Remembering Capt. Lou
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- October
- 15
Capt. Lou Albano, who died yesterday at the age of 76, was a wrestling legend. He was also a Westchester legend, having been born and raised in Mount Vernon. He later moved to Carmel in Putnam County.
He went to Stepinac High School in White Plains which also produced actors Jon Voight and Alan Alda and a host of other people. Albano was a bit of an actor, too.
I interviewed him twice over the years. At election time in 1998, I called to ask what he thought about Jesse “The Body” Ventura’s startling ascendancy to the governor’s mansion in Minnesota.
He was gracious. Ventura, he said was a “very capable wrestler,” who was “always interested in politics. I knew Jesse when he started in. His tag team partner was Adrian Adonis, who got killed in a car accident up in Canada some years back.”
Adrian Adonis—what a great name. The Albano era had a bunch of them—Haystacks Calhoun, Bobo Brazil, Gorilla Monsoon and on and on.
I first met Capt. Lou at a wrestling event at Iona College. There were a number of matches, including a dwarf tag team against female wrestlers. I seem to recall that one of the women threw the dwarf out of the ring. A fun time was had by all.
Outside, I also met “Killer” Kowalski, who developed the famous sleeper hold, which he painfully demonstrated to my chagrin. Kowalski has also gone to his great reward.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 1:58 pm by Phil Reisman.
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Phil Reisman is a veteran journalist and native of Westchester County. He began his career in 1977 as the head copy boy of a startup New York City newspaper that quickly went belly up. Reisman was not to blame for the newspaper's failure, or so he claims.
Great reading Phil. My favorite Albano match was when he teamed with Skull Murphy. His future tag team championship partner Tony Altimore was the referee. His opponents were The Golden Boy from White Plains Arnold Skalland and Regie Van Gleason (Jackie Gleason). This was a classic sketch on Gleasons Live TV show in 1962, pre WWWF. I asked Skalland about it 20 years later and he hushed me by saying he didn’t want people to know he was as old as he really was. R.I.P. Captain Lou.