Former Gangster Disciple Tim Walker and girlfriend Gloria Orozco with Victoria, 3, and four-month old Aaliyah in our Super 7 motel room in Dallas after year-end pay is pocketed. They plan to get a van and trailer, and “relax” for the winter in San Antonio.

Jason Lewis and LaSalle “Q” Mayberry sit on the front table of the tubs joint on Sunday night as they wait for the “We’re down!” call and the end of the State Fair of Texas, in Dallas. In the off-season, Lewis will continue his drug rehab at the Cenikor Foundation and Mayberry intends to live the winter off pay from the tubs.

Patrick White at the “break-a-plate’ joint with a ticket gun on the Super Midway at the State Fair of Texas in Dallas a couple days before his death.

“Tomorrow is an old deceiver, and his cheat never grows stale.”
Samuel Johnson

Patrick White is dead – where is his family.

We were his carnival family but who loved him off carnival roads.

Patrick, 29, collapsed at 4 a.m. last Monday after a long day at the State Fair of Texas working the ‘break-a-plate’ joint, where marks, mooches, aka customers throw balls to break plates.

Patrick and most of the crew left for a carnival south of Houston on Monday night.

“Patrick White is dead,” were the first stunning words I heard on the Dallas fairgrounds as we arrived the next morning.

He died seated on the side of a bed in a cheap motel in a town he didn’t want to play.

Nobody knew how to get hold of his family in Maryland or Brooklyn or anywhere.

That morning I wrote a post about how he seemed so young, dead and alone, a broken carny plate.

Carnies took drags on their cigarettes and said, “life is too short” and “he could have had any number of things wrong with him but not know it.”

I had a work break with Patrick a couple days before he left for Houston. We sat in the picnic area behind the permanent, three-rowed carousel along the Super Midway in Dallas.

“You like working the tubs?” he said, referring to my basket game where marks throw balls into plastic tubs. “I hate this. I want to change my life.”

He talked about getting a commercial drivers license, joining a union, driving a bus, saving money to buy a laundromat someday when he gets off carnival roads. His girlfriend is pregnant and he couldn’t wait to get home to Maryland after Houston.

I talked to him about growing older, using one of my stock lines.

“I can’t eat or drink what I like. I can’t stuff a basketball. I can’t make love to a woman three days straight. But there are advantages that come with growing old (pause) and when you find them out let me know will you because I’m stumped.”

The line made him laugh at the prospect of growing old.

Living with road deaths

There is a forced intimacy working in a traveling carnival. You work and sleep together. Sometimes you find a lover. Sometimes you throw fists. Often you throw jokes.

People began telling stories of carnies dying on the midway, in bunkhouses or in accidents. Haunting the stories was a superstitious fear it might happen to them.

Carnies are so often broke. Might they die on the road and end up in a pauper’s grave beside the road?

At 29, a carny was cheated. One of our road family. Patrick was a salesman and the death of this salesman was invisible to others but mattered to us.

Patrick White is dead, I heard that morning. All day everyone on the crew thought about life and death on the road, far from people who know us, from home and love.

A mortal whisper passed between us.

Not Patrick … Not Me.

Becoming someone else

It’s a cold heart that relishes conning the weak, the infirm, the poor. Yet that is the game of tubs, which spits back balls as its pernicious heart shows no mercy.

It is twice blessed, it blesses those who pay and those who con. Players are plied with promises of money back or flashy prizes that pay for themselves many times over before moving to a mooch’s hand.

The carny is blessed with an animal’s predatory pride.

“Man, if you bring a woman to your room, you f*ck her,” a coworker told me in training.

“I’m robbing people today,” he’d say after running up the score on a mark.

I’ve read – and it sounds true – that a high percentage of casino dealers believe what they do makes “the world a worse place.” Casino dealers seek therapy for their conflicting feelings.

I switched from running rides most of this year to becoming a “jointee,” running games at state fairs in Minnesota, Oklahoma and Texas. I ran both the short range and the tubs game at this year’s state fair in Texas.

I started with the short range, a basketball game with a shoulder-high hoop and a basketball about twice the size of a large fist.

Both the tubs and the short range tested me as a former alter boy, choirboy and Webelo.

Still, I watched as people being trained to run the tubs go from honest, virtuous people and turn into con men within a day. They turned on a switch and were able to lie, manipulate and usurp their golden rule values in favor of the hand-is-quicker-than-the-eye dodge.

I’ve often marveled at the different people within us, a born truth seeker becomes a deceiver with just a scratch below the skin.

“Mike’s Rainbow”

My basketball game had three rims, so it looked like the usual one from the shooter’s vantage point.

A coworker and I looked over our shoulders as we placed yellow tennis balls from www.tennisracquets.com/collections/used-tennis-racquets tight under the bottom of the tubs to make the game balls bounce out.

When I wanted a mark to play, I left a “cop ball” in to deaden the throw. When I took out the ball, I used my body as a shield to take the cop ball out and nobody noticed as I walked away with more balls in my hands when I turned around.

Carnies running the tubs brag about their best days. Tim Walker, a former Gangster Disciple and roommate, got a sucker for $1,200 once using “The 10 Point” system (too long to explain here).

Scott White (whose stories I make me wonder) claims to have run up a $10,000 sucker.

To this day Scott regrets not being able to get more than just a few thousand out of a ex-con who was spending his compensation for having served time for a wrongful conviction. The ex-con did 20-some years for a murder he didn’t commit and Scott wanted to rob him of all the money he got for his years in prison.

Scott wouldn’t be cast in “Guys and Dolls,” as a loveable Damon Runyon-esque gambler, known to be successful at NoDepositRewards real money gambling sites. But Elia Kazan might have pointed a black-and-white camera at him.

Clayton Pape is proud to say he’s a “F*cking Powerhouse Agent.” He says he was trained by “Fast Eddie” on the East Coast who blindfolded him and made him identify coins by their sound on the counter. He says he can take a dart, pin a $100 bill to a wood counter and keep the mark playing until it’s gone.

He and others on the crew say when they play the game, they don’t, “leave a dollar on the Midway.”

Surrounded by all these great carnies, owner Adam West beckoned me to his pick-up truck on Monday and told me I was the top grossing carny of any game for the Allstate 38 crew.

He gave me a fist bump and a wide smile.

West was brimming with I-can-spot-good-ones pride when he flipped crisp $100 bills out of his fist and handed them to me. (Tax free, of course, this will be my stake to get to Mexico to view carnival feeder towns.)

For 24 days I stood next to carnies with 20 and 30 years of experience and beat them.

I wonder if it was the journalism training that helped. The tricks of gaining someone’s confidence in order to interview them are similar to the tricks of getting people to trust me running the tubs.

A dash of the Stanislavski-style method acting helped too. If I believed the “Despicable Me” minions are great prizes and the game is winnable, I could convince others.

I developed what I called “Mike’s Rainbow,” telling people tongue in cheek that it is a fool-proof system patented in the US Patent Office in Washington D.C.. It consisted of throwing with a rainbow arc to me before throwing at my hand on the edge of the tub.

“I’m going to hypnotize you to win,” I’d say, then engage in throws. “Mike’s Rainbow. Mike’s Rainbow. Now, shoot for my hand on the bucket. That’s it, let’s play.”

With the cop ball in the tub, they had a great chance of winning and “Mike’s Rainbow” became a legend up and down the midway. People told their friends and returned to win “Despicable Me” minions.

In the afterglow of the fair, I took the money and the compliments from West, then vowed to never do it again.

I took more money from the mooches than any other tub thug, more than any other gamer on my crew. I am a deceiver, all day long.

I cheated a breast cancer survivor, deaf people, poor kids, Downs syndrome kids, people in wheel chairs with palsy. I didn´t treat them worse but I could have rigged the game so they would win and I did, but despicably few times.

My youth didn’t foreshadow this talent. It’s as if in my 50s I inexplicably picked up a strange violin and started playing virtuoso “Pachelbell’s Canon.”

Like magic, I turned into the top grosser at a game I wanted to master. Yet all I think about, looking back on the State Fair of Texas, is how Patrick was cheated, how Mike’s Rainbow dazzled and deceived, and how I turned into despicable me.

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The State Fair of Texas ended Sunday after 24 days. This is my ninth month working in traveling carnivals coast to coast. I’ve been living on carnival wages so I’ve hitchhiked more than 12,000 miles from California, to New Jersey, New York, Chicago, Alaska and back. I finished the state fair season with jumps to Minnesota, Oklahoma and Texas. I posted this from Tlapacoyan, Mexico, a town that empties every year of men as they head north to American carnivals, fodder for a future post.

Game agents control the tubs game with their hustle. Earlier this year, a New Hampshire man lost his entire $2,600 life savings on a tubs game.

“O human race, born to fly upward, wherefore at a little wind dost thou so fall?”
Dante “The Divine Comedy”

I got no game. I don’t do drugs. I don’t sleep with whores. I’m no fun.

Alighieri took this like a joke tricks tell themselves.

He’s a black man in his early 20s, broad shouldered with bright eyes, and solid gold teeth along his bottom row. He might be considered handsome. He loves clowning with the crew and free-style rapping.

He’s a great carny agent who can run-up a mark and he’s a pimp.

“I’m going to take you… out tonight. I’m going to drive by the hotel and pick you up and we’re going out. You and me.”

A half dozen carnies are watching the exchange during set-up on a bright, hot day along the Super Midway at the State Fair of Texas, the biggest state fair in America.

Alighieri treats me like a trick who doesn’t know what he needs – just how he plays marks at his joint.

When he picks up a ball, he calls himself, “The Tub Thug.”

In the bucket game, customers toss a ball into a plastic tub. Game agents control the game by palming a ball and leaving it in the bucket when they want a ball to dead-bounce.

The best agents are good at wetting the appetite, the come-on, the flirt.

Away from the midway, he’s a pimp who runs his north Dallas girls from wherever he is working in the country.

Now on his home turf, he’s Dallas pimp royalty, aka “Sir Tey the Great.”

“What do you want. Anything you want, $100 an hour. I’ve got light skinned girls. Hour-glass figures. They’ll do anything you want. Anything. You like whips, chains, domination?”

We are pinning bright, yellow, stuffed “Despicable Me” minions to hang before opening.

He wasn’t taking no for an answer. I was a challenge. He could see something there. A tell.

Hookers and gamers

Prostitution on carnival road is a good fit.

On van rides to and from work, at the hotel or truck stops, carnies are pointing out the hookers and commenting on their asses and age.

Out of a sense of friendship, a hotel roommate recently offered to clear out if I need some time with a local hooker. At least two others on my crew brought streetwalkers back to their rooms in the last few days.

I knew a Northwestern University transportation expert who said long-distance truck drivers are harder to find since AIDS and the crackdown on prostitution at truck stops.

Without prostitutes, he maintained, the road is too much for these men of flesh.

Still, the “tell” Alighieri saw in my eyes was desire of a different kind, for a story of a night with a carnival pimp player. For a night, as he puts it, “selling salmon and peeling bananas.”

Many writers and artists I admire wrote about this part of human desire.

Stephen Crane’s first novel was, “Maggie: Girl of the Streets” and he lived with a madam. Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Victor Hugo and Hemingway all drew prostitutes into their art. (At the other end of the spectrum, Dante wrote about “courtly love” and his unconsummated love of Beatrice.)

A universal reaction among gamers is the excitement as they talk about their hustle. Their hustle calls the mark in. Their hustle runs up the tab. Their hustle leaves the mark broke.

A synonym for prostitute is hustler.

Easy prize at impossible tubs

A few days ago, Alighieri sat on the counter top and under the awning of his tubs during a lightning storm and told me he wants to become an L-7.

Then he took his forefinger and thumb on each hand – forming an L or a 7 – and put them together to make a square.

He’s living a fast life and the brakes could be a 10-year stint for pandering. He wants to take a hard right.

He met a woman on the carnival circuit in “Cali.” She’s “way older” in her late twenties, has a child and a good job.

He’ll miss the girls, the clubs and the “mollies,” a pure form of ecstasy in a powder or tablet. He’ll miss being “fresh,” with $1,500 in his pocket and driving the streets of Dallas a carny pimp player.

“I’m the greatest at pimping, what are you the greatest at Mike,” he proudly said.

All this he says he’ll miss but he also wants to miss the bullet, all those things he loves “makes me a target.”

So he dreams of becoming an L-7 square saved by the love “of a good woman.”

That life is so close. It’s just a commercial driver’s license and a clean drug test away. Be a trucker, with a California home and a family.

Get out of Dallas, where the game is all around.

“I need a fresh start. With some money. A good woman. That’s not bad is it?”

Walking away from the life will be tough for him and yet as easy as winning a bright, smiling prize at his impossible tubs. So for others out there who also want to win big, it’s now possible thanks to pages such as FM카지노.

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*Alighieri is an alias.
This is my ninth month working in traveling carnivals coast to coast. I’ve been living on carnival wages so I’ve hitchhiked more than 12,000 miles from California, to New Jersey, New York, Chicago, Alaska and back. I’m finishing the state fair season with jumps in Alaska, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Texas.

Two women from our crew work to sort five trucks of stock in 100-degree heat before opening of the Oklahoma State Fair in Oklahoma City.

Miss Trudy holds her granddaughter at a carnival crew party/birthday party at Cosmic Bowl in St. Paul, Mn. Her son and carnival unit owner Adam West is on the far left.

“A merry life and a short one shall be my motto.”
Bartholomew “Black Bart” Roberts

This morning at the Super 8 continental breakfast, Roger came in with a stripper from last night’s “titty bar.”

I was eating Raisin Bran and reading an online New York Times story on Elizabeth Gilbert, author of “Eat Pray Love,” when he and Candace sat down with me and talked about a wild night.

Roger was tossed from the bar for asking strippers to come on the road with us. Yet here he was with a stripper from that bar, who said she loved the movie, “Eat Pray Love” adding lots of people say she looks like Julia Roberts.

“I don’t have her big lips, do I?” she said with an ear-to-ear smile.

She does, if Julia Roberts had greenish tattoo crosses on her fingers and tattoo flowers on her chest, and was still drunk from the night before.

Roger later regaled the carnival crew about convincing Candace to get into bed with his carny roommate to wake him up with a fake story of a menage a trois last night involving him.

Breakfast talk then turned to the drunken brawl last night in my room, which resulted in a broken lamp and a flying TV set.

The Super 8 is filled with carnies working at the Oklahoma State Fair and there are many stories like these told by the legion of the hungover this Friday morning.

I’ve changed sides in the carnival world, I’ve gone from “ride jockey” running rides to “jointee,” working games.

Jointees like Roger, a tall thin army veteran of Somalia and Kuwait with a less than honorable discharge, strike me as the closest thing modern American men get to buccaneers.

He’s got closely clipped hair, thin rectangular glasses making him look a bit like Buddy Holly but his prison record and life tell the story of man constantly in and out of trouble while in pursuit of money and women.

At 54 years old, I’m about the age that the Welsh pirate Captain Henry Morgan was when he died. Captain Morgan and the pirates of the Spanish Main captured a lot of loot, women and imaginations.

Minus the murder and the Jolly Roger flag, jointees are a subculture of mostly men in and out of trouble in pursuit of money and women, mixed with copious servings of drugs and booze.

All these pursuits they again and again mistake for happiness long after Captain Morgan’s crew sailed off to toward mayhem on a flagship named “Satisfaction.”

Batman’s two crew parties

Carnival unit owner Adam West’s six-month-old daughter was passed carny to carny around the table at On The Border until she made it back to her mother’s lap.

It was the free crew dinner before the opening of the Oklahoma State Fair in Oklahoma City. About a dozen carnies feasted on beer, margaritas and fajitas.

Some of the carnies held the baby in front of them at arms length like she was going to shit on them.

Others mustered their rusty fathering skills and bounced her like she was in a dryer.

“It’s like that line from Armageddon, ‘I was raised around roughnecks, what did you expect,’” said West, paraphrasing the biggest grossing film of 1998.

This is my second jump with West’s crew. In Oklahoma we have nine joints. One of the features of the “Adam West” unit are the black Batman logos, in a nod to the actor who played Batman in the TV series.

The Oklahoma crew party reminded me of another crew party at Cosmic Bowl before the opening of the Minnesota State Fair in St. Paul.

“Roughneck” carnies stood around West’s other blonde daughter and sang happy birthday for her sixth birthday party, an event usually filled with squealing first-grade girls.

The carnies cheered when she threw gift wrapping in the air and her dad pushed a dab of cake on her nose.

They towered over her with cigarettes behind their ears. Chango stood with a pitcher of beer in his right hand and a double shot in the left hand. Slamming shots with one hand, he’d hoist the pitcher to his wide-open gullet with the other to the sound of “glug, glug, glug.”

Why doesn’t he just sing “Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum.”

It might have brought back flashbacks for Adam’s mother, who raised him in carnivals from infancy. Miss Trudy was there laughing with the crew.

I told West and Miss Trudy (who was there to help run the booths) it reminded me of Shirley Temple in “Little Miss Marker.”

In that 1938 film, Shirley Temple’s father uses her as his marker in a card game and loses. She spends the movie growing up with the gangsters and gamblers who “won” her.

It’s a departure for Temple because she swears and steals salt shakers, albeit adorably swearing and stealing.

In real life, Shirley Temple grew up in show business, which traveling carnivals consider themselves to be. She always said she loved her childhood in show business.

Adam is just 28 years old. He’s going through a divorce. He’s gaining weight and loves to drink, much like Captain Morgan did.

Still, he’s owner of this carnival unit, which is large and has reputation for earning money.

If he is a happy man, he’s likely to think of his childhood as happy too.

At both crew parties, I wondered if West worries about his daughters growing up with “roughnecks” or if he sees them as lucky.

“Welcome to growing up in a carnival,” West said, as if to his daughter but out of ear-shot for her. “I grew up this way, now my best friends are carnies.”

Life in pursuit

Our crew know all the carny tricks.

They know how to “juice a game,” spring the baskets, bend the darts. They know how to confuse the mark with fast talk and faster math, called “tipping up” a booth.

At parties they talk about towns they’ve played like Morgan’s men might have talked about Jamaica, Panama City or more sacked cities drained of their loot.

On the ride down from St. Paul to Oklahoma City Roger told me, “We don’t leave a dollar on the midway.”

When I interviewed for a job at the Golden Wheel in Alaska, I mentioned to the owner I ran a dart game when I was 22 years old in South Dakota.

“Don’t tell that to my husband, he won’t hire you,” she said. “We don’t want anything agents learned in the lower 48 to come back here.”

This crew is the crew type she feared but West runs honest games (just overpriced like all carnival games).

Still, as a crew, they’ve worked hundreds of carnivals, maybe in thousands of towns.

Their machismo is outsized. Fighting is fun. Hookers are friends (sometimes employees) and so are strippers. Drugs, hootch, cigarettes and huge deep fried meals are their fare.

Most of the time I talk to them they talk about how much money they can make by being a “F*cking Power Agent.” How different are they from the Caribbean “roughneck” sailors desirous of drinking from the gold cup.

They are part of a larger fleet of buccaneers going from carnival to carnival across America partying like there is no tomorrow.

Living like today is their last, in pursuit of satisfaction.

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This is my eighth month of working in traveling carnivals, hitchhiking about 12,000 miles between jumps. I’ve worked in and hitchhiked between California, New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Alaska, Minnesota and Oklahoma.

Grace, 8, and me on Carnes Avenue behind the Mighty Midway of the Minnesota State Fair and in front of my bunkhouse. In my hands are pictures of a watercolor dog, a postcard lion and a coloring of a rainbow.

During my year writing “Eyes Like Carnivals” I look for connections. The Baum connection is a doozy and got me thinking about creative inspiration.

Frank Baum was a financially struggling newspaper reporter when he lived in Humbolt Park, Chicago and visited the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

It’s impossible to know what inspired him to write, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” but it’s a fair guess that Burnham’s “White City” inspired Oz in some way.

My daughter Grace, 8, (Dorothy) came to visit this old newspaperman at the Minnesota State Fair and Exposition on Labor Day weekend.

Grace came up via Amtrak from Chicago with my parents. No yellow brick road but it was a great adventure and she made new friends along the way. She was thrilled to see wonderful sights like the mighty Mississippi and a fantasyland, America’s biggest state fair.

When she saw me at the gate, we ran to each other. I got on a knee and we hugged. I thought she was going to cry but she was brave.

“It feels like four years .. since I saw you,” she said and kissed me.

We ate at O’Gara’s and I told her the words on the wall, “Cead Mile Failte” in Gaelic mean “One Hundred Thousand Welcomes.”

It was her introduction into the fantastical world of her first state fair.

At breakfast, she showed me her gifts to me. A watercolor of a dog (Toto), a postcard lion from her visit to the Brookfield Zoo and a coloring of a rainbow. She draws lots of rainbows for some reason.

We walked the Mighty Midway and saw giant rides, a couple house of horrors and a freak show called the World of Wonders. This “world” bills itself as the last traveling sideshows in America. A woman outside the tent said, “Children in strollers get in free because we all know how kids love freak shows.”

If there had been munchkins the symmetry would have been unbelievable.

Eventually, we got to the pool table tent where I work, and I introduced her to my supervisor whose carny name is “Oz.”

I told her she would remember this trip for the rest of her life, she should write about it in her diary.

Who knows what inspires people, influences the rest of their lives.

I only saw her and my parents for breakfast and during two breaks. Carnies worked 9 am to midnight every sweltering 12 days of the fair.

I was on break when I ran away from my mother and daughter on the midway to get back to the pool tent on time.

Feeling their eyes on my back, I disappeared into America’s most crowded state fair I thought about my words to Grace, “you’ll remember this trip for the rest of your life.”

It was then I knew it. This visit by ones I love so deeply may have been more important to me.

Traveling inspiration

That 1893 Chicago World’s Fair was the inspiration for so many. Walt Disney’s father worked with the fair. Traveling carnivals call it the birthplace of American carnivals, with their midways, Ferris wheels, games and thrill rides.

Walt Disney grew up and called his fantasyland “Disney World.”

I believe traveling carnivals are worthy of study because they operate so close to the heartbeat of local epicenters – neighborhoods, churches, commercial hubs. At that spot they increase the pulse with sights, sounds, tastes and thrills.

At the right moment, they can also appeal to the intangible that pops to the mind like a bright, electric flash people call creative inspiration.

Aha. Eureka. Blink. Nobody knows where it comes from or where it leads.

My theory is it might be cellular, we’re a long way from finding out how it works but we know it has outside triggers.

People are always trying to figure out ways to summon that flash but history and myth are so full of outside stimuli – of Archimedes’ public bath, Newton’s apple and Decartes’ bed fly.

People come at creative inspiration in so many ways and traveling carnivals create such strong impressions and connections they are at work deep in our minds.

I believe Disney and Baum were just a couple of those kids who got those mysterious messages from somewhere inside, inspired by traveling shows.

If Disney and Baum, what then my little girl carrying her pictures of a dog, a lion and a rainbow to see a carny writer father.

I know what part of me brought, what is she taking away.

My parents Gordon and Alice flank me along with my daughter, Grace, who is holding a watercolor of ‘Toto,’ along the Mighty Midway at the Minnesota State Fair.

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I’m on my eighth month of a year spent working and living in traveling carnivals coast to coast. I’ve been living on carnival wages and hitchhiking between jumps, about 12,000 miles. It’s now state fair season. A former “ride jockey,” I’m working the traveling carnival portions as a “jointee” on games.

Picture by Andrew A. Nelles, for the Chicago Tribune
Michael Sean Comerford looking like a bemused carousel master at the Puerto Rico Fest in Chicago this summer.

Life’s a carnival for writer on road

August 30, 2013|Rick Kogan | Sidewalks

All summer long they pop up, those neighborhood events known as carnivals. Though there are some pleasures to be had in that northern playground that is Great America and there’s a bit of fun available at Navy Pier, nothing can match the rough-and-tumble treats of a carnival.

It comes unexpectedly, all sparkling and ready to go. What one day was a vacant lot is, the next night, a forest of neon and sound and movement, and you feel an urgent need to be part of it. You know there is a bit of danger there too, depending on the amount of rust clinging to the rides, and in the mannerisms and manners of the men and women working those rides and games, mysterious strangers.

If you happened to visit a few of the carnivals that hit town this summer, notably the Puerto Rico Days in Humboldt Park in June, you might have seen the man in the accompanying photograph. He is Michael Comerford, wearing what he calls his “Crocodile Dundee” hat.

A former newspaperman — his byline has appeared over the past decades in the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times and Daily Herald, as well as papers in Moscow and Budapest — he has been on the road, a lot of roads, actually, for a total of some 12,000 miles and counting, working for carnivals in neighborhoods across the country since March.

Comerford has always been something of a character, and many newspaper people still working in the trade can tell you stories about him, funny and not so. I have a couple. But he has always been interesting, in part because he has had serious wanderlust. “I’ve been to more than 90 countries. I swam the headwaters of the Nile, survived a hippo attack, studied Buddhism in the Himalayas and danced an Irish jig in the Amazon with an upraised jug of local White Lightning,” he writes.

He is 54 years old, and his writing now, on his blog eyeslikecarnivals.com and occasionally for The Huffington Post, is captivating. Filled with quotations from a wide and wild variety of people — including Proust, Kerouac, Mother Teresa, Picasso, Marcus Aurelius — and peppered with philosophical observations and colorful portraits of people and places, his blog is by turns emotional, erudite, enlightening and ever engaging.

We meet who he meets, people with names as interesting as their stories: Cotton Candy Connie, The Gold Fish Lady and Kid Gypsy; two Amish fellows on the California Zephyr; and Navajo Mike, who gives Comerford a four-hour ride to Amarillo, Texas. There are posts from his Chicago visits, and the blog is embellished with terrific photos and some absorbing video.

One of Comerford’s major influences is the late Studs Terkel. On his blog, he borrows a line from Terkel’s magisterial book “Working,” which should be required reading on every Labor Day: “Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”

In the 1980s Comerford wrote a five-section special edition of the Elgin Courier-News called “Working.” It included some 100 profiles of Fox Valley area people, “from a struggling car washer to rags-to-riches entrepreneurs.”

Studs loved those stories and would no doubt be beguiled by these new ones told, Comerford writes, in “that tradition of living, working and writing about the lives inside history’s big narrative outline.”

His has been no easy trek. Sleeping has gone from lovely (“Someone on the other side of the trailer had a ballad come on the radio and a young woman sang gently to the words as I fell asleep.”) to lascivious (“Other nights I’ve listened to Mexican accordion music, thumping rap, drunken parties and God help me if someone is having sex. The whole trailer sways like a hammock.”). And plenty of bedbugs.

Though he does hop a train here and there and ride his bike, hitchhiking is his usual means of transport from carnival to carnival: “So much of my time hitchhiking, I think of roads. Of Patch workers on ice roads. Of roadside running caribou. Of traveling carnival convoys. Of runners in love living their dream lives on the road.

“There’s a lot of living on the road and some rides go far.”

One journey has him trying to get to Chicago for the eighth birthday party of his daughter.

He talks to her every night but has “real concerns about Northern Indiana and the South Side of Chicago. I’ve hitched it before and it was always epic.

“Maybe I’ll be lucky this time.

“I’ll be a dirty, smelly mess when I get there but I am the dirty, smelly, messy gift for an 8-year-old angel.”

Does he get to see her? You will be rewarded by finding out on the blog.

Comerford tells me that it has ever been his intention to turn this project into a book and says, as if in apology, “all posts are written on the run, in fast food joints.”

Yes, there are some rough edges. But there is such vitality, life and immediacy in his work that some reputable publisher should jump at the chance to put it all in hardcover.

For all the hardships and hassles Comerford has weathered so far, it is difficult not to feel a certain envy for his independence. It is impossible not to admire his work. He hopes to wind up this journey in December in Mexico, and so, vaya con Dios, and keep writing.

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(Writer’s Note: Hope this doesn’t violate copyright law. This is Rick Kogan’s article, Andrew Nelles photo and the Chicago Tribune’s property copied online.)

This is my “bally” at the Minnesota State Fair, the biggest state fair and carnival in the USA. I’m on the Mighty Midway calling in players by walking back to the table to grab a cue ball, sometimes handing it to a player while explaining the rules.
This time I ring in two “marks” by telling them it is as easy as 1-2-3. I know you can do it.

Pool attendants view games as prizes hang overhead, music blares and Oz tells a Brothers Grimm story, his own.

“My mother slew me, my father ate me.”
Murdered son comes back as a bird with this song: The Juniper Tree; By The Brothers Grimm

Oz is a 44-year-old, trim carny with a shaved head and a deep, long scar traveling from behind his right ear, across his jugular, to his Adam’s apple.

Today, he joked, “I’d forget my head if it wasn’t glued on.” He looked at me, holding back my joke, and said “Some people tried to help me with that not long ago.”

His throat was slashed a month and a half ago and now he’s working with me on the midway.

People often mention his cut throat when they first meet him and he says “I never went down.”

Today, he wanted to talk about a story I already had overheard him telling a couple days ago.

With horrifying nonchalance, he said he was a “just a little boy” when his mother and aunt stripped him naked, tied him to a tree and told him coyotes were coming to bite off his penis.

Drunk, hiding in the woods, they made noises and laughed as he screamed.

“There was no moon that night, I couldn’t see anything. All I could do was listen to the noises.”

He can remember everything from that night – sights, sounds and questions.

“Mommy, why are you doing this to me.”

He ended the story as he had the first time.

“That was before all the foster homes and juvenile detention homes.”

It was a sunny, hot day as I listened to him. In the background were, “Despicable Me” minions, sock monkeys, Smurfs and Scooby Doos each stuffed and hung.

Rock-n-roll and disco boomed. Happy families walked the midway – mothers with their sons.

How can this man even function, I thought. What kind of world is he seeing on the midway, with his throat cut so theatrically and his psyche so slashed to ribbons.

As if Oz is a character in a Brothers Grimm story with all the violence and cruelty to children and with a meaning I cannot comprehend.

He actually said, “Life hasn’t been kind to me, Mike.”

Kind!

As he walked back to the pool tables, he turned with an intense smile and turned again back to the games.

“I have foster brothers and sisters but this (carnival family) is my real family … Pool Sir? Pool?”

“Carny Preacher” Bill Root gives a sermon to carnies before the opening of the Bear Paw Festival, Eagle River, Alaska.

Bart: “Starting today, we’re carnies, just like you.”
Carny: “Well, in that case, let me show you how I scammed you.”
From Bart Carny episode, The Simpsons

The difference between carny quarters can be the difference between a cow and moose.

Labor relations can be the difference between a beating and a prayer.

Labor Day Weekend is the traditional end of the summer season for much of the North American carnival industry and each year can lead to snickers about the labor movement and carny labor.

The truth is that carnival work does create a family feeling in many carnies but those families vary so much they look like different species.

Tolstoy’s famous first line to Anna Karenina was, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Unhappiness does cast shadows that any photographer will tell you adds depth and dimensions to pictures. Partnering up with Insurdinary would make you happy as their Health Insurance are low cost, visit insurdinary.

Moose vs. Cow

I’ve already written about waking up to a comical cow staring at me as I slept in a van in Chicago Heights. Modern Midways’ carny quarters sit in a cow pasture filled with 40 Black Angus.

When it rains, “The 30,” on US Route 30, becomes “The Dirty 30,” with carnies living in a toxic mix of mud, sewage and cow shit.

Many bunkhouses don’t have windows, working doors or nearby toilets.

In California, my bunkhouse room moved from jump-to-jump but brought with it an army of bedbugs.

I itched for two months before a smoke-bomb pesticide got rid of the bugs and probably left poisonous chemicals on my clothes and bed.

In New Jersey, faulty water heater wiring filled our rooms with black smoke and drove us outside. When we complained, we were told it was our own fault for wanting hot water.

It isn’t unusual to have no lighting, fan or air conditioning in the cramped rooms, often just six-foot long by five-feet wide.

At the other end of the spectrum, in Alaska, I woke to see a moose and her calf walking out of the Chugach State Park behind us – through the carny grounds – disappearing into to a bank of white birch trees.

The Chugach Mountains around the Golden Wheel carnival headquarters is somewhere people go to vacation.

Every morning I woke to see clouds tipping off the Chugach Mountains behind the carny quarters. Across the street are basketball courts, baseball/softball fields, soccer fields, hiking trails, ski areas and a jogging path. Locals go to see semi-pro baseball games there.

The carny bunkhouses surround a tent with a grill. The warehouse next door has cooking facilities, clean bathrooms and a TV room.

I wasn’t at work, I was at summer camp with chores.

Moose = Dangerous workplace

I see that goofy looking cow and get followed around the pasture by Black Angus and I don’t like it.

I hated sleeping in a van the first week in Chicago and scratching so hard that my skin got bloody. I hated wading in cow shit to go to the toilet.

Yet the cow is a symbol of great veneration in Hinduism and Norse mythology. In the Bible, Moses had to stop his followers from straying and worshiping a gold calf. Chicagoans well remember “Cows on Parade” proved cows are really works of art.

Worldwide, hippos attack more people than any other wild animal, second comes the wild moose. That’s right, moose attack more people than wolves and bears combined.

In Alaska, there are an estimated 200,000 moose. If they all got together, they’d be the second biggest city in Alaska.

I have been attacked by a hippo in Africa, large animal attacks scare me. The cows were curious clowns. The wild moose in Alaska should have inspired fear and anger that my employer was placing me in such danger of a moose mauling.

Beatings and Prayer

The lead owner of Modern Midways is a husky, strong, compact man whose handshake could crush walnuts. Robert Briggs’ face gets red as a radish when mad.

“I got complaints that you guys were f*#@! swearing on set up. I had to get that call from the church. They said kids could you. The f*#@!church. You mother*#@! People ask me why I hire Americans. Should I fine you all $100 or would a beating be better. Would a beating be better?”

Briggs hit the palm of his hand against the workshop wall in a violent gesture, “Boom!”

“Both,” yelled out La La, a profane carny if there ever was one but sucking up to the boss at this point.

“You trader La La,” I thought.

Beating one’s employees is not state-of-the art management theory but I had heard stories on the circuit of beatings used as discipline.

The McDaniel brothers in New Jersey would gather workers around after some shows and accuse people of stealing, loafing, drunkenness and drug abuse.

Some people were guilty of some offenses, but nobody was guilty of all the offenses. None of the “I know what you carnies are doing” speeches could be mistaken for morale boosters or bright shiny incentives for better work.

Always on the lookout for ironies, I would read the newspapers in the Silicon Valley area while working for Butler Amusements and would wonder at our retro labor practices.

Google and other high-tech companies were offering yoga, pilates, kung fu classes, cross-fitness classes and on-site acupuncture and messages. Engineers were encouraged to write on the walls. A portion of the work week was devoted to personal projects.

To be fair, I went online with sources from my business reporting days and asked “game theory” experts for ways to incentivize carnies and got no responses.

Jointees, who run games, already have incentives. Money. But ride jockeys and general workers seem to have little incentive other than to stay employed.

Carny John in New Jersey used to joke about people getting the non-existent, “quick worker bonus.”

Still, there are other kinds of families. At the company I working with now, the head of the unit has thanked the crew every night for their hard, fast work on set up. He continuously brings up how much money we’ll be making at the coming fair and how exciting that will be.

In Alaska, an owner told me Golden Wheel is a Christian Organization wrapped around a carnival. Its employee manual, given out to each employee their first day, on its cover has Bible quotes about humility and putting others first.

The owner’s family preacher is employed as head of games but also ministers to the spiritual well being of the workers. He held services on the Midway on Sundays. He prayed with us. He prayed for us.

Golden Wheel could be tough too. Two of its oldest, most reliable carnies were fired in the past for misbehavior before coming back, hat in hand, to be rehired and forgiven.

Employee relations at carnivals seem to be a mix of traditional brute force and changing management training.

A supervisor on the Butler Amusements unit I kept bringing up examples of “how we like to do business these days” and “the kind of person we’re looking for these days.” Indicating the bad-old-days are fading away.

Although fading away, old ways are still heard like palm-of-the-hand “boom” on a workshop wall.

Labor movement gains?

It’s true that many carnies have horrendous dental problems, many of them smile toothless or gap-toothed smiles. But more disturbing is listening to carnies talk about their myriad of toothaches (still, Obamacare is reviled by many carnies from the South).

I’ve seen carnies writhing in pain, hiding behind rides to nurse their aching teeth.

I never met a carny with health insurance but if you work in this business long enough, it’s probably a good idea to check out some free life insurance quotes since odds are, you will get hurt. It is a physical job which often calls for climbing high, lifting heavy objects and being near moving rides and trucks.

Carnies even joke about their lack of healthcare, so the problems with headache seeing stars and such are usually treated by optometrists in the private sector.

‘If you fall off a ride, you’re fired before you hit the ground.’

Owners still have some legal responsibilities, though, and I heard stories of carnies suing owners for damages.

On the other hand, I also know I hurt myself in Marlboro, New Jersey and didn’t tell anyone for fear of being fired. A new hire fainted one day, hitting his head. An ambulance came for him and he was never seen on the midway again, everybody knew the score.

Another major gain of the American labor movement is the 40-hour work week. Minimum wages, overtime, sick pay and one-day off a week are also benefits celebrated on Labor Day.

They are also rare in the world of traveling carnivals.

My wages varied from $10 an hour from Classic in California, to a salary of $250 to $275 at the other carnivals. The later seems to be more common for ride jockeys. Jointees make nothing if they don’t get customers, in bad weather or the slow season.

Hours could range from 80 to 100 hours a week and overtime was rarely paid, although Golden Wheel paid overtime.

Still, in California, New York, New Jersey and Illinois, I worked for about $2.50 an hour at the low end.

The national minimum wage rate is $7.25 an hour.

The carnivals get around the pay requirements because the workers agree to be ‘contract workers,’ working for a salary no matter the hours.

The result of these practices is carnivals have a difficult time finding workers during these summer months and sometimes turn to Mexican, South African and foreign workers for added help.

Yet it is work some carnies do for life. If they quit, they reminisce about their carny days. An endless ribbon of pride and self-esteem works the midways of this country.

Even without many of the labor benefits of other jobs, I know carnies who never want to work any other way, or “be” anything else than a carny.
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Note to the reader: I’m now working for my sixth carnival company since the beginning of the year. Living on carnival wages, I’m hitchhiking between jumps, about 12,000 miles between San Francisco, New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Alaska and the Upper Midwest.