The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [10]
Jamming paid well and yielded a certain artistic satisfaction, but it did not content Dufour. He felt that it was not creative and that it had only an oblique educational value. It was at the Louisiana State Fair at Shreveport, in 1927, that Lew found his real vocation. He recognized it instantly; Keats felt the same way when he opened Chapman's Homer. There was a medicine pitchman at the Fair who carried with him a few bottles of formaldehyde containing human embryos. The pitchman used the embryos only as a decoy to collect a “tip,” which is what a pitchman calls an audience, but Dufour, who was at the Fair with his auction store, dropped in on the medicine show one evening and at once sensed there was money in the facts of life. He must have had an intimation of that vast, latent public interest in medicine which has since been capitalized upon by Dr. Heiser, Dr. Cronin, Dr. Hertzler, Dr. Menninger, and all the other authors of medical best sellers. “A scientist may know a lot about embryology and biology,” Lew has since said, “but it don't mean anything at the ticket window because it's not presented right. I felt the strength of the thing right away.” From the day when he decided to present biology effectively, Lew began to collect suitable exhibits.
The important thing in assembling a cast for a biology show is to get a graduated set of human embryos which may be used to illustrate the development of an unborn baby from the first month to the eighth. The series parallels, as the lecturers point out, the evolution of man through the fish, animal, and primate stages. As an extra bit of flash, a good show includes some life groups of prehistoric men and women huddled around a campfire. Sometimes it takes months to put together a complete set of specimens. While it is true, as Lew sometimes roguishly observes, that you cannot buy unborn babies in Macy's or Gimbel's, there are subrosa clearing houses for them in most large cities. It is now a small industry, though seldom mentioned by chambers of commerce. The embryo business even has its tycoon, to borrow a word from graver publications, a man in Chicago who used to be chief laboratory technician at a medical school. The specimens are smuggled out of hospitals by technicians or impecunious internes. Hospitals have a rule that such specimens should be destroyed, but it is seldom rigidly enforced; no crime is involved in selling one. Dufour can afford to keep companies standing by. The actors need no rehearsal and draw no salary. Early in his biological career, Lew thought of a terrific title for his show— “Life.” He did not pay fifty thousand dollars for this title, as Henry R. Luce did when he had the same inspiration. He did pretty well with his “Life” exhibits, playing state and county fairs and amusement parks, but he didn't get to the big time until he teamed up with Joe Rogers.
During Dufour's years of orientation, Rogers had been acquiring a comfortable bank roll by merchandising unbreakable dolls and cotton blankets in western Canada. His merchandising apparatus consisted of a wheel with fifty numbers on it. The customers paid ten cents a chance, and after every whirl one customer or another collected a doll or a blanket. In order to keep their midways free of swindlers, the Canadian fairs make contracts awarding all the concessions at each fair to one firm of concessionaires. Rogers' wheels were honest but allowed a nice margin of profit, and he usually got the concessions. Joe had established his headquarters in Chicago, and he used to travel through Canada west of Toronto in the winter, signing contracts with fairs. He was always a heavy bettor on sporting events, and on his journeys acquired an expert knowledge of professional hockey, which, in those days, existed only