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By Root 496 0

in the profession. Outdoor showmen always refer to important sums as “paper money.” When concessionaires with less of it ran through their bank rolls at past fairs, Dufour & Rogers bought them out. That way the firm wound up the second summer of the Greater Texas Exposition at Dallas with thirtyeight attractions on the midway, including the “Streets of Paris.” The “Streets of Paris” was a girl show, but even a girl show may prove a good investment after the original proprietor's investment has been written off the books. The competition of palefaced indoor showmen, like some of the concessionaires at the Fair who had a Broadway background, always makes Lew and Joe feel good. “Give me the sky for a canopy,” Rogers once said, “and I will take Flo Ziegfeld and make a sucker out of him. How do you like that?” The difference between what will draw in Beloit, Wisconsin, and what will draw in New York, they think, is not basic, but is chiefly a matter of flash—the old vaudeville word for “class” or “style”—in presentation. “You can buy a ham sandwich at the Automat,” Dufour says, “or you can buy it at the Waldorf. What's the difference? The Waldorf has more flash.”

The partners have little of that pure enthusiasm for a freak as a freak that distinguishes some of their friends. A man named Slim Kelly, for example, who managed “Nature's Mistakes” for Dufour & Rogers, once spent three months and all his capital in the lumber country around Bogalusa, Louisiana, where he had heard there was a Negro with only one eye, and that in the center of his forehead. Kelly still believes the cyclops is somewhere near Bogalusa but that he may be selfconscious. Lew and Joe feel that the chance of finding a really new kind of freak is a tenuous thing on which to maintain a business.

Joe Rogers is a hyperactive man in his early forties, with contrapuntal eyes set in a round, sleek head. He has a boundless capacity for indignation, which he can turn on like a tap. Rogers' complexion, when he is in low gear, indicates rosy health. When he is angry, it carries a horrid hint of apoplexy. During the last few weeks before a fair opens, he carries on a war of alarums and sorties with contractors, delegates of labor unions, and officials of the concession department. His theory is sustained attack.

Once, on being approached by a stranger at the Fair grounds, Joe asked the man his business. “I'm a landscape architect,” the stranger said. “Oh,” Rogers yelled before beginning to bargain, “so you're the muzzler who's going to rob me!” He had a particularly bitter time with the contractor on one of his buildings in Flushing, a tall, solemn, chamberofcommerce sort of fellow whose work Rogers regarded as slow and expensive. “He is a legit guy, a businessman,” Rogers moaned one day, “and he tries to sell me a soft con!” “Con,” of course, is a contraction of “confidence game.” A soft con is one that begins with a plaint, as, “When I made this contract I didn't know the site was so marshy.” A short con and a quick con are less humiliating variants because they are aimed at catching a victim off guard rather than insulting his intelligence. “Me, a showman, a snake guy!” Rogers continued. A snake guy is one who has exhibited snakes in a pit at a fair. The incongruity of the contractor's attempt to invert the natural order appeared to affect Rogers deeply. “Trying to cheat the cheaters!” he screamed. “I'll wrap a cane around his neck!” And he went out looking for the contractor.

Before he had gone three steps from his office in the “Strange as It Seems” building, however, he had become involved in a quarrel with two gypsies who sought employment in the Seminole Village. “Me Indian,” said the first gypsy, who was swarthy enough to qualify. “You gypsy!” Rogers yelled. “You want to open a mitt joint in my concession! Get outa here!” A mitt joint is a booth for palm reading. Its bad feature, from the point of view of a respectable concessionaire, is the frequent disappearance of patrons' pocketbooks. This provokes beefs, which are bad for business. Rogers' life as opening