Fun on a Dump

"They do things so funny in Cleveland. This whole thing is really terrific." What made pert, red-headed Toto Leverne thus exclaim last week was the French Casino's canvas top which one night leaked buckets of rain on her naked body, spoiled her swan dance. But for the 250,000 people who last week gaped at Dancer Leverne and other exhibits of Cleveland's Great Lakes Exposition, her remark was the perfect tribute to a city's spirited struggle to lift itself up & out of Depression.

By 1934 Depression, plus a wave of strikes and racketeers, had brought Cleveland to its knees. First rally was organization by the Advertising Club of a

"Come-to-Cleveland" committee, which this year is bringing to the city no less than 176 conventions. Civic affairs got a distinct lift last November when Harold Hitz Burton, an able, vigorous Independent Republican backed by Cleveland's three newspapers, was elected Mayor. Meantime, a little group of public-spirited citizens had been thinking that the 100th anniversary of Cleveland's incorporation as a city offered a good chance for some kind of municipal exhibitionism which would put Cleveland back into the national sunlight. Having had the inspiration, they turned for action to a onetime Clevelander named Lincoln Griffith Dickey.

Genial, hook-nosed "Linc" Dickey got his first training in showmanship by promoting itinerant Chautauquas and William Jennings Bryan. In 1922 Cleveland hired him to manage its huge Public Hall, scene of last month's Republican Convention. So notable was his success that in 1928 Atlantic City lured him away with $25,000 per year to run its Auditorium. Five years later rich Manhattan got him for chief of its Convention & Visitors Bureau.

Glad to get back to Cleveland to do some creative showmanship, "Linc" Dickey finished up his blueprints for a Great Lakes Exposition early last winter, laid them on the desk of Cleveland's No. 1 philanthropist, Dudley Stuart Blossom. Enthusiastic Mr. Blossom promptly agreed to bear all development costs up to Jan. 1. By the end of January contributions ranging from $25 to $50,000 had underwritten the Exposition for $1,100,000. Setting up a nonprofit corporation, General Manager Dickey, General Chairman Blossom and 125 trustees went into action.

The city contributed its $25,000,000 worth of halls and stadiums, its unsightly 150-acre dump sprawled along the lake front. Last March contractors began blasting away at frozen ashes, tin cans, bedsprings. In three months 15 miles of paving were laid, huge buildings erected. Exhibitors, paying $4 per sq. ft. for space, moved in their products. When last fortnight Secretary of Commerce Roper drawled a dull greeting into a microphone before a tiny audience, Cleveland suddenly woke up to find its dump converted into a thing of fun and beauty.

Pointing to Chicago's Century of Progress, which was five years in the making, and to New York's 1939 World's Fair, for which ground was broken on the Flushing, L. I., meadows last week, Clevelanders boasted that their Exposition had taken just So days to build, that every nail was in place for the opening. Supposedly the Exposition centered around the Romance of Iron & Steel, theme selected to typify the eight Great Lakes States.

But almost deserted was the underground Lakeside Exhibition Hall, where visitors were invited to prowl through plaster of Paris mines, gaze at blast furnaces and Bessemer converters, store away such bits of useful knowledge as: "It takes five tons of material to make one ton of steel." Touching off a brighter spark of interest was the Hall of Progress. There, not far from a distiller's display, was the Woman's Christian Temperance Union's booth, the Ohio State Chiropractic Society's show, a $275,000 exhibit of the good works of the Federal Government. In the Automotive Building were a Dream Bus of 1950, the coach in which Abraham Lincoln drove to his assassination, streamlined toilets, streamlined murals.

Streamlined, too, was Shakespeare, six of whose plays were cut to 45-min. editions. Rowdy and rollicking was the Midway with live pythons and motorized dinosaurs. Appearing in "The Front Page," a crude re-enactment of how criminals are executed, was John Dillinger Sr.. grizzled, 71-year-old father of 1934's Bad Man.

So poor an attraction was Father Dillinger and his stories of Son John that his female manager discharged him after three days. Second most ballyhooed exhibit of the Midway was "The Bouquet of Life," a "fearless, daring, beautiful" series of human embryos from three days to 240. For Cleveland's tremendous (72%) foreign population the Exposition offered the "Streets of the World," in which 36 nationalities were represented, with and without food. Expositions are made or marred by the amount of female nudity on display.

Grey beards today still remember "Little Egypt" (Frieda Mahzar) and her hootchy-kootchy dance when they have forgotten everything about the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. Philadelphia's Sesquicentennial in 1926 was a dismal failure largely be cause it put patriotism ahead of peep shows.

Fan Dancer Sally Rand was more responsible for the success of Chicago's Century of Progress (1933-34) than any other single individual. Stripped of all its cultural appeal, the Great Lakes Exposition will be put across, if at all, by the bare body of Toto Leverne as displayed five times a day to the 1,000 pop-eyed customers of the French Casino. A Scottish lass, born Trudeye Davison, Toto Leverne went to Northwestern University for two years, quit in 1934 to dance.

At the French Casino she appears with nothing but a stuffed swan's neck in front of her, dispenses with even that in her finale. Theatrically indignant at her surroundings last week, she declared: "Imagine me dancing in a tent! I came here thinking it was the Mayfair Casino; honestly I feel wicked as hell. I've never appeared this nude before, and my family don't know what to think." For Cleveland's 100-day combination of culture & carnival 1,000,000 tickets at 50-c- each have been sold in advance. Well aware that 26,000,000 people live within a 300-mile radius of Cleveland, and that only 40,000 a day are needed to make this Exposition a success, Promoter Dickey last week was in a thoroughly optimistic mood.

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