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Memorable Matches

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•What's New

Action Photos Index

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Before the 1960s

Roy's Big Stars

Battle Royal

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About Me

•Cauliflower Alley 2003

Last Updated: May 13, 2008

My email address changed over a year ago! If you have written to me and did not receive a response, please write to me at viktor2@mac.com

.

Welcome! Thanks for visiting my site!

There has been very little information available on the Internet about Roy Shire's NWA "territory" and the professional wrestling matches he promoted in Northern California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Hawaii and Alaska for twenty years. Hopefully, I can help change that.

I started taking photos at the wrestling matches at the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium in 1969 when I was fourteen years old. My mom was a photographer and I took her equipment with me to take pictures. Soon wrestlers and fans wanted to buy copies of my pictures. I was working many Saturdays at my grandfather's printing company, and because there were no souvenir programs sold at the matches in Sacramento, I started pestering Roy Shire to let me print programs for sale at the Sacramento matches. It took several months of bugging him, but with some helpful convincing from Hank Renner (who I had been giving pictures to) Roy finally agreed to let me try, probably just to get me to shut up. I'm sure he didn't expect much because I was only fifteen years old by then.

The next night at the studios at KTXL Channel 40 in Sacramento, Roy took me in a back room and wrote out our contract by hand on the back of an "Application for a Wrestler's License" and the back of an "Application for a Promoter's License." It basically said I had to pay him 10% of my gross sales for all the programs I sold at his shows.

That's how it started. At the first show, I sold out my whole press run of 350 copies (and made $175.) and I was in business! I took two or three rolls of film at every Big Time Wrestling taping at Channel 40 and every house show I attended. I tried hard to never print the same photo twice -- a complaint fans at the San Francisco's Cow Palace had made because the photos in those programs almost NEVER changed. Most photos in the Cow Palace programs were close to ten years old and had been used dozens of times! They were being printed by John Swenski, an ex-wrestler who co-promoted wrestling with Roy in San Jose, California.

Roy quickly noticed that the 10% cut I was paying him in Sacramento was a lot more than the 10% he was being paid in San Francisco, where crowds were several times larger! It wasn't long before I was making programs for the San Francisco Cow Palace shows too, and I slowly spread out to sell programs in most of the cities where Roy Shire booked shows in California and Nevada. I loved it because I got to go to the wrestling matches a few times a week, I got to know the wrestlers, and I made a few bucks without flipping hamburgers. The only reason I could not do more was because I was still in high school and could not travel every night.

Luckily, I kept all of my photo negatives from those days and I tried to keep everything I could about Roy Shire's Big Time Wrestling territory. I lost a stack of wrestling posters to a storm, and water damaged a few negatives, but most remain in perfect shape. All of the stories here are from my memory which I am the first to admit, can be faulty at times. I have tried hard to be as accurate as possible though. Please let me know if you have any suggestions or corrections to dates or names or if you would like to contribute your own stories or pictures from those days. Ed Moretti has helped me with several memory lapses of mine.

While I scan my negatives and work to make a fancy, permanent web site, I decided to post this site. The first pictures I posted here were scans from my programs, not from the negatives. But I have finally figured out how to use my film scanner, so the photo quality of what I am posting now is much better.

My pictures are all protected by Copyright. You can't sell copies of them or use them commercially, but you can enjoy them all you want. My reason for posting this site is to do my part to help preserve professional wrestling's history since very little information about Roy Shire's territory has been documented on the Internet until now. We really did have some of the world's best professional wrestling matches in California, and now we have proof! I put a counter on this site recently and people from 82 foreign countries have visited my site, including fans from the country of Niue (wherever that is), and Iceland!

If you have any information or stories to you would like to add, please send them to me and I will post them to the site. I hope this brings back as many memories for you as it has for me. Thanks to Mike Rodgers, publisher of Ring Around the Northwest for all of the results of our wrestling matches, and "Moondog" Ed Moretti for helping me with names I have temporarily forgotten.

Viktor Berry

Read newspaper stories about my wrestling programs!

Roy Shire was a big-name professional wrestler in the 1950s in Ohio and the Southeast. In the early 1950s, he wrestled as "Professor Shire" and entered the ring wearing a Mortarboard and Graduation Gown. In 1951 and 1952 he was the Midwest Wrestling Association World Junior Heavyweight Champion on two separate occasions.

By the late 1950s, he was best known as part of the tag team, The Shire Brothers with his "brother" Ray (Ray Stevens.) In Georgia, he worked a well-remembered program with boxing great Archie Moore. But early in his career Roy Shire realized that the big money in the wrestling business was going to the promoters, not the wrestlers.

Roy Shire is wearing the black jacket and Hank Renner is on his right at the KTXL Channel 40 studios in Sacramento. If you look at the monitor on the TV camera behind Roy, you can see a part of "Miss Wrestling" and the photo book she used to show viewers who would be appearing at the next big house show. The cameraman kept focused on her a lot, even when we were not taping.

In the late 1950s, Roy moved to San Francisco, backed by money from promoters in the Midwest and East Coast of the United States. He started supplying their video tapes of wrestling shows to KTVU Channel 2, located on Jack London Square in Oakland. Channel 2, the Bay Area's leading independent TV stations, broadcast a strong signal and was perfect for advertising Shire's new promotion. Roy had two tapes a week playing from Chicago and Atlanta. Stars like Angelo Mosca, Pat Patterson, Kenji Shibuya, Wilbur Snyder, Ray Stevens, The Sheik, Andre the Giant, and Vern Gagne were on the airwaves every week. Roy flew them in once a month to work shows in San Francisco, Sacramento and San Jose.

He began as "the opposition promotion" to the established NWA promoter in the San Francisco Bay Area, Joe Malcewicz, who had been promoting professional wrestling in San Francisco since the 1930s and had made his money. On several occasion, Shire had offered to buy-out Malcewicz or offered to work with him without success. Wrestling had not been promoted much in the last few years, and in 1960 the crowds were small and wrestling matches were usually held in small meeting halls. When word got out that Roy Shire had rented the Cow Palace (seating 14,115) for his first big show, insiders laughed -- wrestling had never attracted that kind of crowd in San Francisco and everyone knew Shire would lose everything and disappear.

On March 4, 1961, Roy's first show at the Cow Palace sold out, and Shire made his entire investment back! Joe Malcewicz kept promoting shows for a year or so, but his promotion disappeared fairly quickly after that.

If you would like to read the corporate documents Roy filed with the State of California to form his Pacific Coast Athletic Corporation check them out. If you know who any of the "Officers and Directors" listed are, please let me know.

In 1962, Cow Palace gates averaged $40,000 per show, with 14,000 fans showing up at the box office, the largest wrestling crowds in the world at the time. That year he pulled in a million dollars from Cow Palace cards and another million from running shows in smaller towns all over Northern California, making him one of professional wrestling's most successful promoters.

Promoters from around the country, who had combined forces as the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA), remained bitter about Shire running in opposition to one of their own, and Shire wasn't allowed to join the NWA until 1968. It was then that Roy started promoting the NWA World Tag Team Championship and NWA U.S. Heavyweight Championship matches at his shows.

Shire was well-known in wrestling circles for being very difficult to work for and he bragged about running his promotion with an iron fist. He yelled and shouted at everyone and his language could embarrass a seasoned sailor. I tried to avoid him as much as I could. When Roy was mad at me for some reason, he would walk over to me, spitting his cigar juice on the floor (no matter where he was) and start cussing up a storm. I had never heard anyone cuss like he did, and I had never heard a person combine cuss words together like he did. I always started laughing when I heard them and just made Roy madder. It was a vicious circle of my laughing and Roy's screaming. I did increase my vocabulary tremendously which served me well after I joined the U.S. Navy and spent four years underwater on nuclear submarines. When I had to call Roy at home on the Toe-Hold Ranch, I used to cross-my-fingers that Roy's wife would answer the phone, instead of Roy. She served as his assistant and she was always very nice and usually able to help me with whatever I needed.

Roy had only been promoting wrestling for a year when the Sacramento Union published the following editorial blasting pro wrestling:

This is Louie Miller. I took this picture at the KTXL Channel 40 studios on his only visit to the studio that I am aware of. The production of the TV show, Big Time Wrestling, was always run by Roy (or Pat Patterson occasionally.) Louie was co-promoter of the house shows in Sacramento with Roy. He also promoted wrestling matches in Oakland, Stockton, Richmond, Antioch, and Pleasanton. He was an ex-boxer and also promoted some boxing shows.

Louie's real name was Louie Elchinoff and he was from Bulgaria. He was a circus strongman when he was younger. He carried bundles of photos in his pockets and more in the trunk of his car, and when asked about his past, he would pull out the appropriate photos and recite his story. Louie showed me photos of him pulling a train car and a large truck down a street on a chain. He also had photos of five or six women hanging in the air on his arms, and he used to pound nails into a board with the palm of his hand. Louie always threatened to show us that feat, but he never did. He was definitely very strong, and still was when this photo was taken. Louie was not afraid of anyone and often helped get heels back to the dressing rooms safely. He was a very nice man, always friendly, and he liked greeting fans as they walked into his shows. Louie passed away in Oakland, California on August 8, 1987.

Johnny Miller, who promoted wrestling matches at the Uptown Arena in Modesto, was not related to Louie. He was a Modesto policeman and an ex-boxer. He also unsuccessfully tried to promote boxing shows in Sacramento. Miller claimed that Shire had forced him to cancel his Sacramento boxing matches when they were scheduled during the same week wrestling was scheduled in Sacramento or Roy would destroy his wrestling promotion in Modesto. Wrestling matches were held on Friday nights in Modesto in the Uptown Arena, a building I remember as looking like a large barn inside. It was upstairs in a two-story building housing a car repair business on the first floor. Fans entered by walking up a ramp once used by cars to get upstairs. The rafters were fairly low, and the wrestlers had to be very careful not to hit a few beams crossing over the ring.

Johnny became very mad at Roy Shire on one occasion because Roy stopped booking his wrestlers in Modesto at least once, and other times (according to Miller) Shire would not send Pat Patterson to Modesto. Johnny believed Roy wanted to put him out of the wrestling business. Miller wrote a letter to the California State Athletic Commission demanding they investigate Roy because he did business like a gangster and had threatened to kill Mildred Burke, a past World Womens Wrestling Champion who booked women wrestlers to promoters throughout the United States.

Here, you can read this for yourselves:

As you can see, not all of the great fights were in the ring. This is another story about Johnny Miller's complaints about Roy which came out two weeks later:

	"You take a master tape – if I'm making a tape for the Cow Palace, which is my master tape, I'd have the wrestlers come in, and interview the ones that are in the main event at the Cow Palace. And then, when I go and make the tape for, say, Las Vegas, I had the spot in there, say three minutes, that was blank. Where the interview had been done for the Cow Palace by, say, Pat Patterson. Well then – but Pat is not in the main event in Las Vegas – say, Joe Blow's in it. Well, I put Joe Blow in <Pat's> place, talking about the match in Las Vegas . . ." "So you make custom tapes for everything, you know? And the guy's there saying 'I'll kill that sonofabitch!' And the other guys saying 'He ain't gonna kill me!" Roy Shire

Roy's first television show in the San Francisco Bay Area, All-Star Wrestling was produced at KTVU Channel 2 in Oakland. Walt Harris served as the ring announcer on that show throughout it's run. KTVU's web site briefly mentions it's part in wrestling history:

	All-Star Wrestling One of KTVU's most popular locally-produced productions was All-Star Wrestling. The bouts were staged in Studio A, and originally aired live Fridays at 9 p.m., then moved to Saturday nights. Wrestling was already a successful venture before KTVU went on the air. Ex-wrestler Roy Shire regularly filled the Cow Palace for his exhibitions, and in 1958, readily agreed to help the fledgling television station stage its live bouts, largely to publicize the upcoming Cow Palace events, which often sold out. The most popular wrestlers included Ray Stevens, Pepper Gomez, Bearcat Wright, and Kenji Shibuya. The ringside announcer was Walt Harris, who interviewed the wrestlers, who occasionally "threatened" Harris if they didn't like his questions. But they knew better than to actually throw a punch. Harris recalls how he helped choreograph the show. It needed to end precisely at 10 p.m., so the Ten O'clock News could air on time, so Harris would wiggle his necktie as a signal to the wrestlers to end their bouts. Ray Stevens appeared frequently at KTVU. Harris remembers Stevens as an exceptional acrobatic athlete, "a little boy in a man's body, with no idea of responsibility." He referred to everyone as "pencil neck." Stevens ran into serious problems with the Internal Revenue Service, and died in 1996 in Hayward. Another popular wrestler was Ernie Ladd (lower photo at left.) Ladd, who stood 6'9" and weighed 315 pounds, was an All-Pro football tackle for the Kansas City Chiefs, who wrestled during the off-season. The wrestlers were divided into villains and heros. They knew their assigned roles, and generally did their best to please the crowds, and the KTVU producers. They were paid well (stars earned $200-300,000 a year) and had no reason to complain. Harris says, "The villains were the best. They'd thank you for anything you did for them. The good guys took it for granted." But Bearcat Wright didn't like losing. Once, after being matched against a much bigger and stronger wrestler, Wright simply jumped out of the ropes, and into the parking lot. KTVU finally pulled the plug on wrestling in the early 1970's, in favor of less violent sports.
			Kenji Shibuya and Walt Harris at KTVU
			Ernie Ladd explains the facts to Harris.

When All Star Wrestling was cancelled in 1970, it was KTVU's top-rated television show. Roy did not get along with station management, and the relationship with KTVU brass had been very rocky for a long time. Several wrestlers told me that at least some of the problems concerned Roy's spitting his "cigar juice" on the floors year after year after being asked not to repearedly. Faced with no TV exposure in the San Francisco Bay Area for the first time, Roy distributed printed flyers at the next Cow Palace show urging fans to write and telephone KTVU management and demand that wrestling be returned to the station's schedule. But Channel 2 had moved on, and All Star Wrestling was dead.

With no TV show in San Francisco, Cow Palace gates plummeted. I remember the Cow Palace looking very empty at the next show. It was very depressing. Roy began a tour of Bay Area television stations, and he was finally able to make a deal with KHBK Channel 44. They agreed to air Roy's Big Time Wrestling tapes from KTXL Channel 40 in Sacramento, with interviews and promos edited in for San Francisco viewers. Unfortunately, KHBK was a UHF station and it reached a much smaller audience than Channel 2. Roy's business would never again maintain the levels made possible by Channel 2's robust signal.

Big Time Wrestling's Announcer, Hank Renner

This is Hank Renner -- with a copy of my Action Wrestling Photo Yearbook which I sold in 1972. Almost all of them were sold through the mail so I did not have to pay Roy the 10% of the gross I had to pay him at the arenas. (If you have a copy of the Wrestling Yearbook, hold on to it! They are very rare!)

Hank almost always had a Tiparillo in the corner of his mouth so he talked out of one side of his mouth a lot. It was Hank Renner who "smartened me up" to the business shortly after I started publishing the programs. I knew the finishes for four or five house shows into the future most of the time and I loved being on the "inside" of things. It was very helpful to plan my programs and to know who to take photos of, but I had to promise Hank that I would always act like a mark when I talked to Roy. As time went on, most of the boys and Roy (to some extent) began to open up to me, but it was Hank who first told me everything.

As bad as I wanted to talk, I don't remember ever telling any of my friends who was going to win a match. Much later, I probably told Bobby Cartago, another teenager who sold programs with me and helped take photos for the programs later. But at the beginning, I never told a soul. Bobby went on to work as a cameraman at Channel 40 and then was hired to work for the WWF to work on their TV productions when they went national. He also supervised many WWF house shows when they came out to California and the western United States.

It turned out that Hank Renner lived a few blocks away from my family and because I was too young to drive, I rode with Hank to the shows in Stockton and Sacramento at the beginning. Hank became quite a celebrity in the Sacramento sports scene -- he also acted as the ring announcer for many boxing cards in Sacramento, and was a big follower of horse racing. I went to the harness races with Hank several times and I was always amazed at how many races he won. He definitely knew horses and harness racing.

He appeared as the television announcer on Big Time Wrestling when it played on KCRA Channel 3 all the way to the end of the show's run in 1979 on KTXL Channel 40. Hank continued to live in Sacramento until he passed away in the mid-1990s.

Big Time Wrestling was taped every Thursday evening at 7:00 p.m. in front of a live audience. It ran first on KCRA Channel 3 in Sacramento, and it was hosted by Walt Harris. Harris drove to Sacramento every Thursday for the Sacramento taping and then hosted the live National All Star Wrestling show on KTVU Channel 2 on Friday evenings. He quickly tired of the weekly drive to Sacramento and Hank Renner was cast as the announcer of Big Time Wrestling, first at KCRA and then after the show moved to KTXL in 1969.

Fans had to go to one of the sponsor's stores to pick up free tickets beginning Monday morning, and tickets did not guarantee you seat. More tickets than the number of seats in the studio were distributed because some people did not show up on Thursday. Ticket holders started lining up along the back wall of the studio more than two hours early each week to insure they got a seat. I remember Marshall's Furniture and Abba Dabba Rents were two long-time distribution centers for tickets.

The TV show was taped in front of a live audience. The audience was present for the matches themselves and the interviews after each match which referred to the next big house show at the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium. When the show taping was completed, the audience was lead out of the building and the wrestlers then completed interviews with Hank for each city that was airing a copy of Big Time Wrestling. The show was broadcast in Phoenix, Honolulu, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Ankorage, and Fresno with customized interviews for those cities.

Two television cameras were used at Channel 40 -- one was on a four foot platform that looked down to the ring, and one camera on was on the floor, which could move along the front of the ring for closer shots. When the interviews were done for San Francisco and other cities, the platform camera was used the most -- because it was pointed downward, you could not see that the audience was missing behind them. The floor camera, when it was used, did very tight shots so a wrestler's face almost filled the screen so empty seats could not be seen.

That's when the fun began. Many nights, jokers like Pat Patterson and others would start doing things off-camera to make the boys being interviewed break out laughing, and catch the wrath of Roy in the control room. Because tight camera shots were used and viewers could only see Hank and the wrestler talking from the chest up, others would crawl on the floor in front of them and tickle them, pull on their tights, unbuckle Hank's pants, whatever it took to break their concentration. Others would stand next to the TV cameras making faces, ruining the shot and requiring a re-take.

Fans often stayed outside the studio by some large double doors with their ears up to the crack between the doors trying to hear what was being said in interviews for the other cities. They could often hear the boys screaming during their promos as well as explosions of laughter when another prank had been pulled on the poor guy standing next to Hank. If you have any videos of the TV show, watch how the guys being interviewed look around the studio as Hank talks to them -- you can only wonder what was happening in front of him that the viewers never got to see. The fans standing outside the doors were not safe either. With everyone's ears up against those large doors, one of the boys would sneak over and slap a hand on the doors as hard as they could, and laugh as he could hear a dozen people fly backwards on the other side.

In the early 1970s when I was around, it was not unusual for tapings to go on past 11:00 p.m. On a bad night it could go past midnight or more. At that time, tapes were sent to stations in San Francisco, Fresno, Bakersfield, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Hawaii and Alaska. Channel 40 was carried on cable networks in many western states, so the Sacramento show was seen by a huge audience across the western United States.

In the mid '70s, Big Time Wrestling moved to Monday evenings, and was aired LIVE. In those years, some interviews were done before the show, and the rest were completed after the live broadcast.

Big Time Wrestling was Channel 40's top-rated show from the very beginning. The owner of Channel 40 cancelled the show in 1979 after several arguments with Roy.

KTXL Channel 40's web site mentions wrestling it its station history, too:

	KTXL-TV, Sacramento, has come a long way since it first hit the airwaves on Oct. 26, 1968. Back then, the station was distributing UHF antennas to help educate viewers that they could receive the station's signal, and $86 bought a prime-time spot. Since then, the station has accomplished several industry firsts, including being one of the first independent UHF stations in the country to launch a seven-day newscast and have its own satellite downlink. It also was the first station in its market to have a satellite truck and to computerize its newsroom. . . . . . . The station also recorded "Big Time Wrestling" matches at the station on Thursday nights from 1969 to 1979, and syndicated the show every week to stations throughout northern California, Utah, Alaska and Hawaii. "The matches were a big deal in the area and featured names such as Andre the Giant, Moondog Mayne and The Great Mafisto," (sic) says Dick Leeson, production manager and 30-year KTXL veteran." People used to line up on Thursday nights two hours before show time to get into the studio for the matches." In fact one of the station's men's rooms still has a shower that the wrestlers used.

Well after all that, let's look at Miki Garcia, Roy's first Miss Wrestling. She was Miss Sacramento when she won the coveted title of Miss Wrestling. She was 26 years old in this picture. She is showing pictures of the wrestlers scheduled to appear at the next big house show while Hank did the talking. The board in back of her shows who was wrestling on that TV show and the star on Ray Stevens' name shows that he won his match. (It was not with her.) It looks like Pat Patterson is looking right at her uh, her.

Miki went on to appear in Playboy a few month after I took this picture. I think Miki is in the February, 1973 issue. She was the second Playmate to show full frontal nudity. (What a tasteful way to say that!) She went on to become a Vice-President at Playboy and spent ten years there.

I am totally amazed by how much everyone remembers about these wrestling shows that took place almost forty years ago. Here is a real trivia question for you and I am asking because I do not know the answer. I don't think this photo has ever been seen before -- it is a trophy (that is a wrestler on the top of it) that was awarded by Miki Garcia to one of the wrestlers on Big Time Wrestling. Does anybody remember who received the trophy and what it was for? Or, was the trophy presented to her, for being selected Miss Wrestling? Answer: It was awarded to the winner of the Sacramento Battle Royal at the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium. There are more pictures in the "Action Photos" pages.

Who knows what possessed Miki Garcia to abandon Big Time Wrestling to pose for Playboy magazine? Well, she did, and Roy went through the gruelling process of personally interviewing (who would delegate that job?) Miki's replacement. The lucky Miss Wrestling #2 (hey, this is wrestling) was named Sandy Herdt.

3/10/03 - I received this note in my email today about Sandy!

Dear Viktor,

Funny how small this world we live in is. A friend of mine printed a
picture of a lady we know and work with off of your wrestling web site. She
is your "Miss Wrestling #2" and her name is Sandy Herdt. I showed her your
web site especially where you had a picture of her standing next to a sign
with the names of wrestlers' who were on that day's line up. She still
looks exactly like the picture you have on your web site of her when she was
Miss Wrestling #2. She told me that she wished that she had the video taped
stuff of her when she was Miss Wrestling #2 for her collection, and so I
thought I'd contact you to first tell you that her last name was Herdt, and
second, to see if you might have any of the video footage of her and maybe
could get her a copy.

Sandy also mentioned that she did some of the Dean Martin Roasts that aired
on T.V. in addition to being Miss Wrestling #2.

Thank You

If anyone has any video of Sandy as Miss Wrestling, please let me know! I'd like a copy, too!

I found this photo today (12/28/02) -- of Miss Wrestling #3 -- I did not remember there was a third while I was there, but obviously there was. It looks like she may have started in December, 1972. I don't have any record of her name. If you recognize her and know her name, please let me know what it is.

		"Being World Tag Team champion with Pat Patterson gave me instant credibility and heat, the kind of heat Roy Shire, the promoter, said he wanted out of his main events.  'Bring the fans to the point of a riot, and then back off.'  I'll never forget those words." "Superstar" Billy Graham

Before I forget, this was the cover of the first program I made for the shows at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. It was for the May 8, 1971 show and I think we sold 4,000 programs that night. I was very happy. I first called the programs Big Time Wrestling. But later I wanted to change the name to something that was just mine. So I changed the name to Action Wrestling. The Big Time Wrestling programs were almost 9" x 12" but when I changed the name, I changed the size to 8.5" x 11" -- a more-standard size, which was a lot cheaper to produce.

			If you want to read a good book by a wrestler who worked for Roy Shire at the very beginning, read Jack Laskin's book, One of the Boys
	Copyright 2008 Viktor Berry • All Rights Reserved •