Friday Night Wrestling
I was talking to a cousin of mine from town a while ago. He was telling me that he had attended the funeral of a man we both knew but not all that well. The man was 93 years old when he passed. I said to my cousin, "you know you' getting old when you attend a 93-year-old's funeral and you can say you knew his parents better than you knew him." Which was true for both of us. Well, that gets me to my story, cause like many my age, I can remember when television didn't exist. At least not in the part of the world where I grew up. When we were young, my brothers and I, we used to stand outside a furniture store in our hometown watching a television set in the showroom. It was always left on so people could view it from outside the store. It was a small black-and-white, no colour in those days, no flat screens either, no cable or satellite. Now, television was new back then and so were television stations. There were no 24-hour broadcasts. The few shows that did come on started in the afternoon around three or four o'clock in the afternoon. There was this image on the screen called a test pattern that was an Indian head. Every time the image moved at all we thought a show was about to start. We would stare at that test pattern for hours. Later on, as some of the more well-to-do folks in our town bought television sets, we, my brothers and I, would stand outside their living room windows watching their television until they either closed their curtains or drove us away. There was one lady who would ask us into the house to watch the shows with her kids. My father got wind of what we were doing and forbade us from doing that any more. But of course, my father worked away a lot. Believe it or not, televisions cost more then than they do now. We were one of the first families in our neighbourhood to own a TV, not that we were well-to-do or anything like that. Our father was so ashamed that we were going around looking into other people's windows that he went out and bought one. God knows how long it took him to pay for it. It was an RCA Victor 18" black and white with rabbit ears to bring in the signal. Our back kitchen resembled a local theatre most nights because all the people in the neighbourhood came to watch TV at our house. Can you imagine that happening today? We kids loved the half hour shows that came on before supper. Every day of the week there was a different show. We watched Range Rider, Annie Oakley, Tex Ritter, Tim McCoy and Roy Rogers, and there was even a show with an Indian star Brave Eagle. That's how we got into cowboys and Indians. The most popular show with the grownups was Friday Night Wrestling from Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. All the men in our neighbourhood and most of their wives came to watch the wrestling. It was standing room only in our back kitchen those nights, every chair in the house was occupied. The wrestlers didn't wear fancy outfits in those days, just plain swim trunks and knee-high boots. The referee always checked for foreign objects - not that they had anywhere to hide them. I can remember a lot of their names, but seeing as I can't get the spelling right, I won't attempt to list them. I do remember one of the most popular good guys was Whipper Billy Watson, he did a lot of work with sick kids, especially polio victims, and helped to raise a lot of money on their behalf. He was famous for his dropkick and sleeper hold. There was another named Pat O'Connor, his trademark was the mule kick, and who could forget Yukon Eric, who said he ate two dozen eggs for breakfast every day. And of course there were the bad guys - the Russian brothers and Tiger Tasker. You can imagine the scene as the good guys fought the bad guys with two out of three falls determining the winner. Everyone was on the edge of their chair some watching blow for blow with their favourite wrestler. It was quite the sight to see, even better to hear. My mother wouldn't allow any swearing or foul language, so everyone had to exercise a great deal of restraint. It was hard to believe that these were all good, church-going people at times. Many a hat was either torn to shreds or bit to pieces in our back kitchen. Eventually, almost everyone in the area got themselves a TV set and the local theatre went back to being a single-family home. We still watched Friday Night Wrestling, but it got much quieter when there was only us. Cyril Griffin New Perlican, NL
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