by John Capouya
Elsie was an accomplished seamstress and she’d shown her daughter how to make fancy little dresses for her dolls. So, working on her own time and using her own money—and without asking anyone’s permission—Betty replaced the plain white blouses and straight black pants all the usherettes wore with more colorful custom-made attire. “I made cute blouses with big puff sleeves and wide-legged pants with straps that went over the shoulder,” she remembered. When queried as to whether the other girls liked her handiwork, she seemed taken aback that the question could even be asked. “Of course they did.”
Betty had been working at the theater for about a year when George Wagner strolled in to the picture show, toward the end of 1938. The projectionist at the movie theater, name of Bob, had met George at the armory matches and invited him to catch a show for free. (Then as always George had the knack of collecting people who would do things for him.) At twenty-three, he was feeling confident about himself and his prospects. Certainly, other pro athletes were doing vastly better. Joe DiMaggio, just six months older than George, was about to sign a new contract with the Yankees for $25,000, while the wrestler was probably making one tenth that. Still, $2,500 was two and a half times the national average and five times what the first minimum wage, just enacted, of twenty-five cents an hour would bring in on an annual basis. George had other reasons for contentment as well: He wasn’t sacking any more cement and he punched no man’s clock—he was young, strong, and making a living at the game he loved.
He looked good doing it, too. When the wrestler showed up that evening, the petite dark-haired cashier with the striking greenish eyes noticed him immediately—one good-looker responded viscerally to the other. “I thought he was a very handsome man,” she said. “With beautiful dark hair. And muscles.” The young man dressed nicely, too. Nothing fancy, but his slacks and sport shirt were well chosen; he clearly paid attention to his appearance. And to hers. Right away, the larger of the dark beauties asked the smaller one out, and he got his first taste of Betty’s independent sass. “No,” she said, “I won’t go out with you, I don’t know you.” But after a couple more tries, with Bob vouching for young Wagner, she relented.
Their first dates were doubles: Betty went with Bob and his girlfriend to watch George wrestle, then they all went out to dinner. Very soon it was just the two of them, going out dancing. Two local wrestlers owned the down-home Glenwood Tavern in Springfield, where a steak sandwich with a soft drink cost thirty-five cents and the chicken in a basket was fifty cents, served without silverware. “Be Yourself,” the menu advised, meaning use your hands. After their simple dinners, the two hit the floor, Betty wearing flattering dresses she’d made herself. George, it turned out, was a very good dancer, light on his feet, and she especially noticed his “beautiful, soft hands.” Big-band swing—Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller—was the musical rage across the country, but there wasn’t much of it in Eugene, so she and George ended up doing a lot of ballroom dancing, including waltzes and foxtrots.
Dancing was practically the only socially acceptable way for unmarried men and women to touch one another in public. The fox-trot didn’t lend itself to much contact with its slow-slow, quick-quick pattern of steps, but during a waltz or other, more deliberate dance, Betty would lean into George, the top of her head just coming up to his breastbone, her face turned so her pale white cheek rested against his shirtfront. He smelled good, she thought. Holding her, George looked enormous, and on some inchoate level, that pleased him.
“After a couple of months,” Betty said, “I guess we just fell in love.” In the beginning she’d been seeing another young man at more or less the same time—Bart, the brother of one of the girls working at the theater. Betty chose George, and dispatched Bart. “Ooh, he didn’t like it,” Betty said, her eyes widening as she recalled the scene. “He threw a hysterical fit.” George took an apartment four or five blocks away from her room and they saw a lot of each other for a couple of months. Then George went out of town for a few weeks, wrestling in Oklahoma. On the night he returned George was walking her home when he asked, “How about we get married right away?” Betty kept her equilibrium, or at least that’s the way she told the story. “All right,” she responded. “Now or later, it doesn’t matter to me.”
Betty would make George gorgeous. She sewed his spectacular finery, creating beauty in front of him as his mother did with her embroidery. She dressed the wrestler as she had the State Theater ushers and even her girlhood dolls, then put the curls and the color in his dark, straight hair. George would never be tamed, but when he was with Betty, he was remarkably compliant, deferring to this slightly older woman (she was twenty-six when they married; George was twenty-three) in ways that were quite unusual given the sexual politics of those times. Perhaps his service to his mother led George to accept a certain level of female direction. Betty pushed, coddled, and captivated him all at once, exciting and reassuring him in just the right admixture.
Betty claimed she responded calmly to his marriage proposal, but she was excited enough about George’s courting her to save a menu from the Glenwood for the next seventy years. To her, George was a strong man, with a strong personality, who shared her energy and eagerness for life, her adventurous sense of fun. In many ways he was the opposite of her beloved, contained daddy. But in George, Betty also found a man who, like Clyde Hanson, would sometimes let her drive the train.
George had made his way out to Oregon after his New York stint, arriving there in January of 1938. In the Northwest wrestling territory, grapplers George’s size were classed as middleweights; more importantly, the lumberjacks and salmon fishermen who filled the armories and Legion halls liked fast action, favoring the more nimble and acrobatic workers. Here the good guys or babyfaces were known as “cleanies,” and the heels were the “meanies.” Like his counterparts in Atlanta and New York, promoter Herb Owen took the handsome Wagner for a natural cleanie and George certainly didn’t object to being touted for his good looks and “scientific” ring technique.
Billed for unknown promotional reasons as “George Wagner of Chicago,” he quickly got work in Salem, at Portland’s Labor Temple, and most of all in the National Guard armory on East Seventh Avenue in downtown Eugene, a few blocks west of the Union Pacific railroad tracks and, just beyond them, the Willamette River. In the next year he would wrestle as many as 200 to 250 times, including a monthlong trip to Oklahoma. Owen pushed the newcomer heavily and the local fans were taken with George’s athleticism and showmanship. At one of his first Thursday-night armory matches, before a crowd of two thousand, the Register Guard reported, “the newcomer left the fans breathless as he demonstrated holds that have never been seen here…The Chicago lad, built like a Greek god, is a true wrestling stylist. He boasts a pair of ‘rubber’ legs that allow him to bounce around and jump at unbelievable heights.” Another story quickly pronounced him “one of the finest cleanies ever to appear here.”
George liked his technique as well, but the realist in him noticed that sportswriters in Oregon were among the freest with superlatives. Here as elsewhere the scribes were compensated by the promoters to make sure wrestling was amply covered, and their payoffs went well beyond bottles of Christmas Scotch. Some newspapermen were hired to write press releases, which they then turned into their stories, and others were simply handed envelopes of cash. The Eugene writers and editors showed great enthusiasm, and it seems to have been at least partially genuine. In May George was partnered with fellow cleanie Al Szasz in a tag-team match. The two meanies, reprobates that they were, both attacked George at once—the rules clearly state that tag partners must alternate—and each got him in a leg scissors. Szasz came to the rescue, grabbing each heel by the hair and peeling them off George, only to reveal that George had both meanies tied into a “double Indian death lock,” in which they were quickly pinned. This was entertaining wrestling, no doubt. To the Register Guard, though, it was “the most thrilling and spectacular finish in local mat history.”
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br /> Here, too, ethnic identity and national rivalries were used to gin up fan interest. The United States’ involvement in World War II was still a few years off, but by this time enough was known about Germany’s National Socialists for Curley Donchin, “the Jewish lad from Philadelphia,” and his ring opponent, “Baron von Hoffman, the German villain,” to be billed as “natural enemies.” Mixing stereotypes furiously, one anonymous writer (these wrestling stories usually weren’t bylined) described Donchin as “the Philadelphia Jew with the Irish temper.” The blood feud or “bitter personal hatred” between two wrestlers was another classic ploy, and George immediately got one going with “the lantern-jawed Mick,” Pat O’Dowdy. The wild-eyed Irishman, as he was also known, took to calling George “prison puss,” and young Wagner was properly contemptuous of his new archenemy. Asked about some threat from the Irishman before a match with José Rodriguez, George yawned and said, “I’ll probably have my hands full with this Spic without bothering about O’Dowdy.” In March of 1938 “George Wagner, the people’s choice,” won the Pacific Coast middleweight title by beating Jack Lipscomb at the armory in front of three thousand rabid fans. After surviving a cowardly attack from his enemy, O’Dowdy, who rushed him from the stands, George walked out with the studded championship belt, only to lose that “coveted gonfalon” to O’Dowdy a week or two later. And so it went.
George had a new publicity photograph taken, unveiling a much more glamorous look. In it his hair is jet black and lies flat, parted on the left and neatly tucked behind his ears. His bare, hairless chest is oiled and he’s got his arms crossed just below his pectorals, popping them out and upward as if boosted by a push-up bra. His clenched fists sit under his upper arms, making his biceps and triceps bulge. George looks off into the distance, to his left, not at the camera. It’s a posed beauty shot, more Clara Bow than bone-bending grappler, and very unlike the mug shots the other wrestlers handed out. George’s upper lip always had a striking Cupid’s bow in the middle, but now this prized feminine double curve is strikingly prominent. Movie actresses of that era exaggerated their bows with lip liner; could George have done that, too?
Night after night, though, the pretty boy took his lumps in the ring. The roughneck fans demanded violent action, responding most viscerally to the sight of spilled blood, which the writers called “the claret.” George injured a hip (and missed a few paydays as a result) in losing to Gust Johnson when he overshot his run at the Swede and flew over the ropes and crashed down on the armory floor. In later years the apron, the area around the ring, would be padded, but in George’s day it was concrete or bare hardwood. He couldn’t hesitate, though—willingness to hurl oneself onto bone-breaking surfaces is what separated the boys in the ring from the men in the stands. These were the moves that got heat, the highlights the writers hailed in their next day’s accounts. After another Wagner loss, a “humiliating defeat” by George Becker, Register Guard sports editor Dick Strite celebrated the way George suffered for his art: “Catching Wagner by the wrist, Becker whipped his opponent into the ropes and charged into the opposite strands to gain momentum to the most smashing crash of human flesh this writer has ever seen.”
In tracing George and Betty’s alchemy, it’s nigh impossible to tell who was the sorcerer and who was the apprentice. Betty took credit for most of their innovations. “I pushed, and he did it,” she liked to say. However, she gave him all the kudos for their first outrageous scheme, getting married in the wrestling ring. George hesitated to ask at first, thinking his bride-to-be might object; he hadn’t known her all that long. She said yes immediately. “I could see it was going to be great publicity.” Her parents must have been startled but they didn’t object to the unconventional nuptials. They liked George a lot, and with their daughter still single at twenty-six, late in the game in those days, they were probably relieved as well. George’s father and brothers couldn’t make the long trip from Houston, so he and Betty planned to go see them on their honeymoon, combining that visit with a wrestling tour. The ceremony would not be a religious one. Betty and George thought the local ministers might view a wrestling wedding with some skepticism, and engaged a justice of the peace instead.
Promoter Herb Owen and his allies at the newspaper beat the drum for weeks beforehand. As part of the buildup, George lost his Pacific Coast light-heavyweight title—middleweights were now known as light-heavies—to Bulldog Jackson. Afterward the Bulldog told the world: “I guess I gave that mug a wedding present, eh?” George responded by insisting that their team match at the wedding be “winner take all.” As far as the fans knew, the victor would take home the entire purse.
As sometimes happens with important events, Betty remembered her wedding as a blur. It was over practically before she knew it; unlike George’s wrestling match, the marriage was scheduled for only one fall. Betty and her mother made her dress together, working evenings in the living room at the turkey ranch. It was a long white gown with panels of tulle or white net, and it had a white veil of the same material. Even the fans in the back of the house could see the way its tucks showed off her tiny waist and other curves, and the white halo around her head made her dark hair look even more lustrous. She carried a bouquet of pink roses and sweet peas, and her daddy gave her away. One of the things she remembered more clearly afterward was the line of potted plants and flowers along the aisle floor leading to the ring, and then the flower arrangements—tulips and acacia, with local heather—arranged around the mat surface. That raised, altarless square sat in the center of the brick armory, surrounded by rows of wooden seats and, above, the balcony. Unsure whether wedding or wrestling etiquette prevailed, the fans rose to their feet when she appeared at the top of the aisle, and began to applaud.
George, used to the public eye and in his element, could take a mental step back, and better observe his stunt realized. Just the thought that others were paying to see him get married instead of shelling out himself gave him a little kick of glee. He stood waiting for Betty in the ring in his black tuxedo, joined by Bob, the projectionist who’d introduced them, his best man, and Dee Esta, the maid of honor, a friend of Betty’s and fellow usherette. Promoter Owen’s sons, Elton and Don, served as ushers. George surveyed the crowd, and he could see immediately that there were far more spectators jamming into the arena than the two thousand or so who normally came to the Thursday night matches. Close to thirty-five hundred, out of a Eugene population of twenty-three thousand, paid to attend. George’s grin grew a little wider; he’d negotiated a higher-than-usual percentage of the gate with Owen. When he heard the people begin to clap, then turned and caught sight of Betty, though, his vision narrowed, and the surroundings disappeared for him, too.
The justice of the peace, Mr. Kennedy, played it straight, and the couple likewise behaved. In short order, the “I do’s” were spoken, to more applause from the standing fans. Betty left the ring and sat down, still in her wedding dress, in one of the front rows with her parents, along with Eve and her children. George went down to the dressing rooms in the armory basement and put on his wrestling gear. He and Harry Elliott, a wrestler and frequent referee, were the cleanies, taking on meanies Tony Garibaldi (“the Italian mat villain and two-fisted slugger who throws caution and ethics to the wind”) and sworn Wagner foe Bulldog Jackson.
The Register Guard sent their society writer, Catherine Taylor, to cover the event, giving the wrestling scribes the day off. Judging from her long story the next day, “Wedding Bells Ring at Armory Mat Match,” she had never attended a wrestling match before. She called the boys “players” and the falls “rounds,” but she just as clearly enjoyed the assignment. The meanies she likened to “two primitive animals” who put on “an exhibition of the cruelest and most obnoxious tussling that can be imagined…with no sense of fair play.” When George and Jackson plummeted out of the ring together, she observed, they fell into the lap of a woman “who wore a lovely high-crowned black hat with a red feather.” The woman’s male companion sla
pped the meanie, and the melee continued.
The match went the distance, three falls, the groom’s team prevailing “much to the delight of the crowd which was by this time surging about the ring in great excitement.” After the wrestling and a quick shower for George, Herb Owen hosted a small reception for Mr. and Mrs. Wagner in a room off to the side of the main auditorium, serving coffee and wedding cake. The mood was one of jollity and relief: The tag teaming of bride and groom and the wrestling had both gone according to plan, and the turnstiles had turned in very satisfying fashion. The conversation turned to the honeymoon. Betty and George had bought a new car—well, a used one—a beige Ford sedan, since Betty’s coupé was too small for them and their luggage. They were headed for points south: Los Angeles, then El Paso, to Houston to meet George’s family, and then to a series of matches booked in Mexico.
On the same day the Register Guard reported their wedding, it ran a regular column reporting the doings of local families. Mr. and Mrs. Vern Keahy would be vacationing at the Grand Canyon, this edition noted, and from there would travel to the World’s Fair, in Flushing Meadow, New York. The theme of that exhibition was “Building the World of Tomorrow.” What role the gigantic fourteen-ton typewriter displayed by Underwood (its ribbon was a hundred feet long) would play in the future remains unclear. However a genuine technological breakthrough was showcased at the RCA Pavilion. President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave an address at the Fair, and was simultaneously seen and heard elsewhere. Not later, as in a newsreel, but just as it happened. Not just his voice, either, which radio listeners were accustomed to, but his image and movements as well, conveyed by a transmitter atop the Empire State Building. Since this new system sent things seen over distances, it was called “tele-vision.”