When you are a writer and don’t know where to begin, use a photo. Or many.
To start, look up at the one at the top of the page.
That’s me, Roger Baker and Sweet Daddy Siki in Roger and Gloria Baker’s kitchen in Aurora, Ontario, just north of Toronto. Oh what an afternoon that was in April 2017, two veterans of their trade sharing stories, me just there to listen, to provide a forgotten name or some details on whatever happened to the subject. Naturally, before Gloria left us (probably to play mahjong!), she had provided a nifty little lunch.
The news that Roger died on November 7th, at the age of 88, has my brain very much on manual focus, trying to work the F-stop, switching the lenses, pushing past security, grabbing that unique shot. The photos in my mind are fortunately much sharper than the ones I ever took with real film.
But man, the ones that Roger took!
He was at ringside for Muhammad Ali versus George Chuvalo at Maple Leaf Gardens.
He was at ringside when The Sheik debuted at Maple Leaf Gardens.
He went down to Omaha, hanging out with Chris Colt and Ron Dupree once for a magazine piece, oblivious to the fact that Colt and Dupree were a couple. The pictures are awesome, poolside hijinks.
He was a pal of Bearman Dave McKigney and has some of the best photos of Dave and his bears — one of Roger’s was on the cover of the reprinted Drawing Heat, Jim Freedman’s classic 1988 story of southern Ontario wrestling, still, to this day, my favorite wrestling book.
Roger, more than anything else, was someone who shared, and, as the one who helped ease him back into the wrestling world, he shared a lot with me. I plan to do a piece down the line on many of his road stories, dealing with the magazines and getting his photos and stories published. A lot are in Andrew Calvert’s books and his Maple Leaf Wrestling website and in the 2015 story Sports film fest brings photos and film of Roger Baker into focus.
I can’t pinpoint the exact year, but it was probably around 2006, when Roger first reached out to me. He just said he had some photos of the old days, would I like to see them? He’d found me both through my first book, The Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame: The Canadians and SlamWrestling.
It grew from there. We became friends, though it helped that he didn’t live too far from my in-laws, so it was an excuse to go visit him and leave the wife with her family for a couple of hours. I treasured those times talking, flipping through photo album after photo album, magazine after magazine, watching old wrestling footage.
The most epic of the adventures was the six-hour trip from Toronto to Amsterdam, New York, for a Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame induction weekend, where he had a blast, though always joked about how fast I drove his car, that he’d never gotten it up to those speeds (in my defense, it wasn’t crazy, just the I-90 heading there begs for a little energy).
He loved, loved, loved to be around pro wrestlers, to hear their stories, to talk to other fans. If it wasn’t that trip to the PWHF (RIP too), it was Titans in Toronto dinners, a fabulous afternoon barbecue at Bernie Livingston’s.
Filming some of the Sweet Daddy Siki’s documentary in Roger’s basement has to be the apex of it all. Roger had his walls covered — and I mean covered — in wrestling photos, magazines, posters. It was incredible, especially considering that a lot of them were his. He had his weight set too, and Rog loved to talk about jacked he was back in the day, an early weightlifting junkie, and he often told me on the phone about his exercise routine that day.
What else was in the basement? More wrestling.
“I’ve got so many negatives in the basement, hundreds and hundreds of them,” he recalled. At one point, he outsourced the scanning of thousands of slides, both for wrestling and home photos. We are all richer for his work.
A little background helps the reader, and makes me smile, thinking of the stories.
Though he was born in Buffalo on March 29, 1936, Roger moved to Toronto when he was nine years old, when his mom remarried. His father had died when he was very young. As a youngster, he faced anti-Semitism growing up, kids chasing him just for being Jewish.
By trade, he started as a kosher butcher at a Miracle Mart grocery store. Fortunately, the Humber Memorial Hospital was just down the road, as in one three-month period he went three times for stitches: a cut on his hand; a cut to his abdomen, though not deep; and a prong went into the palm of his left hand, which necessitates a Roger story: “It had poison in it, and within minutes, a line started to go up my hand like this. I could see it, I could see it moving. … And a couple of the other butchers looked at it and said, ‘Get the fuck to the hospital, Roger.'” The doctor told him that within another 15 minutes, the poison would have been in his heart. “He took took a needle, he froze it, then took a knife, cut it, disinfected it, and stitched it up.” Roger was back at work the next day, but had to wear gloves and do different work.
Roger eventually went off on his own, running a fish shop at Bathurst and Eglinton in Toronto’s Jewish neighborhood, where he became famed for his lobsters.
In between the jobs, Gloria, and soon two kids — son, Charles, and daughter, Robin — and working out, Roger decided he wanted to go from clipping out wrestling photos from the newspaper to taking them.
“I was always fascinated by the pictures of the wrestling that the newspapers put in, back in the day when they really covered it extensively. And I wanted to do that myself. I was very excited at the prospect. I used to shoot from the front row, and get as close to the ring as I could. I shot 8 mm movie film and used my 35 mm camera,” he once told me.
It was never full time. “It was a hobby, but I’ll be very honest with you, the income at times was quite important. Once or twice that $50 check, or $75 check came, it helped me close out the month.”
Alas, on one of the last times we talked, Roger shared how prostrate cancer had reared its ugly head, further along than anyone wanted. For someone who had so much get up and go, so much life, it was tough to hear, “I don’t have the spark to me that I used to.”
The Yiddish word mensch comes to mind when I think of Roger, as it just really means that he was a good person.
And he did good, and knew how fortunate he was.
“I’m a very gifted man with the grandchildren that Gloria and I have,” he told me. “I’ve got a billionaire’s family.”
Now that the story is done, I can finally let out some tears.
That was a tough one to write.
The photos sure helped a lot, Rog.
Say hi to Bruno, the Whip, Joe Gollob and all your old friends. Frank Tunney can’t kick you out of Heaven the way he did from ringside.
Roger Brian Baker is survived by his wife Gloria, son Charles (Angela), daughter Robin (the late Eli Ovadia), and grandchildren Robert, Daniel, Siegal, and Ezra, as well as his brother Michael Feldman (the late Susan Goodman). Memorial donations may be made to One Family Fund, 416-489-9687, www.onefamilyfund.ca. Details of the funeral, on Sunday, November 10, at 2 p.m., can be found here.
