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SHOWMAN
organize an expedition to rescue him after the curtain had fallen. Anybody else would have complained to the management, with some justification. But not Fairbanks —he loved it, and gave the supers just as good as they sent all the way.
Fairbanks means movies, of course, the way Carnegie means steel. There were other spots where the approach of the movies was making itself felt. In fact, it was through me that Adolph Zukor got into pictures. Out in Chicago I had run into a fine racket— a long narrow store on State Street with an entrance fitted up like the observation end of a parlor-car, an interior to match, and a movie-screen at the far end. The customers paid a dime or a quarter admission, climbed in, sat down in the cushioned seats, heard a bell ring and a whistle blow and an air-brake hiss and then saw on the screen a trip through the Rhine Valley or the Grand Canyon. All the while some trick machinery beneath the car was joggling and swaying the whole shebang to give a pretty fair illusion of being on a real railway journey through high-powered scenery. Hale's Tours, it was called, after the fire-chief in Kansas City who made a small fortune out of inventing it.
By this time you can probably figure how closely that kind of gadget was going to nestle up against my heart. I immediately made a deal for half a dozen of the cars and took the notion to Zukor, who was already fairly well known as an entrepreneur of penny-arcades and store-shows in New York. We set up our first car in a
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