For Immediate Release: Sally Rand Rides Again in New Book...The Girl Who Crashed the 1933 Chicago Worlds Fair

 Sally Rand ran away from the Ozarks with the circus and then became a silent movie star under Cecil B. Demille but ended up in Chicago sleeping in alleys during the worst year of the Great Depression. She had one shot to save herself and she took it, crashing the 1933 Chicago Worlds Fair on a white horse with only some white makeup on her body. She was arrested and then immediately hired and became famous for forty years, singlehandedly making the Worlds Fair profitable and herself rich. 

In the new book, Sally Rand American Sex Symbol Bestselling author William Hazelgrove holds up Sally Rands seven minute fan dance as a symbol of hope. "It wasn't just sex, people could go in to a darkened theatre for seven minutes and watch a woman with seven pound ostrich feather dance naked to classical music under a blue light...it was escapism and more than that, hope." Just like today, people were looking for some glimmer of hope under the avalanche of bad times. The small five foot blond with girl next door looks provided that. Sally Rand was a rags to riches story in the worst year of the depression. 

A , Chicago Tribune feature and a write up in the  Sunday Express in Britain have given the book the wings that Sally Rand used over a forty year career ending with her dancing for the Astronauts in Houston at age sixty. "She crashed the Chicago Worlds Fair but broke sexual barriers for women all over the world," Hazelgrove concludes. "Without Sally Rand there would be no Kim Kardashian or Lady Ga Ga...I think that is an amazing legacy for a hillbilly from the Ozarks."

The First Kim Kardashian...Sally Rand

 She was famous for being famous. We  take this for granted today. But in 1933 Sally Rand was a phenomenon. She became famous overnight for crashing the Chicago Worlds Fair on a white horse with viturally nothing on. She was imediately arrested and then immediately hired. She became the biggest financial draw of the Worlds Fair and was responsible for making it profitable. She made 5000 a week in depression era dollars and ended up dancing for two years behind seven foot ostrich feathers. 

She then went on the road and there she stayed for forty years. She would dance for the Apollo Astronauts end up on To Tell the Truth, give speeches at Harvard, star in movies, have cartoons built around her...but her fame all dated back to the night ride into the Worlds Fair. She had her own television show, nightclub, and flew to her gigs at a time when few people flew anywhere. She got her pilots license when most women didnt even drive a car. She was her own business manager, agent, publicist, and made over a million dollars at a time when few options were open to women besides being a teacher, nurse, or secretary. 

She married three different husbands who squanderd her money. She took care of her family her entire life. She kept dancing well into her seventies. When she died Sammy David Junior gave her ten thousand dollars for her medical bills. Her name was Harriet Beck but Cecil B. Demilles changed her name for the movies and the world would remember her as SALLY RAND 

Chicago's Forgotten Fair of 1933...Hold the popcorn

Microwave popcorn. That is among the many things the 1933 Worlds Fair in Chicago brought to the populace 33 years after the turn of the century. That and a star in the flag of Chicago. There are four stars in the flag, one for Ft Dearborn, one for the fair of 1893, one for for the fair of 33 and one for the incorporation of Chicago into a city. But because the fair was held during the Great Depression it is overshadowed by HH Holmes and the Devil in the White City fair.

You could make a long distance call at the fair. Call anywhere in the United States. You could see yourself on a crude television. You could watch popcorn appear out of the air from microwaves. You could watch peas get canned and get a souvenir can yourself. All you had to do was press a button. Or you could watch your next car get built. Chrysler had a whole assembly line at the fair and cars rolled off the assembly line every hour. You could watch a woman in grease paint hide her body behind two huge ostrich feathers .

And if this wasn't enough you could ride on the Skyride 625 feet up across the lake to Northerly Island. You could watch the Zephyr the first diesel electric train set a new speed record from Chicago to Denver. And you could do all this for a nickel unless they threw the gates open on "kid days" which they did frequently because a lot of people didn't have a nickel. And you could go to the fair secure int he knowledge Al Capone had just  gone to prison and there was less chance you would get shot by some Thompson machine gun toting gangster.

You could even watch an unknown singer named Judy Garland.  She would bump into a man at the Biograph and get his autograph right before he was gunned down by the police. John Dillinger would not make the 33 fair.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair