Showman (1937)

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SHOWMAN Pacific coast to take on some of the prominent local performers and, the more I talked about it, the less he seemed to like it. His experiences as far west as Chicago had been pretty rough and he was anxious to get away from this savage America and back to civilized Turkey. Still, I hadn't realized how badly he was feeling about it until he disappeared one day— slipped out on my lieutenant in charge, walked out of the hotel and never turned up again. Somebody had made him a proposition that involved going back home, ostensibly at least, but we never knew who it was. All we knew was that the Terrible Turk was a steerage passenger on La Bourgogne, the French steamer that rammed a sailing-vessel off the Newfoundland Banks and went down in one of the worst marine disasters in history. The sailors went crazy and so did the steerage, from the best anybody could ever find out about it. Out of seventy women on board, only one was saved. And, by the irony of fate, the first bath the Terrible Turk ever took in his life was the death of him. When they found his body, he still had on his money-belt, but the sharks had torn it open and all the gold had gone to the bottom. Once I'd branched out, I didn't stop with wrestling. There were plenty of other popular sports that well repaid attention. From a modern point of view the sports set-up of those times probably sounds as queer and old-fashioned as a mustache-cup. Many of the sports that now draw big crowds and big money hadn't 223