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Show STREET FAKERS One of the great American institutions institu-tions that 1-? in danger of becoming extinct is the old time street faker, as i nth a Yankee product as apple plcr baseball, the cirrus and black-face minstrels Old-timers may have noticed some ihing lacking this ppring. and not been sure Just what it was. What thev miss is the street faker. Montague Silver, "greatest street man west of the Alleghenies" and typical typ-ical of his profession, rises in memory. mem-ory. It l a warm June evening, back yonder in the old home town Montague's Mon-tague's big red gipsy wagon is parked in the public square Towering abouo the half awed, half-iubilant half-iubilant faces of the populace is Montague Mon-tague himself, beaver bat, frock Coat checkered vest, goatee and all including in-cluding one of the Brazilian dlamondr., large as a hickory nut, which Moni carried In stock Under the flickering light of a banjo-shaped torch, the old street fake dispensed Wa-Wa, ' the remedy whose, formula I procured while a captive among the Sioux Indians." When interest in tonic of 98 per cent alcohol strength waned, Monty brought forth razors, combination handy tools, eight handkerchiefs for a quarter . . . aud the Little Giant Prize Packet that included everything every-thing under the sun, especially a trick ring for squirting perfume in a friend's eye. Usually a street faker "came regularly, regu-larly, once a year," but rarely twice to the same town, especially when the Chinese peach trees he left behind turned out to be dogwood or black -haws The street faker flourished before the days of scientific salesmanship. J of which he was the original discoverer, discov-erer, and many a "captain of industry ' owes much of his selling ability to boyhood evenings listening under the I gasoline torch. To gather the crowd together and ! hold them when they grew restless i aud showed signs of drifting away to poolroom or homee, there was a black face entertainer who told the joke about the mule breaking its leg when it kicked mother in-law in the jaw. The niinatrel's sure-fire was the old time favorite song. "My Gal's High-Born High-Born Lady." 1 Once in' a while, these days, you see a Montague Silver and" his blackface black-face entertainer passing out their plunder from a wagon But mostly the street faker docs business from a sult-case-Blze stand, cramped in i business district nook or a side-street gutter The game isn't what it used to be The street fakers had too much business busi-ness ability to continue on a small scale; they branched out Then, too. it's hard to get a street crowd togelh er in these days when pedestrians have nearly all taken to autos, nobody walking. The street faker is vanishing into memory, whore ho stands out cloar and conspicuous, enticing, likable, a monument to the simple pleasures and thrills of days when Bryan was a young man and bb? champions were 1 vowing not to get their hair cut until he entered the White House as presl- dent. |