The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [12]
For the two summers of the Century of Progress, Lew and Joe prospered. “Life,” the TwoHeaded Baby, and Darkest Africa, the Ethiop village that they opened the first season, all made plenty of “paper money.” The Hawaiian Village, their most ambitious promotion, earned no profit, but the partners broke even on it. A vista of paper money and excitement opened before Dufour & Rogers in the fall of 1934. The only requisite to continued success was a steady supply of world's fairs. Brussels and San Diego had announced expositions for 1935. The firm divided its forces. Rogers went to Brussels with “La Vie,” a variation of “Life”; “Les Monstres Geants,” a snake show featuring rattlesnakes, or serpents a sonnettes, a novelty in Belgium; and, as a feature attraction, a show like “Gang Busters,” called for the Belgian trade “Le Crime Ne Paie Pas.” Dufour took the same line of shows to San Diego, and in addition had the firm's mascot, the twoheaded baby. “Le Crime Ne Paie Pas” had a collection of tommy guns and sawedoff shotguns reputedly taken from les gangsters americains, a rogues' gallery of photographs featuring postmortem views of Dillinger and an old PierceArrow sedan billed as “L'Auto Blinde des Bandits.” The old Pierce has especially thick plateglass windows, and the doors and tonneau are indubitably lined with sheet metal. Its history is uncertain, but it must have belonged to somebody who was at least apprehensive of accidents. The car was like a box at the opera. In Brussels it passed on alternate Wednesdays as Dillinger's, on odd Fridays as Al Capone's, and at other times as Jack “Legs” Diamond's. Jack “Legs” Diamond was the most popular gangster in Belgium, Rogers says, because once he had tried to land at Antwerp from a freighter and had been turned back by the Belgian police. The Belgians felt they had had a personal contact with him. During the weeks before the Flushing Fair opened, Joe drove the armored car around the streets of New York, usually between the Fair grounds and the West Side Ruby Foo's, where he likes to eat.
The star of “Le Crime Ne Paie Pas” was a man named Floyd Woolsey, who sat in an electric chair and impersonated a murderer being executed. He had to give special performances for delegations of curious European police chiefs. Belgian journalists reported that “Le Crime Ne Paie Pas” gave them a fresh insight into American life. Dave Hennen Morris, at the time United States Ambassador to Belgium, found the show a fine antidote to nostalgia, but a few stodgy American residents of Brussels protested against giving Continentals such strange ideas of our culture. Therefore, acting on the Ambassador's suggestion, Rogers rechristened the show “Les Gangsters Internationaux.” The inclusion of a few German gangsters in the rogues' gallery made everybody happy, and, as Joe says, “the heat was off.” He thinks well of Europe except for the climate. “It is the wrong setup for snakes,” he says. “Cold and rainy all the time.” But the weather had no deterrent effect upon the crowds. The Belgians, Joe concluded, had given up hoping for fair weather.
During 1936 and 1937, Dufour & Rogers operated clusters of shows in the expositions at Dallas, Fort Worth, and Cleveland, but these were mere workouts: they had already begun to plan their layout for the World of Tomorrow. Throughout the Texas and Cleveland fairs, none of which was an unqualified success, Lew and Joe maintained a record of profitmaking most unusual among concessionaires. Each time they emerged unscathed from another fair their prestige in the trade and the amount of paper money which they apparently had at their disposition