WHEN I was a tyke in the 1950s and television was securing its place in America, one of the weekly family favorites was wrestling. My dad, my uncles and I loved watching and booing a wrestler named Gorgeous George. He was the original flamboyant wrestler.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Gorgeous George was really a man named George Raymond Wagner. He wasn’t a huge man, at five feet nine inches tall and 215 pounds. But he had a flair for the dramatic, and understood that his antics were his biggest draw.

GORGEOUS George attended Houston’s Milby High School, but dropped out at age 14 in 1929, when financial demands on his family grew heavy. He became a professional wrestler during the Depression because that’s how he could make a living. It wasn’t until he was 26, however, when he developed his Gorgeous George character. He had heard about another wrestler who used pompous, over-the-top behavior to antagonize fans. George decided to become Gorgeous George.

His character fawned over his looks, his longer than usual blond hair, and his somewhat effeminate behaviors. He was the Liberace of the wrestling world and he relished taunting his audiences. They loved to hate him.

Gorgeous George went to meet his maker the day after Christmas of 1963, at only 48 years of age. By that time, I was a young teen and knew that wrestling shown on television was basically fixed, that it was a theatric performance. My friends and I enjoyed watching it late at night on Saturday nights in the mid 1960s, though.

A television station out of Houston would run wrestling from an older venue in Houston, with a host who had the cauliflower ears to prove he’d spent too much time in the ring as a combatant. Sometimes a group of us would get together at Steve Reid’s house and watch wrestling. Lynn Parker, Eldon Ricks and Bill Bartlett would often be there.

OUR FAVORITE wrestler was Fritz Von Erich, who used a highly dramatic hold he called “the Claw” on his opponents. He would suddenly reach up and grab his opponent by the skull, using his hand on their head like a claw. He would grip them by the head, and they inexplicably could not manage to get free of the Claw.

Fritz Von Erich—whose real name was Jack Adkisson— would use the Claw to walk his opponents around the ring. They were helpless, the way only a professional wrestler can become suddenly helpless. They could go from being 250 pounds of muscle to an eighth of a ton of Jello in seconds.

Lynn Parker and I would sometimes reenact the Friday night wrestling in our Physical Education class. We would drag out the mats, arrange them for a ring, and get busy with our fake wrestling. Reprising the role of Fritz Von Erich, Lynn would get me in the Claw, and march me around the ring. Coach Poole always got a kick out of our performances.

Gorgeous George and Fritz Von Erich represent 1950s and 1960s TV wrestling.

If you grew up in East Texas, I will wager you watched them, too.

© 2009, Pappy Moore, All Rights Reserved.

Pappy Moore is a humorist, a native son of East Texas who still makes the piney woods his home.

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