Building a Book on Alabama Pro Wrestling History (Part 7)

    Formatting is in the final stages, and everything is still on track to have book in-hand by the end of January 2019.   If all goes to plan, it should be released along with a few other, similar books.

    In the meantime, I have been spending a lot of my research hours on trying to fill out other territories where most of Chris Jordan's roster worked between 1930-1935 on WrestlingData.com.  For the most part, that means filling in the Michigan towns run by Adam Weissmuller and Farmer Nick (Detroit, Battle Creek, Benton Harbor, Jackson, Flint), Mike Meroney's territory that covered the northeastern corner of Arkansas (Blytheville, Jonesboro), southeastern corner of Missouri (Poplar Bluff, Sikeston, Cape Girardeau, Caruthersville), southwestern corner of Kentucky (Hopkinsville, Paducah, Bowling Green, Owensboro) and most of western Tennessee (Dyersburg, Clarksville), a bit of Sam Avey's territory (Tulsa, Joplin, Oklahoma City), Gust Karras early efforts in St. Joseph, Missouri, as well as an assortment of other towns including Evansville, Louisville, Memphis, Chattanooga and Atlanta.  It might take awhile to find the results for Poplar Bluff and Bowling Green, as neither are currently covered in any of the online newspaper archives, but both represent significant towns in their respective territories.

Box ad from the 26 Aug 1934 Battle Creek Enquirer and Evening News

     This effort will greatly fill out the records of Joe Dillman, Freddie Knichel, Jack Purdin, Cecil "Blacksmith" Pedigo, Jack Reynolds, Dale Haddock, Stanley Buresh, Billy Love, Lon Chaney, Jimmy "Kid" Lott and Roy Welch.  After having heard so much about Roy Welch in recent years from reading books published by Mark James, as well as all of the wonderful memories from Ron Fuller's Studcast, I was surprised that so little of Welch's early career had been documented in any detail.  I wish WrestlingData had a way of showing a graph of matches being added by wrestler over time. 

    So once the book comes out, you will be better able to track the various paths taken by these, and many other, wrestlers from 1930-1935.  I will attempt to do the same for 1936-1940 when the second book is ready to go.

Building a Book on Alabama Pro Wrestling History (Part 6)

In the lengthy break since the last posting here, much progress has been made.

     To follow up on the previous post, for the most part, newspaper clippings from 1931-1940 are complete.  Apparently Cullman was never run as a regular town, despite it's prime location along Highway 31, about halfway between Decatur and Birmingham.  Along the way, I found wrestling had been run in Selma, Opelika and Marion, at least briefly.  I also learned that Chris Jordan actively pursued either running shows or providing talent to towns in the surrounding states, as well as all the way to the East Coast in the Carolinas.

     I've been working with Scott Teal, at Crowbar Press, and after much discussion, the decision was made to break the book into two volumes.  Book one has been compiled, submitted, marked-up, re-edited, re-submitted, appended and is generally done.  Unfortunately, in my attempt to format my working draft along the lines that Scott recommended, I did not take the differences between the inner and outer margins into account.  While I submitted a draft that I thought would be sufficient once ads and photos were added, as it turned out, those margins resulted in a lot more fitting on a page than I had anticipated, and I came up a bit short in my initial effort regarding the expected page count.  On one had this was very frustrating, but on the other, it forced me to go back and find a lot more content to add to the book.  It also means I will be much better prepared for volume two.

    Volume 1 will cover 1931-1935, but will also have an opening section giving a quick overview of the state of wrestling in Alabama from 1908-1930.  Newspapers.com released a few new runs of Alabama papers while I was "finishing up" my draft which exposed me to a much broader look at the subject.  I had made some assumptions, due to earlier limited search results, that there really wasn't all that much wrestling in Alabama prior to 1931.  There was more than I thought, though it was not all that organized, and was very sporadic.  With all that Scott and I added, the book will still end up a bit short of 200 pages once printed; probably in the vicinity of 175-185 pages. 

     Unfortunately, due to the poor quality of a lot of the microfilm scans from the earlier days of microfilm technology, many of the wrestler photos I had hoped to include were found unsuitable for re-printing.  Thankfully others were found as replacements, but I will make a stronger effort to find the newspaper hardcopies for Volume 2, if I run across any questionable quality photos.  Thankfully, the various county archives, as well as the Alabama state archives still have a lot of the hardcopies of their newspapers in large, bound volumes.

    
    Since the January post, I was also able to make contact with the families of three of the wrestlers who appeared in Alabama in the 1930s.  I met with Chris Jordan's grandson and daughter-in-law, and they shared some wonderful memories, photos and a scrapbook of newspaper clippings from around 1931-1932.  I met with the family of Freddie Knichel's son, and they also shared some great memories.  Unfortunately, in their case, Freddie's house burned sometime in the 1970s, along with almost all of the memorabilia from his wrestling career, but they graciously shared what surviving photos they had.  I also had a phone conversation with the son of Stanley Buresh, and he also shared several memories and photos from his father's career.  Most of what Chris Jordan's family shared will be in Volume 2, as most of the photos and items were from after 1935.

    I expect to have Volume 1 in my hands before the end of January 2019, and will try my best to see that Volume 2 is ready by the end of 2019.  I am hoping enough people buy Volume 1 that I can get some good feedback on ways to make Volume 2 better.  The general format for both books will be like Scott's earlier books on Nashville and Madison Square Garden, including details of every card I could find across the entire state of Alabama, interspersed with a variety of advertisements, articles, as well as introductions for each year summarizing the events of the year, including some historical context.  Also included will be some statistics on appearances by the regularly used talent and brief overviews of various venues to hold wrestling.

    As this is a relatively undocumented piece of wrestling history, I really hope someone learns something and enjoys it (or hates it) enough to provide some feedback.

Building a Book on Alabama Pro Wrestling History (Part 5)

     In what may be the final trip to the Alabama State Archives in Montgomery, I managed to finish off scanning what I needed from the Birmingham News for 1939-40.  I also managed to fill in a few gaps or oversights in my Montgomery coverage as well as picking up the 3-4 months that Chris Jordan ran wrestling in Selma in 1932 from the Selma Times-Journal, which had some good photos.  As far as I know, that is the last town that ran wrestling in the 1930s.  Or at the very least, that is the last town for which I found a reference where I could find any actual evidence.  The two towns that are still mysteries are Courtland (a small town along US 72 between Muscle Shoals and Decatur) and Cullman (the largest town on I-65 between Decatur and Birmingham). 

     All I've found for Courtland was a mention in either the Decatur Daily or the Florence Times about a show being scheduled there at their new arena.  But when I checked the actual local weekly paper, the Moulton Advertiser, I could find nothing about it in the issues before or after the event was supposed to have taken place.  As far as I could tell, Courtland didn't have its own paper, and Moulton was the next nearest town that did.

    Cullman, which was also only covered by two weekly papers, the Cullman Democrat and the Cullman Tribune.  The Cullman Democrat (which is partially covered at Newspapers.com) was very spotty with its coverage of wrestling.  There are a handful of references to wrestling shows, a couple of which give the impression either that wrestling is about to start, or that wrestling has already been a weekly thing.  But no more than a couple of references can be found in the entire year.  I suppose for the sake of completion, I should check out the Tribune.

    I also picked up everything from 1931-1938 from the Jasper Advertiser, which seemed to be the "major" paper covering Jasper, Alabama in the 1930s.  For a out of the way place like Walker County, Alabama, I was surprised to find they were covered by three different newspapers; the Mountain Eagle, the Jasper Advertiser and the Carbon Hill News.  What I was happy to find was that the Jasper Advertiser, at least early on, included some great photos of several of the wrestlers (and the brand new Jasper City Auditorium), and as I was photographing from the hard-copies (instead of b&w or gray-scale microfilm), they should hopefully turn out good when printed.

    So If I don't find anything major in the Cullman Tribune, I think I'm done here, and can spend the next month hammering out the connective tissue for this beast and working all of the results into a shape more closely resembling what Scott Teal used in his Madison Square Garden and Nashville books.  Oh, and it looks like this will probably be a two-parter.  It was getting fairly hefty with nothing but cards and results and a few bits of writing (nearly 250 pages), so I've been convinced it would be best to break that in two to allow a lot more room to breathe.  That gives me a good 100 pages per volume to work in photos, ads, articles and history.