George Whitney
"Barnum of the Golden Gate"
May 20, 1950
Saturday Evening Post
By Dean Jennings
Few people can separate a chump from his nickels faster than George Whitney -- the brain who operates America's biggest amusement park. And anything he can't sell, he gives away -- at a profit, of course.
One bleak morning last year when a bus load of tourists was glumly trying to see San Francisco’s famed Seal Rocks through an ocean fog, they were diverted by the arrival of a giant truck carrying a sixty-foot totem pole. It turned out to be the biggest totem pole in the world, and was planted, with a few halfhearted war whoops, in front of the historic Cliff House Restaurant at the exact spot where P.T. Barnum once talked dreamily of training seals to ride horses sidesaddle. The big pole was carved from a single cedar log by a Canadian Indian named Chief Mathias Joe, and, almost before the first sea gull came in for a landing, guides were explaining that the grotesque figures on it were Chief Joe’s tribal totems. This was sheer expediency, because the carvings were not authentic Indian at all. They actually represent the immediate family and relatives of George Kerr Whitney, San Francisco’s shrewd and sometimes bizarre millionaire showman, who believes that people will pay to see anything if you tease’em a little bit and keep it clean.
Those who know Whitney anticipate the early installation of a coin slot on the totem pole which, for one small dime, the tenth part of a dollar, would make the carved figures light up and revolve to music, with an unreasonable facsimile of Whitney himself gaily whirling around the base. “I am the only genuine low man on a totem pole,” he says, dead-panned. Whitney loves this kind of whimsey, especially if it pays off, and apparently it does. He owns the Cliff House, where seven United States Presidents have dined; the Cliff House Souvenir Shop, largest in the world; and nearby Playland, largest year-round amusement park in the United States. Together these enterprises cover a nineteen acre chunk of beach and bring him a gross of more than $3,000,000 a year and a reputation as the top outdoor-entertainment man in the world. Whitney would also have owned the Seal Rocks -- and the sea lions on them -- if Congress in 1887 had not deeded that landmark to the people of San Francisco in perpetuity. But Whitney fixed that, too, by installing telescopes on the Cliff House terrace which pierce rain, fog and acts of Congress, and also fill his pockets with 8000 dimes a month.
In the gaudy world of mayhem, vertigo and gastronomic oddities which comprises the great American institution quaintly called the amusement park business, lean and dapper George Whitney sticks out like the frankfurter in a roll, mainly because he disagrees with Barnum’s dictum that a sucker is born every minute. He thinks life is a perpetual scramble for customers, but he scorns such supposed essentials as shills, barkers, gaffed games and old-time operators trained in the clip-the-chump school. Veteran high pitchers and bally-joint men who straggle into Whitney’s dignified offices looking for a soft-touch spot invariably are shocked and repelled to find (a) that they’d have to work on salary and leave their gimmicks home, and (b) that Whitney’s 600 employees belong to a staid AFL union. “Imagine that!” one indignant applicant growled recently. “A union for grifters! Next thing you know they'll be giving saliva tests to the ponies on the merry-go-round.” Actually Whitney prefers to hire young and inexperienced people, especially students working their way through school or college. His ex-employees include at least seventeen San Francisco physicians and dentists, a couple of engineers and half a dozen artists, musicians and lawyers.
Though Whitney insists he is primarily a businessman, he says that, among other things, he introduced the jumbo hot dog, the Photo-While-U-Wait idea, and the cutout stand which makes it possible for uninhibited people to have their pictures taken with such painted foregrounds as horses, barrels, grass skirts and froopy bathing suits. Whitney is probably the nation’s foremost authority on shooting galleries, and has contributed certain refinements to the trade which have virtually eliminated impulse suicides by thoughtless patrons. He invented at least one ride, a death-defying whirl called the Rocket which never frightened anybody and thus an artistic flop, and his park has been the happy testing ground for many other high rides now twisting the viscera of masochistic customers from coast to coast.
Currently, while some of his rivals significantly tap their foreheads, Whitney is injecting a note of refinement into an essentially rowdy business with two concessions unique on the midways of America. One is an exhibit of six of the “lost” paintings of Gustave Dore’, a French artist best known as a Bible illustrator. The paintings had been in a New York warehouse for thirty-four years, and Whitney recently bought them after a previous purchaser’s check bounced. the canvases are so huge -- on, for example, Christ’s Entry Into Jerusalem, covers 600 square feet -- that Whitney had to kill off some profitable hot-dog stands and a couple of minor rides in order to get space for a gallery. the other exhibit if a life-size tableau of The Last Supper by Hollywood artist John Michael Schliesser. Whitney has already spent some $150,000 on the two displays, including a new $50,000 theater for the tableau, but the entire take will go into a fund for underprivileged boys. “Yes, I know,” he says. “The other boys think I’m nuts, but a little education never hurts anyone. You’d be surprised how few people know the story of the Last Supper. I’ll give odds right now that the show ill draw.”
As a diagnostician for sick concessions and games, Whitney takes a paternal delight in prescribing cures, and when he’s away from home he goes on a lone prowl incognito, like a benevolent caliph, spotting joints that have gone cold and warming them with his Midas touch. Some years ago, as one example of his technique, Whitney was on the Midway at the Cleveland Exposition when he came across a concession with a sign that read: See the most remarkable show on the midway. Complete mechanical village. Took five years to build. Admission Ten Cents. Next door a bubble dancer was packing them in, but the little show was deserted, and inside Whitney found a morose young couple who had mortgaged their Ohio farm to set up their ingenious exhibit. They had been there three weeks, and were broke and ready to quit. Whitney promptly threw out the old sign and ordered a new one which said: Walk In -- FREE. See this remarkable Mechanical exhibit. Then he bought a coin hopper like those used on streetcars, fastened green felt to the metal flaps, and glued two dimes, five quarters and two half dollars to the felt. He put the baited hopper near the exit, with another sign: If you enjoyed this show we will appreciate any donation if you care to give, and rearranged the exhibit railings as patrons would pass in single file and could not backtrack. “Now,” he said to the young man’s wife, “you stand near the hopper, smile sweetly at the people as they come toward the exit, and say “Thank You” so they can hear it.” That first night donations to the “free” exhibit amounted to some twenty dollars, and when the exposition closed, the delirious couple had netted $11,000.
Whitney sees nothing remarkable in this type of resuscitation, because he believes that though curiosity may kill a cat, it can also fatten the bank account. “The changes I made in the Cleveland exhibit were elementary,” he says. “People are always intrigued by that magic word “free,” and if you also whet their curiosity you can hardly miss. Why do you think the bubble dancer was coining money? Curiosity. The customers thought the bubble might break. Another thing about human nature -- it takes a thick skin to walk past a baited hopper and not contribute.”
Other typical case histories in which he volunteered his advice include a Chicago artist who was painting landscapes in a store window, and starving, until Whitney turned the easel to the dauber’s progress could not be seen from the sidewalk, thus luring people inside; a puzzle concession which began to click after he put a pretty girl in the show window to demonstrate each device; and the huge society horse show at the 1939 San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition which was in the red until, over the protests of the dowagers, he augmented the blue-ribbon nags with the Canadian Mounties, a trick Sheriff’s Posse and a clever blind horse.
Once, to help a needy friend, Whitney assembled a new concession and had it operating in tow hours. He bought $2.85 worth of canvas and rough boards, and sent a truck to the junk yards to pick up old bottles, dinner plates, cups and window glass, He filled tow packing cases with stones gathered from the nearby beach and - quicker than you can say “money in the bank” -- there was the Blow-Off-Steam game. Some 300 men patronized the crude booth that first night, heaving rocks and whooping joyfully with every crash of class. Whitney’s friend took in forty dollars the second evening, and on the third night -- unwilling to believe it could last -- sold the concession for fifty dollars and disappeared. Nowadays this basic idea is used in a permanent attraction in which the customers -- still yelling -- hurl heavy balls at aluminum bottles and sent them clattering to a steel floor.
“Most men are still kids at heart,” Whitney says. “As any mother knows, kids like to break things, yell and make noise. Also, a lot of our customers rush out here just after they’ve had a beef with their wives or lost money on a business deal, and they can blow off steam without killing somebody.” Of course, Whitney would rather have the entire family there, venting its excess adrenaline en masse, because he believes what Samuel Johnson said 200 years ago: “Public amusements.. keep people from vice.”
Paradoxically, most amusement-park men, including Whitney, have struggled for years against a persistent public suspicion of side shows, concessions and carnival-type games. This doubt is periodically acknowledged by the National Association of Amusement Parks, Pools & Beaches, of which Whitney is a director, with an advertised reiteration of its strict code of ethics which pledges “clean, safe and wholesome outdoor recreation for everybody.” Whitney is perhaps the most vocal crusader of all, because he still nurses a painful mental scar as the result of an experience many years ago when he checked into a Portland, Oregon, hotel as the local Rotary Club meeting was getting started.
“Can you please tell me,” he asked the secretary, out of curiosity, “who represents the amusement-park business in your club?” “There is no such classification,” the man snapped. “And I doubt very much whether Rotary will ever recognize that as a legitimate business.” Whitney says he was wounded by the crack, but admits that at the time there was perhaps some justice in it. The San Francisco Rotary Club eventually applied for permission to create an amusement-park classification in Rotary International and honored Whitney with the initial membership, but he is still sensitive on the subject, and is not convinced that all the 1000 or more operators in his business have seen the light. Whitney has banned from his own park all games that are easily gaffed -- that is, mechanically controlled -- but has concluded, philosophically, that most people like to be fooled and resent any implication that they can’t outsmart the grifters.
Whitney’s record in the community paid dividends soon after Pearl Harbor, when drastic blackout rules were closing amusement parks all along the Pacific Coast. His engineers had already decided that Playland couldn’t meet the dim-out specifications, and Whitney announced he would shut down. But a few hours later a high ranking Army officer called him and said, “We have to enforce the dim-out, but we also want you to stay in business for the servicemen who will be coming here.”
The next day a squad of Army and Navy engineers showed up at Playland. In eight days of frenzied work with Whitney’s men, the Army-Navy experts erected screens on the ocean side of the park, blacked out windows, altered the wiring and changed the candlepower on some 75,000 lights. the Navy ordered out a destroyer for a final inspection, the Army sent up observation planes, and Whitney soon got an official clearance for night operation. During the war he had only one conflict with the high brass, which he now refers to as Operation Kewpie Doll. For some reason that Whitney has never carefully analyzed. these cheap plaster figures which are standard equipment on any amusement-park prize list -- seemed irresistible to the Navy, and the sailors carried them away by the thousands. But one day an admiral noted for his picturesque language complained that the Navy was cluttered up with the blankety-blank dolls. He said the man were falling all over them at sea, and demanded that Whitney give the sailors some other kind of prize. Whitney says he apologized, but he had no other prizes available because of wartime shortages, and the sailors presumably kept on cluttering up their ships with the so-and-so’s. Today the demand for plaster figures is unabated, and Whitney buys about 300,000 a year from a San Francisco artisan named George Travertini, who mass-produces them in the basement of his home for as little as four cents each.
Whitney has been aware of mankind’s frustrations, curiosities and inhibitions since he was a youngster in Mt. Vernon, Washington One of the town boys refused to go barefooted in summer like the other kids, and Whitney discovered -- by offering a new jackknife as a bribe -- that this boy had six toes on one foot and a sort of duck webbing on the other. Three weeks later, with an old sheet, some gunny sacks and tent stakes, Whitney was in the show business at a smalltown fair, with the boy as Exhibit A. The amateur freak show took in $4.60, and thereafter Whitney lost all interest in any other kind of business.
Whitney was only fourteen when he and his older brother Leo, now an artist and designer, opened a photo studio in Seattle penny arcade in 1904. The boys worked out a process whereby they could put a celluloid strip over a wet negative and deliver a finished print in twenty minutes. Whitney believes this was the first Photo-While-U-Wait studio in the world, but the idea was not patentable, and within a year was being used everywhere. It was during this same period that the brothers worked out the cartoon-prop idea, with Leo doing the artwork. Patrons could pose as a cowboy, a fat woman, a strong man or even as September Morn merely by getting behind the chosen cartoon and sticking their chins into a slot.
These gag-photo studios are a common sight nowadays -- Whitney still operates one -- but the brothers were never able to protect their idea. “We didn’t care, though,” he says. “We had a gold mine. It’s funny how people let their hair down when they’re away from home. Something comes over them and they’ll do the darnedest things, like posing for these pictures.” Whitney earned thousands of dollars with his cameras at an age when most boys were just entering high school. When he was seventeen he opened a branch studio in Vancouver, British Columbia -- a city where he knew no one -- and unwittingly shared a room with three young men who were burglars.
One night the police broke in while they were asleep, tossed all four into the local bastille and gave Whitney a bloody massage. He was released the next morning after a friendly businessman interceded for him, but he never forgot the incident and to this day never turns away a lonely or friendless youth. Once a year at Playland he entertains and feeds 1500 youngsters from the San Francisco Boys’ Club and has built a summer camp for them. At other times he is host to thousands of newspaper-carrier boys from towns in Northern California, and has donated some $50,000 to various boys’ organizations.
Whitney credits the first World War with launching him into the concession business. Noting the growing morbid interest in war stories and relics, Whitney had hired a retired Army officer and hurried him off to Europe to pick up battlefield souvenirs. The emissary returned with a boatload of stuff, including a German plane, French and German uniforms, guns, flags, helmets, cameras -- all in spotless condition. But the show didn’t draw at all until Whitney, on a hunch, decided to add a little homemade horror. He cut his finger and dabbed his own blood on the uniforms. Using a pencil, he poked a string of “machine-gun-bullet holes” through the airplane near the pilot’s seat. He wanted a camera with a bullet embedded in it (See the camera that saved a soldier’s life!) and finally succeeded after ruining a dozen camera in a field and paying for one cow -- accidentally shot down. He dented helmets, and put “bayonet” slashes and bullet holes in uniforms. The show immediately picked up business, a reversal that convinced him many people are sadists at heart.“I’ll make a bet now,” he says cynically, “that a wax replica of the St. Valentine’s Day gangster massacre in Chicago would outdraw an important historical exhibit five to one.”
Despite the intrinsic success of the war show, Whitney feared it wouldn’t return his $10,000 investment, and subsequently sold it for $3500 to Mike Golden, an old-time gifter. Golden, alas, took it on the road in 1917 just as the United States declared war on Germany and cleared $80,000 with it before six competitors invaded the field. It was Whitney’s first and last major loss.
In 1923, after eight years as an amusement-park man in Australia, Whitney landed on the San Francisco beach with one shooting gallery, and with this as a nucleus soon perforated all the existing competition. This probably explains why the ping of a .22 on a tin duck is a lyrical sound to Whitney, even though his shooting-gallery business was for years as hazardous as if in a psychopathic ward. In San Francisco alone Whitney had five men shot out from under him, so to speak -- customers who pumped themselves off without so much as a token payment. Whitney’s shooting-gallery experience also includes a couple of impromptu murders, half a dozen fatal accidents, and a city ordinance here and there that temporarily put him out of business.
After the first half dozen uninvited corpses, Whitney brought his attendants out from behind the counter, so they could grab dangerous shooters, and for a while thins were under control. But then the customers discovered they could pop themselves or others with .22 pistols before the attendant could interfere. Whitney eliminated the pistols, put short chains on the rifles, and hasn’t had a tragedy since. He has persuaded many another operator to adopt similar measures, but in spite of all precautions there are still occasional suicide attempts here and there.
In his five galleries Whitney now uses about 3,000,000 shells a year, plus an equal number of lead pellets for his air rifles. Nowadays most of Whitney’s regular customers are fathers teaching their sons how to shoot, and Whitney often hangs around the rifle ranges -- as he prefers to call them -- out of sheer nostalgia. There was a time when he could do tricks with a .22 rifle, and many a chump -- here he uses the word affectionately -- found it was expensive to challenge Whitney’s skill. Indeed, he admits the bulk of the transient business still comes from brash young men anxious to show their girls that they’re Dead-eye Dicks.
By 1936, when Whitney had a stranglehold on the beach business and had already quietly purchased scattered portions of the land, he cast a speculative eye on the sprawling Cliff House facing the Seal Rocks at the ocean’s edge. The century-old landmark had been dark and cobwebbed for twelve years, for no entrepreneur had ever been able to make it pay. For months Whitney watched the sight seeing crowds peer through the dusty windows, and listened to them talking of its former glories and the great names who had dined and wined there. “Perhaps that was the trouble,” says Whitney, “champagne, mink coats, glamour .. and too much overhead.” He finally bought the building and five choice acres for $250,000 -- against the advice of even sentimental San Franciscans. He ruled out French menus, gleaming goblets, imported linen and obsequious waiters, and hired a maitred’hotel who doesn’t won a Tuxedo. “Your ought to be ashamed, sir,” one social registerite protested; “you’ve made a regular restaurant out of it.” Whitney nodded. “Yes, I have. And I would turn it into a hot-dog stand before I’d go broke.”
To get things started and give the Cliff house that lived-in look, Whitney sent a brassy young man to Hollywood to get some genuine-celebrity pictures properly inscribed, such as “Dear George: The ham was wonderful,” or “Dear George: I love the seals with your meals.” The young man brought back thirty photos of movie stars, and they were promptly framed and hung on the walls. “After that, the rest came easy,” says Whitney. The collection now totals 322 pictures of famous names, and new ones come along unsolicited every week. Jimmy Roosevelt was dining there one day, for example, and asked to meet Whitney. “I see you have a lot of pictures there,” he said. “Wouldn’t you like one of dad and mother?” “I certainly would,” said Whitney. Three weeks later a big envelope arrived from the White House, bearing autographed pictures of President and Mrs. Roosevelt. Unfortunately, Whitney also receives hundreds of autographed pictures from people he never heard of, and who are miffed when they discover they’re not on the wall. In any case, Whitney has never had a losing day at the Cliff House, and the building is now bracketed with Fisherman’s Wharf, Chinatown, Telegraph Hill and the Golden Gate Bridge on all the organized sight-seeing tours.
Not so long ago, to increase the revenue, Whitney built the largest souvenir shop on the globe into one wing of the Cliff House. The cavernous store is a single room covering 12,000 square feet, and twenty-six girls work there seven days a week selling carload lots of sea shells, pennants, Indian blankets, copper horses, coral, alabaster and other gimcracks, none of which, ironically, is made in San Francisco. Another part of the building holds Whitney’s personal collection of ship models, which he kept in storage for years until they were ready to make money. Now they make up a “free” exhibit, with the inevitable baited hopper yielding a tidy profit.
One block farther down the street, Whitney built his Musee Mechanique, the only concession of its kind in the United States. The museum houses more than 100 mechanical devices -- a barnyard, a Danish village, a toothpick circus, dancing girls, animated portraits, antique juke boxes -- all of which Whitney has equipped with coin slots. Whitney rounded up this remarkable collection, part of which one belonged to Barnum, with the aid of private detectives and others who printed veiled want ads in Billboard, and rummaged through cellars, attics and warehouses from coast to coast. But he says it was worth the trouble. The first four machines, which Whitney found in a dusty San Francisco basement and bought under an assumed name, took in $5200 the first year, or four times what they cost.
But Whitney’s first love is still the big amusement park, with the sights, odors and sounds of eight-five concessions, games and rides. He acquired the last of the beach land five years ago with a check for $1,000,000 and has since spent another $250,000 for new ways and means of punishing the seemingly indestructible human form, inside and out. A short, dapper and quiet man of fifty-nine, Whitney seems deceptively conservative, and the only flashy concession to his garish business is a four-carat diamond ring which he acquired by a circuitous route from an impecunious madam. His trim white mustache, rimless spectacles and graying hair suggest the retired executive neatly clipping coupons. Actually, he is wound up tighter than a gold ball, is a chain smoker, and rules his domain with an intense and remarkable awareness of the minutiae involved -- the endless chain of hot dogs which creeps into the world at the rate of a mile a day, the infinity of spun sugar, the record number of redwood burls sold every month, the thousands of tiny painted live turtles wrapped up for people from Main Street or Buenos Aires, the astronomical stream of nickels fed into popcorn machines, player pianos, foot vibrators and skee-ball games. Among other curious trivia, for instance, he knows that it was Boxer Tony Galento who established a Playland record on day by wolfing down twenty hot dogs, five hamburgers and a gallon of beer in twenty-nine minutes.
Whitney’s modest offices are plumped down in the middle of the highest decibel zone, an area so noisy with shrieks, calliopes and canned music that people who talk with him there frequently find themselves still shouting when they get out. But the noise doesn’t bother Whitney unless it stops suddenly, and in that case he knows there is trouble or that a capricious fog has dispersed the paying clientele. There are minor crises almost everyday, and even the protection of a $400,000 insurance policy doesn’t entirely soothe Whitney’s nerves. The insurance reports list an average of 160 accidents a year, most of them on a fiendish device called the Big Slide or on the Big Dipper, the roller coaster that scares the hell of of the 750,000 riders a year.
Once Whitney was gazing out his office window when a sailor stood up at the crest of the ride. Whitney rushed out in a panic to stop the car, but the sailor had already been bumped out, and landed on the Fun House roof with nothing worse than a few broken bones. Another time the Big Dipper attendants, who are probably the most nerve-racked employees in the park, saw a customer dive out of a car headfirst and land at their feet, quite dead. Whitney personally prefers the merry-go-round because 70 percent of the riders are not jazzed-up teen-agers, but graying adults gaily reliving their youth and incidentally swiping 70,000 metal rings a year. Whitney is also known in his business as the man who used to protect his multi-million-dollar properties with a lone night watchwoman. He hired her not only because she claimed a blood link to the immortal Annie Oakley but because she worked with two enormous great Danes that strained at clanking chains and looked very hungry indeed. This innovation in burglar proofing was a great success until one blustery night when the night watch woman encountered a cloaked figure prowling around the Goofy Village. “Halt,” she bellowed, “or I’ll sick my dogs on you!” “Go ahead and sick ‘em,” the stranger said. “You must be nuts.” “I am not nuts,” he said. “I am Orson Welles.” And Orson Welles he was indeed. the dogs joyfully clambered over the actor, and the night watch woman resigned in a huff, reporting that when she last saw Welles he was happily wrestling with the giant hounds on the sidewalk and murmuring chidingly, “Wood, woof.”
At the moment, Whitney is busy with a far-flung network of agents, talent scouts, dealers and self-appointed ambassadors who comb the world for new ideas and merchandise. In Switzerland, for instance, an emissary is searching for antique music boxes because Whitney bought $15,000 worth there two years ago, and they’ve long since repaid the investment. There’s an agent in Suva, Fiji Islands, packing up exotic shells to be sold in the Souvenir Ship, and a man in Brazil buying butterfly-wing trays, which sell better than hot cakes. Collectors everywhere send him old bicycles for what is one of the largest private collections in the world, and his son George, Jr., or his son-in-law, Floyd Gilman, sometimes flies to old mining towns to buy ancient player pianos.
Whitney also collects characters, one of whom was Yorkie Warren, a retired grifter. Yorkie went into an old-folks’ home very broke, and to help him out Whitney agreed to buy his memoirs, at once cent a page. Yorkie wrote thousands of words, starting out with large pages and many words, but as the weeks progressed the paper began to shrink. The pages go smaller and smaller, until finally Whitney was compelled to pay a penny for two or three large lines on post-card-size paper. When he protested, the old-timer pulled out a gold nugget on a watch chain and said, “Don’t worry, boss; you’ll get it all back. I’m leaving you this nugget in my will.” Yorkie died a few days later, at the age of eight-two, and the nugget was delivered to Whitney. He took it to a jeweler friend, and was laughed out of the store. It was brass. Whitney likes to think of Yorkie, marching off to the happy midways of some other world, snickering to himself and saying, “Now looks who’s a chump.” The End