Books by Eugene McCormick

Featured Book

Struck Down, Standing Tall: The Life, Times, and Legend of Ray “Slim” Caldwell

A Cleveland’s Buried History title focused on the life, times, and legend of Ray “Slim” Caldwell. This listing is now available with an Amazon purchase link.

Available through Amazon.

Featured Book

Death at the Crossing: The 1930 Brook Park School Bus Tragedy

A Cleveland’s Buried History title examining one of the region’s most heartbreaking transportation disasters. This book revisits the 1930 Brook Park school bus tragedy with a careful, researched narrative that brings the people, place, and lasting impact of the event into sharper focus for today’s readers.

Available on Amazon for $5.99 and Gumroad for $3.99.

Featured Book

Only In Cleveland : Don King’s Untold Story of Crime, Blood, and Hustle (Cleveland’s Buried History)

Long before Don King became boxing’s most flamboyant and feared promoter — before the wild hair, the American flags, and the billion-dollar fights — he was running numbers on the East Side of Cleveland.

Only in Cleveland tells the story they left out of every boxing biography.

Drawing on Cleveland Police Department records, Cuyahoga County court documents, contemporaneous reporting from the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Cleveland Press, and decades of buried local history, Eugene McCormick reconstructs King’s Cleveland years in full — the empire he built, the men he crossed, the violence that defined him, and the single killing that finally sent him to prison.

Between 1951 and 1966, King was arrested more than thirty times. Not once did the system hold him. He ran one of the East Side’s most profitable numbers operations, employed dozens, defied syndicate boss Alex “Shondor” Birns, survived bombings, beatings, and two killings — and walked away from all of it until the night of April 20, 1966, when a $600 debt and a man named Sam Garrett changed everything.