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.
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