Word: piers
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...museum, ballroom dancing, a Kiddies Theater where nearly all performers are under 16, a diving bell for the observation of bottom life. All this begins on the New Jersey shoreline and seems to end somewhere near the coast of Spain: it is Atlantic City's Steel Pier, the coelacanth fish of show business, conceived in the age of gaslight and blackface...
...Independence Day this week, the Steel Pier moved into the full swing of its 64th season, so big and boffo that only the Atlantic Ocean can compete with it for the attention of tourists. The pier draws a steady 15,000 people a day, up to 28,000 when the weather stops on double zero. They are what Owner George Hamid calls the "high blue collar types." To keep them coming, Hamid gives them much more than corny carny fare, pays top fees for entertainment headliners. Among this season's top drawers: the Stan Kenton and Glenn Miller bands...
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...
Wages Up, Jobs Down. For years, Curran and Hall have waged a Pier 6 brawl with each other for dominance of seagoing labor. Hoping to forge ahead of Hall, Joe Curran this year demanded a 30-hour work week, a 12% package wage increase over four years, and assorted fringes. Hall, not to be outdone, asked management for something much more controversial-the right to bargain for more than 20,000 foreign sailors who man U.S.-owned ships registered abroad. (Curran made the same demand, but passed word that he would drydock it for sweeter wages and hours...