On a Friday night in May 1942, the Shadowland Ballroom in St. Joseph, Michigan, hosted a match between Karol Krauser, a Polish wrestler, and Gorilla Grubmyer. Grubmyer was an ugly man with cauliflower ears, and he had a habit of eye-gouging. Krauser was, as the local paper noted a few weeks before, “the poor girls’ Robert Taylor in a G-string”—in other words, a gentleman-hero. “Karol is a champion, and wrestles like one. He refuses to stick his tongue out at the referee, won’t bite very hard, and deplores amateur histrionics.” He was also the model for Superman.
To be more specific, he was the model for the version of Superman that appeared in a series of cartoons made by the Fleischer Studios in Miami. It’s not clear when he posed for the studio team, but it was probably during the previous summer, when he was performing in matches at the city’s Tuttle Arena, one of them a battle royale in which he and eight other wrestlers hurled each other at a 500-pound black bear.
Krauser participated in thousands of matches over a three-decade career, but this particular match in Michigan is notable for how casually the unnamed writer who covered it interchanged the names “Krauser” and “Superman” in their reportage, taking the most famous fictional character in American history out of the comics and cartoons, off the radio, and, via kayfabe, placing him in something adjacent to the real world. The reporter describes the second round: “The Adonis-like Krauser, who palpitates female hearts … was promptly tossed into the ringside seats by the roughhouse Gorilla.” The end of round three: “Finally, Superman rallied and dished out some punishment of his own, eventually pinning the Gorilla after a ram into the ropes followed by a body slam.”
Krauser continued to wrestle throughout the 40s, billed as “Karol ‘Superman’ Krauser,” “Karol Krauser, Superman cartoon model,” and “Karol Krauser, the Polish Superman.” His wife, Zosia, a pioneer woman wrestler, sometimes appeared on the same lineup. In the 50s, he grew a beard and adopted his stage nemesis’s surname—Kalmikoff—to form a tag-team of brothers who had defected from the Soviet Union. The Fleischer cartoons were rerunning on television then, but a live-action series featuring the B-movie veteran George Reeves as Superman was more popular. Either way, it would require an impressive imagination to connect the aging wrestler with the square-jawed, clean-shaven hero that an animation studio in Florida had developed a decade earlier.