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SHOWMAN
ippine exhibition, which drew large crowds by exhibiting a group of natives who daily burned a dog alive as preparation for eating it. After the government made the Filipinos stop that, the Boer War was unchallenged cock of the walk.
Everybody was talking about the Boer War at the Fair— and presently Orlando Harriman, brother of E. H. Harriman, was talking to me about it as something we could make money with. He held an option on a strip of useless marsh with over a mile of riparian rights between the Brighton Beach Hotel and the Manhattan Beach Hotel out Coney Island way. His idea was to take up the option and fill in the marsh and start a big amusement layout to compete with Luna Park— the chief feature to be a huge stadium for displaying the Boer War show after St. Louis was through with it. It was a half-million-dollar proposition for the land alone. But Harriman knew all the answers in financial juggling and, by means of my credit and a flock of assorted mortgages and the fact that he was agent for the sale, we got the land without sinking a real dollar in it. My end was to supply the knowledge of show business which Harriman singularly lacked— and corral the Boer War. In those times I was the logical man to swing such a deal. They started filling in our swamp and putting up the biggest roller-coaster in the world and the biggest merry-go-round in the world and a midway with concessions— a miniature world's fair, in short— and I headed for St. Louis.
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