies of Dick Gilbert is that he once defeated a young Jack Dempsey. The English language Wikipedia entry, summarizing mid century newspaper columns, simply states that “In the 1910s, Gilbert won a boxing match against future heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey.”
The primary evidence is less simple. Official lists of Dempsey’s fights and the work of boxing historians agree that the two men did box each other in Nevada during Dempsey’s journeyman years. An IBRO study of “The Early Jack Dempsey” notes that contemporary accounts describe Dempsey gaining a decision over “Fighting Dick Gilbert of Louisville, Ky.,” and treat the bout as one of several hard tests on his way up the ladder.
That is a very different picture from the later claim that Gilbert beat the future champion. The likeliest explanation is that a mid century human interest columnist misremembered or dramatized the encounter, turning a competitive loss into a colorful win for the older man, and later writers repeated the story without checking against the fight records. Wikipedia’s brief line reflects that tradition. The match itself is real; the outcome is contested.
For our purposes, two things are clear. First, Gilbert was good enough that promoters chose him as an opponent for Dempsey, a marker of his status in the regional fight world. Second, the confusion over who won says something about how sporting memory works. An Appalachian kid, flattened more often than not by bigger names, gets remembered in popular retellings as the man who “once beat Jack Dempsey,” a small victory wrestled from the hazy edge between record and legend.
From the ring to Culver City
By the early 1920s, “Fighting Dick” Gilbert was reaching his mid thirties, an old age in the brutal math of the ring. Around the same time another opportunity opened far to the west.
Culver City had become the busy home of Hal Roach Studios, where the Our Gang comedies, Laurel and Hardy shorts, and a host of other slapstick series churned out reels for theater programs. The Swedish Film Database sums up the next phase of Gilbert’s life in a single line, describing him as an American actor whose film roles ran from 1922 to 1951 and noting that he was also a boxer.
Appalachia Bare’s profile puts the two careers into one sentence: “Dick Gilbert was born Richard Lewis Gilbert in Knox County, Kentucky on July 12, 1889. He was a light heavyweight boxer nicknamed ‘Fighting Dick’” who later quit the ring and began an acting career, appearing in small roles as policemen, drivers, and tough guys.
Studio level evidence supports that summary. A specialized Our Gang research site called The Lucky Corner works from Hal Roach payroll records and production documents. On its pages for shorts such as “Back Stage” and “The Cobbler,” it identifies Dick Gilbert both as an on screen performer and as part of the props department crew, confirming that he had a regular place on the lot that went beyond quick “day player” appearances. LordHeath’s biography, built from those records and stills, lists dozens of Roach productions in which he appeared between 1922 and the early 1930s.
A family source ties the boxer and the actor together. In 2016 an obituary in the Daily Breeze for Frances Virginia Gilbert Williams, a ninety one year old artist and World War II veteran, described her as born in Culver City on 4 February 1925 “to Richard ‘Fighting Dick’ Gilbert and Anna Mahoney,” then recalled her childhood “cherishing the magic of the lots at Hal Roach Studios.” Gilbert’s daughter remembered herself as a child of the Roach lot, and Hal Roach scholars have noted that she even appeared in an Our Gang short, cementing the link between the Kentucky fighter and the Culver City actor.
Taken together, these sources show a clear arc. A mountain born boxer who had once chased purses across Colorado, Arkansas, and Nevada hung up his gloves and found steadier work in Hollywood, using his stocky build and battered face to play cops, strongmen, and comic villains for the rest of his working life.
Playing the heavy in Our Gang and Laurel and Hardy
Gilbert’s screen career began quietly. Filmographies for Hal Roach shorts list his debut as an uncredited role in the Our Gang film “Young Sherlocks” (1922), where he played a motorist who becomes the target of child sized mischief.
From there he became a familiar type. In silent Our Gang entries like “The Cobbler,” “Back Stage,” “The Big Show,” and “Giants vs. Yanks,” contemporary cast notes and frame grabs show him turning up again and again as the burly adult whose hat gets knocked off, whose shoes are ruined, or whose patience finally snaps at the antics of the kids.
He crossed easily from the children’s comedies into Laurel and Hardy’s world. Film reference works and restoration notes for Roach’s classic shorts list Dick Gilbert among the supporting players in titles such as “The Battle of the Century,” “You’re Darn Tootin,” “Busy Bodies,” and “Any Old Port.” In some he is a policeman in the wrong place at the wrong time; in others he is a workman, a mug, or a bystander whose misfortune fuels another pie fight or ladder gag.
These performances were rarely credited on screen, but still photographs circulated among fans. LordHeath’s gallery, assembled from images provided by Gilbert’s daughter, shows him posing in his prime as a boxer, then later in studio stills in uniform or suit, as well as candid shots around the lot.
Altogether he appeared in more than fifty films between 1922 and the early 1950s, often without his name on the poster but always in the thick of the chaos. For an Appalachian born worker who had once fought Jack Dillon and stood across from Jack Dempsey, the Hal Roach contract offered something the ring rarely did: a steady paycheck, a relatively safe workplace, and a chance to turn his toughness into laughter instead of bruises.
Goldfield, Nevada and the last round
The end of Dick Gilbert’s story takes him back toward the mining frontier. Film databases and biographical sites agree that he died on 6 May 1960 in Goldfield, Nevada, at the age of sixty nine. A FamilySearch cemetery index for Goldfield Cemetery lists “Richard Lewis Gilbert, 1889–1960” among the burials, confirming both the dates and the place.
Goldfield itself had been one of the West’s last great gold boomtowns, a place where ore strikes around 1902 drew thousands of miners, speculators, and camp followers into the Nevada desert. Decades later, long after the boom had collapsed, historian Sally Zanjani used Goldfield’s cemetery as a window into frontier mortality patterns in an article aptly titled “To Die in Goldfield: Mortality in the Last Boomtown on the Mining Frontier.”
Gilbert’s grave is one more line in that story. An obituary in the Evening Vanguard of Oxnard, California, cited in reference lists for his Wikipedia entry, reportedly ran under the headline “Former Dempsey Opponent Dies” and described him as a retired boxer and film worker who had passed away in Goldfield.
Why he spent his final years there is not entirely clear from the surviving sources. Perhaps the old mountain fighter felt at home in a declining mining town, surrounded by people whose working lives had also been shaped by extraction and hard travel. Perhaps it was simply where employment or family circumstances took him late in life. What we can say is that a man born in Appalachian Kentucky, who fought his way through Denver rings and then survived Hollywood slapstick, ended his life in a desert town that itself symbolized the booms and busts of the early twentieth century.
Why Dick Gilbert’s story matters in Appalachia
It can be tempting to see Dick Gilbert as a footnote. In boxing, he was a tough opponent rather than a star. In film, he was the cop in the background rather than the headliner. Yet for Appalachian history his story opens several doors.
First, it reminds us that the mountain South produced more than miners, moonshiners, and ballad singers. A Knox County born farm or coal camp kid could end up on Denver posters and Hollywood call sheets, carrying an Appalachian accent and work ethic into spaces far from home.
Second, his life shows one path of the early twentieth century diaspora. Like many young men from the region, he left Kentucky in search of work and adventure. The ring offered a way to turn physical toughness into cash, albeit at the cost of punishment that would echo for years. When that path closed, he altered course again into film work that still drew on his physicality but did so in service of comedy rather than combat.
Finally, the debates over his birthplace and his bout with Jack Dempsey are a useful reminder about sources. An early record book says “near Lexington.” Later film archives and family materials say Knox County. A mid century column insists he beat Dempsey; the bout records say otherwise. Students of Appalachian history will recognize the pattern. Mountain lives often slip between official categories, requiring historians to weigh vital records, family stories, newspaper notices, and local memory against one another.
Richard “Fighting Dick” Gilbert does not fit neatly into hero or villain boxes. His boxing record shows more losses than wins. On screen he usually played the butt of jokes or the heavy enforcing order against mischievous kids. Yet the arc of his life, from Knox County to Goldfield, runs straight through themes central to Appalachian experience: migration, hard physical labor, the search for steady work, and the complicated pride of seeing “one of our own” in the headlines, however small.
Sources and further reading
FamilySearch, Goldfield Cemetery index entry for “Richard Lewis Gilbert, 1889–1960,” listing him among burials in Goldfield Cemetery, Esmeralda County, Nevada. FamilySearch
Sally S. Zanjani, “To Die in Goldfield: Mortality in the Last Boomtown on the Mining Frontier,” Western Historical Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1990), a study that uses Goldfield’s cemetery to explore death and disease in the mining camp era. OUP Academic
“Frances Virginia Gilbert Williams,” obituary, Daily Breeze (Torrance, California), 15 September 2016, identifying her as born in Culver City to Richard “Fighting Dick” Gilbert and Anna Mahoney and recalling her childhood around Hal Roach Studios. Legacy
Evening Vanguard (Oxnard, California), 9 May 1960, obituary reportedly headlined “Former Dempsey Opponent Dies,” cited in modern filmographies as the primary death notice for Richard Gilbert. Wikipedia
Atlanta Georgian, 25 November 1914, sports item “Dillon Gets Verdict Over Dick Gilbert,” reporting Jack Dillon’s fifteen round decision over “‘Fighting Dick’ Gilbert, of Denver.” Georgia Historic Newspapers
South Bend News Times, 4 November 1914, short notice that Jack Dillon and “‘Fighting Dick’ Gilbert, Denver lightweight” had been matched for a twenty round fight, evidence of Gilbert’s regional reputation. Hoosier State Chronicles
Los Angeles Herald, 5 February 1915, story “Gilbert Beats Petroskey,” describing “‘Fighting’ Dick Gilbert of this city” winning a decision over Sailor Ed Petroskey in Denver. CDNC
Western Liberal (Clayton, New Mexico), 25 June 1915, advertisement promising “Fighting Dick Gilbert 10 Rounds” in a large outdoor arena, showing his appeal as a headliner on regional cards. UNM Digital Repository
Jack Dillon biography at Boxing Hall of Fame site (Boxing Wise), listing “Fighting Dick Gilbert, Denver, Co., W 15” among Dillon’s 1914 opponents, based on contemporary fight reports. Boxing Wise Hall of Fame
Championship Records (c. 1916–18), an early boxing annual, entry for “Richard L. Gilbert” giving his birth as “near Lexington, Ky., July 12, 1889” along with physical stats and a fight record, cited and discussed in later IBRO research. Internet Archive+1
International Boxing Research Organization, “The Early Jack Dempsey – Another Visit,” using the All Time Ring Record Book and contemporary Nevada reports to reconstruct the Dempsey–Gilbert bout and Gilbert’s wider career. Ibro Research
BoxRec, “Dick Gilbert,” modern compiled boxing record listing his full name, approximate birthplace, nicknames “Fighting Dick” and “Kid Gilbert,” height, and fight by fight results. BoxRec
Svensk Filmdatabas (Swedish Film Database), person entry for Dick Gilbert, describing him as an American actor and boxer, “born Richard Lewis Gilbert in Knox County, Kentucky, [and] died in Goldfield, Nevada,” and listing his film roles from 1922 to 1951. svenskfilmdatabas.se
LordHeath.com, “Dick Gilbert,” detailed Hal Roach era biography giving his birth as 12 July 1889 in Knox County, Kentucky, death on 6 May 1960 in Goldfield, Nevada, and providing a comprehensive filmography and gallery of stills supplied by his daughter. Lord Heath+1
Appalachia Bare, “Appalachians in Moving Pictures – Part IV,” by Delonda Anderson, profiling Dick Gilbert as an Appalachian actor, summarizing his Knox County birth, “Fighting Dick” boxing career, and later work in silent and early sound comedies. appalachiabare.com
Wikipedia, “Dick Gilbert,” short biography identifying him as Richard “Fighting Dick” Gilbert (1889–1960), boxer and actor at Hal Roach Studios, and repeating the claim that he “won a boxing match against future heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey.” Wikipedia
The Lucky Corner (Our Gang research site), production notes for shorts such as “Back Stage” and “The Cobbler,” verifying through payroll records that Dick Gilbert worked both on screen and in the props department for Hal Roach Studios. Wikipedia+1