SP Times: Chesty Morgan: A life more than skin deep

Wadda honochik!! Dick Stello was married to Chesty Morgan? How did I miss this?

She is among the last of the old-time burlesque queens. She values the tease as much as the strip. In San Francisco, she christens a ship in a costume so tight the sailors carry her to the water. Now and again she is arrested, allegedly for letting men next to the stage touch the tops of her breasts. She wants the world to know they are real. Chesty Morgan does not need breast augmentation!

She marries again, in a lonely moment, and moves to Florida. Husband No. 2, a major league umpire named Richard Stello, is a nice man, fun to be around when home, but he is never home — he travels for a living. Of course, so does she. They divorce in 1979.

Still, they keep in touch. He helps her through the death of her oldest daughter in a traffic accident in New York in 1984. She and her ex-husband remain close. He loves her chicken soup with matzo balls. He is killed in an auto accident near Lakeland in December 1987. They had planned to spend the holidays together. She was going to make him soup.

She continues dancing, crying, saving money, crying, investing in the stock market, buying real estate. She dances for the last time in Houston, 1991. She remembers because it is the opening night of the Persian Gulf War. On stage she dances the hoochie koo. Backstage Chesty Morgan is glued to the television with the rest of America.