Sputnik Monroe – Memphis, Tennessee … He Was in Negro Cafe (January, 1960) …item 2c.. Chris Rock – That Train Is Never Late (niggaz and jews are next) …

Sputnik Monroe – Memphis, Tennessee … He Was in Negro Cafe (January, 1960) …item 2c.. Chris Rock – That Train Is Never Late (niggaz and jews are next) …

Image by marsmet531
Monroe was represented in City Court by Russell B. Sugarmon Jr., negro attorney who ran for the City Commission last August.

After court, City Judge Boushe said it as the first time he can recall that a white man was represented in City Court by a negro attorney.
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……..*****All images are copyrighted by their respective authors ……..
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An old lady called me a "nigger-lovin’ son of a bitch", and this really blew up, and when we got in the arena—the TV studio—they had bleachers on one side and curtains on the other side of the ring, and I’d open the curtains and act like I was kissin’ the little black guy and that old lady would just raise holy hell.

And finally Security told her if she kept cursing he was gonna have to put her out, and she says, "What he really is, by God, is a damn Sputnik." The Sputnik had just went up, I didn’t know what the hell it was. And everybody took up on it, the announcer and the commentator started calling me "Sputnik" on TV in my first match in Mobile, and then everybody picked up on "Sputnik", like, you know, it was a big deal. But, finally, maybe a month later, I figured it out that it was, Russia had beat us into space with a "Sputnik". And my middle name, Monroe, fit right in there."
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… marsmet474 photo … The White Mandingos …item 2a.. – My First White Girl (Official Video) …item 3.. Is Kanye West a genius or a lunatic? (Sep. 29, 2013 6:29 PM) — “Where is the culture at?” ..

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… Flickriver … marsmet473a

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…..item 1)…. Saturday, January 29, 2011 … Sputnik Monroe / Sports News 647 & 649 (1961)

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darwinscans.blogspot.com/2011/01/sputnik-monroe-sports-ne…

Sputnik was born just before the Great Depression in my beautiful home state of Kansas in Dodge City as Rocco Monroe Merrick – which was his father’s last name. I’ve seen his given last name as DiGrazio, too, but from an interview with georgiawrestlinghistory.com I gather that DiGrazio was a name also in his family line that he used on his Navy application so he could get in earlier. Dodge City was once known as the most wicked town in all of the west, and apparently his family lived up to the rough-and-tumble connotations, as Sputnik’s mother’s father, Andrew Jackson Gosee, was a bare-knuckle boxing champion. Just two months before his birth, Sputnik’s father was killed in an airplane crash which I gather pretty much devastated his mom, and Monroe spent his his formative years living between grandparents. Gosee chose Rocco as the only one of his grandsons he’d train as a boxer and began teaching him the sweet science when he was only five years old. His mother remarried when he was a teen, and the family moved to Wichita. His stepfather officially adopted him at age 17 (the year he joined the Navy), so Sputnik took his stepfather’s last name of Brumbaugh. In 9th grade, Sputnik joined the wrestling team because there weren’t many boxers around and perhaps because he’d met pro wrestlers at his local YMCA and admired their fancy clothes, big cars, and hot gals.

When Sputnik and a friend attended a carnival in Wichita, Monroe learned he could earn 5 dollars if he could stay in the ring with the hulking carnival wrestler (Bill Ely) for 5 minutes, and his pal talked him into the challenge. Monroe was small and fast compared to Ely and quickly leg-dived him and cross-barred his arm for the submission win. This made an impression on the promoter who was forced to pay him off. This promoter, Jack Nazworthy, who Monroe remarks was a very tough guy himself, ran a successful line of "athletic shows" in the long tradition of carnival wrestling where show wrestlers would fight marks from the crowd and also take on staged plants or talk trash to the gawkers to stir up business. Nazworthy convinced Monroe to stay on at the carnival but warned that if he ever lost he could just pack his bags and leave. Many of the techniques of showmanship as well as the catch as catch can combat styles from these carnival shows would be the basis for what would become wrestling as we know it in the 20th century (The Golddust Trio I wrote about a couple posts back being a prime mover in this process), and this is where Sputnik would learn to talk the talk and his techniques of crowd manipulation and become the truly tough, loud-mouthed mofo he was, claiming that he never lost a match in his five years as a carny fighter with up to 30 bouts in a day. He’d work in a 40×60 tent with no chairs, so the crowd would be bellied right up to the 16×16 ring, and if the wrestler got too close to the ropes and the crowd didn’t like what was going on, they’d burn the wrestler with cigarettes. Monroe would sometimes insult a guy’s girlfriend to get him in the ring or even just hit a guy to stir the action. "Marks" (the locals) would often be the referees for such matches and wouldn’t count their buddies out, so the carnival wrestlers depended on submissions for victory. From Ron Gordon’s 2001 book, It Came From Memphis,

"I started in the carnival athletic show, meeting all comers," (Monroe) explains. It was nearly half a century ago, when half a sawbuck and plenty of machismo could get you five minutes in the ring with the strong man and a chance at fifty bucks. "Whoever wants to do their thing, however they want to do it," he says. "I had shovel fights, rope fights, pickax-handle fights, wrestled, boxed, one hand tied down, whatever their specialty was. One time I had a guy turn his back to me and hook me by the head, and I realized he’d seen something on TV and wanted to flip me over his back. So I let him flying-mare me. I got up and staggered around, and let him do it to me again. The people cheered and he did it again. And he did it again and he did it again and then he puked and fell over. I never let anybody get out of there a winner."

In an NPR interview, Sputnik recalls, "I took knives away from guys and cut them on the arm. I had one babbling and crying like a baby because I just slowly dragged it across his throat. It was a pretty sharp knife; it cut him a little bit. Scared the pee out of him." I can only imagine the sorts of farmhands and roughnecks he was fighting around Kansas and the Midwest at the time. It would require a staggering amount of confidence, but Sputnik had it in spades and relished a good fight, in or out of the ring, and this and the contacts he would make with other wrestlers and promoters in the region is what prepared him for his wrestling career and for a lifetime enraging crowds. In the process, he went from a being a 170-pounder when he left the Navy to a hardened fighter ready for the professional ring. There’s a nice article on how these athletic shows operated and created a sensation from town to town at the bottom of the page here at www.1wrestlinglegends.com.

Monroe began his career as Pretty Boy Roque (sounded out as "Rocky", Rock and Papa Rock were names that friends and family called him) when a Gorgeous George copycat by the name of Mel Peters got hurt and Monroe bought his wardrobe. Pretty Boy Roque wrestled on cards around Kansas in places like Topeka, Salina, Dodge City, Wichita and St. Louis working for competing promoters Orville Brown and Max Bowman, going from territory to territory every six to eight weeks. His hair was permed, and he played the Hollywood dandy in an all-pink get-up. For NPR, Monroe recalled of this period, "I got arrested on time. It was 1951, I had long hair, pink tights, pink shoes. I was helping set up the Ferris wheel, and a lady called in complaining there was a woman with no bra on the Ferris wheel. The police came out and I had long hair. You know what you do with long hair in 1951? Every time you stop the car you have a fight. Whenever you want to fight you just stop the car. Nobody had long hair (chuckles)." (BTW I’d love to see photos of Monroe’s earlier characters if anybody out there’s got any). From St. Louis, Monroe went to Toronto still as Pretty Boy and then to Louisville where promoter Frank McKenna thought he looked like Elvis and gave him a new name, Elvis Rock Monroe, who I believe Sputnik played as a babyface. An alternate story is that Sputnik picked up this name after a stint at the Louisville fairgrounds as a decoy for Elvis. After a concert, Monroe would be dressed as Elvis and run to a waiting limo while screaming lady fans chased him to the getaway limo while the actual Elvis would sneak out another way. After St. Louis and Louisville, Monroe would spend time in Toronto then Minneapolis then Salt Lake City then Seattle (wrestlers were really on the move in those days going from town to town while there was interest), and somewhere in here he caught the chair to the head in Chicago that would give him a deep splinter followed by an infection that left silver streak where the wound healed. In the late 60s the streak started to turn a yellow color, and Sputnik would bleach it out to keep up his trademark look.

Coming from Seattle on a cross-country trip to Mobile, Alabama, Monroe picked up a black hitchhiker to help him drive on a day that would earn him the nickname he’d use for the rest of his career. In an NPR interview, he described the situation, "I pooped out in Greenwood, Mississippi. I couldn’t drive anymore, and I pulled into the station. There was a little guy there, a little black guy with a suitcase, in Citronelle, Alabama. So I asked him if he could drive, and he said, yeah. And I said, okay, drive me to Channel 2, to the TV station and after it’s over and I’m woke up, we’ll go rock and roll with the ladies on the street." In an interview at georgiawrestling.com, he gives an extended version of the story which is the best I’ve heard him tell it,

"Nobody stayed in a territory like they did later, like I did in Memphis, I was there a year – probably fifteen, sixteen months. But after Salt Lake, I was in Seattle, then I went from Seattle to Mobile, Alabama, and I pooped out. I left on Thursday to be there on Saturday, and I drove as far as I could drive, and then I’d sleep, and then I’d drive, and then I’d sleep. And I finally got where I was—I had a thermos of coffee, and I would get out and walk around the car, and then get back in and drink a little coffee and go on down the road a little further, sometimes 8 or 10 miles before I’d get on the nod again.

And when I got to Greenwood, Mississippi, I was really plumb out, and there was a little black guy hitchhikin’, and I asked if he can drive, and he said, "yeah," and I said "okay", and I told him to be very careful because I’m a wrestler and I’ll break your legs if you get wild. So he had to take care of business, and I’ll take a nap. So he drove me to the TV studio, in Mobile, and that’s where I got the name.

An old lady called me a "nigger-lovin’ son of a bitch", and this really blew up, and when we got in the arena—the TV studio—they had bleachers on one side and curtains on the other side of the ring, and I’d open the curtains and act like I was kissin’ the little black guy and that old lady would just raise holy hell.

And finally Security told her if she kept cursing he was gonna have to put her out, and she says, "What he really is, by God, is a damn Sputnik." The Sputnik had just went up, I didn’t know what the hell it was. And everybody took up on it, the announcer and the commentator started calling me "Sputnik" on TV in my first match in Mobile, and then everybody picked up on "Sputnik", like, you know, it was a big deal. But, finally, maybe a month later, I figured it out that it was, Russia had beat us into space with a "Sputnik". And my middle name, Monroe, fit right in there."

I really love that story. How many white guys would pick up a black hitchhiker in those days in the first place? And I really love the stories of these old grannies that would go to a wrestling match and get all worked up but would probably act perfectly polite the rest of the week. This dirty wrestler had the nerve to have his arm around a black man, and here amid the cold war hysteria the worst thing she could think of to call him was a damned communist. And Monroe took the label as his own, a slap in the face to America, a bizarre-looking satellite blasted into the stratosphere, way out there in orbit, freaking out an entire nation. The crazed reaction Sputnik got here as a man with the nerve to kiss a black man on the cheek gave him some direction and the a powerful tool for maddening southern audiences, and when Buddy Fuller, the promoter and wrestler who ran the Alabama territory, bought the Memphis territory, he brought Monroe with him and Monroe immediately went about stirring up shit by developing a relationship with the black community. Sure, there was a big element of self-promotion in this, but there’s no doubt that Sputnik was always a rebel and identified with the underdog. A relationship with a black nanny in Kansas might have played a role, too. Sputnik says of her, "I grew up with a nanny. She had the patience of God, an old colored lady that was just outstanding. And I thought, `Boy, what a great people,’ you know?" Just as soon as he got to Memphis, Sputnik headed down to Beale Street, where blacks from all across the South came to party. Monroe recalls, "When I arrived in Memphis, I went straight to Beale Street where the blacks hung out and from there straight to jail…They charged me with ‘mopery and attempted gawk,’ that’s an old southern vagrancy thing they made up. I was on Beale Street every night for the first six months. I got arrested three or four times until that didn’t work anymore and the cops left me alone." The University of Memphis special wrestling collection has some articles from the paper from when this happened that memphiswrestling.com hosts:
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img code photo … Wrestler Monroe Fined: He Was in Negro Cafe

tinypic.com/view.php?pic=ju8zuw&s=7

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img code photo … Owner of Negro Cafe Warned … After Arrest of 2 White Men

tinypic.com/view.php?pic=vgl7pz&s=7
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Police arrest Rock Monroe Brumbraugh (Sputnik), 27, and Clinton M. Hickmon, 27, in a negro tavern at 327 Beale owned by John Brown. Brown denied today that the wrestlers had been sold beer, said they entered to give out passes and promote the wrestling matches.

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I can just imagine the shock on the judge’s face when Monroe walked in with a black lawyer, the very idea of a white man being defended by a black man must have been contemptuous and mind-boggling (Sugarmon would go on to become a General Sessions judge and is now retired). In the tribute article in the local paper after Sputnik’s death, Sugarmon says, "In those days Beale Street was segregated, but he would go into the restaurants and bars and drink with the people. And one night the police ordered him out, and they wouldn’t go, so they arrested him. He called me and I got it dismissed, and we were friendly with each other from then on." Billy Wicks, Sputnik’s main opponent in Memphis at the time, remembers, "He was…kissing little black babies, and doing things like that was not accepted. He liked the challenge of doing certain things society and culture didn’t want him to do. He was going to do it his way." Or as Jim Dickinson says put it, "People in Memphis liked to ignore what was going on, and Sputnik wouldn’t let them do it…Elvis was just implying it, Sputnik was verbalizing it and talking about it. And you were definitely not supposed to do that." He and a black friend went into Dillards, refusing to take off their homburgs, letting the patrons know that any trouble would mean a fight with Sputnik. No one took him up on it. Wrestling fan Jim Sellers says, "Sputnik decided to identify with a group of people who sort of were there but had no one to champion. So he says, `Hey’–and it sort of became a `He’s our man’ thing." Even though Memphis was supposedly desegregated at the time, blacks at the wrestling matches in Ellis auditorium were still forced to sit up in an area referred to as "the crow’s nest," and this is the crowd that Sputnik played to and fought for.

Pre-Sputnik, Ellis was in a sag with an average of maybe 300 patrons, but Monroe changed all that and packed them in the seats. Before matches, Sputnik would go down to Beale and hand out coupons for discounted entry to his black fans, and the whites of Memphis were clamoring to see this rooster get a good ass-kicking. When Monroe entered the auditorium, he wouldn’t even look at the crowd around him, booing him and baying for blood. Eventually, the boos would die down, and Sputnik would raise both hands in the air, and his black fans up in the nose-bleed section who’d been quiet through all the whites’ boos would go wild in adulation. When he was victorious or strutted around with an opponent laid out on the mat, he’d play to this crowd, and they loved him for it. Guston Davis says of those days, "You could hear the whole neighborhood yelling and hollering while wrestling was going on. And at the time, you thought he was defeated, he was down, he wasn’t going to get back up, you’d be sitting there, like, staring at the TV. And he’d jump up and he’d shake his head like the Three Stooges does, and he’d stiffen both legs and he’d do that Sputnik walk, and, hey, it was on, man. After the wrestling was over, that’s what we did. We went outdoors and everybody was just wrestling and doing the Sputnik walk, you know, doing that thing." But Sputnik wasn’t satisfied and used sneaky and then direct means to end segregation in Ellis. Jim Dickinson explains in It Came From Memphis,
"The way they would cut off the black audience…they had a guy counting the white door and a guy on the black door. And they knew how many blacks the section could hold. Sputnik paid the guy who counted the blacks to say a low number every time he was asked, so when the boss said, ‘How many have you let in?’ he would say ‘Twenty-five,; or whatever, and there was five hundred people up there. Finally the audience got so big and so heavily black that they had to integrate the seating. That is really how integration in Memphis started. There’s no other single even that integrated the audience other than the wrestling matches and Sputnik paying the guy to lie."

When the promoters caught on to what was happening and objected, Sputnik threatened to leave. From the Commercial Appeal, "[Sputnik] was carrying the big stick because he was drawing so huge,’ says famed wrestling manager Jimmy Hart, then a teenager selling Cokes in the crowd, ‘And he went to the promoters and said if these folks can’t get in and sit with everybody else then I’m out of here. They couldn’t afford to refuse him." After he integrated Ellis, he continued to fight for desegregation causing ripples throughout Memphis society. When black leaders were coming together to figure out how to protest a car show that was whites-only, Sputnik called the sponsoring dealership and told them thanks for their attitude, he’d open up a blacks-only car business and make a killing. That night’s evening news announced that all were now welcome at the show. Judge Sugarmon contends that Monroe’s stand at Ellis had a domino effect in integrating other aspects of Memphis life, "I remember trying to go to the theater with my wife, and we got to the box office and they wouldn’t sell us tickets. The committees that were working on those things said ‘Well, we have to integrate these things slowly; we don’t want to upset the unwashed masses.’ And we said, "Well the unwashed matches are getting along quite fine sitting alongside each other at the wrestling matches!"

Blacks in Memphis to this day remember Sputnik and give him a special place in the history of the movement. Fanny Gardner says, "He was the chosen one, you know, so nobody knows from what day or what year or what time, who’s going to be the one to step out, and I think that with his heart, you know–he was a kind person, you know, a gentle person, although a lot of people feared him. He just had a way of bringing somebody out to pave the way for other people." From the memorial article in the Commercial Appeal,

"Just last year, we were Downtown, and [Sputnik] wanted to go to Beale Street, " recalls Monroe’s friend, longtime Memphis deejay and television personality Johnny Dark. "and we parked at Peabody Place and walked, and on the way down there at least four young black kids walked up to him and hugged him and told him their parents had his picture on their wall of their house growing up, they they knew who he was and what he had done…[Years after Sputnik’s heyday], when Johnny Dark was a deejay in Louisville and Monroe was wrestling in the area, the two went out after one of Monroe’s matches. Dark recalls, "This black lady walked up to him with tears in her eyes and said, ‘You don’t know me but I used to live in Memphis, and I just want to thank you for getting us out of those buzzard seats in Ellis Auditorium,’ And I looked over there at that big 230-pound man," says Dark, "and he had tears in his eyes as well."

But it wasn’t just the blacks that were the fans of Monroe, he had plenty of young rock ‘n’ rollers that came to appreciate his anti-authoritarian ways and message of inclusion as well. More from It Came From Memphis,

"You’re talking about separate water fountains, you’re talking about back of the bus, " Says Jim Blake, who managed wrestler Jerry Lawler in the 1970s, and whose Barbarian Records recorded several heroes of the ring. "I went through my whole twelve years at school having never been able to share an experience with a black, and I was starting to resent this, because I was also listening to radio and Dewey Phillips and hearing all these great black records and realizing that these were some talented artists, this was another culture. Where at first we’d gone to the matches hoping to see Sputnik get beat, we started to realize that he was pretty fucking cool. He had his audience and he never played down to ’em, never talked down to ’em. He became a role model."

Sputnik would probably laugh at the idea of himself as a role model and bristled at being called a do-gooder, but there’s no doubting his popularity at the time in Memphis. "If you would have had some kind of election about who was the best known face in Memphis at the time – Sputnik, Elvis, and the mayor – Sputnik would have been real close to Elvis," says Johnny Dark.

At the peak of Sputnik’s popularity, he wrestled in an a title match against Billy Wicks at Russwood park with Rock Marciano standing in as referee with 20,000 fans in attendance. The wrestlers were paid 0 each, and the winner got a Cadillac. The story made the front page of The Commercial Appeal, and I gather the match ended with Marciano feeling the need to knock Sputnik out and the victory and Caddy going to Wicks. At some point during the day, Monroe says he was surfed on hands over the giant crowd.
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…..item 2a)…. youtube video … Chris Rock – Never Scared full … 38:54 minutes

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZv-3JdYiE8

foisel Al -Shamali

Published on Jan 13, 2013
Chris Rock – Never Scared full

FULL SHOW HBO

very funny

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People & Blogs

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…..item 2b)…. youtube video … Chris Rock Never Scared Parte 2 Sub Español … 14:34 minutes

… (timeline 12:23… niggaz and jews are next) …

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSNeBaRUrLs

juan rua

Published on Feb 21, 2013
No description available.

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…..item 2c)…. youtube video … That Train Is Never Late … 58 seconds

www.youtube.com/watch?v=poqoClsEhR4

redblackredblackred

Uploaded on Aug 8, 2010

Chris Rock: But you see these weird white guys getting overly patriotic, and they have their fucking flag hats on and their flag drawers and their flag pick-ups.

Chris Rock: I’m American man, I’m American, fuck all these fucking foreigners. I’m American, I’m American!

Chris Rock: And you like, hey, calm the fuck down! And their was a lot of accepted racism when the war started. It was accepted. "I’m American man, I’m American. Fuck all these foreigners!" And that was cool. "I’m American man, I’m American. Fuck the French!" That was cool. "I’m American man, I’m American. Fuck all these Arabs!" And that was cool. Then they went to "I’m American man, I’m American. Fuck all these illegal aliens!" Then I started listening. Cause I know niggas and Jews is next. It’s like any day now. That train’s never late.

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