My Entire Family Ran Away And Joined A Carnival

     More than sixty years ago, the year I turned 9, my entire family ran away and joined a carnival. The idea was my new step-father's, one of his many get-rich-quick schemes driven by his lack of a good-paying job. The plan was to buy a covered truck, build some cages, and trap a few desert animals (we lived in Phoenix), all at minimal cost except for the truck, which they would later resell.  He would then drive to the northern midwest, where he knew some people with a carnival (he seemed to know shady people almost everywhere).  He would hire a helper (carnies being both cheap and plentiful), and join the show in April when it started.  The carnival would travel from town to town in South Dakota, North  Dakota, Montana, and maybe Minnesota, where snakes and other desert animals would be considered exotic.  Dad would charge the local rubes whatever the traffic would bear, and they would make out like bandits.  My mother and I could join him when school was out, if he was making enough money, and they might be able to save enough to start a small business when they got back.  My grandfather, with whom we were living, was to front the money for the truck and the tent, and Dad would take care of the rest.

     This last was what got my grandmother's back up.  If she was going to pay for the tent and truck, she wanted my grandfather there to keep an eye on them.  He couldn't help put up the tent and pack the truck, he was too small (Grandpa was a pituitary dwarf, standing all of 4'6"), but certainly there was something else he could do?  Dad reluctantly came up with an alternative for Grandpa, one perfectly suited to both his size and his tempera­ment--he could run a penny-pitch.  This barely legal game ap­pealed to the greed in the marks--all they had to do was toss a penny from a few feet away into a dish set up in the center of the game area.  If they got it in a certain dish, they won that dish.  If they tossed a nickel or a dime and got it in, they won bigger dishes.  The catch was that the combination of distance and angle was such that almost nobody could get it right without several dollars worth of practice.  And if anybody did actually win anything (which was necessary for the scam to work), the dishes were extraordinarily cheap anyhow.  The only gamble was, would Grandpa make enough to pay his expenses and show a profit?  Dad thought he could, and Grandpa determined to give it a try.

     Everything went according to plan.  The cages were built, the tent and truck were bought, and the animals were trapped.  Dad took me with him on his trips to the desert to pick up the trapped animals, and I was frightened and confused.  Dad's calm presence was reassuring, though, and I soon calmed down.  We trapped, among others, two diamond-back rattlesnakes, a sidewinder, several king snakes and bull snakes, a pair of chuckawallas and several other varieties of lizards, and dozens of mice.  These last, Dad explained patiently, were mostly to feed the snakes, but the rubes wouldn't know the difference and so they would be displayed with the other animals.  There were to be no larger animals, like coyotes; they would be too difficult to catch and care for, and besides couldn't be transported easily.  The fact that the snakes and certain of the lizards were illegal to transport across state lines didn't particularly bother Dad, and it never occurred to me.

      In the end it was done, and it was a pretty motley collec­tion.  Dad had known it would be, and he had been saving the big surprise for last.  The centerpiece of the display would be a human skeleton, still partly dressed in cowboy gear, with a hangman's noose around its neck.  The skeleton was a fake, of course, but it was close enough for government work, and nobody would want to get close enough to check anyhow.

     Dad and Grandpa left in early April, Dad driving the truck and Grandpa a new station wagon loaded with cheap dishes.  The plan was for them to sleep in the truck to save money and keep an eye on their gear at every stop.  They would call Grandma and Mom every week, and decide each month if they would continue.  The first two decisions were positive, and in the second week in June Mom and I took the bus to South Dakota to join the show.

     I was about to turn nine, and was a skinny, sickly, weak child.  I spent most of my time indoors reading, approved by my mother because she thought I was so fragile.  Dad tried to encourage me to run around outside more with boys my own age, but knew better than to cross Mom just yet about my upbringing.  He hoped that the summer would have a good effect on my stamina and strength.  In a way it did, but not in a way that any of them anticipated.

     As both the youngest and weakest child "with the show," as the carnies said, I was a constant target for abuse, both physical and verbal.  The older boys (there were no girls traveling with them) taunted me constantly, although they soon tired of beating me up, since I wouldn't fight back.  After a while a ten-year-old and an eleven-year-old befriended me, mostly out of pity, and the physical abuse all but stopped under their protection.  They were farm boys, and their father was traveling with the wrestling tent.

     Now the wrestling tent was quite a draw for the carnival.   The show was normally in a town for three days and three nights, and during the day they would simply put on exhibition matches for the few people who showed up.  But at night, when the men came in and drank a lot of beer, they issued their challenge far and wide: for $100, three falls, no time limit, if it takes all night.  The carnival champion would take on all comers.  These were small towns, with mostly farmers, and there would usually be one or two strapping fellows who fancied themselves wrestlers.  If one of them accepted the challenge, the wrestling would be for real, with the carnival champion disposing of the challenger in quick time.  Most of the time, though, there was a ringer in the crowd, and he accepted the challenge.  This was the usual job of the father of my friends.  There would be a lot of name-calling and bad-mouthing, and the challenger would win the first night and get his $100.  There would be bad blood between the wrestlers, however, and the champion would demand a rematch the next night.  The challenger would agree, and the next night they would wrestle again, this time with the champion cheating openly, apparently hurting the challenger, gouging his eyes, bloodying his nose, and so on.  At the end of the second night, the challenger is desperate for revenge, and the third night they wrestle yet again.  Either  one could win this match, depending on what­ever they agree on in advance, and how they read the crowd.  The whole thing, of course, is fixed from the beginning, and care­fully rehearsed.  The show makes its money from the fact that the audience from the first night comes back both other nights and brings their friends; and there are also some illegal side bets that get covered.  The fixed wrestling is called "working," while the real thing is called "shooting."  They avoid shooting whenever possible, because they can't always control the outcome and because they can't make as much money at it.

     The man who ran the wrestling tent was call Henry, and he supposedly was once a world champion wrestler himself.  If this had ever been true it had been a long time ago, since Henry was  now in his sixties and had quite a pot belly.  He had been run­ning with the carnival for over thirty years, and he was both Dad's contact and his idol.  It was Henry that Dad had wrestled for in one of his many premarital gigs, and he hoped when he was Henry's age that he could be doing exactly the same thing--what he wanted, when he wanted, where he wanted.  In his spiel to attract paying customers Henry would tell the crowd that he was from Arkansas, and all they had in Arkansas was mules and wrestlers.  It was a pretty dead crowd when somebody didn't shout out, "Yeah, which one are you?"

     One night the shill in the crowd was sick, and Henry asked Dad to fill in.  He was hesitant, since he hadn't wrestled in two years, but he owed the old man and said he'd be glad to.  Kids weren't allowed inside, so I didn't get to see Dad wrestle,  but I stood outside the tent and listened. It sounded pretty wonderful.  Unfortunately this was a night that the local boy was supposed to lose, and they altered the scenario so that Dad would bring back a friend of his the next night who would teach the carnie champ a lesson.  That seemed more credible than Dad actually winning, since he was so out of practice and easily beaten.

     Henry didn't ask Dad to wrestle any more after that, but in my eyes he didn't need to.  Dad was enshrined forever as my hero, and from that time on I followed him everywhere he went for the rest of the summer.  Mindful of this new responsibility, Dad resolved to make some changes in my life.  He started to teach me to wrestle, for example.  In the mornings before the carnival would open, Dad and I would  "work out" in the ring.  Dad showed me a few of the holds, a few of the throws, and how to fall without breaking anything, and we began to set up some working routines.  I was particularly fond of the "Beale Roll," in which I would clasp my hands behind Dad's neck, jump up and plant both feet in his belly, and merely fall on my back.  Inertia, a forward somersault, and acting ability did the rest, and it looked to the uninitiated that I was tossing a full-grown man around the ring at will.  My friends saw to it that the other boys with the show watched some of this, and I was never bothered again.

     For some reason the money wasn't rolling in quite as quickly as Dad had anticipated, as Grandpa and Mom pointed out with increasing stridence, and there wasn't enough spending money for me to have a weekly allowance.  Dad hit on the idea of me taking a job, and with Dad's contacts in the carnival it was easy to set up some light work that paid a pittance but relieved at least some of the financial pressure.  Dad also thought it might help my self-confidence, having observed my almost obsessive desire to please everyone all the time and having diagnosed it as the symptom of low self-esteem that it was.  My first job was with one of the midway games, the one where marks toss softballs at milk bottles and win prizes if they knock them down.  My job was to restack the milk bottles when anybody hit them.  This lasted exactly two days before I was fired, since the milk bottles were made of lead and were too heavy for me to lug around easily.  The illusion was thus shattered, and the marks were less liable to part with their cash in a quest for a teddy bear.  My second job was equally dishonest but more suited to my unimposing physique.  I worked at another of the gambling games, this one the fish pond.  This was a circular trough of water in which the proprietor floated wooden fish with prize numbers on the bottom.  The rube paid for the privilege of picking one or more of the fish (depending on how much he or she paid), winning the prize corresponding to the number on the bottom.  The vast majority of the prizes were worth two or three cents, but there were a few (again, mostly teddy bears) that were worth several dollars.  I had two jobs: first, I was to pretend to play the game, being sure to pick the teddy bear fish when there were lots of people around, running off screaming with my prize.  Second, I was the official cheater for the game.  I was to stand at the back of the trough, out of sight, and remove the big prize fish from the water whenever there were more than one or two players buying chances.  I was told that the law required the fish to be in the water a certain percentage of the time, and it was my job to make sure the law was upheld but that nobody (except a shill) ever won the big prize.  I was very good at both parts of this job, and kept it for the rest of the summer.

     In my final days with the carnival because of the imminent start of school, I had an unusual piece of good luck.  I happened to be wandering the midway when I noticed another of the game proprietors working a crowd.  This was a much simpler, and much more expensive, game, composed of simply picking a sealed envelope out of a barrel and winning the prize written down on the sheet of paper inside.  This game cost a dollar a chance, while most of the others were ten cents each, or three for a quarter.  At the same time, the potential prizes were much bigger as well.  The grand prize was a huge plush teddy bear, five feet tall--taller than me, and in fact taller than anyone in my family except Dad.  I wanted it very much, but had never had enough money to try for it, aside from knowing what my chances were from working on the other games.

     On this afternoon, however, the proprietor was inserting new envelopes into the barrel, and he claimed that these were the ones containing the slips for the big bears.  There were four enve­lopes, and naturally the man tried to mix them in very well so that nobody watching could win the big prize.  I, wat­ching very careful­ly, noticed that one of the envelopes wasn't mixed in, and was in fact sitting on top in plain sight!  It was no different from any of the other envelopes, but I knew it was one of the big winners.  I watched for someone else to pick it, but nobody did.  Apparently I had been the only one to see it.  I desperately counted my money, but had less than twenty cents.  I quickly raced to my grandfather's spot on the midway, but Grandpa was busy with a rube and didn't pay any attention to me.  My mother was in town shopping, and Dad (I knew) was busy with "The Living Desert," now being run as a ding joint.  This meant that "patrons" were admitted free and asked for a donation when they left.  Dad had not done this out of any misplaced pub­lic spirit, but simply because they made more money this way, and to me it seemed perfectly natural.

     In any case, there was nobody I could beg or borrow a dol­lar from, and my sense of need increased dramatically.  I had to win that bear.  Having no other options, I raced to the truck, took out the plaster piggy bank Mom had made me deposit half of my earnings into, and shattered it with a rock. I quickly pocketed over four dollars in change and ran back to the midway as fast as my legs could carry me.  I held my breath as I looked again into the barrel--and the envelope was still there!  I elbowed my way to the front, presented four quarters to the man (who of course knew that I was with the show and intended to give my money back later), and plucked the enve­lope out of the barrel with a sense of triumph.  The man opened it up and was astonished to find that it called for the grand prize-winner's choice of any panda on display.  Smiling for the crowd, the barker gave me my five foot teddy bear, showed them all the winning envelope, and braced himself as he was inun­dated with children and parents wanting to try their luck.  I half-carried, half-dragged the giant bear back to the truck and waited for what I knew would now happen.  Even Dad would not be able to save me from the inevitable embarrassment, fear, rage, and humiliation that I would suffer over this disobedience.  At least, though, I would have the panda.

     My punishment, however, included the locking of that be­loved object in the back of the truck, the confiscation of all of my remaining money, and the terminating of the carnival experience a week earlier than necessary, because it was obvious that I couldn't be trusted any more.  Mom and Grandpa would take me home in the station wagon, while Dad finished out the season and tried to salvage a little from the wreckage of Grandpa's investment.  This had all been decided beforehand, of course, but it provided a convenient punishment to tell me how it was all my fault because I was so bad.
     The final humiliation happened when Dad got home with the truck. Grandma (who was also a pituitary dwarf, standing 4'2" and as big around as she was tall) saw the teddy bear  and immediately claimed it as her own. She spirited the gigantic (to her) toy into their bedroom, and while I saw it again sitting on their bed I was forbidden from entering the bedroom and never got to enjoy my ill-gotten gains.
     I never particularly thought about it before, but my carnival experiences during the summer of 1956 probably contributed to my ending up as a theatre professor. So it's all good.