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.