"I'm not a do-gooder. I'm a dooer. Just a dooer."
-Mr. Monroe
There used to be this cool little shop in downtown Port Angeles, Mousetrap Antiques, where I'd kill time before the arrival of beer o'clock. The proprietor, Jerry, was often seated behind the counter examining contents from the latest estate haul, with the requisite country station leaking out of speakers hidden under his counter. It was there I found some of my favorite second-hand booty, the best of which includes salt-n-pepper shakers, souvenir postcard booklets, and a small stack of magazines.
One of these rags, Wrestling Revue, is a poster designer's wet dream come true. With a publication date of March 1967, this particular issue features articles on George Drake, Billy Red Cloud, and Johnny Weaver, to name a few. Once I got over the photos and brilliant ads in the back, I read one article about a man named Sputnik Monroe.
He looked like a badass with his shock of white hair, a man known for fighting dirty with the other wrestlers, sticking fingers and chairs places they didn't belong. "I DON'T LIKE CRYBABIES," screamed the tagline at the top of the magazine cover. He was simultaneously ugly as sin and somehow sexy, self-proclaimed "twisted steel and sex appeal." In the article, he appeared more extreme than his counterparts in wrestling. He really just liked to piss people off.
I scanned his photos for consideration in future poster art, and put the magazine in storage lest it degrade further from the handling it received on my coffee table.
One day in 2000, I was driving in to work and caught an NPR interview with none other than Mr. Monroe. What the hell? What possible connection did that ex-rassler have with NPR?
The interview, as it turned out, had as much to do with Sputnik's role in the early civil rights movement in Memphis as it did with sports. He had a genuine respect for African Americans early on, sparked by the woman who was his nanny growing up. In the late fifties, when there might as well have been police tape separating black and white neighborhoods, Sputnik broke rules by frequenting colored bars with his colored friends when such interaction was highly discouraged.
Sputnik went through a few name changes in his life. He was born Rocco Monroe Merrick in Dodge City, Kansas. When his mother remarried in his teenhood, he became Roscoe Monroe Brumbaugh. In 1945, he began his wrestling career as a carnival beast who would beat the crap out of anyone: Rock Monroe. A few more surnames were added, but he wasn't permanently christened until 1958, by an elderly female spectator at an Alabama match. Monroe had entered the auditorium with his arm around a black friend, which caused an uproar in the audience. The enraged woman barked out insults at Mr. Monroe, including the name of the recently launched Commie satellite. The appropriately derogatory name stuck.
It wasn't just guilt by association with Monroe. He took it upon himself to make damned sure the blacks of his city got to see him wrestle. Segregation prevented Memphis' black wrestling fans from being able to sit anywhere but in the highest balcony of the auditorium where Monday Night Wrestling took place. When those seats were sold, no more blacks were allowed in. Monroe basically bribed the doormen into looking the other way, so that more blacks got in and filtered down to the white seats. Automatic integration.
Sputnik Monroe died in November of 2006 at age 77 in Houston. He wouldn't cop to being an instigator of civil rights in the South, rather, he'd say he was just trying to pick a fight.
I wanted to read more about Sputnik. A Google search brought up a few hilarious wrestling sites, and eventually, Robert Gordon's It Came from Memphis. In this book was mention of the city's relationship with wrestling in the time of Sputnik. It turned out to be just one fascinating chapter in a book that should be required reading for anyone interested in sixties pop culture in America.
Gordon grew up in Memphis, and was particularly interested in the creative underdogs of his city. There's not much here about the Memphis heavies; those who take center stage in this book never attained much in the way of commercial success. In it, a scene slowly evolves across race and age boundaries, and Gordon follows it into its bourbon-and-blood-saturated corners. Monroe belongs in a book like this ...right alongside Alex Chilton, photographer William Eggleston, producer Jim Dickinson, and bluesman Furry Lewis.
I owe this find, and the introduction to an unlikely hero in the fight against segregation, to that fortuitous visit to a little antique shop in my home town.
Revised 9/2008. ©1999-2008 R. Pelikan unless otherwise noted.