WRESTLER Chief Little Wolf is remembered as one of Australia's greatest, best-loved entertainers from another era.
Short and stocky, with a magnetic personality and a 1000-watt smile, the American professional wrestler was a crowd favourite whenever he appeared at the now demolished, old Greater Newcastle Stadium in the city's West End.
And what a colourful showman he was. At the former stadium (now the site of Coles at Market Town) the lights would dim while the excited crowd waited impatiently. The auditorium would be plunged into total darkness. There would be a drumroll and a stentorian voice from the booth would suddenly announce: 'Ladies AND gentlemen. Please give a big Newcastle welcome to . . . . Chief Little Wolf!'
The crowd would erupt, yelling and stamping their feet. A thunderous echo, like a steam train in confined tunnel space, would reverberate around the big tin shed. This was showbiz, 1950's style.
Spotlights would criss-cross the audience as the drumming intensified. Then, emerging in a spotlight coming down the aisle, was the man himself, the heavily tanned Chief Little Wolf, clad in a bright Navajo blanket and sporting an enormous feathered native American headdress. It was quite an entrance, and he knew it.
The legendary Chief Little Wolf (1911-1984) was about to enter the ring to put on another wrestling extravaganza and he wasn't going to disappoint his many fans. For although an American, he must have felt at home, as he spent much of his career wrestling in Australia and New Zealand. He staged more than 1000 wrestling bouts in Australia between 1937 and 1958 out of an estimated 1141 matches (winning about half of them) during his stellar career both here and in America.
His opponents included burly 'heavies' with names such as 'Dirty' Dick Raines, Gorgeous George (the wrestling version of Liberace) and Harold Sakata, who later played the murderous henchman 'Odd Job' with his steel-brimmed bowler hat in the 1964 James Bond film classic Goldfinger.
In 1953, Chief Little Wolf, who also held travelling tent shows between stadium engagements, claimed that 75 per cent of Australians had seen him in action, either as a stadium wrestler or tent-show performer.
And in the very conservative, entertainment-starved, austere post-World War II period, before television or even international stars arrived en masse on our shores, Chief Little Wolf was an exotic crowd-pleaser, a folk hero even.
So, why do I now remember the words of Newcastle showbiz veteran Glen Barker back in the 1990s? Glen was behind the scenes down at the old Newcastle Stadium announcing acts there. That's why I recall his reply when I once asked him if he had any memories of the incredibly popular American wresting icon from years before.
"Chief Little Wolf? Funny that he spoke fluent Italian, wasn't it?" Barker said with a wink.
The Chief himself was also sometimes questioned about his origins, responding in a 1947 interview asking if he might actually be Mexican.
"I was born in Colorado, so that makes me an American Indian. My father was half-Spanish and half-Indian, my mother is a fullblood Indian," he said.
The confusion probably arose because, although his ring name was Chief Little Wolf, his real name was Ventura (or Benny) Tenario. Whatever his background, the Tenario was a showman, first and foremost, generous with his time with fans and the media. Even the prime minister at the time, Ben Chifley, or 'Chif', once commented that more Australians knew who the Chief was than knew him.
Weekender surprisingly stumbled across the Chief's real story recently from author Jim Haynes within the pages of his amazing Aussie tales entitled The Big Book of Australian Yarns (Allen & Unwin, $34.99). And it's only one of about 80 ripping yarns evoking a vanishing Australia by the master storyteller.
Famous Aussie singer Frank Ifield even toured with the Chief in the early stages of his career ,and thought he might have had an Italian background. The Chief certainly wowed his wrestling fans here in 1937, 1939 and 1941. He then served with US forces in Europe from 1943 and resumed his wrestling career in 1946. Earlier, the Chief was ranked the third top wrestler in the world with his signature move being the 'Indian death lock'.
His last Aussie wrestling match was in Melbourne in November 1956. In 1957, he suffered a debilitating stoke and retired from wrestling. He was in a Victorian hospital from 1961 to 1980 when he returned to America. The giant teddy bear of a man, who'd been married three times, died in a US war veterans' hospital in November 1984, aged 73.
Then, in 1994, an appeal for public information about him on Bert Newton's Good Morning Australia on TV, resulted in an avalanche of mail, about 700 letters from former wrestlers, nurses who'd cared for him and hundreds of wrestling fans or those who had met him in the street, shops or at the cinema.
Author Haynes also relates a tale showing how genuinely caring the Chief was. When a member of an Aboriginal boxing clan, possibly the famous Dave Sands, died in a motor accident in the early 1950s, his family was doing it tough both emotionally and financially. Haynes writes that at Sydney's Leichhardt Stadium someone made a plea for the audience to contribute generously. Walking through the crowd during the fights with a bucket collecting donations for the family "was Benny Tenario, dressed in his full Big Chief Little Wolf regalia". The odd thing was that the Chief wasn't listed on the wrestling program that night.
Let's now turn our attention to the remarkable photo (pictured) inside the new Greater Newcastle Stadium in 1938. It was bought at an online auction by Andy Carr, of the Lost Newcastle group.
"I first assumed it was a photo of a boxing match, until I realised that neither of the combatants are wearing gloves," Carr wrote.
The match was between two American wrestlers, "Cowboy" Dick Raines from Texas and Brother Jonathan, aka the Salt Lake Rattlesnake, a bearded Mormon from Utah.
Ah, clear-cut heroes and villains for the audience. Showbiz never changes does it?
