Sometimes I marvel at our behavior in those early years. Here we were hurting for money to the point of constantly begging my parents for some moolah and sometime in this period Mr. Heaney started giving us $20 (equal to around $170 today) a month to pay our electric bill, but we still took some trips throughout the year.
We went to the New York World’s Fair on September 19, going on a Werner’s Bus Excursion up to Flushing Meadows. We had reserved the bus back in May. The theme was “Peace through Understanding”. Yeah, we all see how well that idea succeeded. There were a number of exhibit supposedly showing the world of tomorrow. Today the fair site is a big park with walking paths. Probably the most lasting pieces to come out of Flushing was Disney’s audio-animatronics displays called “It’s a Small world” and “Great Moments with Mister Lincoln”. Both of these ended up as permanent attractions at Disneyland.
globe of the world that dominated the entryway. A big failure of the Fair was the lack of amusements and the failure of the highly publicized shows, such as “Wonder World”, “Dick Button’s Ice-Travaganza” and “To Broadway with Love”, all these closed early with heavy losses. As for us, I barely remember the affair of the Fair. We told my mom it was “so crowded we didn’t do much”.
What little I retain of the wonders of the Fair probably came during our second jaunt to it on September 2, 1965. I do know we managed to go through Disney’s “It’s a Small World After All”, but what stood out for me was in the Vatican Pavilion, Michelangelo’s “Pieta”.
You didn’t get to spent much time with it. You filed into the display behind a long line of viewers and only got to stand before it for a brief matter of seconds, but I thought it was beautiful. It shone in the lights and it was this smooth white that made you want to touch and run your hand around its curves, but of course you weren’t allowed to do that. That Michelangelo, he was something with a chisel! I wondered if Rudolph Condon could do a statue so perfect.
a long time; I wonder what ever happened to the score for “Ya-Ha-Whoey!”? (The picture on the right is Rudolph Condon with the artist Jamie Wyeth. I am not positive, but I think the young fellow on the left is my old friend Robert Condon. It certainly looks like him.)
If I struggle to recall much about the New York World Fair, I don’t have the same problem with another place we visited that summer, Atlantic City. We went the first time on June 28, the day after my birthday, but this was the first of several trips to that shore community. We began spending a few days there each summer in the years to come. This was before the casinos came to town and destroyed the resort.
The Democratic National Convention was held in Atlantic City that same summer. The Convention coverage shown a spotlight upon Atlantic City’s deterioration from its hay day. By the 1960s it was showing its age and getting ragged about the edges as poverty and crime were growing there. Of course, a decade later the politicians decided gambling was the panacea for all the economic woes and legalized the casinos that began flocking onto the Boardwalk by 1976. Well, that didn’t last, but it did ruin the quality of Atlantic City as a family resort. Politicians now think marijuana and legalized drugs are the economic panacea. Anyway, you do know, don’t you, that “politician” is an old Latin word meaning, “corrupt fool”?
down to Atlantic City for us. We did go on the beach and in the sea, but we spent a lot of time just taking in the attractions along the Boardwalk. The central point during those times was the Steel Pier, or as they always billed it, “The World Famous Steel Pier.”
There were attractions and displays down the length of the pier and a large auditorium where headliners once came to perform. On one of our trips the headliner was George Gobel. A lot of people probably have forgotten Gobel, but at one time he was a top comedian and star. He had his own TV show. Lonesome George, as he was known, even added some phrases to the language. Some of these popped up in movies over the years, such as, “Well, than there now”, quoted by James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause” and his oft used, “I’ll be a dirty bird,” uttered by Kathy Bates in the film, “Misery”.
acts because it was something like a Vaudeville presentation or the old Ed Sullivan variety show. Gobel, of course, was the featured act and the biggest name, so he appeared last on the bill. An act or two before his appearance was another comedian, a much older man with an unknown name. He obviously had been in the business a long time and probably had appeared in both Vaudeville and Burlesque along the way. He was hilarious. He just rattled off jokes like a machine gun. He was of the Henny Youngman or Rodney Dangerfield school of comics. You weren’t done laughing at one when another was sailing by you. He had the audience in hysterics, rolling on the floor.
Whoever booked the program did Gobel a disservice. George Gobel was a soft-spoken, gentle comedian. His delivery was slow and more humorous than funny, he was sort of a down home philosopher. Putting him on so close after this other comedian was disastrous. Gobel paled in comparison. He just didn’t have the right style to follow Mr. Machinegun Jokester.
We took in some of the other attractions of the town, such as the high diving horses. This was a popular and much ballyhooed performance of the time, but later came cries that it was cruelty to the horses, and it eventually disappeared.
Every year we would also pass by the diving bell. It may have been the thrill of a lifetime as advertised, but not ours. Lois is claustrophobic and something about plunging down under the ocean in that little box held very low appeal for me.
It just looked so fragile.
into the dark and dingy place. What a surprise when we got seating. We expected a bunch of grungy old men or perhaps a rough bunch of hooting rowdies. Instead we were surrounded by other couples much like ourselves, although most seemed to be a bit older than we. We learned after a time that this was typical. Just like us, these people thought they were being daring. We were all away from our home towns, away from our nosy neighbors, so why not something a bit sinful like sex.
The Globe almost appears quaint compared to what is available almost everywhere today, including the InterNet. It followed a set routine. Mostly it was dancers taking it off or a couple of comedians doing fairly classic blue material. Sometimes they would do a couple skits that included one or two of the women.
The comedians at the Globe were guys who had been around for ages. For instance, one of the stars at the time was Billy “Cheese ‘n’ Crackers” Hagen, who was pushing 80 at the time we started going to the Globe. The other comedians were no spring roosters either. The only relatively young man in the whole production was the singer and nobody much cared if he showed up or not. He was more filler between the other acts. The only time he garnered real applause was during a big production of “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody” that was sung just before or just after intermission. The reason for the applause wasn’t because people liked the song. It was because during the singing the women would parade out on stage to pose in these scanty outfits.
down front and went into a long spiel concerning these boxes of candy he was hawking. A girl had a box-like tray held by a strap and paraded up and down the aisles while the guy hawked the candy. She looked very much like the photo on the left, except at every performance we ever saw the Candy Butcher was a man. He would hold up one of the boxes and shake it. He gave a talk about how exotic the candy was, although it was usually some pieces of salt water taffy, but the real come on were the prizes some boxes may or may not contain. Oh, he would go on and on about the valuable prizes hidden in a select few boxes, the fancy watches and then he’d wander up the center aisle waving a box.
People would clamber to buy a box, at something like a dollar or two a pop. Probably a pretty good turn over considering a 1964 dollar would be worth $8.40 today. That little box probably sold in the salt water taffy shop for a dime, maybe a quarter. As for the prizes, well, after going a couple rows there was some guy who would suddenly leap to his feet shouting he got a gold watch and wave the new gained ticker in the air. This guy was a shill and he won that gold watch at every show. He just didn’t get to keep it.
may have enjoyed the comedians, even if they had heard the routines many time before, some of that material was funny and these guys certainly had the timing down.. But let’s face it, people came to see the girls, at least the husbands did. I can’t speak for the wives. Most of these pictures here were taken by the famous photographer, Diane Arbus. (left)
She was one of my favorite photographers. Her picture were seldom pretty. They sought truths. They were often tawdry and sad, photos beside strippers she did dwarves, transvestites, mentally impaired and the impoverished. She died in 1971 at the age of 48 after ingesting barbiturates and slashing her wrists. In her diary she wrote “Last Supper” and left it and her appointment book on the steps leading to the bathroom. She was found there two days later in the bathtub. Arbus, like my wife, suffered up and down and deep depressions.
Were the ecdysiast young and pretty? Hard to say. By 1964 the
burlesque theaters were disappearing and the striptease artists were a dying breed. A number of these women, like the comedians, were clinging to the last venues of their art. Many were past the young and pretty years, but it is amazing what some makeup and stage lighting can do to deceive the eyes of the beholders.
Were they sexy?
(left, stripper Blaze Starr photographed by Diane Arbus)
Yeah, they were sexy to me. I had never been to a burlesque show before the Globe, never seen real live women taking their clothes off in front of strangers. I’m not going to play noble and lie. This visit to the Globe turned me on. I had a favorite stripper, too. I don’t remember her moniker, but she was definitely the star bump-‘n’-grind practitioner there. Something about her appealed to me more than the others. I wish I knew her name or had her picture, but I don’t. She was also more daring than the other dancers. In those days there were strict laws on what a dancer could reveal, although they could show a great deal, they couldn’t go nude. They would do their thing down to pasties and g-string. They all did that, but this particular dancer, just as the lights would go out on the stage, would whip off her g-string. You never really saw anything because she had her timing down perfect, but she really was risking a lot. If the lights had flickered just a few nanoseconds it could have brought on a raid and a closing of the theater. But boy, in a couple short years that bit of enforced modesty would disappear.
The nights at the Globe may have been the gateway drug for our sexual future. Right now, however, these trips to the world’s fair and The Globe simply diverted us from the trouble about to fall upon us.
No comments:
Post a Comment