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By Root 488 0

could not find a suitable Catholic organization to sponsor the “Last Supper,” so they dropped it. Rogers says, without any intended disrespect, “The nuns would not play ball with us.” Dufour, the senior partner, saw no conflict in the subject matter of the “Last Supper” and “We Humans.” He is a man of a speculative and scientific temperament. “We tell the customers about evolution,” he says, “but we don't advocate it.” Jang, a Malay boy with a tail six inches long, was a principal in “Strange as It Seems,” another Dufour & Rogers attraction. Dufour wanted to invite all the inhabitants of Dayton, Tennessee, to come to see Jang and draw their own conclusions. Rogers, however, was against the necessary outlay for postage stamps.

As the partners had already rented a midway site for the abandoned religious spectacle, they substituted a hastily erected saloon and restaurant called the Rondevoo. The Rondevoo made its chief appeal to other concessionaires and their employees— an example of Dufour & Rogers resourcefulness, because, as Rogers said, “The attendance is off, but the boys have got to be here anyhow.” The Rondevoo turned out to be their most profitable stab.

In deference to Dufour's scholastic leanings, Rogers, an earthy type, sometimes calls his partner “Dr. Itch.” The firm believes in diversification of investments, as Dufour puts it, or, as Rogers says, spreading its bets. When the Fair opened, the partners had five shows and one ride, the Silver Streak, ready in the amusement area. They also had one of their evolution shows in operation at the San Francisco Fair. The New York shows were “We Humans”; “Strange as It Seems,” which they described as a “de luxe Congress of Strange People, Presented in an AirCooled Odditorium”; the Seminole Village, the title of which is selfexplanatory; “Nature's Mistakes,” an exhibit featuring Adonis, the Bull with the Human Skin, and “Gang Busters,” an epic depiction of the dangers and fascination of crime, with reformed gangsters reenacting the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and Juanita Hansen, a reformed movie actress, lecturing on the evils of narcotics, to which she said she was once addicted. They also added “Olga, the Headless Girl, Alive,” and the restaurant. This list includes about every kind of proved midway attraction except a girl show, and that omission is due not to prudery but commercial principles. A girl show for a world's fair must have a rather elaborate installation, usually a name star, and always a considerable salary list. Moreover, one nude nonfreak woman is much like another, and while it is certain that one or two of the dozen girl shows at a world's fair will make money, nobody can tell in advance which ones they will be. Freaks, crime, fivelegged cows, and aborigines are staple midway commodities. At Flushing the fivelegged cows came through for the firm, but the human freaks lost money.

Dufour and Rogers began their joint career at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago in 1933 and have figured conspicuously on the midways at San Diego, Dallas, Fort Worth, Cleveland, Brussels, and San Francisco since then. Long before 1933 they had worked separately in that curious world of sixty thousand outdoor show people, the “carnies,” who travel from town to town with carnivals. A stranger once asked Joe Rogers whether he had started as a barker with a carnival. “Hell, no,” Rogers replied. “I worked my way up to that.” And anyway, he might have explained, no carnie says “barker.” The man who holds forth outside the show to bring the people in is the “outside talker”; his oration is known as “the opening.” The fellow who guides them about inside the exhibit is an “inside talker.”

Banks, as might be expected, are reluctant to lend money to carnival people, so Dufour & Rogers finance their ventures largely by selling “pieces” of them to other men in the amusement business—owners of touring carnivals, manufacturers of slot machines, and retired circus proprietors. The ease with which they promote money from this skeptical investing public is evidence of their prestige