The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1915-04-15
JIM JEFFRIEs, FORTY
 TO-DAY, IS QUALIFIED E
 FOR PREsIDERTC5

Congratulations are due today to that distinguished, if somewhat eE- tinguished American, James J. Jef- fries. The great man of Los Angeles will be forty years old today. AL though it may never have occurred to Jeff, he has the makIngs of first rate presidential timber. In launching h4al candidacy for the exalted job which will be decided at the polls by the sovereign voters of the United States self as possessed of the following qualifications:
 He is a. male.
 2-He is white.
 3-He is of legal age.
 4-He is a native-born citizen of the United States.
 5-He was born in Ohio. where most presidents come from.
 Gle is a c1ergyman's son.
 He was born in a. log cabin
 That last is the clinehef which makes Jeff loom upe as a. real presi4 dentfal possibility. Practically all men are males a majority are white, millions of 'em are past the age re- quirement of thirty-five, vast mum berS have been born in the. United States and no small proportion of them in Ohio. clergvmen are noteEs-. ously addicted to large families but mighty few men ofs4today can hq.a.Et of having been born sfn a log cabin. Ana, TOT d man Wn0 FclIlLS to DC Ilillll1l
 executive of the U. s. A. that sort ofL a, house is the very best of all to be born in. -N
 It was a crude and tiny edifice Of logs, on a farm mostly timber. 'in the rubeurbs of Carroll, O., where Jen first saw the light O. day on April 15, 1875. Alexis c. Jefries, the great mans papa, was a. sturdy son of-tlle soil descended from a race of braWny. daring pioneers. Farmer Alexis was proficient with the plough and tho hoe and the axe, but at about the time of Jeff S. birth he laid these aside and went out to preach the gospel bp the Ohio heathen- Jeh's father didn't
 believe in houses of worship. and did his preaching in the open air.
 Jeff was about six years old when the Rev. Alexis found the Ohio neiBtls borhood becoming too civilized and we'll settled to suit him, and gather ing his family together, he set out for the wild, free, woody west. They didn't travel in Pullnans, but eVe1tu- ally they reached their goal, which was the Arroyo Seco Canon, near Los Angeles. Jeff occasionally sat in at school, but he was educated prinG1- pally at home, and when he had grown into a strapping lad he got a l job in Los Angeles factory as an 1 ironW orker. There he scrapped with | the other hands and gradually at l tained a local reputation. It was a | long time, however, before Jem could be convinced that he had the maH= l ings of a professional fighter His ring career is usually given as begin ming with his San Francisco battle | with Dan Long of Denver in 1898.
 Nearly three years before that, how ever, Jeff, then eighteen, fought the famous negro, Hank Griffin and J ef- fries knocked out the clever veteran in the fourteenth round. Hank had publicly expressed the opinion, before a. crowd of sports in a Los Angeles saloon, that he could lick any hombre in the town, and Jeff was picked as the proper person to reduce Griffin's bump of seIf-esteem. And Jef did! 1 Still Jeff didn't have any idea of be- coming a. professional fighter until he | met Dan Long, He put the Denver ite to sleep in the second round and the purse of a thousand bones looked
 so good to the young giant, who had then just attained his majority, that he decided to buy a stack of chips in 8 game which held out such golden
 rewards, far beyond that to be achieved as a boilernnaker-