Names like Lonnie Mayne, Buddy Rose and Dutch Savage may not be familiar to some today, but for fans of Portland’s professional wrestling scene of the 1960s to early ’90s, these were some of the headliners that sold out the old Portland Sports Arena. As first reported in Slam Wrestling, two Portlanders have been working to preserve the history of the Pacific Northwest wrestling scene and making sure these names and more aren’t forgotten.
Rich Patterson is one of these historians and a video wrestling archivist. Kerby Strom is a fellow historian of the scene as well as a collector of memorabilia. He also recently had recovered footage played at the Hollywood theater earlier this week. Strom and Patterson join us to share more on the history of the city’s wrestling scene and what they’ve found while collecting.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Lonnie Mayne, Buddy Rose and Dutch Savage may not be household names today, but for fans of Portland’s professional wrestling scene in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, these men were larger than life stars, the headliners who sold out the old Portland Sports Arena. As reported recently in Slam Wrestling, two Portlanders have been working hard to preserve this history. Rich Patterson and Kerby Strom have been collecting old videos and memorabilia to make sure this era is not forgotten and they both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on the show.
Kerby Strom: Hello.
Rich Patterson: Hello, Dave.
Miller: Rich Patterson, first. What’s your first memory of Portland wrestling?
Patterson: Boy, I do remember watching it. I think it was on Friday nights at the time. I was over at my aunt and uncle’s house. My folks were playing cards and Portland wrestling was on. Tony Borne and Lonnie Mayne were up in the interview area, the crow’s nest, and Lonnie’s dad was up there yelling at Tony Borne about how he’s treating his son and everything. And Tony Borne goes and beats up Lonnie Mayne’s dad, makes him all bloody and everything. And I’m probably 7 years old at the time and I think, “Oh, boy, this is horrible. He just beat up his dad.” That was probably around 1969 or so.
Miller: What was it about wrestling that you loved?
Patterson: I think just the action, it was fun. It was something that was, I don’t know, exciting. It wasn’t cartoons which I was watching at the time. It was in Portland and something that my family watched. So it was something that we also did together.
Miller: Kerby, that last part or the one right before - this was in Portland. It’s a key piece here. Right now, we have the WWE, AWE, National Wrestling Universe’s brands, that people can watch wherever they are. How local, how regional was wrestling in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, early ‘90s?
Strom: So, with Portland wrestling, the television was based out of Portland as indicated by the name. But the towns would run as far south as Ashland in Oregon and up to Seattle and the Washington area. And there was even like an Italian Exchange in the Vancouver B.C. area with their promotion as well. But yeah, I mean, it certainly had a very strong local flavor, I think that really resonated with a lot of its viewers. It was grassroots, it was grit and grind, it was blood and guts.
Miller: You’re a little bit younger than Rich. Were you a fan of wrestling as a kid though?
Strom: So I grew up watching wrestling in the ‘90s during what was called the Monday Night Wars. And as a kid, like so many people, Roddy Piper was one of my favorite wrestlers. And my dad, having grown up in Eugene, mentioned that one time – he’s like, Roddy Piper, actually, he began wrestling here in Portland. And of course, in an era before YouTube, I just, that always kind of stayed with me until the advent of YouTube, and I found some of Rich’s footage that he was able to salvage and see some of these stars like Roddy Piper. And then that kind of just really started the rabbit hole for me, to want to learn as much as I possibly could about this region and this promotion for wrestling in the Northwest.
Miller: Rich, why did you start collecting Portland wrestling memorabilia and videos?
Patterson: I think it was something from my youth. I really enjoyed it and I just wanted to see if there was any of that available. And back in the early days of the internet, in the early to mid ‘90s, there were trade tapes, tape trading sites where someone may want something from Florida wrestling … “Well, here, I’ll give you something I have from Portland.” But the quality was not good. It was horrible. And I just wanted to try and get something that looked good. I knew that Playboy Buddy Rose, I found out that he had taped a lot of things. So I found a way to approach Buddy and that’s how it kind of got started. He gave me a lot of his tapes initially and that was that.
Miller: For people who aren’t familiar with these names, who was Buddy Rose?
Patterson: Playboy Buddy Rose was what they call a bad guy wrestler, a heel. He came into the area in August of 1976. He was a young, blond haired, arrogant, someone you just … looking at him, you hated him. And he came in and was a star immediately. His first night in, he teamed with Jesse Ventura, another guy who got his start here in Portland and he was a main eventer from then on.
And then it was in June of 1983 that Buddy became a good guy. And the night he became a good guy – I have the video, I believe it’s on YouTube – fans rushed the ring, they put Buddy up on their shoulders. He was the good guy. I would say if there was a Mount Rushmore of Portland wrestling, Buddy would definitely be in the running to be on that.
Miller: Let’s listen to a clip of him. I guess this is from his bad guy days. This is 1981. This is Buddy Rose.
Buddy Rose [audio clip]: “You can have your scrap match but not until Tuesday night, 10 days from tonight, but on one condition. I did a title match with Jay Youngblood. Youngblood, next Saturday night will be your last night as the heavyweight champion of the Northwest. And I’m gonna take the belt and I’m gonna pitch it into Mount St. Helens. And then Tuesday, I’ll step in that ring and I’ll figure out some way to whip your butt.”
Miller: Rich, how did you get Playboy Buddy Rose, years later, to give you a bunch of his tapes?
Patterson: Well, I’ll try and make this real short. I contacted Buddy, he was doing a sports talk show on a low power station in Portland and I knew he was a sports fan. I said, “Hey, if you have tapes, I’d love to see them. In return, I’ll give you some tickets to Blazer games.” And that’s how it worked out. He had very old format tapes from the mid ‘70s that couldn’t be played anymore. He gave those to me. And then after he passed away in 2009, his widow was just going to take these boxes and boxes of VHS tapes. She was gonna put a couple of boxes in recycling a week or give the rest to Goodwill. I said, “No, you can’t do that!” I can’t imagine somebody paying 25 cents at Goodwill to take a tape and record Dancing With the Stars over a Buddy Rose/Jay Youngblood strap match.
So she gave me about 900 video tapes that were not labeled and I went through them. It took a long time. It took about a year and I got about 450 hours of Portland wrestling that I’ve been able to save.
Miller: I should say, the reason you were able to give him those Blazers tickets is that folks may recognize your name as the long-time Blazer Radio Network producer, Rich Patterson.
Let’s listen to another clip. It features Lonnie Mayne. Kerby, what should we know about Lonnie Mayne before we hear him?
Strom: Lonnie Mayne, beloved baby face of the territory …
Miller: That’s me.
Strom: I guess you would say he had a kind of a hillbilly gimmick almost, but very beloved, just kind of had like a childlike wonderment, I would say, to him. But one of his ongoing expressions he would say is, “There’s excitement in the air.”
Miller: Let’s have a listen.
Audio Clip: [Announcer] “Well, kind of inopportune time right now, but we did want to mention that somebody thought enough of Lonnie and his birthday there. You see a beautiful birthday cake and of course it’s kind of being wasted because Lonnie is not in the mood for any kind of celebration right now.”
[Lonnie Mayne] “Right! Buddy Rose, I’m telling you right now! I’m telling you right now, you ain’t gonna break nobody else’s arm, nobody’s arm! And I guarantee you and you people from Portland, Oregon, agree with me! I don’t care what I gotta do, Frank, he’s gonna get his arms busted one way or the other. He’s done too many!”
Miller: We got a great story on Facebook from Ted Anderson.
He wrote this: “When I was a kid, I would get my haircut in Oak Grove. The barber knew all the wrestlers. One time my mom dropped me off while she went shopping. Tough Tony Borne came in and my barber said, ‘Hey, Tony, do you know whose kid this is?’ My folks were co-owners of a pretty well known restaurant in Gladstone. When he was told who my dad was, Tony growled in only the way Tony could and said, ‘Give me those scissors. I can’t stand his dad.’ I can only imagine the look on my face. All the men at the shop started laughing and Tony put me at ease by saying he ate at my dad’s place all the time.”
Rich, I understand that after you started building your collection and digitizing all of these old tapes, you began sometimes to give DVDs to aging wrestlers, so they would have footage of their, of what they had done. What did that mean to them? What did you hear from these guys?
Patterson: Well, it was really something because they would always say, “How much can I pay ya? I want to buy these.” It’s like, no, for years, you guys work six, seven nights a week, busting your tails, not making a whole lot of money. And you provided a ton of entertainment for a lot of people. The least I can do is give you the memories of your work. A couple that stand out – I gave a bunch of DVDs to Roddy Piper of his work in Portland and he sent me an email thanking me profusely and how much these meant to him, and we got to get together sometime, have a Coke and talk about the old days. And Roddy passed about two months after that.
Rip Oliver, who was a notorious bad guy – worked in Portland for about 10 years – he had some tapes, but they got lost in a storm, in a flood. And so I gave him maybe 30 DVDs of his work, and he sent me a message and the reason this stands out is his verbiage. He said, “Thank you so much. Now I can show my grandkids what their grandpappy used to do for a living.” And, yeah, there are probably about seven or eight wrestlers that I’ve done that for. Mean Mike Miller, a wrestler here in the ‘80s, sent me some of his videotapes over the summer because he wanted me to take these VHS tapes, and put them onto DVD and onto flash drives for him. So I did that, no problem.
Miller: Kerby, do you have any favorite items in your collection at this point?
Strom: One of my favorite things to collect is … because I’ve learned so much visually by seeing this, especially since I didn’t get to grow up watching this myself. Obviously, I have Rich’s tapes to thank for being able to brush up with. And another thing worth mentioning about those tapes too is that the promoters didn’t save the tapes, hence why this footage is so valuable to us because the promoters didn’t really think that there would be a necessity for a library. And they’re promoting tomorrow, they can’t promote yesterday. That already happened. So that’s why this footage is so valuable.
But I really love finding photographs that are not mass circulated or uncirculated, whether it was the 8” x 10”s they used to sell at the merchandise tables or these scrapbooks I’ve been able to acquire by just the fans who would attend every Saturday night, and then they would make the scrapbooks contemporaneous to the time that they were going. So that’s like something I love collecting because you get into the mindset of the person attending it and how much they love it, that they felt compelled to document it through scrapbooks and things like that. And that’s certainly one of my most favorite things to collect in the whole thing.
Miller: Rich, what led to the end of the regional wrestling scene in Portland?
Patterson: Two words: Vince McMahon. Because the way that Don Owen, the promoter for Portland wrestling, worked is that he did not pay KPTV anything. What he got was to promote all of his matches from around the state on his TV show. But Channel 12 was providing the labor, the cameramen, the technicians, the people in the TV truck. And so it was costing them a lot of money every week to produce this show. Vince McMahon comes to him in 1991 and says, hey KPTV, I’ll pay you, I believe it was $1,500 a week – I may be wrong on that – if you run my show. But you can’t have any other wrestling on your channel. And so financially it was a no brainer for Channel 12. Goodbye Portland Wrestling. Hello WWF.
Miller: Kerby, what do you think was lost when wrestling went national?
Strom: I think the localized flavors really allowed the people who would go to get really attached to a lot of these people, the stars, the wrestlers – I think that was very much lost. I think Portland wrestling kind of did have a very countercultural feel, based on the people I’ve talked to that did attend it, like they felt like they were really part of something that was truly theirs. And I think there was a celebration sometimes when they would see their stars, especially in the twilight years of the promotion, when they would see them on WWF and say, “Hey, I saw that guy in Portland.” Then that made those stars mean even that much more to them, especially when they would return to Portland to work the Portland territory again. That meant so much to the people here. And yeah, all that kind of got lost once Portland wrestling went away.
Miller: Kerby and Rich, thanks very much.
Strom: Thank you.
Patterson: Thank you.
Miller: Kerby Strom is a musician and one of the folks who is trying to preserve the history of Portland’s wrestling scene, along with Rich Patterson, longtime Blazer’s Radio Network producer.
Contact “Think Out Loud®”
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.