Pop Haydn does his Amazing Miracle Oil pitch at the 3 Clubs, Hollywood for Diamond LIl’s Gold Rush Follies at Monday Night Tease, 2012.
Category Archives: Medicine Shows and Pitchmen
The Senior Pitchman’s Reunion
In 2008, the first Senior Pitchman’s Reunion was held in Las Vegas. All pitchmen over 60, no Johnny Come Lately’s. These are the men and women who pitch svengali decks, kitchen gadgets, mops, shamwows, knives and all the other products that are demonstrated and sold in flea markets, carnivals, streets, malls, mega-stores and television.
Nancy Magill and I attended this wonderful convention and interviewed the participants for hours, with Magill manning the camera. We released those in a School for Scoundrels DVD “The Senior Pitchman’s Reunion.”
In 2010, we went to the second reunion and will be releasing a DVD soon from those interviews.
Pop Haydn’s Radio-Medicine Show
Jagger Peyton Entertainment Group
The Pop Haydn Radio-Medicine Show is now being distributed by Jagger Peyton Entertainment Group in association with Radio Submit (RadioSubmit.com). To hear some clips and get more information about our show, go to: PopHaydn.comThe Lummis House:
Taken at the historic Lummis House (ca 1880), this is a fundraiser for the Historical Society of Southern California, featuring a Medicine Show with Pop Haydn and Phil Van Tee, followed by a casino night in which Phil and Pop suckered the people with the shell game, three card monte and fast and loose.
Photos are here: Lummis House
The Horn Nut Scam
In the course of a tour de force round of stories and virtuoso performances of a number of entertaining pitches and ballys, Bobby Reynolds explains the Horn Nut Scam, a ruse he used as a child to sell worthless Chinese horn nuts as Chinese Water Lily bulbs.
The scam is evidently very old and has some interesting associated stories.
The nut looks like a water buffalo head, and the horns will float upwards when the nut is placed in water. A hole is drilled between the horns, and a gladiola flower is glued in place. Three or four of these are floated in a bowl of water.
Horn Nut
Nancy Magill and I were delighted to participate in both of the Senior Pitchmen Reunions in Las Vegas. This is a gathering of pitchmen over sixty years old, people who sold medicine in the medicine shows, svengali decks in the carnival, puppets on the street corner, and kitchen gadgets, miracle cleaners, dusters and a million other items on television and now on the internet.
We videod four hours of interviews at the convention in 2009, and that became our DVD, “The Senior Pitchman’s Reunion, 2009” from School for Scoundrels (available at www.scoundrelsstore.com)
This video is from volume II, “The Senior Pitchman’s Reunion, 2010.” We should be releasing this volume in the next month or so.
— Pop Haydn
New Senior Pitchmen DVD
Here are Bobby Reynolds, S. David Walker and Wally Nash talking about the Medicine Show pitch at the 2nd annual Senior Pitchmen Reunion in Las Vegas in 2010.
Nancy Magill and I video-taped four hours of interviews at the first convention in 2009, and that became the Senior Pitchmen Reunion DVD available from www.scoundrelsstore.com
This clip is from the second annual convention DVD, the Senior Pitchmen Reunion 2010. We will be releasing this DVD in the next month or two.
Magill did all the camera work, and I did the editing and titles.
We want to thank Gene Haaheim for letting us be a part of both of these wonderful get-togethers and record them for posterity.
This is a convention of pitchmen–the guys who sell watches, puppets, svengali decks, flower bulbs, kitchen gadgets, miracle cleaners, knives and dusters on the street, in carnivals, in stores, on television and on the internet–all of them over 60 years old.
These are guys who spent a lifetime hustling, drawing a crowd, and pitching the product.
Pitchmen are not only a fascinating, unique and attractive life-style and sub-culture, they are a fountain of information on how to survive and prosper in this most basic of entreprenurial fields. But their knowledge is also helpful to magicians, salesmen, emcees and others who need to know how to draw and hold a crowd, how to control their thinking, and how to sell them a product.
Nancy Magill
Pop Haydn
Pop's Soapbox 