W. C. Fields : his follies and fortunes (1949)

W. C. Fields saloon and bawdy-house situation in his home town. He later apologized for the sketchiness of these references, ascribing it to his extreme youth. "Saloons in Philadelphia," he said, "were closed at twelve o'clock Saturday night and opened at one minute past midnight on Sunday. There were queues formed at nearly all the leading ones, which did a thriving business until the early hours Monday morning. Saturday night the saloons did a fine bottle business. "Of course we had notch (nautch) joints all over the city and there were many reformers who wanted to blot them out altogether, others who wanted to have them concentrated in a certain section of the city. A fellow was afraid to whistle for his dog after nine o'clock at night, for fear of being hit on the sconce with a heavy door key. The low-ceiling price bazaar for sexual relief was a street called Middie Alley. You could barely get a pushcart through this avenue. Top price — twenty-five cents." Fields enjoyed talking about early Philadelphia, partly, his friends suspected, because he liked to demonstrate his phenomenal memory. When in good form, he would rattle off long lists of stray information, such as the fact that Philadelphians called merry-go-rounds "hobbyhorses"; that they called peanuts "ground nuts" ; that small restaurants were called "oyster houses" or "oyster saloons" (though they sold no liquor) ; that Sunday entertainment was limited to band concerts at Willow Grove and Strawberry Mansion in Fairmount Park; that firecrackers were known as "shooting crackers," and that the city was known for Philadelphia Pepper Pot, Philadelphia scrapple, sticky-bottom cinnamon buns, and "Scotch cake," a flat cake an eighth of an inch thick and six inches in diameter, upon which Fields claimed to have broken several teeth in his fledgling years. On one occasion Fowler's secretary took a secret shorthand record of Fields' nostalgic comments. They went as follows: 12