Ripley’s Believe It or Not!^315Before its transformation
into a corporate theme park,
New York’s Times Square
was the world’s largest and
gaudiest carnival midway.
Replete with dazzling lights,
boisterous barkers, and
frightening freak shows, the
Great White Way was a
hugely popular attraction
with a reputation that
spanned the globe. Until the
1960 s, Ripley’s Believe It or
Not! Museum was one of the
most famous of Times
Square’s destinations. For
displayed in a dark and
cavernous dungeon one floor
below street level on teaming
Broadway, illuminated by faint colored spotlights, were myriad oddities
guaranteed to raise hackles andtickle funny bones. Shrunken heads from
Africa, human skulls pierced with hundreds of nails, stuffed vampire bats
with demonic eyes, South American birds with multiple wings, and
domestic canines with extra legs and tails were all splendiferously on view.
The world’s weirdest phenomena were presented with such sublime
verisimilitude that the visitor could only believe it... or else.
Walt Disney discovered gold in Anaheim, California, in the early
1950 s, but he was not the first to get rich through cartoon creation. During
the 1940 s, Robert Leroy Ripley gave his name to, and earned riches from, a
chain of enticingly titled Odditoriums inspired by his popular cartoon,
“Ripley’s Believe It or Not!,” a daily diet of odd and entertaining factoids
(before that word was coined) which ran in hundreds of American
newspapers, to the delight of millions.
Ripley had a lifelong passion for rooting out the bizarre and the
grotesque, as well as the rare and the uncommon, which he discovered
while on globetrotting expeditions that took him to 198 different countries