The Kaiser hates the Tango...!

[Hauksbee]

Found this with morning e-mail and coffee: "Ripley's Believe It Or Not!" Ripley often played fast and loose with facts and accuracy, but this one sounds right. The Argentine Tango had a great surge of popularity around the time of WWI. The Tango, properly done, is erotic enough today. In 1914 it was scandalous. In Berlin there were dance halls called 'Tango Circuses ", where only tango music was played into the wee hours.

 

I recall reading one account of the origin of "Flying Circus" being coined by Oswald Boelcke. It seems that once all the airplanes and attendant gear was loaded on the trains, it was 'party time' in the passenger cars for the pilots. Being pilots, they frequently brought along girlfriends with them. One one occasion, so the story goes, Boelcke wandered in to the pilots car, where the champagne was flowing and girls esconced on laps and said, in his typical good-natured way, "What the hell is this? A Tango Circus?" And the term stuck. At least, that's the version I heard and I'm sticking to it.