Pandemic, snake oil and Allentown Fair memories
Fair Week was a big deal when I was a boy living in Allentown. Schools closed all week, and I could walk to the fairgrounds — we lived variously on Hamilton, Fulton and Allen streets and my grandparents lived on 11th — and spend the whole day there several days that week.
I devoured it all, literally and figuratively.
But I read this week that because of the COVID-19 pandemic, there will be no Great Allentown Fair this year, only the third time it’s been canceled. The others in- volved the more obvious wartime disruption when the fairgrounds were a World War I training ground. The memory is vague, but I think my father trained there in the ambulance corps.
The fair changed over the years and became less an attraction than it was when I was a kid or teenager. Similarly, when we moved to South Carolina in 2002, the State Fair was fun until our son lost interest. This year, COVID-19 has converted the fair in Columbia to a two-day “Drive-Through State Fair” with a few exhibits, some farm animals but still all the fair food you crave delivered to your car.
I doubt the sights and smells of a fair ever quite go away for anyone who first recorded them as a youngster.
Though a city boy, I liked the farm animals. Later, when a freshman at Lehigh, I brought a friend from Brooklyn to the fair. Mel was astonished to see the size of a sow. He’d thought piglets were as big as they get. He was a real city boy.
I remember when the Allentown Fair had auto races and everything gathered a brownish dusting from the dirt track. The sulky races were even better and not as dusty.
I remember strolling the midway and wondering about the oddities in the tents behind the barkers and the banners. Some were sights you’d have to see to believe; others, sights you were too young to see.
Once in the 1960s, while in college and working at The Morning Call, I sat in for Bobo the Clown one afternoon and splashed repeatedly in the chilly waters of a dunk tank. It’s almost refreshing on a hot summer day. It turned into a good story, though as a journalism professor I’ve cautioned my students about participatory journalism. Oddly, perhaps, the most indelible and fascinating memory to me were the snake oil pitchmen with their displays set up under umbrellas out toward the animal barns. They were, well, an oily bunch. I must have been 9 or 10 the year one displayed, not a snake, but a Gila monster. It was so dangerous, he warned, that if it bit you, its jaws would lock as it chewed poison into its victim. True, though rarely deadly, I’ve since learned.
But at an impressionable age, that sounded ominous. For weeks, if not months — years? — I looked under my bed and in my closet to make sure there was no Gila monster lurking. As an adult, I’d see one or two in the wild in Arizona from the safety of horseback.
I don’t recall what the pitchman was selling, but they always drew a crowd. Surely, it was not an antidote for Gila monster bites in Pennsylvania. Probably not anything to do with snakes. They were just the come-on. More likely some soap, elixir or tonic worth a nickel and yours for only 50 cents. Two for a buck.
The Gila monster no longer bothers me, but the notion of gullibility does. This came together as I read The New York Times Book Review this week. “Will the American thirst for snake oil ever be quenched?” the Times asked, reviewing “The King of Confidence.” It’s the story of a 19th century con man, James Jesse Strang.
It’s a fair question whether applied to a 19th century con man, my 20th century fair pitchman or our contemporary 21st century experience of pandemic and politics.
How easily are we dazzled by the lights of the midway, enticed by exotic sights and smells, teased or taunted by Bobo the clown, lured by the fervent pitchman, even persuaded to sip the snake oil?
Allentown native Charles Bierbauer is distinguished professor and dean emeritus of the University of South Carolina’s College of Information and Communications, a former CNN senior Washington correspondent, ABC News foreign correspondent and was a summer reporter at The Morning Call, 1964-65. He lives in Spruce Pine, North Carolina.