R.I.P. Luna Vachon.
http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Wrestling/2010/08/27/15162451.html
Luna Vachon
Luna Vachon has died. She was 47. According to family, she was at her mother's house and was found dead this morning.
The news comes just a short while after a house fire consumed her home and destroyed her wrestling memorabilia. She was staying at her mother's house after the fire.
Gertrude Vachon -- "Trudy" to friends -- was one of the most colourful and eccentric woman wrestlers of all time.
She was always billed as the son of Paul "The Butcher" Vachon; though biologically she is not his daughter, he always considered her as his daughter, even after splitting with her mother, Van, which was Butcher's second marriage.
Trudy arrived in his life when she was only four years old. "I taught my daughter Luna how to wrestle and also sent her to Moolah’s wrestling school. She patterned her wrestling style and personality after Mad Dog and I. Luna became one of the most famous and recognized lady wrestlers in wrestling history," wrote her father in his second autobiography.
"As a student, she was very much interested, and very much involved in really, really wanting to do the thing. She had good hopes," said Lillian Ellison, the Fabulous Moolah, years back. It was Moolah that named her "Angel" for wrestling.
In a 2000 interview, Butcher Vachon expanded on his adopted daughter's exposure to the wrestling business.
"She was 13, 14 years old and she used to come to the wrestling matches. I was working for the World Wrestling Federation when Vince Sr. was running it. We were living in Connecticut," he recalled. "We'd go early and get there late afternoon, the building would be open and the ring was up and no people in the place. We'd get up in the ring and I'd show her a few moves. Then some of the guys would start coming in and they'd help me start putting her through some paces.
"She could have done anything. She was a beautiful girl and very intelligent, smart, good looking, of course, like her dad. All she ever wanted to do [was wrestle]. Her idol was my sister, Vivien, who was a wrestler. She had been watching her ever since she was four or five years old. That's all she ever did. I told her she was a lunatic because all she wanted to do was wrestle."
"I thought it was the worst business a woman could be in. It's not even a business for men.
Luna always had a wild streak, he said. "This is a kid that at 15 years old, she took off on her own and hitchhiked to California from Florida."
Almost immediately, Luna got a chance to work in Japan, with her father as her manager, who pulling a few strings. "When you come right down to it, if you don't cut the mustard, it don't matter what kind of strings you pull," he said. "It helped her, just like when I started Mad Dog had already been in the business for seven or eight years."