The Texas Tornado: Why June Byers Deserves a Place in Wrestling History Despite Soap Opera Drama

Part One of my Case for Her Hall of Fame Bid

In 1996, the Dean of wrestling journalists Dave Meltzer announced the Wrestling Observer Hall of Fame. Chosen on a long plane ride to Tokyo with former Pro Wrestling Torch columnist John D. Williams, the initial class included most of the giants of wrestling history, a litany of names you can recite off the top of your head—Hogan, Thesz, Londos, Rikidozan. The cream of the crop, to borrow a phrase from another giant from that first year.

Only five women were part of that inaugural list of greats. Just one of them, Mildred Burke, was an American. It’s a blindspot the Hall has never quite rectified. To date only 12 of the more than 250 acts granted this ultimate virtual honor are women.

Although you can make a strong case for many pioneers of the “gentler sex”, most conspicuous by her absence was June Byers, Burke’s successor and the connective tissue between the era dominated by Burke and her husband Billy Wolfe and the decades controlled by Lillian Ellison, better known as the “Fabulous Moolah” who succeeded them. As the years go by and the number of people who knew Byers or even saw her wrestle dwindle to a null set, it seems less and less likely this mistake will ever be corrected.

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Pro wrestling doesn’t have a history. It has a lore, a collection of tales we tell each other to understand a business that often defies belief.

Where does the truth end and the fantastical story begin? It’s often hard to say. In wrestling, just like the old west, when the legend becomes fact, well, you print the legend. All too often, the person telling the tale doesn’t remember how to distinguish between the two anyway.

I preface my story this way because it’s hard to say what about June Byers was real and what was the product of a savvy media pitch, a story to tell local reporters. Good color as they used to say.

Born DeAlva Silby in 1922, even her ring name comes with several tales attached. Did she love June bugs, the rusty brown scarab beetles that scuttled around the South just as the temperature started to become unbearable in the summer? Or did her parents take so long naming her, their 12th child, that May turned to June before they settled on a moniker?

Perhaps neither, maybe both.

She was billed at various times from Houston or Hollywood or Buffalo or Tulsa, attention to detail not always the strong suit of the newspapermen covering a pseudo-sport.

And so it goes, with just about everything.

What we can say for sure is this—after training with a family friend named “Shorty” Roberts and a tough tutelage taking her beatings from the likes of Mae Young, “the scufflin hillbilly” Elvira Snodgrass and Ann Laverne, fearsome of reputation thanks to her famous cauliflower ear, June Byers was a wrestling star in high demand. On the road hundreds of days out of every year, she worked significant matches in every state that allowed women’s wrestling (New York was the most famous of the holdouts). Almost always in the main event or prominently billed as a featured attraction, Byers and her cohort of “girl wrestlers” brought fans out in droves.

“The breakout of World War II would prove especially lucrative,” Pat Laprade wrote in Sisterhood of the Squared Circle. “As millions of men joined the service following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, wrestling promoters struggled to retain talent and keep their cards filled…By the early 1940s, 40 percent of the national audience was women, and more women wanted to become wrestlers.”

Perhaps attracted at first by the titilating prospect of two women rolling around in little more than a bathing suit, male fans and media alike generally left raving about the high speed, violent spectacle they’d just witnessed. Big and strong at 5’7” and around 160 solid pounds, Byers was a real athlete, trained to wrestle for keeps if the situation called for it. Notoriously rough, she’d lick her hand and deliver slaps to the chest that reverberated throughout the building, often leaving opponents bruised and battered.

“Like ground up hamburger,” one opponent complained.

“A generally murderous performance…and great show,” a newspaper columnist proclaimed.

Two sides, one coin.

New York columnist Earl Wilson once asked to witness one of her famous blows in person, recoiling and wincing when she took off her 16-carat diamond ring and whalloped wrestler Dot Dotson right in front of him.

June Byers did not go anywhere to play.

A smiling heel, she trademarked a clever ruse where she’d pick and opponent up as if to bodyslam them, only to carry her hapless foe around the ring, her back to the referee while choking them by the throat. Then she’d slam the poor girl into the corner and deliver a powerful knee drop.

Her finishing hold, the famous Byers Bridge, was a pinning combination that, not by chance, left her exposed to the audience’s depraved glare, both technical and scandalous at once, especially for an era when women were generally seen as gentle and demure.

Byers was also a show-woman, bejeweled whenever in public with diamonds and furs, resplendent too on her way to the ring in gear that often cost her as much as a $1000, a fortune at the time. She was said to design her own robes, some of the most elaborate in wrestling, sequined-trimmed and made of satin.

“Morever, she has a passion for dainty lingerie, dressy gowns, fur coats and diamonds,” The Atlanta Constitution reported, “and one of her real fears is that she will be caught out in public with her fingernail polish chipped.”

Her taste for finer things extended beyond couture. Byers traveled the country in style in expensive cars, racking up more road time than just about anyone in the business who wasn’t named Lou Thesz, the NWA’s industrious male champion.

“I used to average about 125,000 miles a year while wrestling between traveling by plane and car,” Byers told historian Jim Melby. “I lived my life by minutes not hours. I had things down to a pretty good science of just how much time I had to leave for doing interviews, training, wrestling, etc.”

While all pro wrestling claims should rightly be met with skepticism, the newspaper clippings I’ve compiled give this one an air of truth. Byers was everywhere, generally wrestling multiple times as week. I’ve tracked her from Maine to Washington, from the Dakotas down to Miami and almost everywhere in between.

While the don of women’s wrestling Billy Wolfe may have collected more than his share from the women he booked around the country, both in money (his fee was said to be 50 percent of their earnings) and on the casting couch, there was plenty left for the wrestlers. His wife, the diminutive yet muscle-bound champion Mildred Burke, allegedly cleared as much as $50,000 a year (more than $650,000 in today’s money). Her understudies could hit $12,000 in a good year, and the lavish life style was a shoot. It cost Byers once big time—in 1954 she and her then-husband, Wolfe’s son G. Billy, were victims of an armed robbery, the culprits getting away with more than $20,000 in cash and jewels.

But, generally, the bling was also effective marketing. Byers would go to the newspaper office wherever she wrestled and show off her diamond rings. An article, complete with picture, was often the result of this charm offensive.

“Wrestling ladies look like ‘Vogue’ one startled interviewer shared while describing Byers’ stunning appearance, frankly amazed that someone in such a rough business was so refined. She “arrived in well-tailored slacks and sweater. Over her shoulders was a leaf-green gabardine coat and her shoulder-bag was of hand-tooled Mexican leather design.”

When the girls were in town, everybody knew it.

Byers, tabbed in the papers and behind-the-scenes as a potential future champion, was a regular opponent of the forever champion Burke, a gorgeous dynamo who had become famous around the country for both her wrestling prowess and her fitness.

Mildred Burke

The Los Angeles Police hung a poster of Burke in their offices, to shame wrestlers who might be slipping out of shape. She once did 100 body bridges on a desk in the offices of Ripley’s Believe it Or Not to earn a place in their book of legends. Mostly, however, she wrestled—as many as 6000 matches by some accounts. Her claim to the championship of the world dated back to 1938.

“In the history of professional sports there is no record to match that of the brilliant queen of the world’s feminine wrestlers,” the Chattanooga Daily Times proclaimed. “Even Joe Louis suffered defeats and so did Jack Dempsey, but the great Queen Mildred seems to go on and on.”

The two drew big crowds around the country, first meeting in December of 1947 in Tulsa, Oklahoma in front of a whopping crowd of 5500.

“I was matched with Mildred twice,” Byers told the local press, “but something happened to stop it both times. Once I got a collar bone broken a few days before our match and it had to be called off. The next time we were to meet I got my nose broken. I think I’ve got a chance to beat her.”

Byers gave the champion a “few anxious moments”, battering her with “both fists and feet”—but Burke managed to defend her claim in straight falls. The story would play out much like this around the circuit, with Burke using science to defeat the larger challenger’s roughhousing. It was a smash hit most everywhere, topped by a reported 15,000 in Boston. While, it was actually more like 7000, it was an enormous audience for the time. They did 6000 in Memphis, set a near-record in Nashville and had fans from New York, where Byers had established a following as an early star of television wrestling, crossing the border in droves to see them wrestle in New Jersey.

“T.V. certainly changed the nature of the sport,” she told Melby. “You had to learn to become a more dynamic performer as you had a smaller medium and time element to work with. Change is the only constant thing in life.”

Wherever the two went, whether in tandem or separately, the crowds were sure to follow, as Byers was an attraction in her own right.

• Two thousand in Tennessee to see Byers and Wolfe’s favorite paramour, the lovely Nell Stewart who was styled to look like Hollywood star Betty Grable.

• More than 5000 in Verdun, just outside Montreal to watch her fight Rose Evans in a famously brutal match, thousands more in Calgary where she battled Penny Banner at the Stampede Corral.

• Three thousand in Cincinnati to watch her make Gloria Barattini, a trained soprano said to be a European heiress, sing.

There are hundreds of these tales of her various triumphs and failures, the stories taking place in a hundred venues throughout the United States in the days before most cities had large, dedicated venues for sports and entertainment the way they do today. Billy worked all his ‘Girls’ hard and Byers was no exception. Operating from a once lavish suite at the decaying Park Hotel in Columbus, Ohio, by 1951 Wolfe, according to Burke’s biographer Jeff Leen, was “managing thirty-two women wrestlers with another dozen in training in a business that put on nine shows a day nationwide.”

Byers and partner Millie Stafford pose with the “$1000” trophy.

In addition to her pursuit of Burke, Byers became a tag team specialist, winning the championship with five different partners, including pioneering African-American star Ethel Johnson. The prize, in this case, wasn’t a pair of title belts—it was an enormous trophy said to be valued at $1000. The matches that survive on video show wild, frantic action mixed in with a fair share of humor, violence and even some actual wrestling now and then. She was booked regularly in return bouts, almost always discussed in the press as a local favorite.

Mildred Burke was the champion. But June Byers was a star.

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The most famous match between Burke and Byers, of course, came years later as inter-personal affairs left the Wolfe empire fraying. Wolfe had replaced Burke with Nell “The Alabama Assassin” Stewart in his personal life and wanted to make the same switch in the ring as well.

“Ensconced now in the Park Hotel, with diamonds sprouting all over him and surrounded by dozens of attractive women that he could force to sleep with him, he began to have bad thoughts about me,” Burke wrote in her unpublished autobiography. “He began to think that my integrity as a champion was just another commodity. I was something that you could throw away when you were done with it—like an old shoe.”

Though the couple had been living apart for almost a decade (and Burke was also carrying on a long-term affair with his son), she had no intention of giving Billy his way. Angered by his constant infidelity and the way his hands always reached into her pocket, she refused to lose the only thing she had firm control of—her pride.

Burke and her step-son/lover

Wolfe, in turn, refused to grant her a divorce, even when his son begged him to allow the two lovers to finally unite in matrimony. He’d allowed them to carry on as they chose, even buying the couple a house in Los Angeles. But the public becoming aware of this cuckoldry was a step too far. G. Billy was given permission to marry any wrestler in his father’s stable—except Burke and Stewart.

This was reality television before such a thing existed, a telenovela but conducted in private, a soap opera almost too scandalous to believe. If it seemed impossible that it wouldn’t explode in everyone’s face, have no fear. The end was nigh. Shortly after his embarrassing request of his father, G.Billy and Mildred were involved in a terrible car accident. G. Billy ended up in a full-body cast. Burke came off the road with five broken ribs and a serious neck injury.

And Billy Wolfe began looking ahead to life after his estranged wife.

First he reconciled himself with G. Billy, bringing his son back into the fold. Then, his power once again unquestioned, he looked to remove Burke from her perch.

In her late 30s at the time, the end near for any athlete, she began fearing a double-cross. Some would even describe it as paranoia. But is it really paranoia if they are out to get you? Lou Thesz himself, privy to the sport’s many machinations, warned her to “watch yourself in the clinches Millie.”

Steadfast in her refusal to lose to Stewart, even after a brutal parking lot beating at the hands of both Wolfes, she eventually filed for divorce. A settlement with her husband saw her buy rights to the business and the title belt for $30,000. Billy, per their agreement, would stop promoting women’s wrestling for five years.

Instead, Byers (who had actually married G. Billy Wolfe in April 8, 1953, as if this wasn’t already sordid enough) and the elder Wolfe’s girlfriend Stewart formed Girls Wrestling Enterprises with most of the women from Wolfe’s former operation joining them in the new venture.

“Since the new enterprise was run by his girlfriend and his daughter-in-law and not Billy Wolfe himself, the arrangement nominally appeared to get around his noncompete agreement with Burke,” Leen wrote. “But it was obvious to everybody what was really happening.”

The NWA, uncomfortable with a female associate, stuck with Wolfe as well. Burke had purchased what was essentially a shell. Byers, eight years into her career, was suddenly living her dream.

“I have one ambition being a wrestler,” she’d told a syndicated columnist in a 1950 article, “That ambition is to eventually be a promoter of the sport. You can say I’ve had a five year course in promotion work. I have wrestled in every state in the union as well as in some foreign countries and I have learned something about ballyhoo and promotions. Yes, I’d like to become the first girl wrestler ever turned promoter.”

Now, through marriage and merit, Byers was getting the chance. Among the first order of business was crowning a new champion. A week after her wedding, a tournament was arranged in Baltimore for promoter Ed Contos, a Wolfe crony. But the incumbent wasn’t going down without a fight.

Burke petulantly informed the press of Wolfe’s plan to crown Stewart, sending a telegram to the local paper the week of the contest spoiling the results.

“Congratulations…for promoting a tournament in which Nell Stewart is to win from nobody. I wrestled Nell last year in seven matches for the title and defeated her seven straight falls.”

Forced to call an audible or risk an even worse newspaper expose, Byers beat Stewart in the finals instead, becoming the new champion in the 10-woman, one-night tourney.

“Body slamming, flying mares, body scissors and quite a good deal of hair pulling enlivened a show,” the Baltimore Sun reported, “the audience, made up mainly of men, enjoyed from bell to bell.”

Two weeks later, Stewart and Billy Wolfe were married in New Mexico, not a bad consolation prize. Byers had her sights on a different dream match—one more chance at Mildred Burke. And this time she intended to win.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer.