Wednesday, April 15, 2020

ON THE BORDER: Candid Camera revisited

My friend Charles, who crosses the Pennsylvania/Delaware line daily for work, reminds me that the current border closure is not the first: Allen Funt shut down the border back in 1963 on his TV show "Candid Camera," the original reality show. 
An online description of the segment tells us that: 
Dressed in "an official-looking hat," holding a clipboard and standing at a barricade with a DELAWARE CLOSED TODAY sign, a man from the TV show stopped traffic on Ebright Road leading from Pennsylvania into Delaware and simply told drivers Delaware was closed …. And people fell for it. One woman even asked if New Jersey was open and happily said she'd go there instead. 
(Ebright Road runs from Naamans Creek Road to Beaver Valley Road, parallel to and east of Concord Pike.)
I couldn't track down the video, but here's a still from the episode:

Column by Peter Funt about "Candid Camera" and Allen Funt


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