Wrasslin' in the UHF Snow Globe
I do not claim to have walked to school in the snow, uphill, both ways, although I did walk to and from school in the first grade in the tiny Louisiana town where my education began. No, this is a look back at a technology that may be foreign to those of the younger persuasion – Ultra High Frequency (UHF) Television and what wonders it could reveal.
Houston in the dark ages of the 1960s provided only three regular Very High Frequency (VHF) television stations. The nice piece of solid wood furniture that took up an entire corner of our living room tuned them beautifully and was the first to give us color on its standard 13-inch screen! You had to pay attention to the TV Guide to know when your favorite shows were coming on and you didn’t miss them because you couldn’t see them again until summer reruns. In its defense, the family TV gave us most of what we needed for our entertainment sustenance.
The exception was wrasslin’, which could only be viewed on UHF!
The catch was nobody had UHF on their TV in the neighborhood until my dad brought home a little black and white TV that had the same 13-inch screen as the Living Room Big Boy, except instead of a cabinet there was a metal stand with wheels. We put this second TV in the kitchen area and in admiring the new addition I discovered a little round metal thing hanging on the back. The manual identified it as a UHF antenna and told me the location of two screws where it could be attached. I did so, excitedly!
UHF meant we could get wrestling! I could have texted my two buddies, Joe Jackson and Eddie Okruhlik, except of course that communication hadn’t been invented, so I ran to each of their houses with the town crier style of communicating the great news. We could try to watch wrestling on UHF channel 17.
We gathered in my kitchen on either Friday or Saturday night, the wayback machine didn’t register the exact schedule in my memory. We tuned the little TV to Channel 17 and then did some fine tuning, some fiddling and a little cussing until we finally got a black and white picture that looked like the inside of a Christmas snow globe. But, instead of a couple skating or something, there were the two guys locked in an unfriendly embrace. Then they were thumping their chests, hollering at each other, jumping off the top rope and landing on one another and sweating like summertime in Houston humidity.
We were disappointed in the black and white picture as we were all technicolor guys by this time. The snow was somewhat annoying, but we didn’t have a UHF antenna to put on the roof or even know that was an option. The little round antenna did its best and we appreciated the effort.
It was not long until we got into the wrestling storylines, which resembled the soap operas on daytime TV except there was violence and threats coupled with hurt feelings and macho posturing. Of course, there might have been all that on daytime soap operas also, but we were budding young men and were in school during the day anyway.
On one of those magic nights, I found the wrestler I adopted as my very own – Fritz Von Erich, the Iron Claw. He had tremendously strong forearms, wrists and fingers and his signature move was a hold where he attached his five fingers to a poor opponent’s head and squeezed until the guy either surrendered or passed out. Fritz had a brother named Waldo and the two of them were often pitted against the masked Spoiler #1 & Spoiler #2 in tag team matches.
I tuned each week hoping Fritz would unmask The Spoiler, but wasn’t too disappointed when Billy Red Lyons, the Texas State Champion, did the deed and revealed Canadian Don Jardine as the secret identity. Red was often a partner to Fritz when his brother was playing “Where’s Waldo”.
The storylines could get strange and take some twists. There was Playboy Gary Hart, who was the manager of the Spoilers, who took offense to something said by one of the Von Erichs and jumped in the ring one night. Afterward, he started wrestling himself. Joe, Eddie and I didn’t understand this turn of events as Hart seemed too soft and flabby to get in the ring himself. We were not privy to the fact The Playboy had been a wrestler in other parts of the country and could mix it up if necessary.
I got on this wrestling memory trail because I recently saw a movie about my wrestling hero titled after his signature move, “The Iron Claw.” I thought it was going to be a biography that would bring me back to that magical time of wrestling in the UHF Snow Globe.
The movie had other ideas than to waltz me down memory lane. The movie was not about Fritz’s career, but rather his role as patriarch of a wrestling family of six sons, five who tried to follow in his demanding footsteps.
I had known Fritz’s real name was Jack Adkisson and he had played football at Southern Methodist in the early 1950s before making wrestling his profession. What I had not known was after I had moved on from the nights in front of the UHF TV to pursue college, Fritz had made wrestling the family business in the days before the WWE.
Adkisson was assigned the name Von Erich and a fake brother Waldo so they could be billed as German Nazi-like villains, typical wrestling script fare in the decade after World War II. Fritz had graduated to headliner hero in the scripts by the late 1960s when I was cheering him on. I was ecstatic when the arm would theatrically go up in the air and then dart the hand down to trap an opponent’s skull in the Iron Claw grip that led to apparent unconsciousness.
The movie picks up after Fritz’s career is over. The Von Erich’s tragedy had started while he was still wrestling when his oldest son had died at six years old due to accidental electrocution. Jack Jr. was the first of the dominoes to fall in what later came to be known as The Von Erich Family Curse.
The movie chronicles the pressure Daddy Fritz put on the remaining Von Erich sons to carry on his legacy. Fritz became a wrestling promotor after his own career ended, and his best promotional product was his sons. All but one of the sons were eager to follow in Fritz’s footsteps, so pleasing their father was an incentive for all. One by one, each was trampled by a combination of Fritz’s pressure to excel and fate’s fickle finger, which personified into a family curse attributed to a surname that was not even their own.
The Von Erich curse claimed two sons by suicide and another by undiagnosed internal injury and rumored drug use while wrestling exhibitions in Japan. Two of them were in their twenties while the third was lost in his early thirties. Two of the casualties had been nearly as successful as their famous father, while one had not wanted to be a wrestler at all. The common theme was they were Von Erichs, even if they were really Adkissons, and could not disappoint their patriarch.
In the end of the movie, the four lost sons are reunited in what must be Heaven, a placid, beautiful place where there is fishing but no wrestling ring. The movie also makes clear those left behind were more in Hell with the loss of these splendid young men so long before their time.
I left the theatre not liking Fritz Von Erich as much as I had when I entered. The script of the Von Erich Curse was equal to any tragedy Shakespeare could have conjured, but this was a true story. Or at least as true as any real life can be when committed to a page or screen for retelling.
P.T. Barnum said there is a sucker born every minute. There are people who think wrestling is real, or say they do, although I suspect in the back of their minds they are playing along with the inside joke. Wrestlers are tremendous athletes to be able to survive the very real punishment in their pseudo sport. Wrestlers are also lousy thespians and even more sensitive to perceived slights than black and white western movie cowboys in saloons. They shout and vow revenge at a rival on screen who they swear has wronged them… then go out to dinner with their enemy after the show is over.
I thought back to those couple of years where Joe, Eddie and I gathered in my family kitchen to keep up with the antics of the Von Erichs, Spoiler #1 & #2, Bearcat Wright, Billy Red Lyons and Playboy Gary Hart. We fiddled with the little UHF antenna, tried various positions and even wrapped it in aluminum foil because someone said that would help the signal. We discussed the latest story line from the ringmasters as if we cared, but in truth we weren’t all that invested in the outcomes. After all, this wasn’t life or death like Texas high school football. What was important was the three of us being together on those nights long ago. Who cared if wrestling was fake? We were in on the joke anyway.
Pictures of the Von Erichs attributed to their Wikipedia page
