Authors: Lynn Waddell
Tags: #History, #Social Science, #United States, #State & Local, #South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), #Cultural, #Anthropology
Poobah, lights the balls on the ends of two skinny sticks. They flame
up like a torch.
“Watch the little man eat the fire,” Ward says as the dwarf puts a
flame into the back of his mouth. “There it goes down the hatch! And
the vanilla is good. What a way to make lunch.”
Ward then turns to a handsome young man in a fringed Western
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shirt and white cowboy hat holding two 27-inch steel swords. “Now
watch Mr. Tommy Breen. He’s all the way from Fort Worth, Texas. Mr.
Breen will swallow the sword,” Ward narrates as Tommy, who’s actually
from New Jersey, leans his head back and the blades disappear into
his mouth. “Open the lips, past the gums and look out stomach, here
it comes.” The cowboy bends forward, removes the swords, and then
holds them up for the clapping crowd.
“What a way to make a living,” Ward says.
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Ward should know. By his accounts he’s been in the business since
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he was fifteen and has managed a sideshow since he was seventeen. The
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Gibsonton showman has pretty much done it all. He’s been a magician,
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clown, fire eater, and ventriloquist. He’s worked with marionettes,
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played cross saw and whiskey bottles, and posed for knife throwers.
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His most famous role is selling the traditional American sideshow on
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and off the bally stage.
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Through the decades, Ward and his partner, Chris Christ, have at
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times had more than a dozen sideshows performing simultaneously
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with circuses and carnivals all over North America. They’ve played
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Ward Hall, king of the American sideshow. Photo by Lori Ballard.
Carnegie Hall, the Las Vegas Strip, and the Smithsonian Museum in
Washington, D.C. Their shows and freak performers have appeared in
proof
more Hollywood movies and documentaries than you can count on two
hands.
No historical account of the American sideshow is complete without
Ward Hall. He is a living legend, “living” being a key word. He is the
oldest showman still working in America and one of few old-time per-
formers still breathing in Gibsonton, a place once labeled Showtown
U.S.A. for its concentration of sideshow performer residents. The Hu-
man Blockhead, Lizard Man, Lobster Boy, Monkey Girl, and the other
seventy-five to eighty human oddities who wintered in the backwater
community are either dead or in nursing homes. You’ll find many bur-
ied in the Showman’s Rest cemetery in Tampa.
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Showtown’s reputation lives on, in large part due to Ward Hall. I
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later catch Ward and Chris’s full show in all its nostalgic glory at the
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Florida State Fair in Tampa. Tommy Breen, no longer the Texas cow-
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poke, has his dark hair slicked back and is wearing a black tuxedo jacket.
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He’s working the bally and drawing adults and children away from the
dizzying Zoom of Dome and Dream Catcher rides.
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“Now the strangest of the all, ladies and gentlemen, is Zamora,”
Tommy says, pointing his sword toward the painted banner of Zamora
the Gorilla Girl. “When she is on stage, you will see her placed in a hyp-
notic trance. Please watch her close because her eyes will start to sink
slowly back into her head. Watch her teeth. They will grow big fangs.
She will grow thick black fur all over her body. She will change from a
beautiful woman to a giant screaming, hairy gorilla.”
A man in the crowd holding a stuffed bunny carnival prize shakes
his head. “I know it sounds crazy. It is crazy,” Tommy responds. “But
I’ve seen grown men pass out when they watch it. Sir, please don’t be
afraid, because she will be locked in a steel cage. That gorilla will jump
at you. It might make you scream and it may make you laugh. But you
will remember her for the rest of your life.”
Poobah sits on the side of the stage in a miniature cushiony chair
looking rather catatonic. His Facebook profile says: “All you need in life
is fire, sleep, and a comfy chair,” and right now the latter seems more
appropriate. Of course, Poobah, who’s eighty, has been eating fire doz-
ens of times a day his entire adult life, so you have to give him some
slack on his lack of enthusiasm. His real name is Pete Terhurne, and he
was a Munchkin in the original
Wizard
of
Oz
.
My friend Lori introduces me to Little Pete. A hearing aid consumes
his ear, and he doesn’t comprehend when I ask him where he’s from.
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I repeat, and his short response is so garbled I can’t understand him.
Eating fire for a living has its drawbacks.
The five-dollar entry fee painted on the ticket booth has been marked
down to three dollars to create the illusion of a bargain. Parents unfold
the cash and scurry to catch up with their kids who are bouncing into
the striped tent. Inside, the walls are lined with some of the promised
freaks, or rather replicas of them. The giant is just a dusty statue. Glass
cabinets off to the side hold stuffed two-headed animals, a question-
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able mummy, and replicas of long-dead sideshow freaks.
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The show is in process, as always, looping continuously from open-
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ing until close.
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On the low stage a red-haired man with a ponytail is dressed as a
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Scottish Highlander, albeit a little rough around the edges. He’s wear-
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ing a tartan kilt and scarf, once-white socks, and black loafers. John
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“Red” Stuart of Gibsonton is sixty, missing most of his teeth, and has
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ruddy skin as thick as leather.
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I later learn that Red is legendary as the world’s oldest perform-
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ing sword swallower, according to Sword Swallowers Association
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International. He holds the Guinness World Record for swallowing
twenty-five 18-inch swords at once as part of a mass group-swallow.
Yes, there are such things in the seams of entertainment.
Red tilts his head back and swallows long-handled, solid-steel
swords one at a time. The audience claps but doesn’t seem to fully ap-
preciate that this man is actually sticking sharp blades down his throat,
through his pharynx, into his esophagus, straightening its curves and
coming within millimeters of his heart and lungs, and possibly into
the top of his stomach. Seriously, even professionals have died doing
this. And here Red is, swallowing the blades of death every twenty-five
minutes, ten to twelve hours a day for eight to ten months a year in a
three-dollar sideshow. He’s been doing this routine—sometimes sub-
stituting blades with fire pokers and car axles—for the past forty-five
years. He later e-mails me that sword swallowing “is just an exercise to
keep me centered in thought.” He adds that he’s also an electrician.
Out comes a young woman in black with frizzy blond hair. Nata-
lie, an art student from Brockton, Massachusetts, threads a steel hook
through her tongue and uses it to lift a fire extinguisher. The kids and
adults, including yours truly, squirm with empathetic pain. No how
matter how wigged we are, we can’t stop watching. Such is the timeless
allure of sideshows.proof
The show moves quickly with a string of acts about as old as the side-
show itself—the woman in a cabinet-of-blades magic trick and man
who lies on a bed of pointed nails.
Short on true human oddities with physical deformities, Ward and
Chris’s show creates its own—well, sort of. Showmen call these acts “il-
lusions,” but that’s actually just a euphemism for fake. Illusions don’t
quite live up to the images painted in the bally, which sometimes re-
sults in cries for refunds, but technically they fulfill the promise. Ta-
rantula Girl, billed as a woman with a beautiful face and the body of a
tarantula spider, turns out to be one of the pretty cast members whose
body is hidden behind a black wall and her head is poked through to
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the front. The audience merely sees her face as the center of a faux gi-
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ant spider with 3-foot fuzzy legs that look like oversized pipe cleaners.
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Cobra Girl? Same deal except with a fake snake body. They’re so absurd
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they work.
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At last comes the top-billed Zamora the Gorilla Girl, the freak who’s
made grown men faint.
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Red returns to the stage to play the role of emcee and stand-in Brazil-
ian mad scientist. Mind you, he’s still dressed as a Scottish Highlander.
He pulls back a curtain. Sunshine from Long Beach, California,
stands inside a cage wearing a can-can-style dress and rainbow-striped
stockings. Red, who’s a much better swallower than pitch man, tells
how a mad scientist experimented on Zamora with shape-shifting
trances. Then the man in a kilt goes into wacky scientist mode, reciting
hypnotic incantations. Sunshine and the cage disappear behind manu-
factured fog. All at once, “Grrrrr! Grrr!” someone in a gorilla suit with
fake fangs, a King Kong furry if you will, bursts out of the cage acting
all crazy, beast-of-the-jungle-like for no longer than it takes the cur-
tain to fall. A couple of grade-schoolers flinch, then giggle. No doubt
they’ve seen scarier things at Wal-Mart, though they aren’t leaving.
Like Tommy promised out front, the images stick with you.
Freaky Rebirth
Sideshows were once the most common outdoor entertainment in
America. They traveled with circuses, carnivals, fairs, and even some-
times set up shop inside abandoned empty storefronts. For a dime you
could see a man born with no legs or watch a magician make a coin
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disappear. In the mid-twentieth century, an estimated one hundred
sideshows still blew in and out of most every town in the nation. A
vast number of those were based in Gibsonton, or Gibtown, as the lo-
cals call it.
Then came television and thrilling carnival rides. Circuses shrunk
and stopped carrying sideshows. Disability rights groups, which side-
show people derisively call “do-gooders,” started complaining that
deformed performers were exploited. Advanced medical technology
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decreased birth defects and gave people with deformities a chance to
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correct them. The fat man gets a gastric bypass, the bearded lady uses
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electrolysis, Siamese twins are separated.
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By the mid-1990s, only a Coney Island show could lay claim as a
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true, traditional 10-in-1 sideshow, meaning ten live acts for one price.
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Ward and Chris’s World of Wonders show had dwindled down to basi-
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cally a museum with foam replicas of its one-time freaks and stuffed
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and jarred deformed animals. Their only live acts were a fat man and
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Poobah. Ward has announced his final show many times, and each
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farewell generated mass publicity. The British Broadcasting Corpora-
tion even did a documentary on what was to be his last show in 1994.
Nearly every season following his publicized retirements, Ward did
what he’s done most of his life. He dusted off his sequined jacket,
loaded up the semi in Gibsonton, hooked up the travel trailer behind
the pickup, and hit the road for another county fair.
Maybe it was the publicity from his repeated retirements, his media
title as “King of the American Sideshow,” his and Chris’s online posts
seeking new performers, or all combined, but around 2006 the World
of Wonders began to rise from the dust. Young college graduates, ac-
tors, and performance artists from around the country, like the ones I
just saw at the Florida State Fair, started contacting Ward and Chris for
a job. They wanted to be in a traditional traveling carnival sideshow, the
family-freak-out-the-kids kind, not the nightclub-rock-concert-shock
acts like the Jim Rose Circus. Most of all they wanted to learn from the
legendary Ward Hall.
“When he placed a help-wanted ad on the Internet, I jumped at the