Fast Times in Reynolds, GA

I received a letter from my friend Donald (Preacher) Powell yesterday. I wrote about him a few days ago. If you need your memory jogged you can CLICK HERE to read that article.


Donald reminded me of some fast times we had in the early to mid sixties at the Reynolds National Guard Armory when promoter Fred Ward brought wrestling to town.

When I look back on those days, we didn’t have a lot to do in Reynolds in the way of entertainment.

Besides church activities, we attended high school basketball games, baseball games and track meets. The people who played on those high school teams were our real life heroes. We idolized those high school stars.


Then all of a sudden our horizons were expanded. The wrestling stars began to come to town on Saturday night. I still have a mental picture of the posters that were on the store windows in town letting us know who would be on the “card” for the next Saturday night. We were introduced to such wrestling stars as Choo Choo Lynn, Mario (Spider) Galento, Don Carson, the Kentuckian, Jack and Bob Armstrong, the Inferno’s and Sputnik Monroe.

There was much strife that came from those wrestling matches among us twelve and thirteen year old boys though. Some older boys brought up the fact that it was a possibility the whole thing could be fake. There were many arguments among friends about the validity of such claims.

Some of the wrestlers came to our high school basketball games. They didn’t get to watch much basketball because we would be hanging around them in the stands hounding them and begging for autographs.

The villains in the ring were kinda scary. Some of them wore masks and some were just plain mean looking. There was a door from the men’s restroom that opened into the wrestler’s dressing room at the Armory. Some of the braver boys would beat on the door. When one of the villains opened the door and came out we would scatter to the four winds.

The Inferno’s were the meanest tag team that ever came there. They always had foreign objects in the ring and at the end of the match they would light a fire in the eyes of their opponents. We assumed a lot of wrestlers lost their sight but somehow they would be back for the next match seeing just fine.

The biggest frenzy always happened when one of the good guys would try to unmask one of the Inferno’s. The crowd would go absolutely nuts hoping to get a glimpse of the villain’s face. It never happened.

At least in the ring it never happened. The rumor was that Glenda Parks, a local high school beauty, actually dated one of the Inferno’s. When we discovered that, we boys would follow Glenda after the match to try to get a glimpse of the unmasked Inferno in case she left with him.

There weren't just kids at these matches either. There were a lot of adults in our community and surrounding area that took their wrestling very seriously.

Donald reminded me of the night Mrs. Eula Bryan, who sat on the front row, got really mad with one of the masked wrestlers because she thought he had a foreign object. She made some rather poignant remarks to this particular wrestler when he was thrown out of the ring in front of her. The rumor was that he spit on her. I’m not sure if that happened or not.

What I am sure of is that she stabbed him in the butt with an ice pick.

They had to call Dr. Whatley to come down to the Armory to work on the wrestler’s butt. That broke up Saturday night wrestling for a while.

It ended many years later after a large scale free-for-all involving the spectators and the wrestlers. Mattie Julie Pitts hit one of the wrestlers over the head with a folding chair. A real fight broke out that night.

Every good thing has to come to an end I suppose.

But names like Choo Choo Lynn, Spider Galento and the Inferno’s are etched in my memory forever.

Those were some fast times at the National Guard Armory.

At least that was as fast as it ever got in Reynolds, Georgia.