Under the Electric Sky (3 page)

The amount of money it brought in was a strong enough motive for a number of shady businessmen across the United States to enter the travelling carnival business, taking the vulgar display on the road. Even if it was immoral or obscene, people were itching to experience it and they would even fork over a lot of money for the temporary diversion.

By the 1930s, the travelling carnival enterprise across North America was corrupt, run mostly by grifters and other men of dubious character and criminal backgrounds. The games were rigged, the ticket sellers skilled in the deceitful art of short-changing, and there were enough fast-talking fanatics to rope people into things they had no intention of doing before they set foot on the midway. But if
The Halifax Herald
editorial board was upset about the criminal presence on the midway in 1928, they would have to tolerate it if only because every show was criminal to some degree in those days. Many fair and exhibition boards across the continent regarded the travelling carnival as lacking sorely in respectability, but necessary in getting people out to their fairs. There is no conclusive evidence that Williams' shows were crooked, but most carnival owners in those days hired independent contractors to provide concessions, so it stands to reason that transient and possibly disreputable workers would have hired on with him from out of the United States to fill some of the dates he had around the region playing local fairs.

Lynch was determined to change the nature of the business that was quickly becoming his life. The reputation of the travelling carnival had already been established, however, and there was a general uneasiness in many communities throughout the region that carnivals were in town only for cash grabs and then out with whatever they were able to hustle off the locals, whether by legitimate means or not. A fairly good cross-section of Maritimers had been duped in the past and they would only tolerate that kind of abuse once.

Lynch understood the public's concern and made every effort to change the way his show was perceived. He hired mostly Maritimers to run his games and partnered with different service groups in every community to give something back. He made large donations to charities in every town his show played and always reserved time for underprivileged kids to come to his show free of charge. He also owned everything on the show and didn't need to contract any of the rides or concessions out to independent owners. Such independence was an anomaly back then, but it gave Lynch the control he needed to run the business his way. People started to notice the difference in the few short years he had possessed the fair and exhibition contracts across Nova Scotia.

A letter to the editor of
The Glace Bay Gazette
from an August 1934 issue entitled “A Public Spirited Showman” recounts one local fireman's take on Lynch and his operation.

Sir, -- Bill Lynch of the Bill Lynch Shows has donated to the Maritime Firemen's Association a valuable silver cup, to be won by the best department on parade at tournaments. This gives us an opportunity to tell the public something about this man Lynch.

As Bill Lynch he is known in every city and town in the Maritimes. We have had Bill Lynch playing for us for a number of years, and in Lynch we found a man of sterling qualities, as true as the sun and as straight as a die. Mr. Lynch's word is as good as his bond and I can assure the Lynch knockers that Bill Lynch is as true as steel and not a mean man in his make-up.

We are not asking the public to take our word for it, but I refer them to all the fire departments and war veterans that he has played for in the Maritimes, and [they] will find our opinion of Bill Lynch is o.k. As to his shows, Bill Lynch Shows are clean, nothing dirty about them, and everything is run on the square; if they were not I can assure the public the Glace Bay Fire Department would have nothing to do with them. You play his concession, you take the same chance people do who play the stock exchange. As to Bill Lynch taking a lot of money out of town, between Bill Lynch and his 59 helpers they spend a lot of money in town, and with what he gives the fire department I do not think Lynch takes out much more money than he leaves behind.

We will stake our reputation and I can tell you, sir, we have a reputation we are proud of, that Lynch leaves more in Glace Bay than any of the other travelling shows 100 per cent of which goes to the U.S.A, and 100 per cent of the Lynch money stays in the province of Nova Scotia, and at least 50 per cent of it stays in Glace Bay, when he is staying here.

Bill Lynch is a gentleman from the toes up, a true and loyal friend and one thing can be said of Lynch is that he never goes back on a friend.

Yours truly,

A GLACE BAY FIREMAN

The City of Lights was moving. Lynch was just getting started.

Those Crazy Rocking Bunks; New Minas, 2008

B
ill Durham angles the Dodge Ram down the off-ramp, through the fog and onto Highway 101 heading northwest from the Halifax Exhibition Grounds to New Minas with the Hampton Umbrella Ride swaying slightly in the rear-view mirror. It's late afternoon and Bill is on the first of a few runs to move the carnival rides to their next stop in the Annapolis Valley. It will be a long night, he understands, and pulls a cigarette out of the pack with oil-stained hands.

It had rained heavily earlier in the day and Bill's “tear-down” clothes are still a little damp. Tear-down clothes are old, typically worn-out sweats carnies wear to disassemble the rides, although in some cases, there are no discernible differences between these threads and their everyday clothes. But Bill's leather jacket is hung up somewhere grease won't find it. He takes a puff of the smoke and before exhaling asks the question that's been percolating in his mind.

“Where are you sleeping, anyway?”

“They told me the bunkhouse,” I answer, still not exactly sure what the bunkhouse was or what form it would take.

“Ha,” he chuckles in a smooth, clear tone, turning his head in my direction with a look in his eyes that suggests he's about to fill me in on a matter I should be aware of without explicitly stating it. “Some nights those bunks get to rockin'.”

“What's that mean? I shouldn't go a knockin'?”

Bill just shrugs it off and looks out the window. “You'll see,” he says.

In the back seat of the cab my backpack rests, loosely filled with three clean shirts, another pair of pants, and a few toiletries, even though I don't expect a hot shower for the week I'm bunking with the carnival. My only other possessions for this expedition are a borrowed sleeping bag and pillow which I was told I'd need for these rocking bunks.

At thirty-eight, Bill still looks young with sharp blue eyes and a well-sculpted face. He has a serious, thoughtful demeanour and isn't prone to fits of uncontrolled laughter. But the lines betray the solemn impression of the guy who has been on the carnival so long it's now just work. His face is shaded for laughter and he succumbs from time to time to a good chuckle, accompanied by a loud voice for a follow-up laugh.

They used to call him Bull, after the movie character, and when he was younger someone stuck him with the nickname Wild Bill. Now everyone calls him Billy. But that is a childish name and Bill introduced himself with the more mature, slightly abbreviated moniker. Nicknames have a way of sticking on the carnival, however, and if he was no longer Wild Bill, then Billy would have to be the handle around the lot.

The truck hums along the highway, the kiddie ride in tow, as Bill explains how the carnival “got into his blood.” It's a story that's been told before, by other carnies and carnival-goers with slight variations, but it's also a story that could only have happened in the Maritimes. It goes something like this:

Eleven-year-old Billy Durham was given a few bucks by his mother to attend the Bill Lynch Shows when it pulled in to his hometown of New Waterford, but the money disappeared somewhere between home and the fairgrounds. Whether it was lost or stolen or never existed in the first place is hard to ascertain, but watching the carnival unfold around him when he couldn't participate in it was an unjustified burden for a young man who had whittled the days away for this time of year. He found a set of stairs on the Tilt-A-Whirl to plunk himself down and outwardly express his crippling loss.

“And this guy comes up to me and says, ‘What are ya crying for? Big boys don't cry',” Bill recalls. “I told him I lost my money and I can't go on the rides. Anyways, he came back a little while later and he give me a bracelet for the rides. And I said, who is that guy, ya know, and it was Soggy.

“When any kind of fair came in town after that, when I was still a kid, I'd just hang around the fair and follow them around like a little, lost puppy dog. If they needed cigarettes, I'd run to the store, ya know? He was God then, ya know what I mean? I just wanted to stay on the show.”

Outside the truck, the fog starts to lift and the evening sun breaks through as we approach Mount Uniacke. This was the old winter storage home for the Bill Lynch Shows and today, buried under the wet dirt in an old field out there somewhere, numerous rides that had stopped impressing the crowds rest peacefully.

The ride Bill and I are towing is owned by an outfit called Maritime Midways, which is just a fraction of what the old Bill Lynch Shows was even fifteen years ago. The old show was split up a few years back and a man named Jack Adams bought this portion of it – around 25 rides – and the old Lynch route that weaves through all corners of the Maritimes in the run of a season.

Now – twenty-some years later – Bill is running with the show he grew up admiring. There wasn't much going on in New Waterford for a teenager and one dark night when the carnival rolled out of town, Bill left with them for good.

He currently holds employment as a jointee – one who operates a game, called a “joint,” on the carnival. Bill's joint is the old twenty-five-cent-a-try Roller-Bowler where participants pay a quarter for a shot at rolling a bowling ball over a bend in a track and getting it to lie in a little dip on the other side for fabulous prizes. Running a joint on the carnival these days is a tough way to make a living. Jointees work on commission, which means after the last two weeks of rain this May, a lot of them were lucky to get the $35 that appeared next to their name on the ledger that week. Bill's been around long enough to know it's a good idea to have a tiny nest egg of cash tucked away to help ease the burden of being broke during those inevitable lean weeks early on in the season. On hot summer nights, he's pulled in $500 a shift and his years on the road have taught him the importance of being frugal.

They've also taken a toll on his personal life, he explains. He has four children he rarely sees, especially in the summer when he's criss-crossing the Maritimes, playing towns big and small from May to October. His fifteen-year-old daughter came out with the carnival the year before, but Bill lost his temper with a young man who took an interest in her. He sent her home shortly thereafter.

“I don't want my teenage daughter getting pregnant,” he says, “but you can't stop kids.”

He understands this well, considering he's played the role of the young man courting young women on the carnival. He knows the nature of the interaction in this type of environment, recanting a story from his own youth.

“I was over at the Scrambler and we were playing a mall in Sydney and at least three girls – ‘friends' – end up there at the same time and then it was just keeping one away from the other, right? The way it worked was, there was a game here and a line of games here and a line of games here and a line of games here, like a big ‘x' around the square. So there was one girl coming this way, there was one girl coming this way and one girl coming down, ya know what I mean? They were all coming at the same time and there was no way I could talk to one without the other one seeing. So I was fifteen and what does a normal fifteen-year-old do? I jumped over the fence and ran out the back... just got away from all of them.”

He laughs and adds, “There are some stories I couldn't even put my name to. We had different girls at every stop.”

The sun is shining hard in New Minas when we arrive, prompting Bill to take the optimistic approach that the fog and rain will stay back at the Exhibition Grounds in Halifax. There is no need to explain how important agreeable weather is to carnies and things were looking promising as we pulled into the Valley. The rain had followed them everywhere to this point: from Shediac in late April (the first time they've started so early), on to Dartmouth, and to Halifax. Nearly four weeks of rain in a Maritime spring can do a number on anyone's psyche, but when you're out money because of it, you start to get edgy and there was a sense amongst a few of them earlier in the week that things were getting rough and tensions were running high. Nothing was verbalized in Halifax the week at the Exhibition Grounds, but some of the workers were running large debts around the lot in expectation of some glory days ahead.

We turn down Commercial Street in New Minas past the County Fair Mall where the show used to play before a Boston Pizza moved into the parking lot. There was no room for the carnival anymore, management told them last year, so Jack Adams made a few calls and found a vacant dirt lot behind a small strip plaza next door to the mall. The site is concealed from the main drag of “The Shopping Mecca of the Annapolis Valley” – as New Minas bills itself – but with a little advertising and careful configuration of the midway, it could work and the good people of the Valley might catch a glimpse of those flashing lights reflecting off trees in the atmosphere on their way to Canadian Tire. That was the hope, in any case.

Carnivals have a difficult time finding places to locate these days outside of exhibitions. The lucrative dates are the fairs and exhibitions throughout the region, but there are gaps between fairs when Maritime Midways sets up “still dates” that could be in any parking lot or dirt field they can find. Malls shy away from them because of the bad reputation, carefully moulded out of years of dirt and vulgarity in towns across the region. Every mall manager with the slightest concept of public relations fears their bathrooms will be soiled beyond repair and none want to deal with complaints from customers after they encounter a carny washing his privates with wet toilet paper and vinegar in the men's room. That kind of scene can make anyone uncomfortable and it's best for both sides if these events are contained to some dark corner behind the rides, between the shadows of long trailers, away from Mom and Dad and the kids. The carnival owners have taken steps to clean up the situation by installing shower bunks and providing their own porta-potties, but the smell still lingers and the damage to the carnival business has already been done.

Nevertheless, the carnival was pulling into town and a few local kids on bikes were scouting out the new venue the way kids in the Maritimes have for decades, as we pull up. Bill ignores them and cringes at the sight of the lot.

“This place is too far back. Nobody's gonna see us here,” he says with a touch of agitation in his voice, his head turning in every direction to fully absorb the isolation. The weather for carnies is a test of faith all its own, but a poor location can kill profits with as much force and indignity as a mean nor'easter that blows in on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

The only other vehicles in the lot at this point are two trucks with trailers already positioned in the back, against a shallow line of newly bloomed trees. The trees provided a natural buffer zone between the carnival bunkhouses and the residences through the woods, atop the hill that overlooks the site.

Bill backs the Hampton ride off to the centre-right of the new lot and unhitches it. In front of the truck two carnival workers in t-shirts and jeans are wandering around the open dirt by themselves, spray-painting brown gravel rocks orange with all the mad artistic zeal of deranged buskers. The lead man is kicking his left leg out in front of him and marching a few large steps before instructing his partner to spray the spot his heel lands. It's the same kind of rustic ingenuity pirates once applied to bury their treasure, but out here on this sunny spot of dirt and grass in the Valley, behind a strip office plaza occupied by an optometrist and dentist, next to a country mall, the whole scene looks like some sort of perplexing carny squatting ritual.

Which it is, in a way. As I get out of the truck, Verney Groleau, the man with the orange heel, explains that he's marking where the rides and games will be positioned. He's following a vision in his head of how it should look and trying to get it down right. A lot of strategic planning goes into positioning everything on the carnival – nothing is left to chance. The ideal layout has the rides in the back of the lot and the game trailers set up in such a way that people are forced to pass them on their way to the machines. Then the jointees can work their magic and reel people in with their best grind calls.

“You're really supposed to be measurin' this stuff right, but I've been doin' this so long, I know where everything should go,” he says in a superbly rusted-out carny voice. Verney's scraping tone is a strong argument for not answering the phone in the middle of the night. It's the last voice you'd want to hear in the dark as you rest safely in bed. It could give anyone a jolt under those circumstances and sleeping afterwards would be prevented by the terrifying notion that some man who sounds like he eats corroded nails has your number.

His physique is equally as menacing. Verney's not particularly tall, but he has a strong ultimate fighter build and a vicious gait. He's balding on top, with the leftover hair shaved close to his scalp and a ball cap covering the rest. His thick eyebrows are still dark, concealing steely little pale eyes. There's the sense that at any moment he'll lose it and take a swipe at someone, but his temperament is more composed than violent, although there are dangerous undertones in his movements.

“Yeah, we're gonna set this up like one of those ol' girly shows ,” he growls out. “Ya know, like the old shows where kids stick their heads in through the curtain to take a peek.”

Bill starts up the truck and doubles back to Halifax to pick up another ride while I admire Verney's orange artistic masterpiece.

Verney's an old-time carny, a pro, with a firm grasp of the lingo and the rules of the game. He's scammed “mooches” – his term for straight people with jobs – across the continent from Canada to Puerto Rico and parts in between. Verney's been hustling since he was twelve and at forty-eight is content with the position of concessions manager with Maritime Midways, with a vested interest in three of the joints. He gave the carnival up a few years back and took a “mooch job” at a dispatching service to settle down with his girlfriend Val, but when Jack Adams bought the Bill Lynch Shows, he came back out with Val, who works one of the joints herself. He never felt right in the day-to-day job anyway and he knew Adams from the Ontario circuit. Now he owns a few of the joints himself and enjoys the more laid-back approach to carnival operation in the Maritimes.