Published: Friday, Nov. 06, 2009 / Updated: Friday, Nov. 06, 2009 07:03 AM

Last bell tolls for 'Chief Yellowbird'

YORK -- On small-town wrestling cards in both Carolinas from the 1950s through the early 1960s — from the mountains to the sea in red-clay, dusty places such as Bakersfield, N.C., Blacksburg and countless places in between — the ring announcer would warble through a bullhorn.

The crowds would stomp and holler. Thirsty for blood, the blue-haired ladies would yell into the dark night under pale floodlights.

“And in this corner,” the announcer would say, “from Gallup, New Mexico — Chief Yellowbird!”

And the crowds would just plain go berserk.

These were the days before much TV. The days when people called what Mac George did, “rasslin'. ”

Evelyn George, Mac's wife of 64 years, and their son Eddie George — sharp and smart as they can be, eloquent even — sure enough still call it “rasslin.' ”

“Oh, the rasslin', ” Evelyn said. “My Mac loved to rassle. Last time he rassled, when the doctor told him he had to quit after 11, 12 years, he even snuck out. Had my youngest son sneak his shoes and stuff out the door when I wasn't lookin'. ”

And in that wrestling ring all those hundreds of times would be this big, husky, 6-foot, 230-pound guy born on the Catawba Indian Reservation who “never even was in New Mexico — ever,” Eddie said.

“But that was the style in those days. Daddy was always the ‘good guy.' The crowds loved Daddy.”

Mac George died Tuesday at age 84.

This Chief Yellowbird was burly and brawny, back wide as a barn door. For about a dozen years, Mac worked in filling stations and cotton mills and wrestled on those cards whenever he could.

One time two of his ribs got busted in a match, and he went to work the next day at the mill. He went to work with mashed fingers and gouges on his forehead and bruises from sternum to scapula.

“One time a guy lost his head, started to pull Daddy out of the ring,” Eddie said. “Daddy had to cold-cock him one right in the forehead. Raised a big knot.”

Mac even wrestled locally, in Chester and Rock Hill and more, including one time right in York where everybody knew him and the crowds still went crazy for Chief Yellowbird who worked right alongside them in the mill.

People in York didn't just know Mac George, they loved him.

His real name was Moroni — named for the prophet/angel whom Mormons believe told Joseph Smith where to find the golden plates that would become the Book of Mormon.

But everybody called him “Mac.”

“One friend pronounced the name ‘Macaroni' and just couldn't get it right,” Evelyn said. “So we said, ‘Call him Mac for short,' and it stuck.”

After those years wrestling and farming to make a buck and sweating in the mills and helping out as a volunteer with the fire department, Mac is believed by tribal elders and his family to be the first policeman from the Catawba Indian tribe.

He was so honest he once gave the mayor of York a parking ticket. And right afterward, he gave his own wife a parking ticket, too.

“Told me I should have known better,” Evelyn said with a laugh.

Mac's death has left a gaping hole in York, where he lived for almost 75 years.

“The best,” said Capt. Tommy Jenkins, a cop in York for 32 years. “Mac was the greatest.”

Mac George was working at a filling station in 1964 when he was asked to join the police force. He had no training, just a hard-earned GED diploma he got after serving in the Navy and a reputation as the fairest of the fair.

He stayed 23 years, ending up as a beloved and respected lieutenant who worked the night shift.

“In York, they called my daddy ‘The Big Indian,' and when somebody said ‘The Big Indian' was coming to get them, they knew he meant business,” said Eddie, the son.

Mac was a World War II veteran who joined the Navy to serve his country the first day he was old enough to enlist. In 1945, he married Evelyn, a breathtakingly beautiful white girl from York, on a three-day pass from that war.

He met her while working back-breaking farm labor with her father — Mac had to quit school to help his family get by — and stayed with her and loved her forever.

It was more than two decades later that Evelyn and Mac found out that, at the time they said “I do,” it was illegal for Indians and whites to marry in this state of South Carolina.

“I promised him I'd marry him the next time he came home during the war,” Evelyn recalled. “Little did I know it was a three-day pass and we'd get married at 9 at night and he would leave the next morning at 7 and I wouldn't see him again for more than a year when he went back to the war.

“I was 16 and a half years old. I was maybe the first girl ever to be married to a man in the war and still be in high school.”

Mac's passing is a tough one. Gilbert Blue, chief of the Catawba nation for decades until a few years ago, said Mac was always a peacemaker among the tribe's members.

Today, those cops in York will go out to the church north of the city and watch Mac get buried. There will be whites and blacks and Catawbas there who will recall this man with the huge arms who helped more kids with a stern warning and a call to the parents than he ever sent to jail.

And no doubt, up there at the pearly gates, St. Peter will raise a bullhorn to his lips.

The light will be pale, like the 1950s. The unseen crowd will stomp and holler. And the words will careen into the distance as an arm is raised.

“The winner, Chief Yellowbird!”