Popularity
At one time, this show was considered one of the top wrestling shows in the United States. Even though the show started on Saturdays at 6 p.m., the lines started to form around the TV station at noon. The show was so popular that it revived the dying Pittsburgh wrestling market. No wrestling promotion can survive without a strong television presence because pro wrestling is not routinely covered by mainstream media.
Promoter Joseph "Toots" Mondt went from promoting shows at a tiny North Side venue called "The Islam Grotto" to packing in tens of thousands of fans to outdoor shows at Forbes Field. In 1961, Mondt began using the newly built Pittsburgh Civic Arena to run indoor shows on a monthly basis. Even the referees such as Paddy Grimes, Izzy Moidel (who claimed to have once beat Rocky Marciano in an amateur boxing match), and Andy DePaul became local celebrities because of the show's huge audience. An elderly lady named Anna Buckalew, popularly known as Ringside Rosie, who always sat in the front row every Saturday, became well known. Pittsburgh Pirates Hall of Famer Pie Traynor later became part of the show as a commercial spokesman for the American Heating Company. His tag line was, "Who can? Ameri-CAN!!!"
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Famous quotes containing the word popularity:
“Here also was made the novelty ‘Chestnut Bell’ which enjoyed unusual popularity during the gay nineties when every dandy jauntily wore one of the tiny bells on the lapel of his coat, and rang it whenever a story-teller offered a ‘chestnut.’”
—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The popularity of disaster movies ... expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)
“A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of “spirit” over matter.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)