If there was ever a true champion for wrestling fans, especially in the Carolinas and Virginia, it was Bob Caudle. And a champion needs a belt.
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| Bob Caudle with his own title belt, a gift from the Mid-Atlantic Gateway, at his home in Raleigh, NC. |
Originally published on the Mid-Atlantic Gateway.
One of the things that I've always felt made Bob Caudle so special to wrestling fans from several generations is the fact that he was the steady constant on our televisions every week for near 34 years. The wrestlers came and went, but Bob was the constant. Almost every single week from when he took over for Ray Reeve at WRAL in Raleigh on All Star Wrestling in 1961 to the last days of Smokey Mountain Wrestling in the 1990s, Bob was the constant.
He is best remembered as the voice of Mid-Atlantic Wrestling throughout the 1970s and 1980s. His friendly smile and welcoming voice was a warm embrace every Saturday afternoon, and the relationship he established with fans transcended that time to where even well into the 2010s, Bob was attending fan conventions and received warmly by fans.
If there was ever a true champion for wrestling fans, especially in the Carolinas and Virginia, it was Bob Caudle. And a champion needs a belt.
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| The belt on display at my home before making the trip to Raleigh. Also in this photograph are Bob's Hall of Heroes plaque which he gave to me on my 50th birthday (and I treasure), as well as the photograph used for the main plate of the belt. |
The Mid-Atlantic Gateway presented Bob with a special, one of a kind, commemorative belt paying tribute to the Voice of Mid-Atlantic Wrestling. It was presented to him and his wife Jackie on June 17, 2024 at his home in Raleigh.
I wasn't sure how Bob would receive it. While he loves reminiscing about the "old days," he generally is not at all interested in holding on to wrestling memorabilia. Soon to be 94 years old, and in a no-holds-bar match against the ravages of father-time, Bob said it will be a tough task for anyone to take this title away from him. "They will bury me with this!" he said with a big smile.
It was a nice moment with a truly wonderful man.
- D. Bourne
See All Posts that feature Bob Caudle
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Crockett TV Production / Local Promos
The following is a transcript from a brief segment of the popular "Cornette's Drive Thru" podcast. Jim Cornette shed light on the process Jim Crockett Promotions went through in the 1980s to duplicate and distribute their TV shows. He also covered the technical process by which they inserted the local TV promo segment seach week, taped at the Briarbend Drive garage studio. (The transcript is footnoted with some of our observations as well.)
The discussion took place on Episode #261 of the podcast, about 55 minutes in:
"The way they duplicated their television shows, now this is primitive, but remember this is 40 years ago, and it is actually the way that, you know, small budget promotions operated like this in house up until the times that the territories went away.
Let's say we go to Gaffney, SC, on a Tuesday night and we'd do the syndicated television taping at the college gym there in Gaffney. It's 60 miles from Charlotte, so it's about an hour drive. They owned their own television truck, the NEMO truck - - National Electronics Mobile Operation. They'd drive the truck an hour down to one of these high school or college gym around Charlotte. They'd set up the lights, they'd wire everything, they'd run the cables - - they shoot two hours of television: NWA Worldwide and NWA Pro. And that goes from 7:30 to 10:00. And each show they role live-to-tape, and you know they're gonna put a VTR in, they roll it in the truck. They leave black holes for the commercial spots and for the local promos.*
Then they'd drive the truck back to Charlotte and they'd park it back behind the office at Briarbend. And they'd take the two master tapes in, and - - remember ol' Leonard? The guy that did the night work there that alerted me that they were throwing away the entire film archive of Mid-Atlantic Wrestling when Turner broadcasting took over and bought everything.** Leonard would put the dadgum tapes on, and I don't know how many they could make at the same time, and this was the old one inch video reels, right? So you can imagine, you gotta unroll those and put them on the spool, and get 'em all synced up and everything. And then he would hit the button and they would make multiple duplicates of that master tape at one time. And then he'd do nothing all night but just run 'em back and copy the tapes over and over - - however many they could make at a time times however many, because Wednesday morning about 9:00, Gene Anderson would be in there with Jackie Crockett on the camera and all the top babyfaces and heels would come in and do local promos, from 9:00 in the morning until 3:00 or 4:00 sometimes. And then you'd immediately hop in the car and drive three hours to Raleigh or go to the airport to fly somewhere, whatever the case.
But, what they would do, honest to God, is they would sync the tape up for let's say Philadelphia, we got local promos to do for Philadelphia because we got a show coming up at the Civic Center. So whatever tape was going to the TV station in Philadelphia, they would reel it up to the exact point of the babyface interview segment that needed to be inserted and we'd record those interviews right onto the tape that was actually going to the TV station. And as soon as we did that interview then they'd jump ahead to the heel segment, you know, in between segments 5 and 6 or whatever, and they'd do the two minute and twenty eight second interview for them.
The interviews were 2:28 because they left a second to get in and a second to get out, else wise they're rolling over program***, right? Once the Philly interviews were done, they'd stick it back in the case, put a label on it, and whether it was Klondike Bill or Bunk Harris, whoever that day wasn't going to get chicken at Price's Chicken Coop for lunch****, they would take the tapes to the bus station and put them on a bus to the television station in the city that was going to air it that weekend.
So it went out on Wednesday evening and it got there on Thursday. A lot of promotions did this, they would put posters and fliers for sponsors in small towns, they'd put 'em on a bus in those days, they'd put the TV tape on a bus. And they used to have a thing called Delta Dash where before these overnight services were just common in every city in America, they would take it and put it in a box, and take it the airport and they would put it on a Delta plane. You could Delta Dash something for something like $99, and it would go on a plane, and somebody had to pick it up at baggage claim at the other end.
But that's what they would do, they would roll these interviews into the actual tape to the TV station that weekend, there was no post production per se in terms of "OK we're going to shoot all these interviews and were gonna slate them and then were going to go back and insert them, blah, blah, blah." No, that's why the local interviews don't exist anywhere else except in tapes of the television program that aired in that specific market.
So when you see these local promos with Tony Schiavone and the orange background or sometimes the blue background, they had and the chyron, 'Tonight! Charlotte! Tonight Greenville, Chicago!' or whatever the case from Crockett Promotions, that has to be off the actual air broadcast of that television program that weekend [that was taped at home by a fan on a VCR] because they didn't exist anywhere else."
Footnotes:
*This was the big revelation for me: I had always assumed the local promos were sent to stations on a separate tape that would be inserted into the local brodcast by the station like any other local commercial.
**I'm assuming this actually happened when Crockett and Dusty moved the head office from Charlotte to Dallas in 1987 or 1988 and closed down Briarbend Drive, but perhaps the TV work Jim describes above continued in Charlotte at Briarbend after the move to Dallas until the sale to Turner in late 1988.
***Eureka! It now makes sense to me why there was always this short time gap before and after local interview spots where you would see the show's logo or whatever and could hear the crowd noise in the background of the studio going back to those days. They left room for the local promo to be a second or two early or late when taped directly into the master tape.
****George South was the one who first told us about the weekly Chicken Coop ritual back in the day, and how he along with Bunk Harris or Klondike Bill would sometimes make the pick-up. George saud he earned more from tips from the boys than he made wrestling at the time.
PODCAST INFORMATION
Visit JimCornette.com for complete information including links on both of his wildly popular podcasts on the Arcadian Vanguard Podcasting Network.
LOCAL PROMOS IN THE 1970s
Jim was speaking about the procedures in the mid-1980s. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the local promotional spots were taped at WRAL TV on the day of the weekly tapings. Learn more from Les Thatcher here.
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WRAL News personality Nick Pond hosted the Raleigh-only version of the Jim Crockett Promotions wrestling show known simply as Championship Wrestling in the 1960s and very early 1970s.
Pond left WRAL at the end of March, 1971 to become the public relations director of the Durham Chamber of Commerce. He stayed with that job until August, 1973. He returned to WRAL shortly thereafter as a news anchor, but never called wrestling again.
During at least part of the time (and perhaps the whole time) Pond was working at the Durham Chamber, Elliot Murnick (son of Raleigh area promoter Joe Murnick) hosted the version of the Mid-Atlantic show that was exclusive to the Raleigh market.
Soon after, the dual-tapings ended, and Crockett began taping two different versions of Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling. The first, hosted by Bob Caudle (who had hosted the syndicated All Star Wrestling for over a decade), was the "A" show that went to all Crockett TV markets. The second, the "B" show hosted by Les Thatcher, went to markets where JCP was able to barter both shows. Usually (but not always) the second "B" show aired on a different station in that market.
Clipping courtesy of Carroll Hall.
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Visit the DESKTOP VERSION of the website for tons of FILTER OPTIONS to find info on your favorite announcer or studio location. Filter options are located on the right side of the web/desktop version of the website.
