Word: piers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Cost of Hunting. No committee member was a more indefatigable antique hunter than Jackie herself. In storage, and in antique shops in Baltimore. New York and London, she uncovered such prizes as a Bellange pier table ordered by President Monroe and a Victorian slipper armchair of the Lincoln period. Steadfastly claiming that "the question of money should be subordinated to esthetic values," Jackie and the committee refused to reveal prices. But some of the pieces cost as much as $13,000. What Jackie was discovering was a fact happily known to every antique dealer in the U.S.-Early Americana comes...
Around the Flagpole. A long time ago, in the opening season of 1898, W. C. Fields played the pier, somewhat out of place on a structure built by Pennsylvania Quakers for concerts in the salt air. For mass popularity the pier had to wait until 1927, by which time Atlantic City had become one of the first of the last resorts...
Some yards up the flagpole, Alvin ("Shipwreck") Kelly was soon compiling a world sitting record (49 days, one hour), Sir Harry Lauder was acrrracking jokes in the Music Hall, and Gertrude Ederle was finning around in adjacent waters. For five years, a whale on a flatcar was a pier feature. The long tradition of diving horses was largely established by a formidable gelding named John the Baptist, a sort of box office Seabiscuit, who plunged for 30 years, always carrying a bareback and more or less barebodied female rider. Over the years, a prodigious, petition-length list of big names...
Annie Oakley Explained. Owner Hamid, now 65. bought the Steel Pier in 1945 for $2,500,000, has extended its length to half a mile and its box office to some $2,000,000 a year. Born in Lebanon and a tumbler from the age of three, the improbable Hamid was nine years old when, in Marseille, he met the first two Americans he had ever seen: Annie Oak ley and William F. ("Buffalo Bill") Cody. Hamid joined Cody's traveling circus, shined the great man's boots, kept his highballs full of ice, worshiped...
Hamid, long since a millionaire, now leaves the day-by-day management of the Steel Pier to his smoothly agreeable, Princeton-educated son, George Jr., 42, and some entertainers are probably thankful that he does. The Old Tumbler has no admiration for the easy somersaults of the Frankie Avalons, the Fabians, the ducktail warblers. "It used to take some body like Sophie Tucker ten years to get her name in lights," he remembers. "Now you're on the marquee if you cut a single record. I just can't take paying these brats $10,000. Goddamit, I used...