It seems like forever ago that Jack & I did “Legends & Lore” at Kaufman, yet the spectacular was held but a mere ten days ago.
As I think I mentioned back those long ten days ago, we had to cut a bunch of stories. Most of them were for time, but one was cut because Jack's granddaughter was going to be at the show. When we were first putting it together he saw the topic--”Hookers”--and brought to my attention the fact that an eight year old would be present. So there went both my hooker stories. One of them ended up being the video we shot at the History Center and I posted here a few days before the show, and the other?
Well, here 'tis—and it's about Seney, of all places.
In the 1880s, Seney actually had a national reputation as a center of sin. It wasn't entirely warranted; in fact, most of it was trumped up by a highly sensationalized story (written by Nellie Bly) in the 19th century magazine “The Police Gazette”. But there was vice in Seney last century. In the 1880s, the town consisted of 2,000 residents, 22 bars, and two really big brothels on the edge of town, where loggers and railroad workers often fought over women, alcohol, and money that they lost gambling.
Yup. Seney was one of THOSE places.
Most of the prostitutes who worked in Seney actually came from elsewhere. There was money to be made, and unlike in Marquette, where the police had this almost unhealthy obsession with the “ranches” that lined Lake Street, the law in Seney didn't care. Of course, it probably helped that there wasn't really much (if any) law in Seney, but what there was didn't really care.
Anyway, here's the (short) story I didn't get to tell. There wasn't really a bank per se in Seney; instead several large merchants would instead hold money for people and even pay them a little interest on it. One day, a young woman who had just moved into town a month prior came into the store with almost $1,500, which would be worth almost $40,000 these days. When asked where she got it, she was quite honest about it. It came, she said, “from pants that weren't being worn at the time”. As it turns out, she had just gotten engaged, and she and her fiancee had set out in different directions, trying different ways to come up with the money they needed to get their lives started.
I'm guessing that, after a single month, she did quite a bit better than her fiancee.
That's one of the stories I didn't get to tell at Kaufman ten days ago. A few others may end up being turned into videos, but this one? Probably not. I didn't want to let it go to waste. After all, when's the next time I'll get to talk about prostitutes?
Well, I'll actually more hooker stories in June when I do my “Walk on the Wild Side” tour for the History Center. But, I mean, before then?
8-)
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