13 THE EGRESS

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, DON’T MISS THIS special feature: the wonderful, surprising—the Egress! Please, step this way.

As described in chapter 3, Barnum's “Egress” signs—seemingly leading to a major exhibit—were actually directing patrons to the exit. Here we approach the egress of our tour of the sideshows. Sadly, we also come to another egress: the end of the sideshow era. Long ago, circus sideshows disappeared, and now the century-long run of carnival sideshows—certainly the large, traditional ones—is all but over.

The circus sideshows declined for several reasons. In earlier times, people would mill about the lot, both during the day and after the circus performance had ended at night, so there were always customers for sideshows. As times changed, people began to arrive more or less on time for the performance. If they were early and visited the sideshows, by the time they made their way to the big top, the best seats had been taken. “And so as a result,” explains Ward Hall (2001), “sideshows just don't work on a circus today.” He concedes that he knows of one, but it is a little three- or four-banner museum-type show. “So it's not really a circus sideshow either, but that's it. That's why there's no [circus] sideshows.”

But what about the carnivals? Sitting in his trailer behind the Hall & Christ ten-in-one at the 2001 Allentown, Pennsylvania, fair, Hall spoke of the situation today (figure 13.1). He acknowledges that midway crowds are still plentiful and that they can be persuaded to spend money. He notes that he and his partner Chris Christ have enjoyed a greater income in the last fifteen years than he did in any of the previous forty years. I remarked on the irony, given the decline of the sideshows, and he replied that popular interest had been sparked by a number of television specials, including the Learning Channel's Sideshow Alive: On the Inside, a two-hour documentary that has aired dozens of times. There has also been a spate of books and magazines waxing romantic about the disappearing shows (see, for example, The Last Sideshow by Hanspeter Schneider).

FIGURE 13.1. Great showman Ward Hall in his trailer just off the midway. (Photo by author)

Hall states that the decline of sideshows began in the mid-1950s with the advent of the big rides—many of them from Europe. He says, “They were like a vacuum cleaner. They'd just suck the money up off the midway.” Midway space began to be given to such money-making rides, leaving less and less space for shows. The big shows—the girl revues, black minstrel shows, and the like—were the first to go. In the 1960s the carnival sideshows started dropping off at an accelerated pace due to the lack of choice locations and a rise in salaries. So as old showmen died or retired, Hall and Christ bought many of their shows. (Hall stops his analysis to interject that when Chris Christ became his partner in 1967 at age nineteen, “He was the youngest sideshow operator in the United States.” Now, some three and a half decades later, he is still the youngest.) As to the shows they bought, Hall states:

We were not continuing to operate them. Most of them we just took off the road and absorbed their attractions into our existing shows, because we were eliminating competition. And it got to the point where we would go to the fairs convention in Las Vegas and I used to always wear a white suit so that they could easily see us. Chris would wear, you know, bright colors or something. We would just go stand in the lobby. And these guys would come up: “Hey, can you play such-and-such a fair with me?” “Will you come over to my fair?” “Will you come over to my carnival?”…Because we…had the shows and they knew we had to feed ‘em…we had the greatest routes…..Even into maybe the early fifties, if you had a big show, you booked with a carnival, and you stayed there all year. You played their good ones [locations] and their bad ones. There were only a couple of shows that were able to hopscotch and pick out the fairs they wanted…. In 1967 we ended up on Gooding's Million-Dollar Midways, and we had shows there for ten years. And they had, undoubtedly, the best route in the United States at that time. And then also, as time went along—and with each one of these there's a story—but we ended up with the biggest, biggest fairs. And so we would keep one show with Gooding, and the big show with Chris would hopscotch around.

As time went on, the number of excellent rides grew, and they were all trailer-mounted and easy to set up and tear down. In addition, these rides were all owned directly by the carnival. “They're not getting 40 percent and giving 60 percent to some operator; they're getting 100 percent,” Hall observes. “So it's a matter of economics: ‘Why the hell should I give up 400 feet of my valuable space to five or six shows? i can take that same 400 feet and I can put seven rides in there’” (Hall 2001).

As to the future, he paints a bleak picture:

FIGURE 13.2. Showman Chris Christ relaxes at the home he shares with Ward Hall in Gibsonton, Florida. (Photo by author)

Oh, there'll be some single-Os, but even they're disappearing…. Today there is one motordrome working occasionally at fairs. There are no revues, no girl shows; there are two animal shows working—Ricky [Richard Cales] that's here, and Dennis York. There are two sideshow-type things—that's Bobby Reynolds, who doesn't have a live performance, and we still have a so-called ten-in-one. And of the grind shows, there are maybe—maybe—fifty or sixty left out of a thousand. So the whole back-end business, it's the same thing. It doesn't matter if you have a grind show or if you get a bigger show. [The question] is: where do you go that they're willing to relinquish space to you?

Chris Christ (2001) (figure 13.2) echoes his partner's assessment, stating, “We're fighting an economic monster that's bigger than anything we've had to go up against.” Will the economy be the final blow to the sideshows? “Oh, I think it's going to be the final nail, it will probably be the final nail in the coffin. But I think it's going to be the final nail in the coffin for a lot of people”. He adds that while they might be making a good living with their show equipment, all of which they basically made with their own hands, the situation is “getting more marginalized all the time.”

Both Hall and Christ, and others I talked with, discount political correctness as a major factor in the decline of sideshows. It is true that when the decline accelerated in the 1980s, the exhibition of human oddities had begun to provoke complaints from some members of the public. For example, as mentioned in chapter 6, Otis the Frog Boy's act was closed in 1984 after a woman lodged a complaint regarding the display of disabled people. (He moved to Coney Island, where he restyled himself as a working act, the Human Cigarette Factory.) However, such confrontations had no real effect on the decline in sideshows.

“Political correctness had absolutely nothing to do with it,” says Bobby Reynolds (2001). Agreeing with Hall and Christ, he states: “It's all economics. The guys that buy these million-dollar rides need all the room they can get so they can make the payments…. All you'll have out here eventually is very big, noisy rides, fun houses that are not so funny, and somebody hustling you for a teddy bear. And the sideshow will be gone. It'll be diluted like the rest of our country.”

Reynolds's sideshow museum approach represents a cutback in the overhead. As to Hall's show, he says: “You notice he charged two dollars where I’m charging a dollar? That's to make up the difference for the midget [dwarf Peter Terhurne] and the fat guy [Bruce Snowden].” Hall could not let go of them, Reynolds explains, because they are friends. “So Pete has been around him for what, forty years? So what the hell is he gonna do, throw Pete out? So he has to keep him.”

Since I interviewed these showmen, all have closed their shows. Bobby Reynolds ceased to be on the midways in 2002, and in October 2003, Ward Hall and Chris Christ followed suit, finally closing the flaps of their World of Wonders show. Having decided to retire, they planned a last show the weekend before Halloween at Florida's Guavaween Festival. With an anticipated 120,000 people in attendance, according to Pele the Fire Goddess, “Ward got a sequined outfit and planned to give the crowds the bally of his life. Unfortunately, that is not what happened. The show was set up directly across from the heavy metal music stage. Ward didn't even go out and talk because no one could hear him over the driving music.” He just played the tape of his standard spiel, and even though little Pete worked the bally eating fire, “even that didn't help much. Of all those thousands of people, only roughly 500 passed through the entrance of the tent. It was such a sad, sad day for the history of sideshows. What was supposed to be a crowning moment in esteemed careers ended up being over-washed in the waves of guitar-ridden teen angst.” Pele adds, “The end of an era has truly seemed to occur” (Pele 2003). The World of Wonders show was put up for sale. Hall invited his many friends to visit him and Christ at Gibsonton and “to take us out for lunch or dinner” (Sideshow Central 2004).

FIGURE 13.3. Sideshows by the Seashore at Coney Island keeps the carny ten-in-one tradition alive. (Photo by author)

Nevertheless, Coney Island showman Todd Robbins has continued to keep the magic of sideshows before the public. He has worked at the last ten-in-one, Sideshows by the Seashore in Coney Island (figure 13.3), and he is dean of the Coney Island Sideshow School, which continues to teach fire eating and other essential arts and secrets of the ten-in-one era. More importantly, he has created an off-Broadway show called Carnival Knowledge (figure 13.4), which features Todd swallowing swords and doing the human blockhead act, actually using the hammer and wearing the hat of the late Melvin Burkhart, who made the act famous. Other features of Robbins's show are Madame Electra (doing an electric chair act), Twistina (in the blade box illusion), the Flying Ebola Brothers (from the Moscow Circus), a dwarf, the snake charming Pythonia, the sensational girl-to-gorilla transformation, and more. The show even sports banner art by the great Johnny Meah.

FIGURE 13.4. Todd Robbins's Carnival Knowledge presents “The Twisted World of the American Sideshow” to theater audiences. (Advertising folder)

FIGURE 13.5. A broken-down show truck—a detail of a mural by Bill Browning (in the Showtown Bar & Grill in Gibsonton, Florida)—seems a fitting image to close with. (Photo by author)

Elsewhere, of course, there are single-O shows at some midways, and intrepid performers are seeking new audiences at Renaissance fairs, trade shows, the university circuit, nightclubs, and other venues. In addition, television documentaries, movies, journals such as Shocked and Amazed, and a succession of books—including this one—continue to keep alive the tradition, the entertainment, and the wonder that was the sideshow. Perhaps it is not yet time to fold the last tent (figure 13.5). In the meantime, we ask you to please step this way. The egress is just ahead.