Further Research: The Great Antonio and Mr. Wonder, the amputee wrestler of the 1960s
PLEASE NOTE: This piece first appeared as an exclusive on my Patreon page in November 2022, but I have released it for free now to make up for the lack of new content in the past two months.
A few images in support of my previous post about The Great Antonio.
First, an ad for one of Antonio's self-promoted shows - I've struggled to find any information on the names advertised; a number of somewhat notable wrestlers worked under the Atomic Blond and Cowboy Jones names, yet none were likely to be working in the mid-1960s, and certainly not in the north of Canada for a ramshackle outlaw production like Antonio's. More likely than not, they're nobodies - one of the countless names lost to time, working in relative anonymity on shows like Antonio's, which tended to rely on a close circle of regulars who left little impact elsewhere. One name that did stand out, though was Mr Wonder - more on him later.
Next is a photograph of Antonio's Displaced Person ID card, from his time spent in displaced person/refugee camps after the Second World War, marking his movements from the Novara work camp to Bagnoli, and finally on to Canada. I can't fully make out the first line, so apologies if I've missed something key.
It's from documents such as this, and the incredible work of organisations like the Holocaust Museum and the Arolsen Archives, that we are able to still learn so much about the horrors of fascism and war - and, in this case, that I was able to uncover much of the The Great Antonio's past that has previously gone overlooked, or misreported. Most biographies give Antonio's arrival date in Canada as 1945, but it's clear from this and other documentation that he arrived in 1951. It also marks the first instances of his surname being spelled "Barichievich".
The next image relate to Mr. Wonder, who I became fascinated by after seeing him mentioned on multiple adverts for The Great Antonio’s wrestling shows. While bilateral amputee wrestler Dustin Thomas had a few brief moments of fame in AEW and GCW, a wrestler with no legs advertised in the mid-60s was something you'd think would be more widely known, but sadly Wonder has left little lasting impression on the history books.
I eventually tracked down a copy of the issue of Wrestling Revue photographed here, with “Mr. Wonder’s incredible story” as the lead headline on the front cover, hoping that I'd find more information therein.
Sadly, the story inside is brief - a couple of paragraphs at most, in a wider, and quite tasteless, article about "wrestling tragedies", though it does fill in some of the background, and gave me a name - Henri Gagne. A fortuitous surname in wrestling circles, but no relation to Verne and Greg. The terrible accident in question, not detailed here, was horrifying in the extreme - Gagne's legs were lost following a collision between a train and a bus.
Next, we have a flyer for a show in Burlington, Vermont, where Mr. Wonder gets top billing, in December 1961.
Mr. Wonder was something of a regular for a time in the Green Mountain State, and evidently enough of a special attraction to stretch the printer's budget to include a full-length photo. I haven't been able to find any information on his opponent, The Bonanza Kid, or, for that matter, anyone else on the card, with the exception of two men in the six-man tag team match - Jerry Turenne and Bob Lortie; Turenne spent time down in Texas for Joe Blanchard's territory, while Bob Lortie was a Quebec mainstay, who also spent time wrestling in England back in the late 1930s, and by 1961 was at the very tail end of his career.
So, what became of Mr. Wonder? That's where the next two photos come in.
The first shows him alongside the hugely influential Montreal legend Mad Dog Vachon, who anyone watching the WWF in 1996 would know lost his leg following a car accident. If there's anyone who could lend a sympathetic ear to a Montreal native wrestler under those circumstances, it was Mr. Wonder.
More than that, though, Henri Gagne turned his incredible drive and work ethic toward disability advocacy in his post-wrestling career, and continued to break new ground for disabled athletes outside of the ring. This next photo, from Montreal's Gazette newspaper on 14th August 1982, details Gagne's fundraising activities of the time, as he completed a gruelling wheelchair tour of Quebec.
On to the next photo then, from Regina, Saskatchewan's Leader-Post, to see that his 2800+ mile wheelchair trek wasn't even the only athletic endeavour that Gagne embarked on that year - in April of 1982, the former Mr. Wonder came in second in the double-leg amputee class at the Canadian disabled ski championships.
By the mid-1980s, Henri Gagne, then in his late 40s, managed a retail service station in Montreal, staffed entirely by amputees and other physically disabled workers; with Gagne and the Federation d'Entraide Aux Nouveaux Amputes spearheading a campaign to help amputees return to work. Thanks to a Quebec government grant, the station was renovated - lowering workbenches and counters, adding access ramps, and widening doorways for easier wheelchair access. All profits went toward expansion, and the development of new businesses run by disabled workers.
I've not been able to find any further information on Henri Gagne after that, but whatever happened next, it's clear that the man christened "Mr. Wonder" in the wrestling ring more than lived up to that name outside of it.
