Under the Electric Sky (13 page)

“It's all I've done my whole life, so I'd kinda like to keep doing it. What else is out there for me?” Bill offers on the lot one day.

“I'm gonna die out here,” Verney adds, with an air of prophecy in his voice. “Most of us will.”

There's no question older carnival workers like Popeye and a number of other guys enjoy making kids happy, but it's on a level much deeper than a simple midway mission statement. A lot of them have no childhoods to speak of. They were abused or forced out of home at an early age to fend for themselves. In the carnival they found family and a safe home, the way Sam Alexander had on the old sideshows. They were adopted by the lights and accepted for who they were with no judgments cast by any of their peers. For many, it was the only family they had ever known and it became difficult to leave the one place they felt they belonged.

In reflective moments many carnies can see in the blurred faces of happy children spinning around in the multi-coloured night, their own lost childhoods. They were raised on the carnival, but some use it as subterfuge just as easily when things get rough now as they did as kids. That way they never have to grow up. They can remain lost children spinning around as life unfolds around them.

Lynch grew up submerged in it on McNab's Island, but had managed to reconcile both worlds and see them as separate. There was the make-believe realm of the carnival, then there was the real world. The two were always operating in the same celestial body when it came down to it, but separately. Lynch had been raised to understand that, despite spending his formative years as a quiet onlooker to parties raging in different directions near his home. If Gatsby never had any kids, Lynch did in a way, and not all of them were fortunate enough to acquire the same grounding he had.

Many recovering alcoholics embrace the theory – backed up by some clinical research – that they are trapped in an arrested form of emotional development that keeps them stunted at the age they were when they first got hooked on alcohol. The same might be said for a number of carnies. Once it got in their blood, they ceased developing emotionally and play out their lives to the whims of childhood fantasy.

“I can't stay up all night no more...”

F
lipper cuts his story about skipping school to go to the Bill Lynch Shows off abruptly and points at an obese man in grey sweatpants and t-shirt walking down the bus terminal in the parking lot of the Dartmouth Sportsplex.

“There David, do ya know that guy there?” His voice raises in anticipation of David's acknowledgement.

“No,” Dave replies.

“Yes, ya do,” Flipper says incredulously. “Ya know who that big guy is?”

“What's his name?”

“He's the money eater from Sydney.”

“No, he's not,” Dave replies, half skeptically.

“Yes he is! That is him,” Flipper insists.

“Get out. Does he still eat the money?”

“Yes, man.”

Bill Durham's red Chrysler Sundance erupts with laughter. Flipper, who's sitting next to me in the back seat, turns in my direction.

“This guy would eat $50 bills, man. Fifties and hundreds,” he says, as if I won't believe him.

“Why?” I ask, realizing it was a silly question the moment I said it.

“Because he could,” Flipper explains with clear reasoning. “I'm serious.”

“Well, it might be worth five to watch him,” I say.

The logic behind this fat man's magic is thin at best. But Flipper seems to be taken by it, recalling a night years ago in Sydney on the lot. I can picture them handing him a fifty and watching it disappear down the fleshy pipe while the rest of the carnies stood around laughing. I just can't understand the fat man's angle. How would he make anything off his clearly valuable talents? Perhaps he passed the bills later, sifting through the waste for his earnings.

These questions will probably never be answered and that's just as well, I've come to understand.

Flipper, a wiry little guy who picked up his nickname from completing gymnastic feats on the lot over the years, worked for Soggy on the Bill Lynch Shows, owning a few concessions. Dave White was Soggy's concessions manager for years. Dave is a large man with a strong skull and massive hands. That old lineage definitely runs through these guys' veins.

Bill rounded up Flipper and Dave and another guy to talk and we're all sitting here in the parking lot, smoking cigarettes while they reminisce about their carnival days.

Dave says Maritime Midways won't let him on the lot because he knows too much about the games, but that he doesn't care anyway. They're not running things properly, he adds.

“They created the problems here,” he says, pointing to the location the carnival used to play in the parking lot. Maritime Midways won't play the Dartmouth Sportsplex anymore due to violent altercations with some patrons from nearby over the last couple of years. “We played the Dartmouth Shopping Centre across the street for twenty years. We had problems, yes, but it was solved in five minutes. Soggy never ever closed the show. This guy closed at five o'clock on two busy days.”

Soggy would call the police in some instances, but only as a last resort. He'd send some of his boys including Dave and Flipper to talk to whoever was causing the disturbance and see if things could be worked out amicably.

“We'd tell them we gotta make a buck here, guys,” Dave says.

At this point everyone starts to interject and the conversation takes a series of turns in every conceivable direction, all at once. The guys spot a bus driver they used to work with and call him over to engage in the memories. Everyone's talking at once and through the blur I realize Flipper's trying to tell me a story about cooking salmon in his car.

“I'm telling you a fact,” he's saying. “You're tearing down, it's late night, you got no way to eat but you got some fish wrapped up with butter and salt and onions, all ready to go. Slap it on the engine twenty minutes, flip it over and drive another twenty minutes. It's fresh, hot meals, guaranteed.”

The disjointed conversations continue. It's like being on the carnival lot as the machines spin around in every direction while the music and screams spill through the air noisily.

“Ya can't go very far without running into former carnies. They're everywhere,” Flipper says through the din.

“I woke up in a tree once, fifty feet above the ground. Honest to God man. I don't even know how,” the other guy is saying to somebody.

Once everyone has a coffee, the noise calms down a bit and they become more focused. Dave has the deepest voice here, casting out of a large body, which means he gets to tell the story I've been meaning to ask them about.

“We had about sixty guys on top of the ride lifting the platform... trying to get him out of the hole,” Dave's loud voice rattles off.

During the 1995 Atlantic National Exhibition in Saint John, a carnival worker was killed by the Tip Top ride as he performed the morning inspection. The worker, thirty-three-year-old Tyrone ---- , had jacked the platform of the ride up by the air compression unit and went underneath to inspect that everything was functioning properly. He hadn't locked or blocked the platform which meant all that was holding it in place was air as it dangled precariously above him.

“This is what happened,” Dave says with authority, forcing the others to listen. “For years they were after Tyrone to get clean. The owners and bosses: clean up, clean up, clean up. Well, this year he cleaned up, all right? Clothing and appearance and all that. The proper way of checking the ride, what he was supposed to do, was go underneath the ride and look up, all right? He did it wrong. He put the ride up, turned the power off, went over to where he had to be and looked down. Where he looked down there was hydraulic levers. He leaned over and hit the levers…”

Scchhhwatttttttt! Dave's large hands smash together and reverberate violently through the car.

“Twenty tonnes. He never had a prayer.”

The New Brunswick Department of Labour investigated the death, ruling it an accident with the official cause listed as “crush injury with decapitation.” The workers took it hard. They rallied around the scene, verbally assaulting and jostling reporters and photographers who tried to take photos. When officials pulled the body out from under the ride, twenty or so workers formed a barrier with blankets to block the scene from onlookers. It was rough. Everybody was in shock and the thought of working the carnival lot that day was unsettling for many.

“If we hadda opened the Tip Top that night we'd a had a line around the fair lot. People are sick,” the other guy offers.

Soggy had taken Tyrone's death to heart as well. This time it was a member of the family who died on the lot and it was devastating. The old iron heart palpitated in his chest. He was getting too old for this. It was as if the last forty years on the carnival had finally caught up with him. The iron heart had suffered three heart attacks to this point, including a triple by-pass operation in 1985 that doctors said would keep it pumping for at least ten years.

Two weeks before Tyrone's death – and four months before his own – Soggy gave an interview to the Charlottetown
Guardian
on his midway at Old Home Week, the very place he began at the hotdog stand all those years before. The old bruiser from Charlottetown was sixty-five now and though he doesn't verbalize it in the article, he was planning to give it all up.

“Once you hit sixty-five, every day is tiring,” an aged Soggy declared. His hair had since receded and the pompadour was replaced with silver strands brushed over the top from the left side. “I can't stay up all night no more.”

The article reads a bit like a nostalgic account of a man's life. Soggy's sitting in his office trailer, sucking back the cigarettes as his collie Spencer barks at kids who knock on the door for tickets.

“I was like that when I was a kid,” he says of the children in his rusty voice. He adds that he never regretted anything over four decades in the business. “I just loved it. I don't know, it's just something that gets in your blood and it's hard to get out.... If I had to do it over again, I'd do the same thing.”

Four months later, he was dead. And so was the Bill Lynch Shows.

The Day the Music Stopped

O
ld carnies often die in the fall or winter, when the leaves turn and a cool breeze sweeps across deserted fairgrounds, eventually giving way to falling snow that obscures the grounds from their once ethereal state. They've seen the season to its completion and they can finally let go. Others have no say in the matter.

Bill Lynch died in October 1972, shortly before the last date of the season in Halifax. He had taken ill after the Fredericton Exhibition in September and spent about a month in hospital. The exact cause of death is difficult to determine. Every newspaper I've come across from around the time of death failed to report the actual cause. Lynch wasn't particularly close with anyone still alive and there are a fair number of people who worked for him who don't know what killed him either. The best guess is some form of cancer, but it's difficult to ascertain. His record of death will not be made public until 2022, fifty years after his death in accordance with Nova Scotia law. However, in a letter dated August 7, 1959 written to Fred H. Phillips, Lynch apologizes for not responding sooner, shedding some light on an undisclosed illness:

…I have been convalescing for the past two months, as you have no doubt heard, but I am now feeling better and back with the show. Of course, I have not made this public (as I wanted to keep my illness a secret). I have to be a little careful for the next couple of months. However, I do expect to have a complete recovery and be a little more careful about my health in the future.

Whether this condition was linked to the one that killed him is difficult to determine, but Lynch eventually died October 23, 1972. It came as a critical blow to the show, and one it almost didn't survive. It was Soggy who had kept the show together for decades after that. Soggy Reid died on December 5, 1995, after losing control of the vehicle he was driving outside of Levant, Maine, on his way home from Florida. The crash killed long-time carnival worker Terry Hubley, as well. Hubley had been sent with Soggy to Florida to act as his driver. Soggy was not supposed to drive on account of his heart that had rusted along with the voice over the years. Hubley had driven as far as Bangor, where the group of four – including friends and co-workers Dave Smith and Jamie Coffin – stopped for lunch. Soggy insisted on driving from there and twenty kilometres later, at mile 264 on the Maine Interstate – the very number of that old house he had grown up in on Dorchester Street that ran down to the train yard – outside of Levant, the big, iron heart slapped into cardiac arrest and the Chevy Suburban left the highway.

Thirty-three days later, Doug Woodard of the Maine Transportation Department picked up a collie named Spencer who had fled the scene of the accident. His owner was dead, but somehow the dog had managed to survive in the north-eastern brush around Levant for over a month.

“I couldn't believe it,” Woodard told a local paper after finding Spencer. “This is a wonder dog.”

A local veterinarian observed that the dog appeared not to have eaten in over a month, losing half his weight, but looked to be in good condition. Some friends of Soggy's who worked on the show drove down to Maine to collect the dog, but a few minutes before they checked into a Maine hotel room Spencer died. To have lived that long in the wild and then finally, when it came time to go home, die. It came as a surprise to a lot of people who were hoping for him.

“It was a heartbreaker,” Johnny Reid says. “That dog died of a broken heart.”

Four hundred or so carnies' hearts broke as well when the news of Soggy's death reached home.

“Oh my God, it was just unreal,” Betty recalls. “I had called over to Eleanor's to see how she was doing and they told me they had just gotten the news about an accident and how it didn't look like he had survived. I couldn't believe it. It was a total shock. He was so full of life.”

The news spread and anyone in the vicinity made their way down to Soggy's to congregate in the yard. Betty came out and made the news official to friends and family.

“I could just feel a buzz,” she says. “A lot of people depended on him and a lot of them were worried about their jobs. I told them they were safe, that we would find a way to continue.

“Everybody looked up to Soggy like a father,” she adds. “They missed him and it hurt.”

The funeral took place at St. Peter's church in Charlottetown, where three hundred people crammed in and another 150 watched the service via closed-circuit television in the church hall. People who couldn't afford to go found a way to get there to personally deliver their condolences. Father McCarthy, the carny priest, arrived from New York to offer a few words for the friend he knew and the man everybody was acquainted with.

“His shows were his family,” McCarthy told the crowd. “The people who worked on that show were different than any other carnival that I worked with and there has been hundreds of carnivals, as you may know, throughout the world. They were his people and he loved them.”

That Soggy had died just outside of Levant was strangely prescient. As British slang, levant is a verb meaning to default on a debt or to leave in a hurry to avoid paying what's owed. In a way, that was what happened to Soggy. He was returning home from Florida where he had been trying to sell the show to an American carnival operator. He was facing serious financial turmoil on account of growing the business too big in a time when the local economies of many Maritime communities were still reeling from the collapse of the fisheries and other assorted economic conditions beyond their control. Soggy had been expanding too rapidly and the costs of keeping four good-sized units – sometimes a fifth – on the road had caught up to him. He was running a large debt in a time of high interest rates. It killed him to have to sell – perhaps literally – but he had no other options.

Financial intricacies were never Soggy's area of expertise. His books were a mess in 1979 when Revenue Canada suggested ever so subtly that he get them in order. That year a man by the name of John Drummey came east looking for a job in the carnival business. He had worked for Conklin Shows in their financial operations and the timing was good for both of them. Soggy made Drummey comptroller and knew he could trust him to get the books in order. He did and that relationship remained beneficial to both men until that winter day outside Levant. Drummey himself was supposed to be in the vehicle with Hubley and Soggy that day, but he had been called in for jury duty and couldn't make the business trip.

“We just weren't making enough to cut it,” Drummey explains of Soggy's decision to sell. “He just wanted to get out. He didn't need the aggravation and it was a struggle. But he loved that show; it was his whole life.”

John Drummey is a stocky man in his sixties, with closely cropped grey hair around the sides of his head and glasses. He's been involved in the carnival business, like most, since he was a teenager. After finishing high school, Drummey worked as a chartered accountant, eventually managing to merge the financial aspect into his first love, the carnival. He hired on with Conklin shortly after and currently works as a consultant with different shows out of Florida and Ontario. He lives in a lofty home in a tony neighbourhood in Bedford, Nova Scotia, that he says was paid for in real estate dealings.

“There's no money in the carnival business here these days. The margins are so tight because of the economy and because there's no growth in the Maritimes and in the population,” he says from the living room of his home on a warm spring day, surrounded by old Vaudeville-era paintings of clowns. “It kind of hurts, ya know? Back then, the GST was killing us. We were taxed to death on every aspect of the business.”

When everyone met to determine the future of the Bill Lynch Shows after Soggy's death, the whole deal fell into Drummey's lap.

“Nobody else wanted to do the job, so I did it,” he says.

Everybody knew Drummey was from Ontario, but there weren't a lot of options. The workers had avoided any outside influence on this local, home-grown institution for seventy years, but it was finally time to accept it: The Bill Lynch Shows were over. And, in the end, Drummey wasn't all that bad. He was more of a numbers guy than a Soggy-style people-person and he was from Ontario originally, but he had lived here long enough to understand what the show was about.

“I had been here since 1979, so I knew a lot of people by then and they considered me a Maritimer,” he says. “And I am a Maritimer now.”

He proved that by maintaining the most sacred of all policies on the show. Drummey organized Christmas parties for handicapped children at the arena on the Exhibition grounds in Halifax. Every year, the rides would be set up inside and up to 3,500 disabled kids from around the city would be treated to a day of wonders, just like other kids had for decades. The Saint Mary's University football team would volunteer as well, lifting children out of wheelchairs and placing them on those vehicles of joy and terror that would set their imaginations soaring.

“I thought it was a good idea,” he says. “If you've ever seen one of those kids do that, you'd know why we did it.”

Drummey ran the show for three years starting the season of 1996. Soggy's life insurance covered most of the unsecured debt and liquidating $200,000 worth of rides had paid it off in full. The Bill Lynch Shows had a fresh start with no debt, but the economy of the region was still hurting. The GST was a tough drain on razor-thin profits and competition from Campbell Amusements out of Ontario stealing prime spots like Charlottetown and Bridgewater took its toll.

In 1999, Drummey purchased what was left of the show outright from Soggy's estate, after one unit was sold to Ed Waters, who had run the second unit under Soggy for years. (Waters would eventually sell his show to Pat Hinchey, who still travels it around Cape Breton and nearby spots.) That left two and a half units, one and half of which Drummey purchased, renaming the enterprise Maritime Rides and Attractions. Aside from a few poached locations, the route was the old Bill Lynch Shows'. Maritime Rides and Attractions operated until the end of the 2003 season, at which point Drummey sold what was left of his show after downsizing – around twenty-five rides – to Jack Adams, an operator out of Ontario who had only come east to see if he could hire on a few of his rides with a show. The taxes, mixed with the competition, was enough to convince Drummey the old glory days of the Maritime carnival were over.

“You have the new business ethic out there now,” he says. “It's not like it used to be. It used to be one for all and all for one. Not anymore. Just like any other business, everyone's only looking after themselves. And don't forget Mr. Government gets in there and regulates you to death and taxes you to death. So, it's a matter of survival...”

Jack Adams is on a survival trip of his own. Not only does he have to deal with the taxes, but there is now the very real threat to the viability of the carnival presented by the high price of gas and diesel. By the third week in May of 2008, Adams had lost a lot of money. He had started in late April so the workers could put six months in for employment insurance eligibility for the rest of the year, but that practice came back to bite him after almost four weeks of rain with only a few clear days to make money in that period.

“It's a rough way to make a living,” Adams says on a slow, wet day in New Minas. The carnival lot was dead and we were sitting in a truck, pondering the future of the business. Somewhere in his 50s, Adams looks a bit like a missing Baldwin brother in an orange Nike ballcap. He is not a man prone to idle chatter. I have tape of a thirty minute conversation I had with him one afternoon on the lot where he responds to any and all questions with one word answers. But on this day, when nobody connected to the carnival is making any money, he opened up a bit.

“I keep asking myself, why bother, why do this at all,” he says. “I guess I've done this my whole life, so what do ya do? It's too late for me to think about changing jobs or whatever. I don't know that I could even do that. In this business there's a lot of freedom.”

Adams is a welder by trade, which comes in handy for running a carnival. His son welds for the show as well. Jack's wife, Pat, is heavily involved, his daughter owns the cookhouse, his son-in-law helps out and his three-year-old granddaughter spends her formative years exploring the wonders of the midway. Adams started working on the Conklin shows, operating the kiddie rides, eventually purchasing the cookhouse. He sold that a few years later and bought a “dark ride” – the type of ride that travels through a tunnel where imaginary frights jump out to scare passengers. He acquired a few more rides after that and worked as an independent owner on different midways. There is not much of a demand for independent ride owners these days and Adams eventually drifted east looking for shows to work with. Drummey was selling, so after rounding up the down payment, he bought the remains of the old Bill Lynch Shows and the old route, renaming the outfit Maritime Midways.

Some of the old workers stayed on; others tried it for a while and left. The show was not the same. Something was missing and it was more than Adams stopping the practice of putting handicapped people on the rides for free because of liability risks. It was as if the family had been disjointed years ago and never healed properly. The heart and soul of Lynch's dream was gone and a lot of people trace that back to that grey day in December of 1995.

“To tell you the truth, I love the show business,” says Bill Harroun, a fifty-two-year carnival veteran and Soggy's former ride supervisor. “But the last couple years, I don't care if I even go around it anymore. I don't know, the atmosphere is missing.”

High taxes, inflated insurance costs, competition, lack of reliable labour and other costs of real-world issues finally caught up with the City of Lights. Gone are the days of old showmen with big cigars barking out deals, of professional carnies shaking people down for a few bucks, of magic and danger. Soggy never cared about taxes, as Animal says, and that is the price we pay for living in today's world of light-emitting diodes, of frozen dinners and plastic Honda Civics. A world that no longer allows a man to drink in public and forces him into dark spots for a cigarette. The fun of living on the road died and a lot of old carnies miss it. The real world, with all of its detestable rules and regulations, suffocated the spirit of the carnival as many here had come to know it. But in the right spot, on the right midway, the spark still flickers.