by John Capouya
Bessie needed it, desperately. When George was five or six, it seems, she was stricken with a crippling malady. A small, slender woman with sharp features and reddish-brown hair, Bessie suffered near-constant pain and was bedridden for long stretches, unable to walk. The radio, tuned in to KPRC (the last three letters stood for ports, railroads, and cotton), was Bessie’s link to the outside world. She had chronic articular rheumatism, now known as chronic rheumatoid arthritis: an extremely painful swelling of the joints that may also attack the muscles, ligaments, cartilage, tendons, and even the heart valves. As one early medical text, The Eclectic Practice of Medicine, put it: “The ligaments, tendons, and muscles…may so change their structure as to leave little resemblance to their original condition.” At times, it continued, “the tenderness and pain are exquisite.” As seems to have been the case with George’s mother, the chronic pain and sleeplessness often led to depression. Today this condition is better treated with anti-inflammatory drugs, among others, and physical therapy; in Bessie’s day doctors and lay healers recommended bed rest, taking the waters at hot springs; a vegetarian diet; and herbal remedies based on Apocynum, known as dogbane.
As soon as he was able, George, the oldest, was charged with caring for his bed-bound mother, feeding her, changing bandages, and emptying bedpans. He not only had to witness his mother’s suffering, and to be utterly unable to relieve it, but was to some extent imprisoned by it. He served willingly and genuinely wanted to help both his mother and his father, but it’s no wonder that as a boy, he wanted to escape whenever he could, taking the five-minute walk east on dirt paths to the banks of the Buffalo Bayou. Along the water, which looked swamp green in the sun and turned steel blue when skies were overcast, George and his pals easily found enough muck and mischief to fill their days.
Best of all, Brady’s Island, a good-size circular patch of undeveloped land, was just a quick wade offshore. On the far side of the island the ship channel ran northwest or left to the Port of Houston, and right, southeast, to the Gulf. Beyond the island on the far bank lay a derelict barge the locals called the Old Gray Ghost. Bootleggers had staked out part of the island for brewing their illegal hootch, but there was still plenty of room for George and his buddies to clear a patch of sandy ground, roughly twenty by twenty feet, to form a wrestling ring. There were no posts, ropes, or mats, of course, but the soft soil did cushion their falls. In between bouts they’d swap or gamble for wrestling trading cards (these usually came as premiums with candy or cigarettes), featuring grappling heroes like Frank Gotch and George Hackenschmidt and listing their signature throws and holds.
The Brady’s Island gang called themselves the Harrisburg Rats, as in wharf rats. They were tough kids and loyal to the tribe. Many if not most of them wound up as professional wrestlers, including Johnny and Jimmy James, who wrestled as “Jesse” James, Chester “Chesty” Hayes, and Sterling Davis, whose nom de ring was Dizzy Davis. Jacob Brown—the future valet Jefferies—who lived about two miles inland on Avenue Q, never had full Rat status, but was another wrestling buddy and became the closest friend in George’s life. Another early mat adversary, Jack Hunter, would serve as a valet, too; he was “my man Jackson.”
On Brady’s Island they were just a long stone’s throw from some of their houses, but somehow crossing the water—when George was in junior high school they made a primitive walkway out of old planks—made them feel that they’d escaped to their own enclave. Here, where the tang of the refineries hung in the air a little sharper, the dense green foliage and the scraggly southern pines that sank their roots into the bayou also shielded the goings-on from pesky parents or truant officers. George got his toughness from the intramural tussles there and what he remembered as frequent fistfights with other groups of Harrisburg boys. The other gang hailing from, say, Avenue F instead of E, was reason enough to brawl.
When George was ten or twelve he first learned to perform to a crowd, and that he was good at it. The James brothers’ father, a Greek who had likely changed his name to make life easier for his sons, had a fruit stand near the edge of the bayou. As he stood hawking with his back to the water, Johnny, Jimmy, George, and the other Rats would wrestle off to one side in a pile of sawdust left by a former sawmill. The wilder their throws and rougher their falls, George saw, the more coins passersby would toss them. The more change that came clinking down, the more wrestling cards he could buy, or tickets to see Dizzy Dean pitch for the Houston “Buffs” or Buffaloes, the minor-league baseball team, at their stadium on Jefferson Street. The boys also loved movies, taking them in at one of downtown Houston’s ornate movie palaces such as the Majestic or the Isis, or a cheaper Harrisburg venue.
They didn’t wrestle in the Harrisburg schools, which only fielded teams in football and basket ball (which was spelled with two words). As a teenager, George got wrestling instruction at a local YMCA. Besides the classic holds—the quarter, half, and full nelsons, the cradle, the cross face—and escape moves—including sit-outs and the bridge-out—he learned to get behind the other grappler for leverage, and how technique could amplify his natural strength. In one of his more sober and truthful later pronouncements, George would tell reporters: “It’s all about leverage and balance.” Even as he became Gorgeous, strutting more and doing less actual grappling, the other wrestlers could still tell immediately that he’d had this amateur training. “He was fast, he was nimble, and he knew what he was doing,” said Don Leo Jonathan, a six-foot-six, three-hundred-pound heavyweight from Utah who went a few falls with the Gorgeous One.
As a teenager, George was tall for his age and thickly muscled, especially through the trunk and back. Even before he’d learned any wrestling techniques, he took on his schoolmates one day in a nearby lot and threw fourteen of them, one after another. Or at least George said he did. Soon, though, the king of the hill’s growth would stall and his advantage began to vanish. Though as a pro he’d often be billed as six-foot-one or six-foot-two and up to 235 pounds, he never actually grew beyond the five-foot-nine or -ten he reached in high school, and at his heaviest, 190 or so, he was still puny for a heavyweight.
George wasn’t the biggest or oldest Rat and he didn’t dominate overtly. But something in his face, an open and expressive rectangle, in the glint of his brown eyes, and in his stance toward the world made this particular kid stand out. It could have been the kind of distinction that lands boys in reform school. There was a feral male intensity to him, and even more restless energy than his pals had; no doubt wrestling was a providential outlet. Yet he also carried a charismatic charge and a love of comradeship that made the others naturally fall in with him, ready to join the fun he was bound to create. He always wanted to stand out. “Even as a boy,” he said later, “I didn’t want to look like anyone else when I walked down the street. I wanted people to notice me.” He even claimed that “I used to wear knickers just so the other kids would tease me and pick a fight,” but that was likely just a Georgian line. In his late teens, perhaps after the handsome tough had begun to get some attention from girls, he wore a cocky grin, and whether the confidence he projected was genuine or compensatory, it was convincing.
By all accounts Poppa Wagner was easygoing, a placid man. He didn’t raise his voice, didn’t curse, and met his misfortunes with a rueful smile. He was a good-size man; growing up in the Midwest, he took down many a comer in “Indian wrestling,” and he enjoyed teaching that style to George. While his son would puff himself up, however, trying to loom larger than he was, Howard stood with diffidence. When he reached his forties, a ripe middle age back then, his light brown hair retreated behind his largish ears and George’s dad came to look strikingly like the post–World War II Dwight D. Eisenhower ( just two years older). Betty, who immediately bonded with George’s dad, called him “a big ol’ country sweetheart.” Poppa Wagner may have felt he needed to be a buffer, to try to soothe his afflicted wife, while softening the impact her illness had on the boys. She could be a very affectionate mother, b
ut through no fault of her own, her moods were wildly variable, shooting up and down with her suffering. While Poppa Wagner seemed to want little and ask less for himself, Bessie was, in her helplessness, ever demanding.
If his parents are rendered in just these broad strokes, George combined their traits with great symmetry: A manual laborer, he would doggedly ply the same trade his whole working life without complaint. As the Gorgeous One, though, he was an ultrasensitive character with womanish traits, who lived within his own wants and emotions—a special-needs diva. Yet that reading doesn’t do any of them, or human complexity, justice. George loved his well-meaning dad but couldn’t stomach his passivity, the lack of imagination that left Howard resigned to his fate, including his family’s life of poverty. The son would rather have died than accept the short end or meager rations; and in some ways, he did. George would define himself in opposition to Bessie, too: She was physically trapped, confined, so he would spend his entire life on the move. He’d have homes and marriages but he’d never fully inhabit them. She had few if any choices and her fate was dictated by implacable external forces; George would vehemently make his own decisions and break every rule. Wrestling, the métier he chose, is the transgressor’s Eden: All the supposed strictures, and the boundaries of the ring, are made to be broken, and the referee exists only to be defied.
Bessie couldn’t parent George fully, yet she inspired him. When his mother was able to sew, George sat on her bed with her and threaded her embroidery needles. This, he once said, was his first exposure to finery and color, and he was enchanted. Having seen her create beauty, George would prize it and pursue it for himself. As a teenager, he remembered, “I used to stop in front of a clothing store and look at the suits in the window.” But, typically, George didn’t crave the suits on display; he thought he could do better. “They all looked drab,” he said, “and I’d imagine that if I ever got money I’d have them made up to my taste—green and purple suits, black suits with white buttons, dark red, turquoise blue…” As he sat with her in her illness, George also absorbed Bessie’s desire for a different life, taking on his mother’s conviction that she and her children deserved something better. No doubt the radio, her other faithful companion and link to the world outside her bedroom, helped her to envision it. From her imaginings and longings, his own took shape.
Chapter 3
ON THE CARNY GAME
When George was fourteen, the Great Depression crushed expectations and turned the national economy to ashes. Houston wasn’t as poorly off as many other areas of the country; no banks failed there during the 1930s, for example, and the rest of America still depended on it for oil. By 1933, though, the huge grain elevator standing near the channel banks, a looming landmark, stood empty. Industrial employment cratered and wouldn’t return to pre-Depression numbers until 1939. Life changed in the details as well. At least one streetcar company had to open a credit department; too many people were unable to scrape together the change to pay their fares. Some of the movie theaters began accepting IOUs, though they were presumably not foolish enough to accept them from George and his cadre of Rats. Some of the wrestling cards at the City Auditorium turned into food drives: Bring canned goods and get in free, with the food donated to the needy. Poppa Wagner’s painting business, never lucrative, dried up as houses were left to crack, peel, and fade. It’s not known whether Howard went to the Hampshaw Building downtown to apply for Mayor Walter E. Monteith’s emergency relief checks, but the need was certainly there.
Then, at 1:00 A.M. on October 8, 1932, Bessie died. She was just thirty-six years old. George was seventeen, Elmer thirteen, and Carl not quite ten. She most likely got an infection in one or more of her joints and couldn’t fight it off with her compromised immune system. (Penicillin, the first antibiotic, wasn’t in use until the 1940s.) Bessie was buried in Forest Park Cemetery. George was bereft; now he would never get the attention from Bessie he’d craved. But he was liberated as well; he would not be tied down any longer. It seems that he’d already dropped out of Milby High School, about a mile and a half down Broadway from the Wagner house. (While enrolled there, he worked as a gas-station filling attendant after school.) His records are lost, though, and Milby, two stories of beige brick that are still in use, didn’t produce yearbooks when George attended—in the Depression there was no money for such nonessentials.
George was sharp, a quick study, but never bookish. He had a hard time sitting still, and one can easily picture him mouthing off in class to get attention, then resenting the resulting discipline. Since he often cut classes, leaving school was easy. At the same time he didn’t enjoy the alternatives. With so many experienced workers and family men unemployed, work was hard to find, so George couldn’t be choosy. For a while he machined metal parts at Reed Drill Bits alongside his buddy Jake Brown. He wrecked cars with a crowbar; sacked cement at the bottom of a conveyor belt in a construction pit; and chopped cotton in the wet Houston heat. It was punishing work that tore at the sinews and ripped muscle from bone. George’s hands, small but powerful with strong, stubby fingers, took a beating, and he came home with cuts, scrapes, and livid bruises.
He was a willing worker, taking odd shifts and often holding two or more jobs. Even then he had prodigious energy and stamina, a seemingly inherent advantage in life’s competitions that would always serve him. Like many highly successful people, George could simply keep going—keep talking, keep wrestling, keep driving, keep working—when others had to stop or drop. Nonetheless, he was greatly relieved to find easier, whiter-collar work downtown at the Houston Typewriter Exchange at 408 Fannin Street. Later he would tell reporters that he repaired the Coronas and L.C. Smith machines—“No fatigue at the end of the day!” their slogan promised—but it’s hard to imagine George had the patience for this close work, manipulating the delicate rods and hammers. A better guess is that he delivered typewriters and installed replacement ribbons in offices as needed, a service the Exchange offered its customers at no extra charge.
One of the Houston newspapers ran a feature on this shop, and George kept this yellowing clipping for the rest of his life in a scrapbook with wooden covers, bound with leather straps. The photo accompanying that story shows nine Exchange employees, “part of the force,” as the caption calls it. George is the youngest-looking and the least formally dressed; he and one other man are the only ones without jackets and ties. He’s wearing his hair fairly short and slicked back now, still parted on the left; his ears look big and they’re protruding a bit, which may be an early sign of wrestling damage. The sleeves on the white sport shirt he wears are short enough to show off his biceps, and in the ranks of nine white men facing the camera, George has managed to place himself out in front and squarely in the middle of the image. The others seem to want to look professionally serious; George’s cheek-creasing grin is easily the biggest smile. After all the ink spilled on him when he was the Gorgeous One, why did he keep this modest piece for so long? It may have marked the first time he’d improved his situation with his mind, carving out a better place for himself than the berth Fate seemed to be preparing.
All along he did everything a young wrestler could do to improve his skills, make a name, and scrape up a couple of dollars. He’d won some amateur tournaments as a 150-pounder and fairly often a Lions or Elks Club would call for a few high schoolers to put on a Saturday wrestling exhibition, after which the boys would get sandwiches, plus a little money. A man named Hill had a Harrisburg blacksmith shop and also owned the Broadway movie theater. Upstairs there was a stage and some seats, and Hill put on matches there for the local workingmen. They’d drink, yell, stomp their feet on the wooden floor, and bet money they couldn’t afford to lose on the anonymous and carelessly matched kids whaling away in front of them. Once Hill even brought in a bear, and some lunatics wrestled it, too.
As far as we know, George stuck to human contests. The mats spread over the stage were thin and the falls hurt, but he’d come away with the equivalent
of two or three days’ wages at one of his other jobs, and the take increased when he managed to get a successful side bet down on himself. During Prohibition, George, Johnny and Jimmy James, and other Rats also wrestled in speakeasies, throwing one another around for the drinkers’ amusement. Some older man usually played Fagin, finding the combatants, refereeing the bouts, and pocketing most of the money.
Late in his school years George began to pal around with Glen Price, one of three brothers who may actually have been worse off financially than the Wagner boys, and who lived with their aunt over the RB Department Store, at the corner of Broadway and the LaPorte Highway. Glen was two years older than George and handsome, slender but well built, with a smile that slayed the girls, who were just beginning to matter to George. In and out of the Brady’s Island wrestling pit, the six-foot-four Glen was serious competition, and George saw that to hold his own he needed to provide a clear alternative. Glen was soft-spoken and a bit shy, so the shorter, stockier boy became even bolder and cockier around him.
The Price brothers owned one beat-up truck among them (they also shared one good suit of clothes), and many a hot Harrisburg night, Glen would commandeer the truck and run the streets with George. These two, along with the odd Rat or Price brother, would cram into the truck and head for the Sylvan Beach Amusement Park, about a half hour away in La Porte, on the shores of Trinity Bay. Often a traveling carnival had pitched its tents there, and for George, the carnival was the true seducer.