Show Business: No More Rubes

“Come on in, it’s the circus. It’s an educational show for the gentlemen, the ladies and the children. Come on in out of the rain, you dumb Dutchmen. Come on in out of the mud and into the dust.”

The buzzsaw voice rasped between the tarnished silver of a straggly mustache and the soiled afterthought of a goatee. The smutched, shoulder-length mane wagged damply beneath a fly-blown Stetson. “All of that and all of that.” The waving arms and lying words swished briefly before gaudy posters of improbable freaks. Somehow, out of the rain-bedraggled midway of the Gratz (Pa.) Fair, a crowd gathered. It always does when the harsh, vocal magic of Colonel Lew Alter begins to turn the tip (con the rubes) into his new “Can It Be Possible?” show.

Not that a mark (sucker) got much for his money when he bought a ticket (50¢ for adults, 30¢ for kids) to Lew Alter’s sideshow. It cost an extra dime to see the “Pickled Punk” (two questionable sets of Siamese twins preserved in formaldehyde), another quarter for a glimpse of Carmelita, the “Hermaphrodite.” (“Ladies on one side of the curtain, please, and the gentlemen on the other. Wives may stand with their husbands.”) Following the colonel himself past the animal cages was an olfactory experience. Living in a trailer with Devil, the two-nosed dog, a spider monkey named Snowball, and a dark, unhousebroken Capuchin named Herman can dose a man with strange scents as the weeks pass.

Who Is “with It”? Still, the marks came, saw, smelled, paid through the nose and did not complain. But on the rest of the lot, business was lousy. End-of-season weather was spoiling it, even for the pig iron (Ferris wheel, merry-go-round, whip, etc.), the moneymaking rides that most carnies consider the backbone of their show. The crowd-pulling mittcamps (palm-reading and pocket-picking gypsies) were gone. The gypsies had pinched some hogs from farmers in the last town, and the Gratz fuzz (cops) had sent them packing. Billed simply as “Stella,” for its leading stripper, the girlie show was doing all right—neither rain nor dark of night, only the mark’s initial embarrassment, ever slows its ticket sales. But even when the sun came out to dry the midway, the carnies at Gratz knew that it was time to strike their tents and head south.

Today, when the fuzz is cracking down and the rubes are wising up, some 2,300 country fairs still draw nearly 85 million people, support about 350 traveling carnivals. The big shows employ up to 500 people, pay top wages ($125 a week for pig-iron operators, as much as $2,000 for big-name acts), keep their owners in the top tax brackets. The little 40-milers (trailer shows making short jumps between towns) sometimes let a Colonel Alter save something more than a Philadelphia bankroll, sometimes are hard put to buy groceries. But big shows or 40-milers, the carnies were migrating south last week, running from the bloomers (un profitable nights) and hunting down the red ones (good nights). And tough as times were, only the first-of-Mayers (fairweather carnies who are not really “with it”) were sneaking off to steady work in the civilized city.

“Shake It, Gal.” At the Cobb County Fair in Marietta, Ga., the purple cotton candy and the foot-long hot dogs were going great. Duck-tailed farm boys and their girls rode the Ferris wheel for a high-arcing view of the cornfields of home. The talker (spieler) turned them in for 72-year-old Jim Jagger, fire eater (“I will amaze you by rubbing the burning torch over various parts of my body and anatomy”), a tattoo artist and human pincushion. The sword swallower put away a 10-in. blade (“I’ll ram it down my bread basket and tickle my belly button”). The geek (lowest operator on the lot, a man who pretends to eat live animals) tore the head off a live chicken and ripped at the flesh with his teeth.

In Abilene, where a cool breeze rippled off the dusty West Texas plains, sharp-booted Texans and their women paid due homage to the “West Texas Fair,” took in the livestock and the rodeo, then moved eagerly to the midway. The tip built up in front of the girlie shows (one Negro, one white), and their talker began his pitch: “This, folks, is Jody, who taught those Frenchmen in Paris something about the great American art of the striptease.” The crowd rolled in at six bits a head. “Shake it, gal!” they yelled, happily ignorant that Dancer Anita Lopez was a bewigged male. On down the back end (the sideshows) of the carny, they plunked their dimes down for Jennie Thurman, “The Girl in the Iron Lung.” (Healthy Jennie, 17, “did have a touch of polio” once when she was a little girl, insists her father, foreman at the Ferris wheel.)

The front end (concessions, games of chance) got a big play too. A muscular cowpoke swung a big wooden mallet and sent a weight soaring up a wire to clang a gong. He strutted off like a dragon slayer. “The guy can rig that bell any way he wants to,” said an operator. “He twists a knob, and you’ll never hit the bell; he twists it back, and you’ll hit it every time.” Over where the flatties (dishonest concessionaires) worked the barrel ball game, the toss of a ball into a barrel won a prize. But someone stood by to slip a bouncy false bottom into the barrel when the marks began to win too much. The hanky-panks (honest games) also made a profit; the slum (prizes) are never worth the price of a turn.

Up north in Ludington, Mich., Gene and Pauline Skerbeck were toughing it out with their Sunday school (clean, no girlie shows, no flatties). The weather was bringing in bloomers, and though Pauline burned blessed palm leaves in her trailer, the red ones were few and far between. A strip act might have pulled more of a crowd, but Pauline was against it. “We’re Catholics, you see. I always tell people that ask where the girl show is that they should save their $1.50 and get their wives to take off their clothes and dance around nude at home.” “Aw,” answers Fair Secretary Irving Pratt, when the subject comes up, “my wife can’t dance.”

“You Can’t Get ’em Out.” One way or another, good business or bad, the real carnies always stick with their show. There is nowhere else to go. When a man’s show folds, he will be back next season, owner of one ride, maybe, or a hanky-pank, but working for a stake that will let him open his own again. And each year it is getting harder.

The racket shows are slowly disappearing. They have run out of rubes, and they are about to run out of towns. “I just think show business is dying out,” says Colonel Alter’s wife Helen. “You can’t get good freaks any more. Seems like they’re all dying off.” Lew agrees. “They take ’em and put ’em in an institution now,” he moans. “They don’t went ’em exposed. Now I ain’t going to mention any names, but I know an insane asylum where there’s three good pinheads right now. But you can’t get ’em out.”

Out of his Sunday school, Gene Skerbeck has the last word: “It used to be that you could take a show into the back country and those people had never seen anything like it. But they’ve all seen it on TV now. The rubes and the suckers are playing golf now. Oh, I don’t say there aren’t some rubes left, but where they are I don’t know. Sometimes I think the only real suckers left are in the business.”