34st Dojo

Grand Master Richard Lenchus (who everyone just calls “Sensei”) came up the hard way. Truth is, what Sensei Lenchus learned on the street was almost as valuable as what he learned from his masters.

Sent from his home in Brooklyn to live with his mother and younger brother in Richmond, California, eleven-year-old Rick Lenchus got his first taste of the real world in 1949. “I was not considered White or Black,” he recalls. “Every day, on the way to school, the White kids beat me up. On the way home, the Black kids got me.” One day, the White gang hung him by his thumb with a make-shift meat hook. On his forehead, they wrote JEW with his own blood. “They did that so I wouldn’t forget where I came from,” said Lenchus. “I never forgot.”

Young Lenchus was discovered in this predicament by a Hawaiian man named Pete. “He asked me, ‘Didn’t your father teach you how to fight?'” Lenchus recalls. “I told him I didn’t have a father.” So Pete began teaching him Kempo three times a week for the next few years until he returned to New York.

By the time he hit Coney Island, Lenchus was little more than a fight looking for a place to happen. He fought in the streets; and for the P.A.L. He competed in Golden Gloves bouts and was a gangbanger warlord in 1950s greaser gangs. His rap sheet was good and long before he ended up in the U.S. Marine Corps, and there the fighting continued. He fought on the USMC Boxing team; on the U.S.S. Breckenridge, The Sullivan, The Independence. He served in Japan (from Okinawa to Atsugi) from 1957-1961. It was there that he came under the tutelage of Sensei Kenjiro Kawanabe, a direct student of the legendary master Gichen Funakoshi. Kawanabe awarded Lenchus his shodan in 1960.

Website

http://34stdojo.com/

Schedule

http://34stdojo.com/Classes.html

Location

347 West 34th Street New York, NY