Side-show sensations seduced Bangor crowds

Ladies and gentlemen, step right up and see the amazing professor A.J. Pierce swallow bayonets, chew up lamp chimneys and scarf down snakes for dessert. If you were walking in downtown Bangor one fall day a century ago, you would have heard a pitchman barking these words or something similar. Like an oasis in the desert, Bangor was the entertainment crossroads of eastern Maine. While Nordica and Barrymore appealed to high-brow audiences, more exotic acts featuring sword swallowers, snake charmers and mind readers aimed to captivate the less sophisticated.

Professor Pierce, the sword swallower, was the star of one show run for several days out of a vacant storefront on Harlow Street. “He runs swords and small saws and scissors and bayonets down his throat until it seems that it must slash his vitals; but he gets through all right and smiles at the frightened spectators. He chews and swallows glass, eats hot pitch and rosin and sealing wax, swallows tacks and does other stunts that cause the observer to wonder what his insides are composed of. … He finished his stunt by swallowing about 16 inches of a snake,” wrote an excited reporter for the Bangor Daily News on Nov. 11, 1905.

Two colleagues performed similar feats of daring. LaCrosse, the human stone crusher, let people break stones on his stomach with a sledgehammer, while Madame LaMonte, the Hindoo rope juggler, freed herself after being bound in 50 feet of hemp. The show took place in East Market Square (near where City Hall is today) in what the reporter referred to facetiously as “the tenderloin,” a reference to urban neighborhoods known for vice and graft. Indeed, Fan Jones, the infamous, if aging, harlot of Harlow Street, lived a short distance away. The show was operated by professor H.H. Perkins, a scholar of bizarre amusements like his partner professor Pierce.

The Bangor Opera House was not above presenting such sensational fare in between the plays usually featured there. The winter of 1906, it featured Priscelle, the hypnotist and mind reader. For several nights beginning Feb. 19, the hypnotist attracted large crowds, including “many persons of prominence and distinction,” wrote a Bangor Daily News reporter.

Priscelle “discovered” items belonging to audience members hidden about the theater while blindfolded, and he placed a man in “a cataleptic state” who was then able to support the weight of four men standing on his body. The show included “a full-fledged minstrel show” and “a one-ring circus.” Banjo players, a slack-wire walker and illustrated songs by Miss Georgia Houlton rounded things out.

This was an era when there was tremendous interest in extrasensory perception on the part of educated as well as uneducated people, which helps explain the crowds that turned out to see Priscelle and another performance on Dec. 2 at City Hall. It was titled “A Night with the Spirits” and featured The Great Houdon “in his religio-scientific test seance.” A small illustration in an advertisement purported to show Houdon helping the London police catch a murderer.

The audience packed City Hall auditorium, then located at the corner of Hammond and Columbia streets. Both of the city’s daily papers offered extensive descriptions of Houdon’s performance. The Bangor Daily News noted, “Through mental photography, as he called it, the performer picked out persons in the audience whom he had never seen, located hidden articles, read the number of a watch held by a subject … and did other little experiments that made his auditors gasp.”

The reporter for the Bangor Daily Commercial described an onstage seance: “Seated at a table with Robert B. Stewart … Houdon made the table dance so that the two men were hardly able to hold it.” Then Houdon proceeded to read a message from Stewart’s late father: “I am with you tonight and can assure you that this is a grand truth.” Stewart looked at the piece of paper on which the message was written and declared the writing was a facsimile of his father’s.

Entertainment was changing to accommodate the tastes of a generation stimulated by new ideas and inventions. Within a couple of years, some new theaters would be giving the Bangor Opera House competition with movies, illustrated songs and a greater variety of vaudeville acts.

Before that, however, a penny arcade, “the first of its kind in Bangor,” opened on Central Street. According to the Bangor Daily News on Oct. 1, 1906, it was “modeled after similar resorts … in Boston and other large cities. One side of the room is occupied by phonograph and song machines, while picture machines fill the other. In all there are 60 of these machines, and they are but a cent each – a cent for a popular song, a cent for a series of pictures.

“There are many other interesting features, one of the best being an electric automatic rifle and target. This is new here. … A huge Teddy Bear – advertising that very popular song, Won’t You Be My Teddy Bear? – is displayed near the big show window and is certain to attract much attention,” said the newspaper.

Electricity and other new technology made all these wonders possible. “[I]n the basement is the electrical apparatus by which the song machines are controlled. There is a motor and generator, which latter charges the storage batteries of the machines. A number of assistants are to be constantly employed, and there will be a cashier to change your nickels and dimes into pennies, just as in the big city.”

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.