Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [10]
I was pretty worked up the night McNamara came to the Harvard campus. I don’t remember whether I threatened him or not, but certain faculty members told me they preferred that I not show up at his lecture. And I didn’t. Being one of the veterans sent into the Vietnam War under false pretenses, I wouldn’t have let him off the hook easily.
Leaving Minnesota . . . so many memories . . . I’d first moved back after my four years as a frogman ended had ridden rode for nine months with the South Bay Mongols motorcycle club. I was adrift then, with a whole host of choices before me, and really no clue about where I wanted to be or what I was going to do. Not so different, I suppose, than how I feel now, heading down a whole new road. But that was when Terry and I first met, in September of 1974.
I was working as a bouncer at the Rusty Nail, a bar in a Minneapolis suburb called Crystal. By day I was attending North Hennepin Junior College on the GI Bill. Even with a warning about how tough I’d find freshman English, I did discover a knack for it. In fact, I ended up with the highest grade in the class. I found I especially enjoyed the classroom discussions. And I ended up being recruited into a college play, The Birds. No, not the Hitchcock; the one by Aristophanes. It’s a comedy about these two people from Athens trying to escape from the city because of all the corrupt politicians. I was cast as Hercules.
Terry showed up at the door of the Rusty Nail on a Ladies’ Night. She was voluptuous, with long brown hair and the most amazingly beautiful eyes and smile. She’d already been carded by a cop at the door, and now she was headed my way, and I sure didn’t feel like any Hercules in my sport jacket and turtleneck sweater. I had to say something to her.
“Can I see your ID please?” I blurted out.
“But I just showed him,” she said, pointing at the cop.
“I don’t care how old you are, I just want to know your name,” I said, feeling kind of proud of such a good line. Well, she went through her purse until she found her ID again, presented it to me without a word, and kept right on going.
TERRY: This was the first time my two girlfriends and I had ever gone to a suburban bar. They were mostly full of softball players or used-car salesmen, we thought. But we did live in the suburbs, and we were all broke. I was a receptionist, holding down two jobs at the time, and they were going to school. So when we heard about this ladies’ night at the Rusty Nail, we decided to go.
When I first saw Jesse, he appeared to be the biggest thing in the entire place. Downstairs was where the rock and roll was, so that’s where we went first. But I couldn’t get that fellow at the door out of my head. Finally I said, “I’m going upstairs.” My girlfriend said, “You’re gonna go flirt with that guy and leave us down here; real nice.” But I couldn’t help myself.
Later that night, we ended up talking. She was from a rural area in southern Minnesota. I wasn’t calling myself Jesse Ventura yet, but I was already enamored of the world of wrestling. I’d gone to a pro bout at the Minnesota Armory featuring this huge, bleached-blond “bad guy” called “Superstar” Billy Graham. When I’d seen his total control of the crowd, I said to myself, “That’s what I want to do.” So I’d already gone into training just about every day at the Seventh Street Gym. I was big—six-foot-four and about 235 pounds—and I didn’t scare easy. Except, of course, around someone like Terry.
Lo and behold, the first thing she said to me was: “God! You look just like ‘Superstar’ Billy Graham!