Alan Mays' photos with the keyword: audiences

For more information, see the full version of this photo.

A photo of a dock or a pier for the Vintage Photos Theme Park. This is a 1957 snapshot of the Steel Pier , an amusement pier in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Billed as "The Show Place of the Nation," the pier hosted a variety of shows and acts, including a diving horse and a bicycle-riding bear. When I purchased this photo, however, I didn't realize that it showed a bear and a woman riding bikes on the high platform visible on the left-hand side (mouse over the image to see an enlargement ). After I spotted the bear, I still couldn't imagine that you could train an animal like that to climb a ladder and ride a bicycle. But a YouTube clip of the Bicycle-Riding Bear that's part of The Nieroslavski Family at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, N.J. --filmed during summer 1960--provides a glimpse of how the bear performed its act. Attitudes toward animal acts have changed over the past fifty years, however, and making a bear ride a bicycle seems inhumane and dangerous by today's standards. As far as I've been able to determine, there are no longer any bicycling bears or diving horses in Atlantic City.

"J. H. Kanarr, professional hypnotist, Lancaster, Pa. Hypnotism thoroughly taught. Charges reasonable. Diseases cured without medicine. Public and private exhibitions given." Beverly Wilgus (Photo_History) posted an unused copy of this card on Flickr (see Blank Business Card for Professional Hypnotist - c. 1890 ) and speculated that the cards may have come from a nineteenth-century hypnotism school. In fact, I believe that the professional hypnotist cards originated with Lew Alexander Harraden of Jackson, Michigan, who offered mail-order lessons in hypnotism under the name "Prof. L. A. Harraden" in the 1890s and 1900s. Although J. H. Kanarr probably purchased one of Harraden's mail-order courses, it's doubtful that he ever actually worked as a "professional hypnotist."

Something "mysterious" for the the Vintage Photos Theme Park . This photo was identified as a " spirit photograph " when I bought it at an antique co-op in 1994. Handwritten on the back of the photo is the following: "Camp Silver Bell, Mountain Springs Hotel, Ephrata, Pa." Camp Silver Belle was a Spiritualist group founded by Ethel Post-Parrish , a medium whose Indian spirit guide was named Silver Belle. The group held lectures and meetings at the Mountain Springs Hotel in Ephrata, Pa., and published a schedule of programs as late as 1976 (see Silver Belle Presents Lecturers, Teachers, World-Famous Psychics, 1976 ). Eventually, however, the group became inactive, and the hotel fell into disrepair. Today, the facade of the old hotel remains , but the rest of the hotel site was demolished in 2004 to make way for a Hampton Inn hotel and an Applebee's restaurant. So what is that strange haziness hovering above the audience? An ectoplasmic manifestation from another spiritual realm? Hokum conjured up by sleight of hand and camera? Or just an odd yet coincidental defect in the film or developing?