A Curious Man by Neal Thompson

Author:Neal Thompson [Thompson, Neal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7704-3621-6
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2013-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

At Pyle’s air-conditioned exhibition hall, visitors walked past display cases with shrunken heads, medieval torture devices, and hundreds of other treasures and trinkets that Ripley finally released from his boxed-up personal collection, including Jesse James’s first gun and a “cannibal fork” from Fiji.

Farther inside were sixteen small stages, where entertainers performed vaudeville-style acts. On one stage, an attractive sword swallower plunged a two-foot neon light down her throat, where it glowed. Another performer lifted weights with hooks attached to his eyelids, then used the same hooks to tow a wagon carrying his wife. Other stages featured a man who could smoke a cigarette and inflate balloons through his eye socket, a man who could dislocate his jaw and “swallow” his nose, and a one-man orchestra who could play twenty-one instruments simultaneously.

Some of the two dozen performers had been featured in Believe It or Not cartoons over the years, including E. L. Blystone, who wrote more than two thousand letters on a grain of rice, and a man who crammed his huge mouth with four golf balls and a full-sized baseball. As one newspaper writer pointed out, “You’ll not have to wonder about these men and women from a pen and ink illustration. They’ll be right there in person.”

In the first weeks, however, business lagged, and Pyle worried that the Odditorium might be a bust. He considered dropping the forty-cent admission price to lure visitors and shared his nagging concerns with another sideshow operator named Lou Dufour. “I don’t understand it,” Pyle lamented.

Somewhat audaciously, Dufour had come to the fair with a display of human embryos in jars of formaldehyde, including a two-headed fetus. His other exhibit, “Darkest Africa,” was a village of thatched-roof huts inhabited by Zulu and Senegalese immigrants from Harlem dressed in loincloths and carrying spears. “Darkest Africa” also included the hut of a man named Captain Callahan, who had been mutilated during an expedition to the Congo. A show barker told patrons that savages “had decapitated his penis and testicles,” and that Callahan would remove his robe to reveal the scars—for an extra fifty cents.

Dufour told Pyle to find better acts, like Callahan. His advice: less vaudeville, more torture. “The public loves to suffer,” he liked to say. Dufour offered to help Pyle find more interesting performers—a man who could drive long nails into his nose and stick hatpins through his cheeks, one who licked red-hot bars with his tongue—in exchange for 3 percent of the ticket receipts. But Pyle was hesitant to create a blatant freak show.

“People will faint,” he protested.

Dufour assured him, “That’s when the business will start.”

Ripley had by this point stepped back to let Pyle take charge, having learned in recent years that he could hardly manage his empire alone, that he was still a better traveling artist than a businessman. Though he had grown wary in recent years of tainting the Believe It or Not brand and was quick to sue anyone who misused his trademark, with a fellow Santa Rosan in charge he freely turned over the “Ripley” name and hoped for the best.

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