Chapter 1: Fall (1945-1957) 1 FALL (1945-1957) Vince McMahon, like many of his wrestlers, didn''t grow up with the name he now uses. His father ran a successful wrestling promotion that stretched throughout the Northeast, but Vince was born and raised far away from that empire. He wasn''t even a wrestling fan as a child. WWE has often highlighted the boss''s adoration for the man everyone now calls "Vince Senior." But until young Vince was an adolescent, he''d never met the man. He was Vinnie Lupton, and he didn''t know if he loved his dad or not. In his formative years, Vinnie was the son of two people of whom he rarely speaks: Vicki Hanner and Leo Lupton Jr.--his mother and stepfather.
Which is to say, he was a son of North Carolina, however much he may obscure that fact. The sizable Hanner and Lupton clans had been in the state for generations. The Hanners arrived in the colony before it became a founding component of the United States, and by the time of the Civil War, they had settled in as farmers--some of them slaveholders. For example, the most renowned member of Vince''s maternal family prior to him was John Henry Hanner, who, when he died in 1850, held ten people in captivity, making his 614-acre farm (located in what is now Greensboro) one of the area''s larger forced-work camps. But by the time Victoria Elizabeth Hanner was born in 1920, the family had been in a decades-long decline. Her mother was a farmer''s daughter; her father an itinerant mechanic who rambled back and forth between North and South Carolina, barely making a living while working on automobiles. Vicki appears to have been born in Florence, South Carolina, and raised in Sanford, North Carolina. She then did a jaunt at Bob Jones College in faraway Cleveland, Tennessee.
However, a North Carolina birth index of 1939 informs us that Victoria Hanner--who would have been either eighteen or nineteen at the time--gave birth to a child many miles from both home and school, in Charlotte. In the column for the father''s name, there is only a series of dashes. The baby--Vince''s oldest sibling--was named Gloria Faye Hanner, and there is no record of what became of her. On December 6, 1941, just a few hours before the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Vicki married an Ohio-born soldier named Louis Patacca, who was stationed at a nearby military base. That marriage, her first of four, was doomed. Patacca was shipped up to New York City, and Vicki found someone else to occupy her time. We don''t know how she met Vince''s father, but they may have had their first tryst around June 30, 1942, while New York-based Vincent James McMahon was doing his own military service in Wilmington, North Carolina--a local newspaper item mentions that a visiting "Victoria Patacca" had lost a diamond ring. As of January 1943, Vicki was pregnant with her lover''s child.
Patacca filed a vitriolic divorce petition on August 18, 1943, claiming his estranged wife had withheld the fact of Gloria''s birth from him and had cheated on him with other soldiers. Vicki didn''t respond; the divorce wasn''t resolved as of at least four years later, if it ever was. The military moved Vincent James McMahon back to New York, where his and Vicki''s first child, a boy dubbed Roderick James "Rod" McMahon, was born out of wedlock on October 12. We do not know what happened between these two young parents for the next eleven months. But we know they got married on September 4, 1944, in South Carolina''s Horry County, where authorities didn''t seem to note that Vicki''s divorce was still pending in the next state over. By the end of November, she was pregnant again. On August 18, 1945, three days after Japan laid down its arms, Vincent J. McMahon was discharged from the New York base that had been his final station.
Vicki was about to give birth in North Carolina. The couple''s second son entered the world at 7:14 a.m. on August 24, in Pinehurst, North Carolina''s Moore County Hospital. Vicki named the child after its father: Vincent Kennedy McMahon. Kennedy was her mother''s maiden name. On September 16, the infant Vince was baptized in a Moore County Catholic church. The Hanners were Presbyterians, but the McMahons were Catholics, so this was probably the last influence the father would have on his son''s life for years.
By the time young Vince was old enough to remember anything, the man was gone. "You know, I''m not big on excuses," Vince told an interviewer from Playboy in the latter half of 2000. "When I hear people from the projects, or anywhere else, blame their actions on the way they grew up, I think it''s a crock of shit. You can rise above it." The topic of conversation was Vince''s own upbringing. He was talking about being sexually abused as a child. The reporter pointed out how terrible it must have been for him. Vince bristled.
"This country gives you opportunity if you want to take it, so don''t blame your environment," Vince replied. "I look down on people who use their environment as a crutch." The reporter brought up Vince losing his virginity. Vince paused. "That was at a very young age," he said. "I remember, probably in the first grade, being invited to a matinee film with my stepbrother and his girlfriends, and I remember them playing with me. Playing with my penis, and giggling. I thought that was pretty cool.
That was my initiation into sex. At that age you don''t necessarily achieve an erection, but it was cool." He also recalled incidents involving a local whom he described as "a girl my age who was, in essence, my cousin": "I remember the two of us being so curious about each other''s bodies, but not knowing what the hell to do," Vince said. "We would go into the woods and get naked together. It felt good. And, for some reason, I wanted to put crushed leaves into her." He told the interviewer he didn''t actually remember when he putatively lost his virginity. "Your growing-up was pretty accelerated," the reporter said.
"God, yes," said Vince. The interviewer brought up Vince''s childhood family unit. Vince said he lived with his mother "and my real asshole of a stepfather, a man who enjoyed kicking people around." "Your stepfather beat you?" the interviewer asked. Vince''s reply: "Leo Lupton. It''s unfortunate that he died before I could kill him. I would have enjoyed that." Leo Hubert Lupton Jr.
was born in New Bern, North Carolina, in 1917 and dropped out of high school after his freshman year. He trained as an electrician and married a girl named Peggy Lane in 1939. Their marriage was troubled, to say the least. In May of 1940, Peggy gave birth to their first child, Richard. But scarcely a year later, Leo had been convicted of abandoning his family and was sentenced to "two years on the roads," according to a brief, cryptic newspaper item. However, a later newspaper item implies he and Peggy were back together three months later, when their daughter, Ernestine--better known as "Teenie"--was born in September of 1941. Leo''s troubles were compounded upon enlisting in the Navy for service in the Pacific in August of 1944. Although he held the honor of being on a boat that was present in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese instrument of surrender was signed, his wife had a stillbirth while he was at sea.
Upon returning to North Carolina, he and Peggy separated, and he held on to the kids. He appears to have moved with them into his parents'' house in the South Carolina town of Mount Pleasant. Vicki''s parents were also living in Mount Pleasant at the time, making it likely that a parental connection was how the couple met. Vicki filed for divorce from young Vinnie''s father on grounds of desertion, but in a curious way: she filed in faraway Leon County, Florida, the region in the Panhandle that contains Tallahassee, and her listed residence was in Lakeland, Florida--roughly 250 miles even farther south. Divorces were easy to obtain in Florida back then, so it seems likely that she somehow feigned to move there in order to obtain residency, then sought the legal separation, all while actually living in the Carolinas. Whatever the details, the divorce was granted on March 18, 1947, and, on April 5, Vicki walked the aisle for the third time in less than six years, marrying Leo at her parents'' house. Suddenly, Vinnie, not yet two years old, had two new siblings and, more consequentially, his first father figure. "He hit you with his tools, didn''t he?" the Playboy interviewer asked, referring to Leo.
"Sure," was Vince''s reply. "He hit your brother, too?" came the follow-up. "No," Vince said. "I was the only one of the kids who would speak up, and that''s what provoked the attacks. You would think that after being on the receiving end of numerous attacks I would wise up, but I couldn''t. I refused to. I felt I should say something, even though I knew what the result would be." Some of that speaking up, according to Vince, was advocating on behalf of his mother after Leo would hit her.
"That''s an awful way to learn how a man behaves," the interviewer said. "I learned how not to be," Vince mused. "One thing I loathe is a man who will strike a woman. There''s never an excuse for that." That said, the woman in question was not without blame, in Vince''s eyes. "Was the abuse all physical, or was there sexual abuse, too?" the interviewer asked. "That''s not anything I would like to embellish," Vince said. "Just because it was weird.
" "Did it come from the same man?".