Historic 'Burgh Woman Traveled Coast-To-Coast As "Baby Cheryl"

by Thomas Leturgey

On December 14, 1938, Barbara Jane (Ashbaugh) Schroeder was born in the city of Pittsburgh, but her family soon moved to the Mon Valley suburb of Duquesne, Pennsylvania. She would grow to be 3’9” and 88 pounds. As “Baby Cheryl” she would be a key player in the Golden Era of female “Midget” wrestlers.

Renown women’s wrestling Historian Chris Bergstrom said that Baby Cheryl “was one of the very first little women to be trained by The Fabulous Moolah and would become one of the very top ‘Midget’ female wrestlers.”

In the April 12, 1960 edition of the Birmingham Alabama’s Birmingham News, an article previewed the upcoming April 18 event at the Auditorium. Baby Cheryl, 21, was to take on her almost-exclusive foe, Little Darling Dagmar, 18, for promoters Nick Gulas, Roy Welch and Joe Denaburg and the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA). The match was advertised as the first of its type in Birmingham. The opening match of the evening saw Dagmar defeat Cheryl with a rolling front face lock in front of 4,100 fans, according to the Birmingham News.

“Little” Darling Dagmar is not to be confused with the first “Darling Dagmar” another athlete who grappled several years before the more accomplished Kathy Carlton Moreland-version arrived.

Because of the scarcity of “midget” female athletes, the Baby Cheryl/Little Darling Dagmar matchup would be a “first” in many areas of the country and beyond. Always a villain, “The Mighty Mite of Wrestling,” Baby Cheryl wrestled the “The Marilyn Monroe” of “midget” wrestlers Darling Dagmar at least 232 times between 1960 and 1967. [In a peculiar a Las Vegas Review-Journal piece from March, 1960 shared by Bergstrom, Cheryl said she graduated high school and succeeded in business college. However, she had a difficult time finding a job, and discovered wrestling. The March, 1960 date stamp predates any proof of Baby Cheryl wrestling before April, 1960.]

On April 19, Baby Cheryl and Darling Dagmar again the very next night in Nashville, 191 miles away. According to the Nashville Banner, this was the first “midget” match between women at the Hippodrome in six years. A few days later Dagmar would defeat Baby Cheryl in Knoxville (180 miles away). Via plane, train or automobile, the duo criss-crossed the country together for the next six years.

For Georgia Championship Wrestling in Marietta, on May 5, 1960 Baby Cheryl was in an Intergender/Mixed Tag Team match with partner Prince Nero v. Canadian Bill Dromo and Darling Dagmar.

Baby Cheryl will tell the Progress-Index of Petersburg, Virginia, in May, 18, 1960, “I love to wrestle,” and admits that she’s “rough and tough.” A brunette, Cheryl told the paper that her mother was also a little person, but her father was “5’7’”.” [The March, 1960 piece notes that Cheryl has six siblings, all of them “normal size.”] Baby Cheryl also notes that the “female world midget championship” is her career goal.

In perhaps her first professional win, Baby Cheryl finally defeated Darling Dagmar in 14 minutes at the Memorial Auditorium in Greenville, South Carolina on May 27, 1960. The gal from Duquesne was on the same card as Gorgeous George and Karl Von Hess, who lost 2 out of 3 Falls to Ray Villmer and Bob Boyer.

By July, 1960 Baby Cheryl and Darling Dagmar were taking their rivalry on the road, north to Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada for the Stampede brand.

The Baby Cheryl/Darling Dagmar pairing would continue throughout the south, into Texas and Comiskey Park in Chicago among more than a dozen stops.

For Championship Wrestling from Florida (CWF) in Jacksonville, Florida, on August 25, 1960, Cheryl and Dagmar wrestled each other and then took part in a tag team match. In what had to be a grueling evening, Baby Cheryl and Rita Cortez defeated Darling Dagmar and Marie Gómez in two out of three falls.

Lady Angel (Betty Jarvis) and Baby Cheryl took on the team of Lillian Ellison (The Fabulous Moolah) and Darling Dagmar in a two out of three falls match. Wrestledata.com doesn’t note a winner in the contest which was held on September 27, 1960 in Columbia, South Carolina.

Baby Cheryl and Darling Dagmar would spend the rest of the year traveling throughout the south and into the west in one-on-one competition for a variety of promoters.

In 1961, Baby Cheryl and Darling Dagmar would continue their rivalry in singles matches, as well as tag team contests. Cheryl teamed with The Fabulous Moolah frequently during this time.

For many years, women’s professional wrestling was banned in Pennsylvania. The closest Baby Cheryl would get to the Keystone State was a series of matches in Ohio. On February 18, 1961, Baby Cheryl defeated Dagmar at the Armory in Akron for the National Wrestling Federation. Dagmar routinely got the win, but Cheryl did score a victory of occasion.

In 1962, Cheryl and Dagmar took their tour to Hawaii for the first time.

Then on July 18, 1962 Baby Cheryl took on a foe other than Darling Dagmar when 3’2” Canadian and fellow Fabulous Moolah product Dolly Darcel entered the scene. For the Provincial Sports Association in Moncton, New Brunswick, the two opened the show. Match results are uncertain, but Darcel did decisively score a win over the veteran one week later in the same Moncton stadium. The new duo of Cheryl and Dolly debuted all over the United States (like Georgia, Indiana, and Ohio) in August, 1962, with the Baby winning almost all of the showdowns. Towards the end of August, Darling Dagmar returned to battle Baby Cheryl all throughout Florida.

Cheryl and Dagmar continued to face off exclusively in September, 1962 in hotbeds like Texas. In Waco, Texas, the two were on the same card as Tiger Conway v. The Mummy. According to the Harper County Journal in Buffalo, Oklahoma, on September, 15, 1962 Baby Cheryl teamed with “Bulldog” Don Kent in a Mixed Tag Team Match to take on Darling Dagmar and the legendary Danny Hodge.

As reported in the Arizona Republic, The three wrestlers—Baby Cheryl, Darling Dagmar, and Dolly Darcel—worked in a Three Woman Battle Royal on October 29, 1962 at the Madison Square Garden in Phoenix, Arizona for the very first time. In November, 1962 Darling Dagmar served as the special guest referee for a match between Cheryl and Dolly in Victoria, British Columbia. When the trio went to Honlulu, Hawaii in December for promoter Ed Francis, Dolly served as match authority. It would be a partnership that lasted throughout different territories.

Promoter Leo Garibaldi used all three women at the Austin City Coliseum frequently over the years and many of the matches were well advertised in the Austin American-Statesman newspaper. There they were on cards with such heavyweights at Bull Curry and Texas State Champ Rip Hawk. The three “midget” wrestlers would spend a great deal of time in the Lone Star State, Arizona, and even had a stop in Panama City, often for the Big Time Professional Wrestling. In February 1963, Darling Dagmar and Baby Cheryl shared a Tucson, Arizona bill with World Champion Danny Hodge and an up-and-comer named Percy Pringle. Pringle later morphed into the Paul Bearer character in the WWF/WWE.

The year 1963 also saw the addition of 3’8”, 86-pound, Fabulous Moolah-trained Diamond Lil and her real-life sister Doll Paige to the “midget” circuit. Diamond Lil and Doll Paige dotted the record books out west and in the Midwest with Baby Cheryl and Little Darling Dagmar throughout 1963.

The touring would continue on a regular basis until the end of 1966. It’s interesting to note that Mattel’s talking “Baby Cheryl” doll would dominate newspaper advertisements in Cheryl Ashbaugh’s last full year in the ring. She would take on Little Darling Dagmar at least one more time, on March 6, 1967 at the Fair Park Auditorium in Abilene, Texas.

Soon after and according to Bergstrom, Baby Cheryl called it a career in the hopes of starting a family. Back to being “Barbara”, she met and married Art Schroeder and moved back to Duquesne. Their son Dave was born in 1968. Dave Shroeder was a musician and appeared in a 2007 episode of Tattoo Wars to receive ink in his mother’s image on his leg.

Barbara passed away on June 1, 2008 at the age of 69, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. David Shroeder sadly passed away in 2015 at the age of 47.