This Week In History, 1931: A roly poly pachyderm meets a squirmer with a rubber chest
Wrestling promoter Emil Klank presided over an ‘Era of Wonderful Nonsense’ in Vancouver
By John Mackie
Last updated 12 hours ago
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Vancouver newspapers have had no shortage of witty sportswriters. But one of the funniest was anonymous — the guy who wrote wrestling stories in The Vancouver Sun in the early 1930s.
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A classic ran in the July 13, 1931 Sun. The headline was “Roly Poly Bulgarian to Agitate Abie This Week,” with the kicker “Plenty of Squirm Room in Ball Park.”
“Two of the roly-polyist pachyderms in all the land will struggle on the Klankian mat next Thursday night,” said the opening paragraph.
“The two big babies who will bruise and berate each other on one-half of the double five round bill there will be Dan Koloff and Abie Kaplan, the large man with the mobile features and the rubber chest.”
In 1930s sportswriter-speak, a pachyderm was a wrestler. So was a “squirmer.” The “Klankian mat” refers to promoter Emil Klank.
The ballpark referred to was Athletic Park at 5th and Hemlock, which was built for baseball in 1913 but was also used for many other sports. It was torn down after Capilano Stadium (now Nat Bailey) was built in 1951.
The slang continued in the July 17 story on the actual wrestling match.
“Twelve hundred pounds of performing pachydermy tossed, squirmed, and groaned beneath the moth attractors at Athletic Park last night,” said The Sun.
“Dan Koloff is the original absent-minded professor of grappleology and his dereliction cost him a verdict over the parading peacock from New York, Abe Kaplan.”
In case you were wondering what a “moth attractor” was, it was the lights at Athletic Park, which had just been the site of Canada’s first night baseball game two weeks earlier, on July 3, 1931.
There must have been a lot of moths, because The Sun advised that the referees at future outdoor night shows should be equipped with “Flit guns” to dispense insecticide.
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“There’s nothing in the rules allowing referees sweeping away tired moths so that the boys can have a clean place to fall,” read the July 17 story. “Besides, what moth ever deserved such a death as being ironed out by a ponderous pachyderm.”
The Sun sometimes ran photos of the wrestlers in advance of their bouts. On July 9 the paper ran a sideways shot of Koloff that made “the Bulgarian Lion” look pretty imposing. A headline over top said “Grr-Woof!” and a cutline underneath said Koloff was “more colourful than a Vancouver sunset.”
Emil Klank was born in 1876 in Chicago. He started off as a wrestler, but his main claim to fame was as the manager of Frank Gotch, who was world heavyweight wrestling champion between 1908 and 1913.
In 1922, Klank came up to Winnipeg, where he managed Canadian wrestling champion Jack Taylor. By the early ’30s he had settled in Vancouver and was staging weekly bouts at the Denman Arena.
When Klank died in 1940, former Sun and Province sports editor Andy Lytle wrote that Klank presided over an “Era of Wonderful Nonsense” in Vancouver, when “Klank was able to keep a straight face while directing the greatest farcicalities ever offered a gullible public in the name of sport.”
One of his brainstorms was to import wrestlers from overseas such as Jatrinda Goho Gobar, an “Oxford grad from the lush Punjab” in India. Lytle noted that Gobar supposedly “secured his great strength from thin strips of gold leaf which he rolled into a ball.”
Another of his charges was Stanislaus Zbyszko, a man mountain from Poland. Lytle related how Klank took Zbyszko to India to meet Gama, a famed Indian wrestler.
The Maharajah feted the pair for weeks, even taking them tiger hunting. But when the day of the match arrived, Klank found Zbyszko was to wrestle on freshly plowed earth. Before Klank knew it, Gama was sitting on top of Zbyszko, buried deep in the dirt.
“That was the fastest wrestling match in history,” Klank told Lytle. “I spent the next day or two digging segments of the rich soil of India out of my champion.”
Lytle may have written the wrestling stories himself. He left Vancouver in 1934 to become the sports editor of the Toronto Star. According to a Lytle listing on the history website WestEndVancouver, his granddaughter was Toronto journalist Christie Blatchford.
