The Stanley Buresh Scavenger Hunt

     While I was working on my first book on the history of wrestling in Alabama, I was fortunate enough to track down family of some of the wrestlers that appeared in the state in the 1930s.  One of those family members was David Buresh, the youngest son of the Kangaroo Kicker, the Australian Bushman, Stanley Buresh.   As with most things in the wrestling business, the truth was somewhat different than the gimmick.  The moniker seems to have been given to him by a promoter in Texas, attempting to add some pizzazz to the young light heavyweight, due to his ability to throw a dropkick, hit his opponent and land on his feet.  Kind of like kangaroo do.

     Stanley Buresh was not, in fact, an Australian, he was born on the 13th of March 1903 (or 1901 according to family records) in Bohemia, which would shortly become part of Czechoslovakia, and what is now the western half of the Czech Republic.  When he was still a young boy, his family emigrated to the United States, in 1909, and settled in the area of Dodge, Nebraska.  As many Bohemia immigrants had done, Stanley's father Josef brought his family to eastern Nebraska and set about farming.

     If someone wanted to learn wrestling, there is quite possibly no better place they could have landed in the 1910-1920 time period than Dodge, as that just happened to be the home town of one Joe Stecher, wrestling's heavyweight champion of the world, and his brother Anton, or Tony.  The Stecher brothers trained a great many boys to be wrestlers at the Y.M.C.A. in Dodge, among them the Buresh brothers, Stanley and his older brother, Frank.  Both would go on to wrestle professionally for many years, Frank wrestling for some 20 years before giving up the mat to focus on farming, and Stanley for some 30 years before finally retiring from the business in the early 1950s.  In the course of that 30 year odyssey, Stanley would make it as far as New Zealand in 1931, but he never actually made it to Australia.

     After chatting with David, he sent me several photos, some newspaper clippings and this listing that detailed the first 64 matches of Stanley Buresh's career.  As the list is undated, I decided to attempt to track down the details of each of these matches to see what I could chronicle of the young wrestler's just entering the professional game.

   The record states that Stanley "started professional wrestling in the month of March, at Omaha, Nebraska, state tournament, at the age of 19 years.  That tournament took place on March 26, 1921.  The Omaha World-Herald listed Earl Caddock, Wayne Munn and Farmer Burns as referees, though the results only mention Munn (heavyweights) and Burns (middleweights) working the event, along with Walker Barnaby (lightweights).  Among the participants, aside from both Buresh brothers were one Andrew Lutzi of Lincoln, who would go on to a long wrestling and promoting career as Paul Jones, and Rudy Hason, who would also have a long wrestling and promoting career as Rudy Dusek.  Both future heavyweights won their divisions, Hason already a heavyweight, and Lutzi the light heavy bracket.

    Of the 64 matches listed, thus far, I have found newspaper records for 32 of them, while also finding another 9 matches that were not listed.  There are also a few that may not have actually happened, or at the very least garnered absolutely no mention in the local papers.  I did find that Buresh briefly wrestled under the name Ernest Misek, possibly due to a shortage of viable opponents once he had built a reputation in Kansas and Nebraska in 1923.

    During his homesteading in Wolf Point, Montana, in 1925, Stanley participated in a three day wrestling tournament as part of the Wolf Point Stampede.  From Thursday, July 9 to Saturday, July 11, he defeated Elwood House, Jake Armand and Dick Daviscourt.  While the list ends with his 24 March 1926 victory over Bill Pappas, Buresh would continue to appear in Wolf Point through November of that year.  In December 1926, he moved on to the Pacific Northwest and connected with Ted Thye, and it was through Thye that Buresh would join a tour of New Zealand in 1931.

     You can view the wrestling record of Stanley Buresh at WrestlingData.com.  While not complete, it is ever-growing as I, and other researchers, fill in more wrestling cards each day.

Stanley Buresh @ WrestlingData.com

 I am compiling the information as I find it to a Google Docs spreadsheet.

Resources for Wrestling Research

[This post will be a work-in-progress, and will change as I become aware of new resources.]

 

    A good place to start when researching a wrestler, promotion, or other related subject are newspaper archives.  Every day hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of old newspapers are being digitized, made searchable through OCR (optical character recognition) technology and released to the web.  Some such resources are free to the public, some are provided as commercial products.  Some of those commercial options are available through agreements with local public library systems, and so are effectively free for patrons.  For most of the following, I will just be using the term 'wrestler' to include anyone associated with the business be they actual wrestlers, referees, managers or promoters, just to save time.

Aside from just articles, ads and results for wrestling shows, newspapers also bring us news of accidents, deaths and obituaries, weddings, and often retrospective articles when a retired wrestler becomes something of a local icon.

Newspapers (free)
ChroniclingAmerica.log.gov is a newspaper digitization program headed by the United States Library of Congress, and has a goal to digitize all available newspapers that are in the public domain.  That means the content is largely pre-1926.  Through a partnership with Newspapers.com, a lot of the papers on Chronicling America are also available through the paid service, which boosts Newspapers.com's catalog but also allows for a much smoother user interface than what the LOC currently offers.  This program is mostly executed by various state archives and university libraries, where they can receive government grants to digitize their newspaper collections and provide them to the Library of Congress to host on the Chronicling America site.

The Google Newspaper Archive (news.google.com/newspapers) is one of a long line of semi-abandoned Google experiments.  Back when they were binge-scanning every book they could get their hands on, they also began digitizing newspapers, new and old.  They also briefly bought out a website called PaperofRecord.com that happened to have the largest collection of Mexican newspapers on the web.  Sadly, since Google was not able to work out an agreement with the Hemeroteca Nacional Digital de Mexico that had provided the Mexican papers, all of that content was removed from Google's site and, even once PaperofRecord.com was sold to another party, the Mexican papers were never restored and now remain mostly inaccessible outside of Mexico.

Mexican papers aside, the Google Newspaper Archive is still online and while the search facility is mostly useless the papers are still there and can be browsed directly.  While many titles have now been removed, this collection still includes many titles that are available nowhere else, as yet.  So it still a valuable, though tedious, resource for historical newspaper research.

Back to Mexico, there are a few newspapers that are free to search and read on the site for the Hemeroteca Nacional Digital de Mexico (http://www.hndm.unam.mx/), namely El Informador, the main newspaper of Guadalajara.

Elephind.com is a sort of meta search engine that attempts to provide a single search interface for several of the various independent newspaper digitization sites across the world.

Newspapers (subscription)

Newspapers.com is a now subsidiary of Ancestry.com and is available through paid subscription.  They probably have the largest catalog with the best user interface of the available commercial options, and are constantly adding new titles and pages to their offerings.

GenealogyBank.com is a subsidiary of Newsbank.com, and as the title implies, is geared more directly toward genealogical research, but still have an impressive catalog of newspapers in their archive.  For the most part, there is not a lot of overlap with the titles offered at Newspapers.com, so a subscription to both, for those who could afford it, would be very useful.

NewspaperArchive.com has probably the smallest collection of the paid sites, and due to poor management, squandered their early lead in the field.  They also racked up a lot of bad user sentiment with questionable billing practices and poor site performance.  While those days are largely past, the company as it stands now is having to recover a log of lost ground.  They are still adding new content, but they dont' really offer any convenient way to know what that is.  For what they offer, they are also the most expensive of the three sites, but still, the do offer papers not covered by either Newspapers.com or GenealogyBank.com


Genealogy Resources

While genealogy sites might not immediately seem relevant to wrestling research, remember that family history research is largely just searching for information on specific people.  And wrestlers are certainly specific people!  Sites along these lines are perfect for fleshing out personal details about a wrestler's whereabouts at various points in their lives, before, during and after their wrestling careers.  Sometimes tracking them down requires working from a different angle, such as finding a sibling or child and working back toward your main subject.  Often you can reconstruct a part of their family tree and find living family members to talk to, who sometimes are only too happy to talk about their long departed loved ones.

Free sites:
FamilySearch.org is the primary genealogy website maintained by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  The Mormons' enthusiasm for family history is a benefit for everyone due to the sheer volume of information they are constantly making available.  The site contains census records (see where the wrestlers were born, where they lived, family members, etc.), immigration records (mostly ships passenger lists), city directories (sort of the precursor to phone books), vital records (birth, marriage, divorce and death records) and a variety of other records both civilian and military.

FindAGrave.com is another good resource, not just to locate the final resting place of a wrestler, but also possibly connections to family.  Especially in the case of wrestlers long deceased, often it is through family that we might be able to find more about a wrestler.

Fold3.com is primarily an archive of military records, though they do also have some census records, immigration records and city directories.  I have had a lot of success finding wrestlers from the 1910s-1950s in the World War I and World War II draft registrations.  Those draft records typically include a full name, date and place of birth, and current residence.  The WWII records also include employment information, height, weight, hair color, skin color, other distinguishing features (cauliflower ears!) and a copy of the wrestlers' signature.

Facebook.com.  Seriously!  If you have managed to find any surviving relatives through any of the resources listed above (in obituaries or as virtual flowers left on Find A Grave), if you want to get in touch, search for them on Facebook.  I have found more than a few family members and descendants of wrestlers on Facebook.  The most difficult part is then getting them to respond, and hopefully being interested enough to help.

Great Wrestling Venues—Alabama 1931-1935

  After much procrastination and silence, book 1 is in the bag!  I am please to present my first published work, The Great Pro Wrestling Venues, Volume 3 - Alabama: 1931-1935.  On sale now at CrowbarPress.com!

   First to dispel any confusion, the "Volume 3" is the result of a re-branding of a series of results-oriented books Crowbar Press is doing. The initial intent was to do a series of similar books called "Wrestling's Greatest Cities", but the first book was only for Madison Square Garden (Vol 1), the second book was for Nashville (Vol 2) and the third book (this one) was going to be for the whole state of Alabama. When I pointed out that the "cities" series was comprised of 1 city, 1 venue and 1 state, the concept was re-thought and the venues title was born.  So if the MSG and Nashville books see a second printing, they may be re-titled to fit the series.

    Anyway, to quote the listing at CrowbarPress.com:

This comprehensive work covers the matches in the ring and the events that took place behind the scenes in Alabama from 1931 through 1935.  Travel down Alabama highways and enjoy the memories of more than 2,000 wrestling shows, 4,000 matches, and more than 550 illustrations and images — program covers, newspaper headlines and articles, advertisements, and memorabilia — all of which accompany the stories and information to enhance the sensation of traveling back in time.  This is yet another incredible work from Crowbar Press that you will refer to time and time again. 

     The book actually starts as far back as 1905, as I included a brief account of the state of wrestling in Alabama prior to 1931, as a preface to what was to come later.  But the main focus was in the 1931-1935 period.  Now on to 1936-1940!