Friday
September 25, 2000
By
Peter Hegarty
Ann Calvello must be traveling incognito.
Her iron-gray curls don’t have a trace of the green, pink, or blue strands that would slip beneath her helmet when she was the baddest of bad girls on roller skates.
“I’ve got virgin hair,” the Roller Derby legend confides, grinning. Not much else has changed, though. Her fingernails are still painted an iridescent hue and her pale lipstick still glows against skin so tanned it’s chestnut brown.
Then there’s the lions. Calvello has more lions than the Serenghetti: On her T-shirt. On her handbag. On the medallions that hang from her neck. On her sunglasses. On her seven tattoos-some places you only see by following her into the shower. Still more lions adorn the rings that stretch across her fingers like brass knuckles.
No wonder that Calvello a.k.a. Banana Nose a.k.a. Chicken Legs a.k.a The Meanest Mama on Skates, autographs photos of herself in action as the “Lioness.” She could just as easily sign them the “Lion Tamer.”
When Calvello hunkers down and gets rolling-jockeying for position, gliding past the jabbing elbows and the bumping shoulders-anyone crossing her path is spent spinning over the rail. Flipped outside the track like a hamburger on a grill.
“Seven decades and two centuries,” Calvello says. “And I haven’t retired yet.” Just to prove it, Calvello recently went wheel-to-wheel with the young skaters on “Roller Jam,” today’s pale imitation of Roller Derby on cable television. The 71 year-old held her own easily.
I’ve got a great figure for an old bag,” Calvello explains. Her blue jeans are so tight she looks like she was poured into them. Her black high heels are so sharp she could register them as weapons. “ And these tickets are real,” she smiles, glancing down at her chest.
Tickets? “It’s a roller derby expression.” Calvello says.
Soon the millions of fans who watched her on television during the sport’s glory days in the 50’s and 60’s can relive those moments. The Palo Alto film company Fireproof Productions is finishing work on the documentary “Demon of the Derby, The Ann Calvello Story.” The hour-long film features vintage footage and shows Calvello still competing, despite a brain-tumor operation three years ago.
“I’m not the average 71 year old,” says Calvello, standing inside Alameda’s AT&T cable television studio on a recent afternoon. “I’ve never been average.” You got that right. Not ever.
Calvello was on hand as a guest for dentist Mike Lano’s “Canvas Cavity.” It airs locally on Thursday nights and features interviews with sports legends, especially wrestlers: Men like Pepper Gomez, Kenji Shibuya and Big Cat Ernie Ladd.
“It’s like recounting memories of Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle,” Lano says before the filming got underway.
Calvello’s career stretches back to 1948, when she joined the International Roller Derby League, and continued through the sport’s golden age, when matches would sell out arenas such as Madison Square Garden and the Oakland Coliseum,
With her take-no-nonsense attitude, Calvello was notorious on the track. And she skated on teams with names to match her mood: She was a panther, a Demon, a Jolter, a Turbo.
But she’s best known as the original member of the legendary Bay Bombers. When she left the team in 1959 to skate with the rivals, Calvello was the one the hometown team loved to hate.
Boos. Hisses. The Lioness didn’t care. She was the queen of the track and always hungered for a kill. “It’s fun hitting somebody over the head with a lead pipe,” Calvello says. Laughing. “It’s like being in a candy shop.” You couldn’t miss her, slugging her way past archrival Joanie Weston a.k.a. The Blond Bombshell.
Especially with that punk hairdo. Calvello first dyed her hair green in the mid 50’s to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.
Then came the reds, blues, and every color under the rainbow-sometimes sprayed into her hair in the shape of polka dots and stars.
“I like to be different,” she says simply.
And the lions?
“I’m a Leo,” Calvello says, “We have natural color and showmanship.”
Filmmaker Sharon Rutter says what attracted her to Calvello’s story was the skater’s spirit, especially in an era when women were constantly told to conform. “Women in the 50’s were probably looking at her and thinking,” I could change my life too,” Rutter says.
Unlike professional wrestling, Roller Derby’s popularity has waned with the passing decades, despite repeated efforts to revive it.
“An American ghost,” Rutter calls the sport.
When she’s not threatening mix it up again on the track, Calvello works as a ticket collector at Candlestick Park. The San Bruno resident says she still plans to dye her hair and get another tattoo.
“Everybody thought I was Doris Day or Carol Channing,” the Lioness says about her early days as a skater when she was a natural blond.
Filmmaker Rutter interrupts her, “ But Doris Day never had blue hair.”