By Michael Hirsley
Tribune staff reporter
December 11, 2005, 9:03 PM CST
HUMBOLDT, Iowa — The Japanese tourist riding his motorcycle past vast stretches of Iowa cornfields might have seemed lost as he crossed the east fork of the Des Moines River and pulled up to an isolated two-story brick farmhouse.
His minimal English did nothing to dispel that notion when Bette Newton encountered him at the front door. But then he uttered just one word that assured he was just where he wanted to be:
“Gotch?”
The farmhouse, built in 1878, once was a genteel social hub for guests of early settlers Corydon and Lucelia Brown. Many years later it was an abandoned haunted house in area teenagers’ ghost stories. Now it is the Humboldt County Mill Farm Historical Museum.
Its exhibits and documents include a trove of remembrances of Humboldt native Frank Gotch. He was a worldwide celebrity who faced his greatest rival in Chicago nearly a century ago.
Gotch was a professional wrestler at a time when they fought much as college wrestlers do today and were respected much as today’s superstar athletes.
The Iowan grappled with challengers from all over the world and rubbed elbows with President Theodore Roosevelt, Western heroes Wyatt Earp and Buffalo Bill Cody and heavyweight boxing champions Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries.
So great was his fame that huge crowds turned out to watch his two best-known victories, both in Chicago, against a muscular Russian marvel named George Hackenschmidt. Their second match on Sept. 4, 1911, at Comiskey Park drew what the next day’s Chicago Daily Tribune reported on the front page as “at least 25,000 “¦ the largest crowd that ever witnessed a wrestling match in modern times.”
A framed photo of the bout and crowd is part of Gotch memorabilia at the museum. Director Jan Funk, who has succeeded the late Bette Newton, pointed it out as she repeated the Japanese cyclist and haunted house stories.
Funk also recounted how thousands of townsfolk used to watch Gotch train at his camp in Humboldt’s Bicknell Park. She retrieved documentary evidence preserved in an air-conditioned storage room.
Iowa remains a wrestling hotbed and repository of all things Gotch, from the Humboldt collection to that of the International Wrestling Institute and Museum near Des Moines in Newton, Iowa. Its executive director, wrestling historian Mike Chapman, believes Gotch is the greatest wrestler of all time.
“He had it all “¦ good looks, charisma, intelligence, a killer instinct and a devastating toe hold that forced submission from many opponents and made him nearly invincible inside the ring, “Chapman said. “In his day, he was the Michael Jordan of the world.”
Over the years the historian has acquired a derby hat and shoes Gotch wore, as well as his rolltop desk, traveling trunk, chair and ottoman. He also has Gotch wrestling cards that came with cigarettes in the early 1900s, just as baseball cards did then.
But Chapman, who has sold movie rights to his historical novel on Gotch to a small Los Angeles film company, has been seeking one piece of memorabilia for years. Some photographs from the Gotch-Hackenschmidt match at Comiskey Park show a movie crew filming in the background.
“I know film was taken of the match, and I suspect copies of it are out there somewhere, “he said.
His passion for that missing link and his dogged pursuit in countless phone calls and correspondences to possible sources has become a quest for what he calls “the Holy Grail of Gotch.”
The days surrounding Gotch’s most famous match, when crowds swelled around him before and after he entered Comiskey Park, have faded into history in Chicago and almost everywhere else.
But Gotch’s memory is kept alive in Humboldt, home to 5,000 in north central Iowa.
The home where he lived and died is still used as a residence. He is buried in a family mausoleum in the town’s cemetery. His image is on a plaque 4 miles south of town in a park that is named for him, as is an annual Humboldt youth wrestling tournament. And an informal survey of citizens on or near downtown’s main street, Sumner Avenue, found two-thirds still know who Gotch was.
Not bad for a man who died at 39 in 1917.
He was huge in his generation, and then his fame waned with succeeding generations here “¦ until the 1960s, when there was a resurgence, “recalled Geoff Mickelson, a Humboldt farmer and electrician who was a state heavyweight wrestling champion from Humboldt High School in 1968. He later wrestled for one year at Iowa, where he was a four-year offensive guard on the football team.
Even though his generation had come to think of pro wrestling as “phony, “Mickelson said, “As a kid, I’d hear stories about Gotch and pro wrestling being a real sport from everyone from my grandparents to his relatives to the owner when I’d go into the clothing store downtown.”
The rebirth of wrestling at Humboldt High was engineered by physical education teacher Joe Fitch, who became wrestling coach in 1962.
“I was surprised that a town where a legend like Frank Gotch lived and died didn’t have a high school wrestling team, “said Fitch, who now lives in Laguna Woods, Calif. “After all, Gotch was more than an American celebrity. He was a worldwide celebrity.”
Besides resurrecting the sport at the high school, Fitch launched a Frank Gotch tournament for youths from 3rd grade to high school.
His plan was to start grooming prospects early. It worked. By 1968, Humboldt had a state championship wrestling team. By the time Fitch retired in 1985, a dozen of his wrestlers had won a combined 21 individual state titles.
Frenzied rivalries with neighboring towns were stirred by his success.
“I remember a match where we were the visitors and the home team made up a huge deficit in the final three matches, but I knew we were far enough ahead that we’d win by one point when it was over, “Fitch recalled.
As time ran out in the final match, he said, “I was pointing to the clock and the score, but the crowd thought I was giving them the finger and went completely berserk. There was a near-riot.”
Recent Humboldt High teams haven’t equaled those under Fitch.
“We still have a lot of pride in wrestling, “said Phil Monson, who is sports editor, staff reporter and photographer for the Humboldt Independent weekly newspaper. “Wrestling is still big here, passed on from generation to generation. Dual meets on Thursday nights are still big events.”
And Humboldt High still produces state champions such as Luke Satern, a 135-pound titlist last February.
All of that is more than enough to perpetuate the legacy of Gotch, whose official record of 154 victories and six losses included an 88-match winning streak from 1906-15.
“It’s hard to imagine someone of his stature living here, “Monson said.
By keeping Gotch’s legend alive, he added, “We’d like to make the world stand still long enough to recapture that.”
Vivien Hansen and fellow librarian Nina Gower produced a book and news clippings about the wrestler from a shelf and drawer at the Humboldt Public Library.
“Newcomers to town find out who Frank Gotch was pretty quickly, “she said. “I did when I came here in 1966.”
Relative newcomer Arnulfo Galvan, a Mexican-born Californian who moved to Humboldt four years ago and opened a Mexican restaurant, is planning to decorate his establishment’s party room with images of Gotch.
“Some people asked me about him, and I didn’t know, “Galvan said. “So I went to the library, and they got me copies of some photos and pictures of him.
“I think people will like him in the party room. He’s famous here.”
If that sentiment needed further validation, a current Iowa wrestling icon provided it.
Dan Gable won an Olympic gold medal in 1972, compiled a 181-1 record in high school in Waterloo and at Iowa State and coached Iowa to 15 national championships. He learned of Gotch from Chapman.
In his research thereafter, Gable said: “I was stunned at Gotch’s dominance, taking on all comers, and at the way he trained, sometimes going into the fields and running 15 miles. His dedication had an influence on me as a coach.
“Frank Gotch to me is a very popular name that I’m proud to be associated with, but I didn’t know that when I was a young wrestler.”
Now that Chapman has helped make a contemporary athletic hero and his generation of Iowans aware of their wrestling heritage, he wants to do the same for Chicagoans.
After all, he said, because Gotch had a famous and fearsome rival in Hackenschmidt, “the two most important wrestling matches in history were in Chicago.”
And Chapman has not given up hope his “Holy Grail””film of the Comiskey Park rematch”still exists somewhere, “in a storage bin, in someone’s attic or in some lost corner of some historic building.”
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