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Jack Pfefer Wrestling Collection
The Jack Pfefer Wrestling Collection comprises more than 120 cubic feet of materials accumulated by Pfefer over a 45-year promotional and managerial career in professional wrestling, 1924-1969. Types of materials especially well represented include business and financial records; letters and telegrams; photographs; posters, handbills, and other publicity graphics; newspaper and magazine clippings; and wrestling programs and periodicals. Pfefer himself referred to these items, with characteristic hyperbole, as his "Museum Collection," though he was less a collector in the accepted sense than the seemingly exhaustive preserver of all the records and other documentation—personal papers, printed accounts, and images—relating to his business, and indeed to professional wrestling as a whole. The resulting collection provides both an extensive printed account of American professional wrestling from the 1920s to the 1960s, and an inside look at how the wrestling business was conducted over the same period. Of particular interest are Pfefer's financial records of thousands of bookings and promotions, and his extensive business correspondence (which is almost entirely incoming). Also significant is an accumulation of more than 13,000 photographic prints, mainly publicity portraits, representing most pro wrestlers of note from the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth centuries.
