This Blows My Skirt Up

Watching What's My Line? is a nightly obsession -- along with I've Got a Secret, for which, now that I know this, I continually heckle Bess Meyerson, calling her a dirty, dirty whooore. In tonight's What's My Line? the second guest was Mr. Les J. Jackson who operated a "skirt-blowing machine". Amusing for the show, but I was surprised to discover a few things...

On the matter of this service being a part of the entertainment world, the answer was 'yes'; but then on the issue of helping actors or actresses, the reply was 'no'. I has assumed this was used for films, but it was revealed that this was an attraction at an amusement park.

Mr. Jackson was employed at the Steel Pier Amusement Park in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and while I found nothing regarding that specific park, it seems this shocking, titillating amusement was at other parks, including the Pontchartrain Beach Amusement Park in New Orleans:

...the Cockeyed Circus, a fun house of distorting mirrors, slanted floors, and gusts of air that blew up ladies’ skirts. " Women in those days didn’t wear slacks much, it was skirts, And all of a sudden you would look down and realize that there was an audience down on the Midway watching you," says Widmer, " It was an open room and they could see your skirts blowing up and that was the laugh."

For the record, both Dorothy Kilgallen and Arlene Francis admitted participating in such amusements.

Now I shall call them dirty, dirty who-ers too.