#jack pfefer

[vcndrell]

Walton Goggins as Jack Pfefer in the Queen of the Ring trailer.

[closetofanxiety]

who's the most carny promoter of all time, in your opinion?

Jack Pfefer. He was the first promoter to go public about wrestling being a work, giving an in-depth account to Dan Parker, sports editor of the New York Daily Mirror, which famously resulted in the paper publishing the results of a card that was scheduled to happen that night at Madison Square Garden.

Pfefer was an outcast in wrestling after that (he had done it to get even with some New York promoters he thought, probably correctly, squeezed him out of the market), but he continued promoting shows for another 40+ years. All his shows were spectacles: he booked “freaks” (he was the first promoter to bring the French Angel and the Swedish Angel to the U.S.), midget matches, bears, whatever. 

He always ran short-term shows, moving from city to city, because his cards were, in the parlance of the carnival industry, “fireballs”: they drew an initially large crowd, and then practically killed the town because people were so disappointed or disgusted with what they saw. He was the pioneer of booking soundalike wrestlers to confuse the ticket-buying public, e.g. The Nature Boy Buddy Roberts, Bruno Sanmartino, Hobo Brazil, etc. He would stage protests against the “immoral” nature of wrestling before shows to lure in customers, things like that.

In fairness to Pfefer, he also had a good eye for talent, and helped some future stars get their start. A marginal figure, he had no problem working with marginalized people disdained by mainstream wrestling, and he played an important role in the development of women’s wrestling. When the New Jersey athletic commission voted to allow women’s wrestling in 1940, Pfefer started booking all-women’s shows, and then cooked up a worked shoot where male wrestlers “went on strike” to protest the competition, resulting in an intergender blowoff that drew a huge crowd. And he was one of the very few promoters who stayed loyal to Mildred Burke after she was blacklisted by the NWA. 

He was a pack rat and donated all his papers to Notre Dame before he died. I wish they’d digitize the collection, because it contains hundreds of wrestling programs, posters, newspaper articles, etc. but I imagine there’s not enough scholarly interest to justify it. I’d love to go out to South Bend for like a week one summer and spend five or six days with a hand scanner in their archive. 

[aagciii]

Mildred “Cyclone” Burke & Jack Pfefer

[audiemurphy1945]

Just to make a few points I didn’t make the last time we talked. #1) It’s IMPERATIVE that you get all matches ONE FALL, at least for the time being. #2) I’ll leave it to you to pick our “cooperative” opponents, ones who’ll go along with my “Dreck”. (September 1958)

There was a lot of sweet talking you mentioned about coming back right after Milwaukee for two more weeks. Jack as I said there’s not a lot going so I don’t think it would be too advantageous to come right back and expose our novelty attraction too much. The people in all the places went WILD. They love me as long as they can’t have me too much. Farshtaist! (November 1958; the term is Yiddish for “Do you understand?”)

I agree with you only 1/2 when you say I am a sucker. Let’s compare bank books. Mr. America #1 [Gene Stanlee] - 0. Mr. America No. 2 [Steve Stanlee] - 0. Ricki Bean - $0,000. But here’s where I agree when you say I am a sucker. Jack Pfefer (1 and only) - $000,000,000. When you teach me that trick, oh boy! (September 1960)

— Excerpts from letters written by Ricki Starr to promoter Jack Pfefer, preserved at the University of Notre Dame library.

[closetofanxiety]

I liked this old photo of Jack Pfefer, the king of carny promoters, looking particularly sinister with two wrestlers, but I didn’t know how they were. Turns out they’re Frenchy LaRue and King Kong Frankenstein, otherwise known as Gorilla Grubmeyer. The name Frenchy LaRue was familiar to me as a midcard guy in the 1930s and 1940s who was gone by the time TV ushered in the first big gold rush, but the name King Kong Frankenstein, excellent as it is, meant nothing to me. 

Well, as it turns out:

This horrifically brutal crime, with uncomfortable similarities to Benoit, has somehow fallen out of the collective memory of wrestling fans (except Seth Hanson, who tweeted the above article), but there it is. 

A couple things of note in the Associated Press story: note the casual reference to “mock terror,” indicating that when this article appeared, in 1944, mainstream media sources were already clued in that wrestling was a work. This is a recurring gripe of mine: the people who insist fans thought wrestling was real until the 1980s or 1990s or whatever are fooling themselves.

Second, I’m struck by how direct the language used by the cop in this story is compared to the jargon cops use today when talking to the media. “He’s saved the state a lot of money by killing himself” is like a line from a noir film, but that’s how police officers talked to reporters in those days.