Beware of Life Behind the Scenes

Old-timers around this town will recall Fred J. Hall as the towering, no-nonsense head usher at prehistoric, long-gone venues like old Gilmore Field and the Pan Pacific Auditorium to the Sports Arena.

Fred was somewhere between 6 and 7 feet tall and he had the nice, even disposition of a German corporal on a parade ground. He had some classic fights with Hollywood’s greatest, including Frank Sinatra, and once had the distinction of throwing Groucho Marx out of his own box.

If you didn’t have a ticket, not even a print of your latest movie would move Fred to admit you. Rumor has it he once blocked Bing Crosby from his box until Bing could prove his identity with a chorus of “Melancholy Baby,” but Fred says this was a pure falsehood. It was “White Christmas.”

Fred led a charmed life ever since the day in Miami he pulled three neighborhood bullies off a little guy who turned out to be Al Capone’s son. Fred earned himself a real-life godfather from that impromptu encounter. “I just couldn’t stand to see three guys picking on one, and besides, I didn’t like one of the guys,” Fred explains.

He caddied for Gene Sarazen, swam in an aqua-show with Johnny Weissmuller, dived with Sammy Lee and once played football for Occidental. As head usher, he consorted with the great and near-great of the movie colony of the era. George Raft was a personal friend; Gene Doyle, who ran the Gilmore Stadium auto races, relied on him; Casey Stengel was a Pacific Coast League manager and omnipresent at the postgame cocktail sessions in the owner’s bar.

Fred thought life would settle down when he hung up his Andy Frain uniform and took on the life of a sportsmen’s show promoter. After all, what could go wrong with a patented flat show, a collection of booths and boats, fishing lures, rifle scopes, rods, reels and slides of huntsmen’s paradises in the Canadian Rockies or California’s High Sierra

Plenty, Fred would find out. He was reminiscing on the point the other evening as he was readying his 45th state-of-the-art sports show, the Western Fishing Tackle and Boat Show, which is playing this week at the Long Beach Convention Center.

There was, for instance, the time when Fred staged his show outdoors at the old Gilmore Stadium and thought it would be nice to dye the sawdust green to simulate the grassy slopes of the fishing and hunting grounds.

It worked fine till it rained. Then, Fred found he had managed to cover Fairfax Avenue to a depth of several inches in green ooze. It got into people’s shoes and stockings, up their noses, on their garments. It tracked into delicatessens, onto living room carpeting. He tried to placate the neighborhood merchants with free tickets. Fairfax Avenue, unmollified, dubbed him “the Jolly Green Giant” and sued. “It cost me--how shall we say this?--some greenbacks?” Hall recalls.

At that, it was mild compared to the time Fred had to get rid of the huge indoor water skiing pond he erected for his show in the Chicago Amphitheater. After consultation with his engineers, he decided the best way to empty the water was simply to knock out the retaining walls and let it escape naturally. The resultant wall of water was only just short of the Johnstown Flood as it cascaded down Halsted Street carrying everything in its path.

“You had everything but cows floating on rooftops,” recalls Hall. “Fortunately, no one drowned--unless you count a few parked Buicks and a cigar store Indian or two.”

Fred escaped that one because he had good connections in Chicago; among whom, by the way, was Al Capone’s son, by now a respected corporate attorney in the city under another name.

The mayor of Chicago, Richard J. Daley, was not so thrilled with him when Fred brought one of his live attractions, Goldie the lion, to His Honor’s office for some publicity shots. The picture session went off well enough. But the next day, Goldie the lion bit the arm off her trainer. “Daley could have been the first one-armed mayor Chicago ever had,” Hall recalls. “But the worst of it was, that damn lion rode around with me all week long licking the back of my neck.”

Animal acts were always iffy propositions. There were the trained seals, for instance. Fred figured they were from the Bering Sea and needed water with icebergs in it. So, he filled his pool with cakes of ice to make them feel at home. The seals wanted no part of the frigid tank and, like chorus girls in bikinis, they wouldn’t go near the water.

Cold weather interfered with another promotion. Fred decided, for some reason not known to rational human beings, to give away free snakes to the first 100 customers at one of his shows. No one is sure why--unless tarantulas were unavailable. In any case, he left the snakes in a crate overnight. The next morning, they were frozen to death.

Recalls Hall: “Someone asked me if the snakes were harmless. ‘They are now,’ I told them. I couldn’t find anyone who wanted 100 fresh frozen snakes.” So he gave away balloons, instead.

The human attractions were not too trustworthy, either. There was, for instance, the specialty act known as Slingshot Charlie.

Charlie, as Hall recalls, was an absolute marvel with a slingshot, the best since David. But he got stage fright in front of an audience. He could perform best only if he was half-plastered on vodka. “One day he showed up sober,” Fred says, “and we had forgotten the vodka. Poor Charlie couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn door. We said we had to send the sling out to get it re-strung. Actually, we had to send Charlie out to get him re-oiled.”

Howard Hill, the great archer, was another who could perform under a full load of spirits--up to a point. There was the time, Hall recalls, after a long, bibulous lunch, when Howard had to shoot at an albacore flung in the air. He missed. He was equal to the occasion. “I never could fish,” he hiccuped.

Fred Hall pretty much restricts his promotions to trout farms today. It’s not much fun, but it’s safer. You don’t have to get the trout drunk, there’s no danger they’ll eat the mayor, you don’t have to paint them green and there’s no risk of turning downtown Chicago into a trout stream. Fred finds them boring. Maybe, he thinks, he should stock a few piranhas in the wading pools. He’ll need more than Capone’s kid to get him out of that one. He’ll need Capone’s gang.