CARL J. SEDLMAYR 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.”
The skilled showman also knew the supreme selling point of meeting personally with the fair committees who might book his outfit exclusively on their grounds. By this method, he managed to replace Johnny J. Jones as the resident show at the Florida State Fair and establish decades-long relationships with other fairs and venues throughout the country. The Memphis Cotton Carnival, where a teenage Elvis Presley would win a stuffed teddy bear at a baseball concession in the early 1950s, was among them.
In 1925, Sedlmayr upped his ante by partnering with the equally respected Curtis and Elmer Velare, a brother team who started as acrobats with the C. W. Parker Shows and who would go on to help found the Showmen’s League.
When the Velares joined forces with Carl Sedlmayr, who early on saw the potential of outlining the carnival rides with neon tubing, their fellow troupers correctly forecast that they would mold the Royal American into the greatest collective amusement organization in the world. In 1933, the show pushed all larger competitors aside to reign as the leader in the industry (“a mile of magnificent, stupendous midway!”), with more than a thousand workers boarding the Royal American’s seventy private red-and-white train cars each spring.
Tom Parker, whose frustration over his stalled career mounted daily, knew that a position on the Royal American would do wonders for his reputation. And so he approached Sedlmayr, asking to represent the carnival in an office-echelon job. He knew all about publicity, press agents, and advertising, he said. Peasy Hoffman had trained him.
Sedlmayr recognized an overly zealous hustler when he saw one. And so he turned Parker over to the harder-hearted business manager, Elmer Velare, who noted Parker’s fractured English, wondered how solid a character he was, and delivered the word that the front office didn’t need a new man just then.
“The Colonel told me that Velare didn’t think he could handle it,” remembers Larry Davis. “The shame of it is that the Colonel had a lot to teach the carnival, rather than learn from it.”
But for now, either no one at Royal American realized Parker’s worth, or the Velares considered his brash enthusiasm a vulgarity better-suited to running a mitt camp. Yet Sedlmayr admired the young man’s moxie, and told Curtis Velare, the concession manager, to put him in an ice cream booth. Parker soon worked his way into other concessions, running wooden sticks through candy apples for Ruby Velare in her cotton-candy stand and cutting a deal with her during the off-season to provide the treats he sold on the streets of Tampa.
Over the next few years, Parker tried nearly everything to break through at the carnival—even volunteering his services with an old, toothless lion whose sore gums had set him on a hunger strike. According to a story Parker later recounted with great fanfare, he fashioned a set of false teeth for the beast, smearing the choppers with mustard when it came time for the big cat to go on show. The spicy condiment irritated the lion’s tender palate but guaranteed an authentically fierce roar.
Such a story has the decided ring of fiction, if for no other reason than its inherent cruelty. As someone who often treated animals with more dignity than he showed to humans, he would not have tolerated such behavior, much less initiated it.
That rationale is precisely why one of the most famous stories attributed to him—that of the “dancing chickens”—also proves apocryphal. According to legend, Parker carried a hot plate, a gramophone, and a cage of assorted fowl—hens, roosters, or turkeys—with him on the carnivals, a practice that supposedly lasted well into his early days of touring rodeos with country singer Eddy Arnold in the 1940s. Whenever the concession business turned slow or, in Arnold’s case, if a fair slapped an amusement tax on an act without a livestock exhibit, Parker simply covered the hot plate with straw and set it in the cage. Then he plugged it in, dropped the gramophone needle on a fast little number, and gathered the crowds as the poor chickens high-stepped around the cage to keep from burning their feet.
The great cowboy star Gene Autry swore that the story was true, and that it led to a friendship that endured until Parker’s death. But Gabe Tucker says it never happened with Parker, who merely appropriated the tale and passed it off as his own. According to Tucker, the real perpetrator was Dub Albritten, who told Tucker about it in 1945, and it was a dancing duck, not a chicken.
By the time Parker started telling the story to others in the Elvis era—usually flourishing a chicken leg at lunch to bring the tale full course—he’d worked out a kicker. “I’d start each week with seven dancin’ chickens and finish with just one,” he’d say, pausing for dramatic effect. “A fella’s gotta eat!”
Despite his obvious aptitude for myth making, in the 1930s, the Royal American brass still found Parker beneath consideration as a press agent or, for that matter, any job of authority. And so his years there would never amount to anything beyond the camaraderie and pride he enjoyed in being associated with the most celebrated carnival of its day.
The sting of that early rejection—so reminiscent of Adam van Kuijk’s reinforcement of failure—left a permanent welt on Parker’s consciousness. Long after he attained a measure of wealth and fame that would have staggered Carl Sedlmayr and the Velare brothers, Parker returned to the carnival time and again to brag and gloat and seek approbation.
Ernie Wenzik, who operated a Pitch ’Til You Win game on the Royal American midway in the 1950s, remembers that Parker kept up with the carnival’s schedule. “He used to come and visit Mr. Sedlmayr every time he was in the neighborhood,” says Wenzik.
But it was more important that he confront the Velares, who continued to be active in the business well into their elderly years, introducing the ninety-foot-high double sky wheel when most men their age had long since retired. In 1972, Parker finally got his chance, when he spied Elmer Velare at the Showmen’s League convention in Las Vegas.
“Mr. Velare,” he began. “I’m Tom Parker. I used to work for you on the Royal American. I manage Elvis Presley. I’m a big promoter now.”
“Yes, indeed,” said eighty-eight-year-old Elmer Velare, graciously trying to soften the moment. “Why didn’t you do that when you were with us? If I’d known you had this ability, I would have put you to work a long time ago.”
“Oh, but Mr. Velare,” countered Parker, twisting the knife. “I asked you tens of times to let me be a promoter back in the thirties, and you people wouldn’t let me. You remember that, don’t you, Mr. Velare? I told you I could do it.”
Parker had managed a miraculous journey from his days with the carnival, but he never got past his need to boast of his accomplishments, or of his relationships with famous people. From nearly his first major interview in the Elvis years, Parker crowed of his friendships with cowboy stars Tom Mix and Ken Maynard, although none of the Mix biographers or Maynard experts can document an association. Maynard and Parker might have made a passing acquaintance when Maynard played the smaller circuses in the 1930s and ’40’s, but there is one other possible explanation, hidden in the details of an embarrassing promotion.
“One time, Colonel produced a show at some ballpark, where he advertised somebody’s famous white horse,” Alan Fortas remembered. “I’m not sure whose horse this was, but it might have been Ken Maynard’s horse, Tarzan, or this big cream-colored horse that Tom Mix had, Comanche. Anyway, something happened, and they couldn’t get him. So Colonel said, ‘Hell, just take that black one over there and whitewash him,’ which was an old circus trick. But just as they were bringing him across the field, damn if it didn’t start rainin’! By the time they got to where they were going, that horse was coal black.”
He was “always intrigued by cowboys and cowboy stars,” Parker’s friend Oscar Davis observed. His fascination with all things Western never wavered, and resulted in his hiring Nudie Cohen of Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors to create Elvis Presley’s famed gold lamé tuxedo.
More important, the infatuation was behind his insistence that Presley make such Western-themed pictures as Love Me Tender; Stay Away, Joe; and Charro!
If the Western image appears to be a curious choice for a man of his background, somewhere in his psyche, Parker seemed to believe he was a product of that pioneering spirit of the West, seen in his fondness for cowboy hats, and the logo of an old-fashioned covered wagon (“We Cover the Nation”) that adorned his business stationery. During the 1964 U.S. presidential campaign, he “loaned” the logo to Lyndon Johnson, gifting him with a thirteen-inch, hand-carved wagon that doubled as a lamp and carried the words ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ on its cloth tenting. Parker hoped it would inspire a promotional giveaway to symbolize - Johnson’s Texas fortitude.
Yet if Parker did not genuinely embrace the romance of the Old West, it was a perfect ruse for an illegal alien. What could be more American—and by extension, patriotic—than a cowboy, a figure who stood for all things good and virtuous? Certainly not his antithesis, the outlaw. It was always a white hat Parker wore, never a black one.