A Curious Man

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by Neal Thompson


  That day had come. Dufour partnered with John Hix to produce a “Strange As It Seems Show” and museum, a near replica of Ripley’s Odditorium, replete with razor-blade eaters and contortionists. Hix soon launched a new CBS radio show too. A New Yorker magazine profile of Dufour that summer referred to Hix as “Ripley’s bustling young rival,” and said Ripley was “peeved by the affront to his prestige.”

  With performers and exhibits already lined up for the New York fair, Ripley decided to create his first permanent Odditorium in a vacant restaurant building at Forty-eighth Street and Broadway. There, he would present exhibits from his personal collection on the ground floor, and live performers on a second-floor rotating stage.

  Ripley and an investor sank $2 million into renovating the building and creating display cases for his collection of curiosities, including shrunken heads, a box made of human skin, the lifelike Masakichi sculpture, and the shoes of the world’s tallest man, Robert Wadlow.

  Huge neon signs hung off both sides of the corner building, welcoming visitors to Ripley’s “exhibit of curioddities from 200 countries” and “40 living Ripley radio oddities.” For the grand opening, a piano player named Bill Hajak sat out front, insisting he’d play nonstop for a month. He lasted two weeks, setting a world’s record for marathon piano playing, but quit after missing his daughter’s birth. Inside, sword swallowers, glass eaters, superhuman contortionists, and unfortunates with physical deformities performed their acts of self-mutilation or pseudo-torture from noon until one a.m.

  Shortly after the grand opening, though, the crowds thinned and the museum began to falter. Busy with cartoon and radio duties, Ripley had turned the museum over to his financial manager, Robert Hyland, and his brother, Doug, whose blue-collar skills didn’t translate to running a business.

  Shy and solitary, Doug drank to find courage in social settings. Too often he crossed the line. He frequently scuffled with Robert Hyland over management of the Odditorium, and Hyland accused Doug of always being late and/or drunk. Hyland hired his teenage son to pick up the slack, but his son and Doug regularly argued and often came close to blows. Patrons sometimes overheard the shouting, and Ripley’s financial partner started asking why he hadn’t seen any returns. By the fall, other creditors came knocking, and the Odditorium, $100,000 in debt, seemed headed toward insolvency.

  The only good news in the whole mess was that Hix’s World’s Fair exhibition also flopped. Fair organizers invited Ripley to replace Hix and bring a Believe It or Not show to the fair’s second season, in 1940. The San Francisco fair also planned an encore season in 1940 and invited Ripley back as well. This time, Ripley would put Pyle’s partner, Frank Zambreno, in charge of both Odditoriums. Even in death, Pyle found a way to make money for Ripley.

  AS HIS BROADWAY MUSEUM floundered, Ripley fled, making a trip in early 1940 to the only countries still safe enough to visit. He and Oakie covered ten thousand miles during three weeks in South and Central America, then joined Herbert Hoover on a tour through the southern United States to raise money for the Finnish Relief Fund. At each stop Ripley showed movies of his recent travels and tribal masks he’d purchased in Brazil and Mexico.

  His restlessness inflamed, Ripley asked Storer to expand the See America First with Bob Ripley radio series and strive for even more technically complex broadcasts from remote corners of the nation. Ripley even announced plans to take his on-the-spot broadcasts to Europe and South America, that he would start sending shortwave radio reports from war zones and even the North and South Poles. More realistically, Storer reached an agreement with the Department of the Interior to begin touring America’s national parks, starting in the summer of 1940 with trips to the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone.

  But first, Ripley and Storer took their See America show to Florida.

  Marineland, the world’s first “oceanarium,” had opened two years earlier in St. Augustine and quickly became one of Florida’s most popular tourist destinations. Ripley’s crew arrived with plans to broadcast part of the show underwater. Ripley fed a couple porpoises, which leapt out of the water to snatch fish from his hand, then milked a female porpoise that was lifted from the water in a webbed harness. A Marineland attendant had to cut a harness strap so Ripley could reach his hand around the porpoise’s teat, but in doing so accidentally cut the porpoise. A spurt of blood splattered onto Ripley’s diving suit.

  Next, Ripley put on a huge diving helmet, which fit over the headphones and microphone that would allow him to broadcast from a huge pool containing sharks and porpoises. Burdened by the cumbersome suit and helmet, Ripley and a Marineland expert slowly descended to the bottom of the pool. Ripley had grumbled about this stunt all day. He was not a good swimmer and was anxious about speaking on the air without a script. One of his writers quickly prepared a few remarks, but Ripley snapped, “How do you expect me to read underwater!”

  On the floor of the pool, Ripley and his attendant, a professional diver, tried to feed a pair of sharks, using a long stick to shove dead mullets into their mouths. For some reason, the sharks weren’t interested. They began circling Ripley and one shark bumped him backward onto his butt. The diver grabbed Ripley’s arm and dragged him to the stairs, where he was pulled from the water. The diver figured the sharks must have picked up the scent of porpoise blood on Ripley’s suit. The experience frightened and infuriated Ripley, but the show was a thrilling hit.

  His encounter with a hungry shark did little to dampen Ripley’s intrepidness. When he heard about a snake and alligator farm at Silver Springs, Florida, he wired his New York office: “Change next week’s schedule.” He wanted to milk a rattlesnake on the air. He moved the radio team inland, where he began his broadcast on a boat with Ross Allen, founder of the Silver Springs Reptile Institute. “Don’t be frightened by that noise you hear in the background,” Ripley told listeners. “It is just the bellowing of the alligators, who are all excited by this broadcast from their homeland!” He then described how, moments earlier, Allen had dived into the Silver River to wrestle a ten-foot alligator.

  “Ross, how did you conquer that alligator?” he asked Allen, who stood beside him still dripping in his swim trunks.

  “I tired him out,” Allen said. “You’ve just got to understand them.”

  Allen and Ripley next climbed down a ladder into a pit slithering with five hundred poisonous snakes. The plan was for Allen to grab a rattlesnake and show Ripley how to “milk” it and collect its venom. Ripley wore thick rubber boots, while Allen remained barefoot.

  “Nervous, Bob?” Allen asked.

  According to the script, Ripley was supposed to say that after man-eating sharks and deadly snakes, “these Believe It or Not programs will be the end of me yet.” He didn’t get the chance. Just as he and Ross lowered themselves into the pit, the lights went out.

  “Let’s get the hell outa here!” Allen yelled, his words barely audible over the air. (Allen later found that muskrats had chewed into the wiring.)

  He and Ripley fumbled their way out of the pit, and Ripley managed to turn the show over to his New York studio.

  “Take it away, B. A. Rolfe!” he ad-libbed.

  After the sunny Florida broadcasts, Ripley returned to BION Island, which was immediately slammed by an ice storm that turned every surface into an icicle. For days Ripley and his staff lived without heat or electricity, warming the mansion by keeping the fireplaces stoked. As was usually the case when confronted with adversity, Ripley was dazzled by the freak storm, walking childlike and wide-eyed around the island with his dogs, filming the surreal, glimmering beauty.

  People frequently disappointed him—women, employees, even his brother—but nature, and his dogs, rarely let him down.

  IN MAY OF 1940, a special railroad car was attached to the back of the 20th Century Limited and the Believe It or Not radio crew rolled west for a month-long tour. (Instead of Oakie, Ripley brought along a new Japanese girlfriend.) The highlight would be a broadcast from the bottom of th
e Grand Canyon. To achieve this, engineers would have to transmit the audio signal up to the canyon rim, send it along the nearest town’s lone telephone line, then relay the show to ninety-two CBS stations.

  Crew members grumbled that the whole idea was nuts, even as they marveled at Ripley’s willingness to attempt the impossible. It took thirty mules to carry actors, writers, guides, and two thousand pounds of equipment down the seven-mile trail to the canyon floor. Ripley, in cowboy garb atop a white mule, kept waving his hat and yelling yee-haw. The crew was divided into thirds. One group would set up a dramatization around a fire pit, using local cowboys as actors. Another crew would record the sounds of the Colorado River, using a boom microphone stretched over the water.

  The third and most complicated piece of the broadcast was a live report from a river guide as he shot through a section of rapids. Emery Kolb had been navigating the river for decades, but rarely at night, and never with expensive radio gear. Kolb suggested to Doug Storer that they hire an announcer to accompany him and operate the shortwave radio. Ripley grew concerned when he saw the announcer Storer had chosen: six-foot-two and over two hundred pounds.

  “Why didn’t they send a little guy?” Ripley grumbled. “This fellow will sink the boat.”

  Thus was Ripley introduced to a young department store manager and aspiring Phoenix politician named Barry Goldwater.

  The first half of the show went according to plan. But during the shoot-the-rapids sequence, Goldwater and Kolb missed the flash of a lantern that was to be their signal to start downstream. As per the backup plan, they started rowing at what they believed to be the correct time. Ripley and his engineers waited to hear Goldwater describing the rapids, but at first all they heard was a police dispatcher asking fellow officers to be on the lookout for a stolen green Chevrolet—the radio signals had gotten crossed. Fifteen long seconds later, Goldwater’s voice came through, but his report was brief. Water had begun slopping over the gunwales, threatening to short-circuit the equipment and sink the boat. Goldwater reacted quickly. “Take it away, Bob,” he said. “I can’t talk. I have to bail.”

  Ripley picked up the description of the moonlit action, but in doing so missed his own cue to throw a rope out to the boat, which swept past the sandbar where it was supposed to pull out. Ripley watched helplessly as Goldwater and Kolb rolled farther downstream.

  BELIEVE IT!

  Five months later, Goldwater joined pioneering river-runner Norman Nevills on the first-ever commercial paddling trip through the Grand Canyon. Goldwater wrote to tell Ripley about it, and Ripley invited him to New York. The two men hit it off (like Ripley, Goldwater was a foe of Roosevelt’s New Deal), and Ripley encouraged Goldwater to use his photographs to create a slide show and lecture. While delivering his travelogue presentation to packed audiences, Goldwater discovered a knack for public speaking and, after serving as a pilot in World War II, entered politics, eventually making his run for the presidency of the United States.

  AFTER A MONTH on the road, the See America train returned east, stopping in Birmingham, Alabama, for another unique broadcast, from the National Air Races.

  “Ladies and gentlemen. Now I shall present a Believe It or Not which has never been done on the air before,” Ripley announced at the start of the show. “Jack Huber is a young man who will make a parachute jump of twelve thousand feet—almost two and one half miles—and actually describe his sensations to you as he falls.”

  Storer had convinced Huber, a Hollywood stuntman, to jump from a plane with a clunky twenty-pound radio transmitter strapped to his chest. Later, no one could ever say for sure whether Huber actually “spoke” during his 160-mile-an-hour plummet to earth. All that listeners across America heard was the muffled shush-and-whistle of air whipping across the microphone attached to his harness. One reason for Huber’s lack of commentary was that his main parachute failed to open and ripped away from the harness. Unknown to those in Radioland, Huber spent a few terrifying moments plummeting toward his death until his backup chute finally bloomed open.

  Even with his backup chute, Huber had lost altitude and slammed into the ground. His wife, watching nearby, burst into tears as an ambulance sped toward the drop zone. Doug Storer got there first and found Huber slumped at the edge of the field, certain that the daredevil was dead.

  Ripley, back at the makeshift studio, improvised: “You have just heard, in his own words, Jack Huber’s sensations as he made a twelve-thousand-foot parachute drop … And I must say that I, for one, never heard a more thrilling description in my life.” Ripley announced that at any moment Huber would be on the air “to prove that he landed safely, and that all is well.” Storer was relieved to find that all actually was well—Huber was alive, having only had the wind knocked out of him.

  BY NOW, Ripley’s Odditorium on Broadway was in its death throes. Doug Ripley and Robert Hyland had tried to revitalize the show with a two-headed baby from Sumatra, but the deal fell through and attendance slumped further. Ripley’s main investor sued, forcing the money-losing venture toward closure. The museum’s parent company, International Oddities, of which Doug Ripley was president, would soon file for bankruptcy.

  When Hyland learned that a sheriff’s deputy was planning to confiscate Ripley’s collectibles, he asked Doug to intercept the officer and stall while he secreted Ripley’s valuables out the back and into a moving van. Doug helped by getting the officer drunk, giving Hyland enough time to deliver Ripley’s stuff back to BION Island.

  Ripley had been anxious during his museum’s final weeks, terrified that the papers would write about the biggest financial flop of his career. He blamed Hyland for mismanaging the enterprise but defended his brother, bringing an end to his longtime friendship with Hyland, who quit.

  The Odditoriums at the San Francisco and New York World’s Fairs, meanwhile, had performed surprisingly well. Yet, by the time those shows closed in the fall of 1940, fewer Americans were in the mood for that type of entertainment. Freaky sideshows had been a welcome diversion during the Depression but now seemed out of place at the troubled start of a new decade.

  ON OCTOBER 30, 1940, a farmer living on an island in the Bahamas watched a small wooden boat wash ashore. Inside, he found two emaciated and disoriented men, sailors from a British cargo ship that had been sunk by German torpedoes off the coast of Africa.

  Germans had strafed the ship’s life rafts but seven crewmen, including Roy Widdicombe and Robert Tapscott, escaped in an eighteen-foot “jolly boat.” Their craft contained just a few portions of food and water. Within a week, four men died. A week later Widdicombe wrote in a journal, “2nd cook goes mad dies. Two of us left.” Rainstorms provided some drinking water, but the food ran out and Widdicombe broke his teeth trying to eat a shoe. In one log entry he wrote: “Getting very weak but trusting in God to pull us through.” Days later: “All water and biscuits gone but still hoping to make land.”

  That was the final journal entry. Five weeks later, the farmer found Widdicombe and Tapscott on his beach, nearly three thousand miles from where their ship sank. When they recovered enough to speak, the men explained that flying fish had landed in the boat one day to provide nourishment. Small bits of seaweed helped too, but they often went days without water, sliding in and out of consciousness. Widdicombe lost eighty pounds, Tapscott lost sixty. Both were severely sunburned. Doctors called it a miracle that they’d survived.

  When Doug Storer heard the story, he immediately made plans for a live broadcast from the Bahamas. He, Ripley, Oakie, and a technical crew flew to Nassau to set up the show. While getting his script approved by Bahamian officials, Storer was introduced to the former king of England. Now known as the duke of Windsor, Prince Edward had been sent to the Bahamas to serve as governor after abdicating his throne to marry an American divorcée.

  The day before the broadcast, the duke unexpectedly offered to join the show—a potential coup for Ripley and Storer, since the ex-king had never spoken on commercial radio. His par
ticipation remained uncertain until just hours before airtime due to CBS concerns about Rolfe’s orchestra, stationed in New York, playing both “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “God Save the Queen.” CBS didn’t want to give the appearance that the United States was allied with England, now at war with Germany. The duke learned about CBS’s concerns (Storer suspected his phone had been tapped) and offered to withdraw, but Storer begged him not to cancel. Hours before the show, Ripley paced his hotel room in a loose robe that kept flapping open, unconcerned that he was flashing Storer’s former secretary, Hazel, who had become Storer’s wife.

  “You’re crazy,” he kept telling Storer. “He’ll never do it.”

  The broadcast began that night at ten o’clock in the ballroom of the Royal Victoria Hotel. After Ripley interviewed Widdicombe and Tapscott about their ordeal at sea, and the two men gamely answered questions about the slow deaths of their crew-mates, the duke approached the microphone. He read a brief prepared speech, calling the sailors’ journey “an extraordinary adventure up to the standard of Mr. Ripley’s famous feature.” The show was rebroadcast to ninety stations across North America, and the next day’s papers were filled with reports about the biggest scoop of Ripley’s radio career.

  BELIEVE IT!

  Widdicombe would not enjoy his miraculously spared life for long. After recovering, he traveled to New York, then sailed toward England to reunite with his wife and child. With Liverpool in sight, Widdicombe’s ship was torpedoed and sunk. All were killed. Tapscott recovered and enlisted in the Canadian Air Force, then rejoined the Merchant Marine. He served at sea for twenty years, until his premature death at age forty-two. Hellmuth von Ruckteschell, the captain of the German ship that had attacked Widdicombe and Tapscott’s ship, was convicted of war crimes and died in prison.

 

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