Authors: Alanna Nash
If the majority of the Johnny J. Jones troupers were downhearted, Tom Parker couldn’t have been happier to be among them. And while showing Bert Slover’s ponies at a Tampa movie
theater was a natural assignment for him, he was willing to get up at 5:30
A.M
.—which became his lifelong habit to be part of the action.
From the beginning on Johnny J. Jones (where he was an independent contractor and not a salaried member of the staff), Parker set his sights on making the most money, just as he had as a young
dockhand in Rotterdam. That meant working the front end of the lot, or concessions, a broad-based term that covered food, merchandise, and gaming booths, but with one important difference:
merchandise and game operators bought their booth space by the foot; food worked on a percentage basis.
“He started out in a candy stand, making candy apples and popcorn,” says Larry Davis, owner of California’s largest outfit, Carnival Time Shows, who came to know Parker well in
the early ’70s through the - Showmen’s League of America, the venerable outdoor fraternal organization. From there, Parker told Davis, he floated throughout the carnival, doing whatever
he could—shaving ice for snow cones, running the merry-go-round, anything—trying to stay alive.
“I knew him as a concessionnaire,” says Joe McKennon, a carnival historian who worked on the shows. By the time McKennon met him, Parker had several small
concessions, adding a game or two to his food stand, which immediately made him suspect to the other showmen. Concessionaires who ran games were often crooks specializing in “flat
stores,” or games of chance that offered no winning numbers. As “gentlemanly agents” who sold “conversation” and bragged about “turning the duke”—not
just hustling the customer out of his money, but shortchanging the count with a skilled slip of the hand—they were a disgrace to the honest men among them.
In those first years, the young Tom Parker kept his nose clean and stayed out of trouble. In fact, “he just didn’t make an impression,” according to McKennon. But one thing
McKennon does remember about Tom Parker: he went by yet another name. “I used to know what it was, but it wasn’t Parker,” he begins. “At a showmen’s convention about
fifteen years ago, he was the speaker, and I had to introduce him. I said, ‘He was just a so-so concessionaire until he found that boy from Memphis and went into the business of creating
names.’ And I used that name he had on the Jones show. Afterwards, Parker came up and said, ‘I didn’t know you knew that, Joe.’ ”
Parker may have felt compelled to use another alias during the AWOL and desertion period of his military service, and perhaps carried it over to the early part of his Johnny J. Jones days. But
to carnies such as Larry Davis, Parker’s decision to hide his true identity simply isn’t worth noting.
“You could know a guy ten years in that era and not know his real name,” offers veteran concessionaire John Campi.
Indeed, Jack Kaplan, Parker’s best friend throughout his carnival years and an associate for decades to come, never felt the need to ask his true identity. The two slept next to each other
in railroad cars for months on end, but Kaplan had no idea what Parker did before the carnival, or even where he came from, although he noted that “in 1933, he was [still] talking like a
Dutchman: ‘Brassa, was ist los, ja, ja, ja’ ” Parker’s refusal to elaborate on his past was considered neither mysterious nor unusual. It was simply part of the
carnies’ silent understanding.
For those who did feel a need to shield either their identity or their predilections, the carnival offered a perfect place to hide. It was also fraught with danger, a situation that tends to
bend the mind-set of the fraternity.
In the Depression years of the ’30s, especially, those who worked the
carnivals trusted no one, and the strain of always having to watch their back often led to
frayed nerves and sometimes tragedy. Stabbings on the lot were not uncommon, nor was a callous attitude toward death and the survival of the fittest. It was all a part of business as usual.
Parker so identified with that lifestyle that he sought out the company of concessionaires, midway operators, and sideshow performers long after his carnival days were over.
“When we were traveling across country,” says Byron Raphael, who frequently drove Parker in the late ’50s, “he often took me to these little carnivals that were so small
they didn’t even have a big tent. He knew where they were, all through the states, and the first thing he would do was to search out the midgets and the freaks.
“In California, between Barstow and Bakersfield, there were billboards every hundred yards, ‘See the Thing! Half Man, Half Animal!’ He took that really seriously. We’d
stop and go in there, and it would be very dark, very eerie, and ‘the Thing’ would be this poor pathetic black person on his hands and knees in a low cage. He had a tail on him, and
long hair, and when he would growl, it was really frightening.
“The Colonel loved that, and at these little carnivals, he loved the fat lady, and the bearded lady, and he would sit and talk with them for hours. He was a very superstitious person. I
remember him being very respectful of the Tarot reader. Every place we stopped there was always one woman who would sit in a little hut and read your fortune. He would say, ‘This woman is
very good. She can read the crystal ball.’ Then he’d go spend time with the cooks who were making the hot roast beef sandwiches. They all knew him. These were people that he had worked
with.”
Until his death, Parker remained active with the Showmen’s League of America, contributing generously to their causes. “He did a lot of good work for the Showmen’s
League,” remembers Campi, who first met Parker in the ’40s. “He was a beautiful guy, a good man, and a friend. Of course, he was an enemy if you were his.”
But the code of the carnies directed that even his enemies had to concede one point: “I think that everyone in our show business world considered Colonel Parker a great man,”
assesses Larry Davis. “He was just about the best there was at thinking and figuring things out. I’ve never met anyone who thought as deeply as the Colonel.”
In the winter of 1933–34, only a few months past his awful ordeal at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Parker probably still had enough of his army discharge pay, sizable for the times, to
see him through the winter.
But his compulsion to take to the streets to finagle money or promote a free meal had not dimmed since his childhood. The elderly locals of the
area remember him from those days as someone who did what the carnies called “rough hustling”—hawking candy apples, popcorn, or whatever he could—on the streets of Tampa.
Joan Buchanan West grew up in the area hearing her mother tell stories of how Parker sold potatoes and onions off the back of a pickup truck between carnivals, traveling to the little agricultural
communities of Ruskin and Plant City and dickering with the farmers, saving enough beans and tomatoes to keep himself from starving along the way.
It was during this period that Parker met Louis “Peasy” Hoffman, a special agent for Rubin & Cherry Exposition Shows. Hoffman, a short, portly man with an ever-present cigar
setting off a face framed by rimless eyeglasses and a seasoned hat, was a legend in the carnies. Before moving over to Rubin & Cherry, he had carved out a solid reputation as an expert public
relations, advertising, and advance man for Johnny J. Jones, Lackman Exposition Shows, and Cetlin & Wilson.
Tom Parker may have shared much of the flair and philosophy of P. T. Barnum, but if he ever had a hands-on mentor and guide, it was Hoffman, who had started out as a well-finessed and friendly
but persistent game operator. By the time Parker met him, Hoffman was a front-office man in his late forties who dressed impeccably in a three-piece suit and carefully knotted tie. What’s
more, noted the young Parker, who had developed a prominent stutter in his transition from Dutchman to homegrown American, Hoffman could speak smoothly and glibly about nearly anything. One of the
most crucial lessons he passed on to Parker was the importance of getting to know every influential man and woman in even the smallest of burgs in the South and Southeast, long the provincial heart
of the carnival circuit. That was the way the world really worked, he told him.
Yet if the show needed to get a carny out of jail, or if a bribe was required to set up on the grounds or to run unlawful games, another man, the “fixer”—also known as the
“legal adjuster” or “patch”—would step in.
As the promoter Oscar Davis remembered, Parker paid close attention to such ways of dealing with authority, knowing that like almost everything else he learned on the carnival, they would become
useful in other negotiations in life.
Parker understood that the real clout in the carnival lay in the front-office
positions like Hoffman’s. He aspired to such a job himself, where he could be a big shot
and dress in a fine tailored suit. He admired how Hoffman could handle almost any situation with grace and aplomb, certainly a prerequisite for any front-end employee. But it was Hoffman’s
skill at selling advertising that Parker coveted most, and so he offered to chauffeur Hoffman on his local rounds in exchange for tutelage. At first, the lessons were slow in coming—Hoffman
was still on Rubin & Cherry, and Parker on Johnny J. Jones, and so they met up in Tampa in the winter. Before long, they were teaming to work the smaller “turk,” or non-railroad
shows, in the off-season.
Soon, Parker was emulating Hoffman in almost every fashion, and from all appearances stood out as the very model of the well-dressed front-office agent. A photograph of him from the time shows
an eager would-be promoter in a dark suit, white dress shirt, and dotted tie, a fedora on his head. The cigar, which not only gave him an air of grit and confidence, but took a stranger’s eye
away from his weakening chin line would come soon afterward.
“You could say he patterned himself after my father a bit,” says Hoffman’s son, Joey, also a carnival man. “But later on, he attributed all of his dirty tricks to my dad.
Parker was a big, likable Dutchman and a nice fellow, but he was really nothing but a half-assed promoter who eventually lucked into a hot property.”
In his second winter with Hoffman, Parker bragged about several stunts he’d originated on the Jones show, such as a public wedding ceremony. In this stunt, staged on Saturday night for
optimum effect, Parker and a girl off the show—allegedly two carny kids in love—“married” on top of a Ferris wheel. Soon the public wedding ceremony was a staple on
carnivals across the country, and its success filled Parker with the hope that he would be rewarded with a front-office job. Instead, tough carnival owners and managers regarded him as a renegade
who happened to hit with a good thing.
“He always had quick ideas,” remembered Jack Kaplan, Parker’s chief crony of the time, “and he was quick on talking. He wanted to be a big man in this country. He always
said, ‘Them dummies can do it. Why - can’t I?’ ”
If Parker had not yet earned the respect of management, he found in Kaplan the first of a long line of flunkies who would eventually make up a sort of entourage—men who would work cheap
for the privilege of being around him and his milieu, be on call twenty-four hours a day, suffer
silently any form of verbal or emotional abuse, and never question his
authority. Usually, like Kaplan, they were younger men and of small stature, intimidated by Parker’s size, girth, and aggressive personality. They were yes-men to the extreme, perfectly
suited to his deep-seated need to control, subjugate, and bully. Parker hoped having a subservient gofer like Kaplan would boost his profile with the carnival brass and dignitaries—men who
had the title of Colonel in front of their names to designate them as important figures.
By 1934, Parker was on and off the Jones show, hopscotching from one carnival to another to make a season’s work. The smaller the show, the more corrupt, and most of the little outfits
were so undercapitalized that sometimes they couldn’t afford enough tires to simultaneously move all the trucks to the next town.
Understandably, with such limited prospects, Parker was hoping to worm his way into a job like Peasy’s. Hoffman got him a break at Rubin & Cherry, but a front-office job remained
beyond his grasp. Back on the Jones outfit, he talked his way into selling a few ads, yet the front ranks seemed closed to him there, as well.
And so he scrambled to do what he could, including “cherry pie,” or jobs wheedled out of his fellow showfolk, even something as menial as guarding the railroad cars. All the while,
he indoctrinated himself further into the closed, secret society of the carnival, he and Kaplan resorting, when they needed to talk business in front of the townies and not be understood, to the
gibberish of carny lingo.
For a time during this early period, the young Parker moonlighted as a pitchman on a sideshow—in part to lose his stutter and Dutch accent and learn to talk “American.” He also
ran a “mitt camp,” or fortune-telling booth, tracing his customers’ occupations by the calluses on their hands. He could look into the eyes of the gullible, read the life history
on their face, and communicate with them silently, almost controlling the very words they said.
C
ARL
J. S
EDLMAYR
was indisputably the man to see. In just twelve years,
the success of his Royal American Shows, headquartered in Tampa, had made him the modern “King of the Carnivals.” The Nebraskan, a former fountain pen salesman, had ventured into the
carnies in 1907 as a talker on a sideshow. In 1921, he purchased the Siegrist & Silbon Shows, and after two years, changed the name to Royal American—“Royal” to appeal to
Canada, where he hoped to take his outfit for part of the season, and “American” to rouse the patriotism of those back home.
Sedlmayr, whose fierce eyes and formidable, turned-down mouth hid a kind heart and a genuine liking for his employees, was a man of honor. He had built the Royal American Shows’ reputation
by carrying nothing less than clean, high-class entertainment and by creating the extraordinarily diverse “World’s Largest Midway” that treated its customers as patrons, and not
as “marks.”