Here's famed 60s wrestling villain Jerry Graham pulling one of his dirtbag moves on an opponent.
My grandmother was probably yelling at the TV screen.
"Kill that son of a basket!"
She meant "bastard" and it always came out "basket." I never knew why.
Nevertheless, heavyweight wrestling was the preferred spectator sports of my grandparents and they loved to get wrapped up for two hours every Saturday night. These relatively mild-mannered folks would suddenly turn into crazed fans, shouting instructions to their favorite wrestlers grappling on the TV screen. Sometimes in German.
"Watch out, Bruno, he's got something in his trunks."
"Uh oh, goodbye, Bobo."
"Hit him with a chair! Hit with a chair!"
Absorbing all this as a youngster, I loved watching Grandma and Grandpa watching wrestling. And, it was my favorite way to spend a Saturday night. Channel 5, Metromedia in NY, carried two hours worth of matches and the three of us were exhausted by the end. I can remember all the nuances. The arena. The announcer who would interview champ Bruno Sammartino and let him speak for several minutes in Italian. And, for some inexplicable reason, I can recall one of the commercials that always ran during this program. For some liqueur called Cherry Kijafa.
"Joseph, more Cherry Kijafa please!"
I once asked my grandmother what that stuff was. She waved me off.
"Jews drink that."
Duly noted.
Eventually, things changed. My grandfather died and, almost at the same time, Channel 5 stopped running wrestling.
In lots of ways, the world was ending in our house. I felt compelled to spend even more time watching the boob tube with Grandma. But, amid all the shows we enjoyed together, there was no heavyweight wrestling.
And then there was sudden hope. A local station picked up the broadcast and we were in seventh heaven. Wednesday nights at 830PM. The only problem? It was on a UHF channel. In Spanish. Lucha Libre!
"Canal 47...Newark, Paterson, Linden."
Desperate for some matches, we didn't care. Except that, with ultra high frequency television, tuning it in required the assistance of a technician from NASA. That was the strange other dial on your TV that you rarely touched. And, to get Canal 47, you had to be ultra precise. A nano-dial twist one way or the other and you could lose the signal, which was always snowy at best.
The process of tuning in usually started 30 minutes prior to wrestling. My grandmother, sitting on a little stool in front of her pre-remote control era television, working feverishly to get as much static from the screen as possible. Some weeks it was virtually impossible to watch and we'd experience the worst depression since 1929.
One week, I walked through her living room about an hour before wrestling. She was seated comfortably in her chair, listening to a talk show. In Spanish. With some lady in white socks and high heels. Myrta Silva, the Ellen DeGeneres of Puerto Rico. And my grandmother was staring at the screen. I asked the obvious question.
"You don't understand this. It's in Spanish."
Grandma shrugged.
"Yeah, but I got a good picture and I don't want to lose it."
No other wrestling fan has gone to such lengths in order to watch Arnold Skaaland beat up Crazy Lou Albano.
Dinner last night: Sausage and peppers sandwich at Vito's.
4 comments:
"Hit him with a chair!"
I'm so jealous that your grandmother loved wrestling.
Still jealous.
I remember those Cherry Kijafa commercials! The elegant man with the white beard would hold up his glass and say, "A toast...to cherry kijafa!" Nobody drank alcohol in my family when I was a kid, but my siblings and I would love to raise up a glass of OJ or milk or hot chocolate and repeat that grand old toast! PS Sounds like you and your Oma had better luck with UHF channels than we ever did up in Rockland County.
a guy with the kennedy twang responded,, 'cherry kih jaffah
no yorge it's kee yaffa,
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