Five Strides on the Banked Track by Walter Iooss

Author:Walter Iooss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media

8

Drip-and-Dry

Jerry Seltzer took command of the Derby in 1958 from his father, who, disillusioned by the TV rape, had grown weary of the whole exercise. By this time, in no sense whatsoever was it the case of a father handing over a rich, growing concern to his son. The Derby was moribund, drawing crowds of two hundred on good nights in the cavernous San Francisco Cow Palace.

Seltzer, just out of the army—and immediately before that, Northwestern University—first came on the scene as an announcer to pick up a few extra bucks to help augment his salary. He was a salesman at the time, and he did not enjoy that, so Leo shrugged and agreed that he could go ahead and try to pump a little breath into the Roller Derby body. Vamping, Seltzer soon made a deal with a new independent TV channel in Oakland and began shooting kinescopes of the games in a deserted garage. Interest picked up measurably right away, sufficiently, anyway, to sustain a marginal operation. In October of 1960, the Roller Derby’s modern parent company, Bay Promotions, Inc., was capitalized for five hundred dollars. It is estimated that the property is now worth about five million dollars.

The dramatic growth of the Derby really can be measured from 1960, when two events occurred. First, the Derby switched to videotape, which had just been perfected. A process vastly superior technically to the grainy kinescope method, videotape helped put personality into the whirring turbulence. Secondly, a Chevrolet dealer in San Francisco, who was one of the Derby sponsors, opened up another lot in Lake Oswego, Oregon, a Portland suburb, and he decided to advertise himself with a Derby game. A raw tape of one contest was run on a Portland channel, and at one point, almost idly, the announcer asked, “Would you like to see the Roller Derby in Portland?”

During the next couple of days, three hundred letters arrived from Oregon, and Seltzer, still playing it by ear, booked his first road game into Portland. The skaters embarked on a chartered DC-3 that maneuvered somewhat tentatively. It had to set down for refueling and maintenance stops at both Eureka and Eugene, and the players did not arrive at the arena until 8:15 for an 8 o’clock game. Nine thousand excited fans were waiting patiently.

“It hardly seems to be any sort of revelation now,” Seltzer says, “but I was stunned by the realization then, for it suddenly occurred to me that there were no longer any boundaries as we had known them. As far as that great eye extends, people have the same interests.”

He followed the same Portland formula in Reno—telecasts, then a triumphant personal appearance. The word began to get around. The next year, 1961, forty stations carried the Derby games. A few years later, UHF stations were introduced, and, desperate for anything special to compete with the established VHF network channels, they began snapping up area rights to the Derby videotapes. To this day, Seltzer has never had to employ a salesman to sell the tapes.

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