Gorgeous George: The Outrageous Bad-Boy Wrestler Who Created American Pop Culture

By John Capouya

This is the first-ever biography of the legendary wrestler Gorgeous George, filled with incredible never-before-told stories. George directly influenced the likes of Muhammad Ali, who took his bragging and boasting from George; James Brown, who began to wear sequined capes onstage after seeing George on TV; John Waters, whose films featured the outrageous drag queen Divine as an homage to George; and too many wrestlers to count. Amid these pop culture discoveries are firsthand accounts of the pro wrestling game from the 1930s to the 1960s.

The ideal American male used to be stoic, quiet, and dignified. But for a young couple struggling to make ends meet, in the desperation born of the lingering Depression and wartime rationing, an idea was hatched that changed the face of American popular culture, an idea so bold, so over-the-top and absurd, that it was perfect. That idea transformed journeyman wrestler George Wagner from a dark-haired, clean-cut good guy to a peroxide-blond braggart who blatantly cheated every chance he got. Crowds were stunned—they had never seen anything like this before—and they came from miles around to witness it for themselves.

Suddenly George—guided by Betty, his pistol of a wife—was a draw. With his golden tresses grown long and styled in a marcel, George went from handsome to . . . well . . . gorgeous overnight, the small, dank wrestling venues giving way to major arenas. As if the hair wasn't enough, his robes—unmanly things of silk, lace, and chiffon in pale pinks, sunny yellows, and rich mauves—were but a prelude to the act: the regal entrance, the tailcoat-clad valet spraying the mat with perfume, the haughty looks and sneers for the "peasants" who paid to watch this outrageously prissy hulk prance around the ring. How they loved to see his glorious mane mussed up by his manly opponents. And how they loved that alluringly alliterative name . . . Gorgeous George . . . the self-proclaimed Toast of the Coast, the Sensation of the Nation!

All this was timed to the arrival of that new invention everyone was talking about—television. In its early days, professional wrestling and its larger-than-life characters dominated prime-time broadcasts—none more so than Gorgeous George, who sold as many sets as Uncle Miltie.

Fans came in droves—to boo him, to stick him with hatpins, to ogle his gowns, and to rejoice in his comeuppance. He was the man they loved to hate, and his provocative, gender-bending act took him to the top of the entertainment world. America would never be the same again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 19, 2008
• ISBN: 9780061982637

John Capouya

John Capouya is a professor of journalism and writing at the University of Tampa. He was formerly an editor at Newsweek, the New York Times, SmartMoney magazine, and New York Newsday, among other places. He is the author of Real Men Do Yoga and has contributed to numerous publications, including Sports Illustrated, Travel & Leisure, and Life. He and his wife, the artist and photo editor Suzanne Williamson, live in Tampa and New York City.

Book preview

PRELUDE

There was time, the wrestler thought, for one last look in the mirror. It was a thought that came to him often; not just out of vanity, but due also to a lingering disbelief at what he saw there.

A few short years ago, he saw George Wagner. His hair was dark, nearly black. He was handsome with rugged features, a muscular athlete in his twenties with strongly defined biceps, a broad back, and imposing V-shaped thighs. In the late 1930s and early 1940s he looked earnest and uncomplicated, like an ambitious professional wrestler—not the biggest at five-foot-nine or -ten and 185 pounds—who’s trying hard but hasn’t quite made it yet. His good looks and appealing mien made him a babyface, the wrestling term for the grappler who plays the good guy in the ring, as opposed to the villain, or heel. Like all wrestlers of that era, he wore plain dark trunks and black shoes.

On this night in 1949 he sees Gorgeous George. Standing before a full-length mirror in the locker room at the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles, the man has been transformed. He still carries the same Wagner body, but now it’s covered, made practically irrelevant, by his shining, floor-length, quilted pink satin robe. The lining and lapels are a contrasting bright yellow silk; on the robe’s shoulders are epaulets of glimmering sequins. A writer here tonight to write a feature on George for Sport magazine declares that Any woman in town would give her teeth for it. Around his throat George has wrapped a scarf, also silk, shiny, and pink. Peeking out from under the robe’s bottom hem are his small, almost dainty, size-eight-and-a-half feet in white patent-leather wrestling boots.

His hair, too, is strikingly—wildly—different. What was short, dark, and straight is now a shrieking platinum blond, long on the sides and in the back. It’s set in a woman’s hairdo of myriad curls and waves known as the marcel. Every wrestling fan and practically anyone with a television set knows that this style was created for him by Frank and Joseph of Hollywood. George has a big head; as generations of actors and news anchors will go on to prove, this is an asset on the TV screen. With the halo of bright curls surrounding it, his head looks positively massive, floating above the bright pink expanse of his robe. Through oversight or intention his eyebrows are still dark, though that odd detail may be the least startling thing about him.

His demeanor, his affect, is jarringly different. Gone is the determined seriousness, the willingness and eagerness to please. Still watching himself in the mirror, George draws himself up higher, puffing out his chest and cocking his head upward in a parody of imperial haughtiness. He’s become some queenly brute, a pampered, pompous glamour puss with a world-class attitude. Gorgeous George now insists on being introduced in the arenas as the Toast of the Coast and the Sensation of the Nation; he also likes to be called the Human Orchid, a sobriquet meant to indicate that he’s a flower of rare and delicate beauty. Fittingly, the prima donna of the mats will appear on the TV show Queen for a Day. Soon he will codify this transformation by legally changing his name from George Wagner to Gorgeous George. Between the black-haired nights of the past and tonight’s post–World War II platinum spectacle, another change has taken place as well: Unlike his previous incarnation, the Gorgeous One is a rich and famous man.

Now thirty-five years old, George the sissified brute has become the ultimate wrestling villain, the (questionable) man the fans love to hate. When he parades slowly and regally to the ring a bit later, his bearing is disdainful amid the fans’ catcalls, whistles, and boos, that of an exalted personage who, through some misfortune, finds himself among the basest commoners. Peasants! he spits out. The mat addicts, as the sporting press likes to call them, hurl wadded-up programs, peanuts, coins, and even lit cigarettes at the heel. When he reaches the border around the ring, the apron, George turns and faces his tormentors. You’re all ignorant peasants! he informs them, waving his right arm away dismissively. For good measure he declares: You’re beneath contempt! This brings absolute roars from the crowd.

Back in the locker room, before George’s entrance, a taller, thinner, balding man appears in the mirror behind him, wearing a long black morning coat with tails. This mustachioed gentleman plays the role of manservant or valet, a dignified Jeeves-like character who goes by the name Jeffrey Jefferies. Over the years there will be many different valets, including several iterations of Jefferies, before George turns the helpmate role over to his second wife. He calls her his valette, pronounced val-et-tay, which he blithely tells everyone is the correct French way to say it. The valet helps settle the gleaming satin robe across the wrestler’s broad shoulders. George tells reporters, who breathlessly relay this information to the public, that he has eighty-eight of these custom-made creations. It’s the valet’s job—privilege, really—to keep a chart of which ones the master wears when, so he doesn’t appear in the same finery twice in any one venue. One night it’s the silver lamé and the next it might be the lace number, the one with apple blossoms sewn on its bodice, or the gown with the protruding bustle made of lavender turkey feathers. Or perhaps one of several gowns trimmed with ermine at the cuffs and collars. George recently held forth before a throng of reporters on just which furs might be adequate to grace the Gorgeous corpus. Mink is so mediocre, he declared. I will wear nothing less than ermine on my ring robes. He explained further that I owe it to my fans to wear nothing but the most costly and resplendent outfits money can buy.

Tonight’s action is being broadcast live on KTLA, the most-watched station in Los Angeles, and will later be distributed on kinescope, a sixteen-millimeter film of a television broadcast, to cities across the country. Television announcer Dick Lane tells the viewers at home that George pays as much as $1,900 for a single robe. Like the number of robes in his collection, this is a huge exaggeration, but no matter. An American audience still predisposed to believe what it hears—still wanting to believe it, perhaps—is mightily impressed. In 1949, a new car costs $1,650, and gasoline is twenty-six cents a gallon.

Now Jefferies begins to fix George’s curls, a blond Medusa’s mass, in place with what look like gold-colored bobby pins. However, His Gorgeousness insists these objets be called Georgie pins—who, pray tell, is Bobby? At his countless public appearances George will hand them out by way of inducting fans into the Gorgeous George Fan Club. But before relinquishing the trinket he makes the recipient raise his right hand and repeat this oath:

I solemnly swear and promise I will never confuse this gold Georgie pin with a common, ordinary bobby pin, so help me, Gorgeous George.

President Truman’s wife, Bess, is reportedly among those who have taken the oath.

Catching the valet’s eye in the mirror, George grins at his boyhood friend Jacob Brown, aka Jefferies. Okay, Jake, he says, let’s go to work. His voice isn’t high or thin, exactly, just more than the resonating chamber formed by his barrel chest would indicate. Time to give the people what they want. The Olympic, built on L.A.’s Grand Avenue for the 1932 Olympic Games, is already full to its 10,500 capacity. Because Gorgeous George is headlining tonight, the crowd contains many more women than usual, and in the clamor for the Georgie pins they are the most vocal. George’s vain posturing makes the male crunch customers furious, but women, especially older women, are his biggest fans—to them he’s an extremely sensitive, misunderstood lad the other brutes should stop picking on.

An announcement rings out over the PA system: Ladies and gentlemen, Gorgeous George is coming! The fans, men and women both formally dressed to today’s eyes, stir excitedly; they’ve already waited through the undercard, four or five preliminary matches, and they’re primed for the main event. They want George. However, the next thing the audience will see is not George—not yet—but rather Jefferies walking stiffly erect down the long center aisle toward the ring. His expression is completely deadpan, his movements slow and dignified. Not so the crowd, which erupts in laughter at his progress. In front of him Jefferies carries a big silver tray; on it rests a whisk broom, along with some other accoutrements his master might need, including perfume and smelling salts. Between falls the valet will serve tea from it.

George’s opponent is already in the ring, waiting, wearing some nondescript outfit, the kind George used to wear. When the wrestling begins—when Gorgeous George finally deigns to wrestle—the heel will turn impressively athletic, startlingly fast as he moves from one side of the ring to another. Though it’s not entirely called for in these rigged contests, he does know how to wrestle. Tonight’s script calls for George to play the cowardly heel, and he is ready to answer with kidney punches and eye gouges and other dastardly tricks. George will win, but even more than usual in these fixed bouts, the outcome isn’t really the point, and George’s opponent could be anyone. The main event, what the people paid to see, is Gorgeous George, the strutting star of TV they’re thrilled to watch on their new home screens. Tonight the Olympic fans get to experience him live and in the flesh, to take in his grand entrance and outrageous appearance, his over-the-top flamboyance—his Gorgeosity.

The next announcement booms out through the speakers: Ladies and gentlemen, Gorgeous George is here! But the top of the main aisle is still empty; the headliner hasn’t come just yet. He’s still ensconced in front of the locker-room mirror. At times, and this is one of them, even the Gorgeous One is taken aback. He can’t help but marvel at all that’s happened to him—what he’s made happen, rather. We’ve come a long way, Sweetie, he’ll say to his wife Betty.

Now he looks a little closer into the Olympic glass, scrutinizing this new image, his created second self. The vanity he exudes as Gorgeous George is not entirely an act; throughout his life George Wagner will let few reflective surfaces pass by unexamined. Gazing at his reflection, this transformed man, now a Human Orchid, tries to bring back to his mind’s eye what he used to see there. But he can’t, really; George Wagner is gone. Besides, Gorgeous George likes what he sees, likes it very much. He gives up the search and the moment is quickly past. In the mirror the wrestling diva smiles.

G.G.

ACT ONE

I don’t know if I was made for television, or television was made for me.

—GORGEOUS GEORGE

Chapter 1

THE BIGGEST THING ON TV

More than a half century later, Gorgeous George in all his vainglory remains a bizarre sight. The combination of those feminine robes and ornate hairdo with his masculine features—including a somewhat bulbous nose, broken several times in the ring—is confounding and, perhaps because of that, strangely compelling. Not to mention hilarious. Back in the 1940s, however, for any man, let alone an athlete, to willingly present himself as a loud, perfumed dandy crossbred with a dowager, and a sissified coward to boot, was stranger still; nearly unthinkable. To Americans of that era, George and his Gorgeous ways were truly outrageous—just the reaction the wrestler wanted.

In his heyday the strutting wrestler would be chauffeured around the country in long Cadillac and Packard limousines painted orchid, a shade of lavender, to match his namesake flower. In the early, struggling years before, however, he and his young wife, Betty Hanson, careened around the country in a secondhand sedan, as excited as they were flat broke. George Wagner the handsome babyface wasn’t enough of a drawing card, so as they raced to make it to the next arena they improvised on the fly, Betty pushing for more provocative stunts and George putting them all inimitably across. A tiny woman, less than five feet tall, she was his orchid muse and impish co-conspirator. Betty made his first luxurious robes, dyed his hair that champagne-tinted blond, and she may even have coined that fateful nickname, Gorgeous George. Together they created George’s outrageous identity out of thin air, instinct, and imagination.

To make himself sublimely ridiculous took courage, and what’s more, he and Betty did it all on their own. Unlike the Hollywood movie stars Gorgeous George would later rub egos with, he had no studios supplying him with scripts and directors, or choosing his parts. A feisty usherette at a Eugene, Oregon, movie theater, and a cocky roughneck who barely made it to high school in Houston, they became the writers, directors, publicity agents, wardrobe supervisors, and key grips of their own feature presentation, auteurs in orchid.

After World War II, America was adjusting, re-forming and reassembling itself into what exactly no one knew. But it clearly was going to be different, something new. Then television came and took hold, and Gorgeous George did as much as any single person to ensure that new device became a fixture. He, along with Milton Berle and the lovable Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, were the first true stars of the medium that would change American life, and in that transformation the transformed George became a national celebrity. Just as legions perched eagerly near their radios during the 1930s to follow Seabiscuit’s epic races, millions of postwar Americans gathered—as families, everyone from grandparents to newborns—in front of their massive TV consoles and tiny screens, laughing, hooting, and shaking their heads in disbelief at the Gorgeous One, entranced by the new technology that brought him and their living rooms so vividly to life.

With television showcasing George’s antics, his wacky confreres, and numerous imitators, professional wrestling became hugely popular, an improbably successful industry. In this, the grunt-and-groan game’s golden age, matches aired every night of the week in what is now called prime time. After all the war’s mortal damage, it seemed the country was ready for a cathartic release and a harmless good time. Television, that amazing new appliance, delivered them, with wrestling supplying many of the belly laughs. The boys, as the wrestling promoters called their workers, became well-paid entertainers, and George became the Sensation of the Nation. In 1949 the Washington Post declared NO DOUBT OF IT: GEE GEE’S THE BIGGEST THING IN TV.

In the dozen or so years that followed World War II, he was ubiquitous: Everyone knew Gorgeous George. The Los Angeles Times reported that many women there were having their hair done in a Gorgeous homage. Popular comedians of the day, including Red Skelton, Jack Benny, and Bob Hope, told Gorgeous jokes. Songs were written about him, including one (lyrics by Borget, music by Joseph Furio) with this chorus:

His wavy hair, his dainty air

Are every mama’s pride and joy.

He’s such a pet, you can’t forget

Gorgeous George is just the darlin’est boy

His eau de fleur, his manicure

The way he struts so cute and coy

Will show you why you can’t deny

Gorgeous George is just a bundle of joy.

He reinvented himself, in a unique iteration of our national idea. George Wagner, child of the Great Depression, used his wit and prodigious will, then bent his broad back to create a better destiny. In another classic American scenario, his showmanship, catchy moniker, and the outré persona he played to the hilt transformed this poor boy into one of the country’s highest-paid entertainers. As a youngster, he’d wrestled with his friends in a sawdust pile on the banks of a Houston bayou, and they’d split the change thrown by passersby. By the time he was thirty-five he was taking in $100,000 a year, the same amount the legendary Joe DiMaggio made playing baseball for the Yankees. (One newspaper headline dubbed George Gorgeous Moneybags.) An astonishing percentage of those boyhood buddies became professional wrestlers, too, and after he became a star George would loyally find them work, insisting to promoters who wanted the Gorgeous One that they book his friends as well.

His success was at once hard-earned and an amazing fluke, something that could only have happened when it did. Even more unlikely, and less understood, is Gorgeous George’s remarkable influence. James Brown, the late, great soul singer and entertainer, saw George’s shimmering robes as a young man and was moved to add more splendor and flourish to his shows. The sequined capes and lush robes he wore onstage? That came from the rassler Gorgeous George, he said. For more than fifty years Brown used this glittering array in his legendary live performances, and each night the Godfather of Soul also had a faithful valet attend to him onstage.

Muhammad Ali sat right next to Gorgeous George and heard him declaim on his wrestling superiority and manly beauty. This was in 1961, when the boxer was just nineteen years old and his name was still Cassius Clay. Then Clay, a manly beauty himself, went to the matches at George’s invitation and saw him inflame a sellout crowd with his boastful arrogance. The fans were there, the boxer realized, to see this man get beat. And his talking did it. As Muhammad Ali, the lethal braggart, his most frequent and strident proclamations were I am the prettiest and I am the greatest! Few realize how closely those boasts echo the great wrestler’s song of himself—they were vintage Gorgeousness.

Clearly, Gorgeous George’s flamboyant showmanship didn’t take hold with his other most prominent student, Bob Dylan. Instead, a chance encounter with the wrestler when the teenage Robert Zimmerman was a distinctly unpromising musician in Hibbing, Minnesota, convinced him that he could succeed as a performer, that he, too, had the charismatic gifts—Dylan called them lightning and vitality—that the Gorgeous One so clearly overflowed with. To him George was a mighty spirit. Like George Wagner and Cassius Clay, Robert Zimmerman reincarnated himself, changing his name and taking on the persona of a troubadour poet, a Dylan.

Three Gorgeous disciples, among the most important American cultural figures of the twentieth century, they changed sports and entertainment, and more, inspiring countless heirs, descendants, and imitators. They had it in them, of course; George didn’t grant them their genius. All of these men freely acknowledged, though, that the wrestler helped draw out their gifts and give shape to their artistry. Gorgeous George, the greatest, silliest practitioner of a faux, lowbrow sport—whose work seemed so utterly, intentionally unedifying—can reasonably be called a forgotten father of our popular culture.

When George Wagner grew up watching movie cowboy Tom Mix and screen detective Bulldog Drummond, male American icons were heroes and good guys. Villains, almost never. A remarkable man, worthy of our attention and devotion, was stoic and brave—like Sergeant York, the deeply religious World War I combat hero. That was the prevailing model of masculine virtue in entertainment as well, and Gary Cooper, the man who played Sergeant York in the movies, took on those qualities in the public imagination. A real man was also humble and unfailingly modest, like another hero Cooper portrayed, baseball slugger Lou Gehrig, in Pride of the Yankees. After World War II, General Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president, and one of his most admired traits was that even he, the conquering hero on a world stage, was a steadfastly modest man.

Not George. He made a spectacle of himself when that word was still a term of disapproval. The strutting showman shouted Look at me! with his whole being, issuing an irresistible invitation to share in his self-infatuation—or to condemn him for it. Gorgeous George certainly didn’t invent the pervasive culture of narcissism that followed him, but he may well have been a catalyst, a powerful accelerant. He was an avatar of conspicuous consumption well before that term became cliché, spending and showing off wildly in a country just coming out of wartime rationing. Immodesty personified, he put on a visually dazzling display, then praised himself for it. Along with his pupil Muhammad Ali, George helped make antipathy currency and infamy a profitable path to fame, something today’s athletes, hip-hoppers, and marketers clearly understand. And yet the wrestling audiences also came to love the Human Orchid, or at least the way he so reliably, thrillingly provoked them. As one perceptive writer noted at the time, they hated him with affection.

Just as daring in his day, the gussied-up Human Orchid was also one of the first male celebrities to flaunt a sexually ambiguous, quasi-effeminate, vaguely gay persona, and to profit nicely from it. In a 1948 story on the Gorgeous George phenomenon Newsweek magazine noted that both in and out of the ring he affects a…swishy manner, and effeminate fragrance. At that time any hint of femininity in a man was scorned and, except in a few bohemian enclaves, homosexuality considered depraved. Against this backdrop George strutted into women’s beauty parlors, reporters in tow, and cheekily demanded to have his hair marcelled. He and Betty sensed a change in sensibilities, one that meant the American public was willing to be engaged—both enraged and entertained—by a man who flitted to the ring, as George described his saucy stroll. Filmmaker John Waters said it was Gorgeous George’s silly, scary gender-bending that led him to create his own bizarre characters, including those played by Divine, the wrestler-size cross-dresser who starred in Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Hairspray.

When the wrestling began, however, George became a battling macho athlete, taking punishment and dishing out pain with nary a swish audible or visible. A Playboy magazine writer would later dub him a killer fruitcake, and it was the way George synthesized those two conflicting meanings, his shifting mixture of butch and belle, that made him unique, sui gorgeous. From Little Richard and Liberace—who a furious George claimed stole my whole act, including the candelabra!—in the 1950s to David Bowie and Boy George decades later, many other entertainers have transgressed successfully in the sexual arena. This line of provocateurs may have become a full circle in the late 1990s when Stephanie Bellars, a minimally dressed woman with maximal breasts, wrestled professionally under the name Gorgeous George.

Earlier than most, George and Betty saw the value in shock value; indeed, the young couple helped put it there. They were masters of publicity, too; before the words media and hype were in use, much less combined, George and Betty understood that a press-pleasing persona, spin, and savvy public relations were the ultimate submission holds. Their success presaged the day tennis star Andre Agassi famously declared, in a television commercial for Canon cameras, that Image is everything.

George’s fame outlasted his marriage to Betty, but his good fortune did not. After his spectacular rise he would arc downward just as steeply, then die young—he was not yet fifty years old. When he died in Los Angeles in 1963 the city council adjourned to show its respect and passed a resolution honoring his memory. Gorgeous George is buried under a small bronze plaque in Valhalla Memorial Park in North Hollywood, near a much bigger monument to Oliver Hardy. Just before his death George Wagner—by then he was legally, completely Gorgeous George—gave an interview from his hospital bed. In it he described the night at the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles when he felt his transformation was complete and the rise of the Human Orchid assured.

I’ll never forget my first walk down the aisle when my hair was blond, and I was trailed by the haunting scent of perfume, he said fondly. On that occasion the Gorgeous One wore a purple or orchid-colored robe, festooned with cloth flowers sewn onto the flashy fabric. When I flitted down that aisle, George continued, I got the biggest ovation of my life. They couldn’t announce the match. The announcer burst out laughing, but I didn’t mind. I was a sensation.

Chapter 2

HARRISBURG RATS

Gorgeous George reveled in slinging hooey—in making himself fabulous, he became a dedicated fabulist. I’m actually a trained psychologist, he told reporters and his more gullible acquaintances. This specialized background, he explained, gave him great insight into, and mental mastery over, his less sophisticated ring opponents, whom he referred to as the brutes. Sporting scribes of the day, whose obsession with facts was easily surpassed by the value they placed on entertaining copy, passed this whopper along verbatim and it’s had remarkable staying power: A 1998 A&E television documentary on professional wrestling, for instance, appears to have swallowed it whole.

Like the original hard-wrestling George Wagner, the unvarnished truth lacked a certain gloss. What people really wanted, he found, was something more lustrous, and George would masterfully shine them on. He didn’t introduce blarney and ballyhoo into pro wrestling; in the grunt-and-groan game, as in the traveling carnivals that spawned it, lies, exaggerations, and misdirection were not just habitual but fundamental. George simply raised them to their highest exponents. No subject, it seems, was too trivial to be shucked or jived. George insisted he was born in Seward, Nebraska, while his birth certificate makes clear that George Raymond Wagner first stepped between the worldly ropes in Butte, Nebraska, on March 24, 1915. He was the firstborn son of Howard James Wagner, twenty-three years old, and Bessie May Francis, nineteen, and the family lived in Phoenix, a nearby farming community. In the next five years the Wagners moved several times within Nebraska and in Iowa, and George’s brother Elmer was born. Carl, the youngest and last child, came along three years later.

In his private life George was less of a liar, but not necessarily more of a revealer. He didn’t record things, including, to his detriment, his income and expenses. He kept no journals or diaries and neither his wife Betty nor his daughter, Carol, could remember getting so much as a postcard from him during his twenty years or so on the road. He was a caller; he phoned. George and Betty talked about her past and childhood, but never his. Married to him for more than thirteen years, she never knew when George’s mother died, for example, or whether the Wagners went to church. She only knew that he grew up in Houston.

Actually, it was Harrisburg, Texas. In 1925, when the Wagners moved to what is now a neighborhood in Houston’s East End, Harrisburg was its own city of roughly 3,500 people. John Richardson Harris, a New Yorker, founded it in 1824 on the subtropical, swampy acres where Bray’s Bayou met the Buffalo Bayou, which ran south and east to the Gulf of Mexico. Houston was an outgrowth of that city created twelve years later by two more New Yorkers, the Allen brothers, who bought the land to the northwest along the bayou. Lumber and cotton made the area’s first great fortunes and then, just after the turn of the century, oil was discovered at Spindletop, about ninety miles east of Houston, and Humble Field, twenty miles north. The Buffalo Bayou was dredged to create a deeper shipping channel, and the new oil companies built refineries along its banks, including some at the wide mouth bordering Harrisburg. Other industries set up floating shop there as well.

The Wagners’ house on Avenue E was less than a five-minute walk from the bayou. Just three or four blocks in the other direction the streetcar line ran into Houston from a triangular turnaround between Broadway, Harrisburg’s main drag, and Eighty-first Street. Few people owned private cars, so everyone—workers, shoppers, and students—relied on the streetcars; the fare was seven cents, or four tokens for a quarter. With their metal antennae reaching for the wires above, the enclosed orange cars hummed along, past Sallee’s Music Store, an A&P, the Boulevard movie theater, and the Wayside Café. Private jitneys, Ford Model T touring cars often crammed with seven people, were also popular, and they cost only five cents ( jitney was slang for a nickel). In December 1927 Houston annexed Harrisburg and the streetcars were gradually replaced by buses; by that time the fare was a dime.

Like the other thirty houses crowded into their short block on Avenue E, George’s home was a one-story, wooden structure with a peaked roof just high enough for an attic or half floor above the living space. Two stone steps in front were framed by wooden columns. This was a shotgun house, a plain narrow rectangle set with the short end toward the street; there were no sidewalks. The neighbors’