Morning Call columnist Bill White had a piece earlier in the week where he lamented that Bobo the dunking clown was no longer at the fair. Although that's about as funky as it got for Bill in his era, we older Allentonians remember much hotter nights at the fairgrounds. Up to the late sixties the fair had girly shows. I'm going back to the era of Gooding's Million Dollar Midway and Benny's Bingo. I'm going back to three midways packed between the Farmer's Market and Chew Street. I'm going back to when the fair only started after Labor Day.
I mentioned in one of my previous fair posts that Fred Schoenk and I made and sold printed t-shirts at the fairs during high School. At the Kutztown Fair we were hired by the burlesque show owner to letter a new banner for his show tent...as high school boys we would have paid him for the experience.
photocredit:molovinsky...Black rock and roll review with strippers, 1969 Allentown Fair
The "Girlie" shows at the Allentown Fair in the 1950's, when I was in high school, were less "Hootchy" than at the more permissive Kutztown & Reading Fairs, which were smaller events with less folks and fewer morality cops to police both the strippers and the patrons.
ReplyDeleteAt the Allentown Fair an attempt really was made to restrict the attendees to age 18 and keep the girls from removing bras and cod pieces.
The one exception was for the "ten in one" Midway Shows where a magician was one of the acts and a bally feature was a horizontal cabinet with a glass lid where a girl was placed inside and then blades inserted from the sides and top of the cabinet thru slots. The carnival barker then lifted the lid up and reached inside the cabinet and removed her dress, stating to the crowd that the girl, though apparently hopelessly bisected, was actually still inside the cabinet, and to prove it, even though it would "reveal the secret" of the trick, for only twenty cents admission, one could come up to the platform and view the inside. Of course, all the males, regardless of age, providing they paid the fee, rushed to see what they hoped would be a naked lady. (Disappointment followed...plus, out the quarter!)