Metro Pulse/Gamut/Tales of the Midway

Here's a brief rundown of the biggest events at the Tennessee Valley Fair, running Friday, Sept. 8 through Sunday, Sept. 17. Plus pig races!

Friday, Sept. 8
Mark Wills
Homer Hamilton Theater
7 p.m. and 9 p.m.
$5 with gate admission
American Tractor Pull Association Super Regional Pull
7 p.m.

Saturday, Sept. 9
Youngstown
Homer Hamilton Theater
7 p.m. and 9 p.m.
$5 with gate admission
American Tractor Pull Association Super Regional Pull
7 p.m.

Sunday, Sept. 10
The Drifters
Homer Hamilton Theater
7 p.m. and 9 p.m.
$5 with gate admission

Monday, Sept. 11
Jessica Andrews
Homer Hamilton Theater
7 p.m. and 9 p.m.
$5 with gate admission
Tennessee Slammers and Bangers demolition derby
7 p.m.

Tuesday, Sept. 12
Michael Combs and
Won by One
Homer Hamilton Theater
7 p.m. and 9 p.m.
$5 with gate admission
Tennessee Slammers and Bangers demolition derby
7 p.m.

Wednesday, Sept. 13
Brad Paisley
Homer Hamilton Theater
7 p.m. and 9 p.m.
$5 with gate admission
Tennessee Slammers and Bangers demolition derby
7 p.m.

Thursday, Sept. 14
Yankee Grey
Homer Hamilton Theater
7 p.m. and 9 p.m.
$5 with gate admission

Friday, Sept. 15
The Charlie Daniels Band
Homer Hamilton Theater
7 p.m. and 9 p.m.
$5 with gate admission
Spur'n S Rodeo
7:30 p.m.

Saturday, Sept. 16
Spur'n S Rodeo
7:30 p.m.

Sunday, Sept. 17
Toby Keith
Homer Hamilton Theater
7 p.m. and 9 p.m.
$5 with gate admission
Spur'n S Rodeo
5:30 p.m.

How much fun is there in the life of a carny?

by Chris Wohlwend

Tomorrow, thousands of East Tennesseeans will pour into Chilhowee Park for the opening of the Tennessee Valley Fair's 10-day run. Some will be there because of the prize porkers, others to wonder at the size of this year's largest watermelon, still others to pose modestly with ribbon-winning handicrafts. But all at some point will venture through the tunnel under Magnolia Avenue to check out the Midway, where I played and worked in my own younger days.

Swirling lights, numerous and bright enough to confuse night and day, pulsing rock 'n' roll, guaranteed to inspire Baptists to visions of eternal damnation, and a cacophony of come-ons, the Midway symbolizes the fair.

Even in this day of the Internet and satellite TV, for many the Midway is a first tactile introduction to the rest of the world, to the exotic and unusual. There are breathtakingly fast rides that provide death-defying thrills, provocative "girlie" reviews that hint at the myriad pleasures of the flesh, sideshows that induce wide-eyed wonder at the freakishness of nature, and chances to win plush prizes with only pocket change.

"For the kids, it's their first contact with a world that to them is out there on the edge," says Donald Anderson. He should know. He was, as he says, "born into the carnival" and spent more than three dozen years traveling the country, pitching games of chance, selling "lemon shakeups," operating rides, and eventually running his own full-blown carnival.

Birth of a Carny

Anderson's parents, Norman and Marguerite, owned rides and games, and they traveled from their Knoxville home every year, late spring to early fall. In his mid-20s, Donald was running his own carnival for Rod Link, whose Amusement Corporation of America had three complete touring shows.

Anderson, who now owns Steamboat SuperSandwiches at 2423 N. Central, was born in 1943 at an Army base in Kentucky, just before his dad shipped out. His mother's father, Earl Burkert, had converted his carnival concession. "He had one of those moon-picture set-ups, where he would take your picture sitting on the moon," Anderson says. "He left off the moon and was taking pictures of the soldiers as they shipped out.

"As soon as my dad came back, we were out on the road operating Bingo games. We had a travel trailer, a Spartan Manor, and I remember in Kentucky—this was in the early 1950s—for some reason it was against the law to travel with those things on Sundays, which was our travel day.

"My dad would be several miles ahead driving one of the semis and Mom would be driving the car towing the trailer with me and my little brother Joe. And we would get pulled over and escorted to state police headquarters.

"They'd let us hook up for electricity and then Joe and I would go inside the station and bother the policemen in hopes that they would get tired of us and let us go. Sometimes it worked.

"Dad taught me how to call Bingo—B-7, I-16, N-42—and I was the caller by the time I was 12 or 13. Later, when several states decided Bingo was a lottery, we had to convert it to a game of skill. So you tossed rubber balls onto a board with holes cut out until you lined them up. That was called I Got It.

"Dad kept expanding, and finally we were Anderson's Greater Shows. We would start in March fixing and painting and then in May, we'd do what are called festivals, smaller shows in towns like Corbin, Ky.

"July 4 marked the beginning of the carnival season. After that it was county fair to regional fair to state fair until early October.

"Knoxville was always the date after Labor Day. Gooding's Million Dollar Midway was the contractor and their show before was the Indiana State Fair in Indianapolis. The date following Knoxville was the Tennessee State Fair in Nashville, so Knoxville got one of the bigger Midways designed for the state fairs."

Knoxville's fair usually marked a homecoming for the Andersons. And, after he started school, an opportunity for Donald to show off for his schoolmates: "I was proficient at all the games because I had been doing them since I was big enough to walk. So I would win at everything and my friends would love it. At least until the game owners wouldn't let me play anymore.

"I was just a kid and I investigated everything. I watched the tattoo artist work. And I checked out the sideshow—the sword swallowers, the girl with no head, Emmitt the alligator man and Priscilla the monkey lady, who had hair all over her body. Everything was quasi-scientific—the guy who explained the attractions was called a 'lecturer.' By the way, Emmitt and Priscilla were married and had a child who was perfectly normal."

When Anderson got older, he and his dad helped start Knoxville's Golden Gloves boxing program, and he fought as a middleweight through high school, before becoming the tournament's ring announcer.

The boxing sometimes came in handy on the Midway. Once, Anderson returned to his car, parked outside the burlesque show, to find three locals standing on the hood trying to see over the tent wall. "I decked one of 'em and they took off," he says.

The Andersons weren't the only Knoxvillians involved in carnivals. "There was Johnny J. Denton," Anderson says, "and John Gallagan, the Andrea family, and O.E. Bradley, who worked with the Andreas."

Getting Into the Act

While Anderson was working the I Got It games, I was parking cars in my grandparents' yard just outside Chilhowee Park. And Bradley was a neighbor. Eventually, he set me up with a popcorn stand in the old zoo on top of the hill just west of the lake and home to a few monkeys, alligators, peacocks and two lions, Romeo and Juliet.

One of the lions provided a great story. On East Tennessee Day, when surrounding schools let students out for the fair, a teen-aged couple bought some popcorn, then wandered over to the lion's cage a few yards away. The boy, trying to impress his girlfriend, started tossing gravel at the napping Romeo.

Romeo, a savvy long-time zoo resident, knew how to handle such harrassers. He slowly rose, stretched, turned around with his back to his tormenter and relieved himself with a stream of 10 feet or so. His aim was true and the kid found himself soaked—and the object of laughter and scorn from his girlfriend, the monkeys and me.

At dark I would close and go down to the tunnel under Magnolia. Just outside was another of Bradley's concessions, a "duck pond" manned by the Roback brothers, Zafer, Ramsey, Sammy and Farouk, nicknamed "Frookie." There, I would help until closing time.

Frookie had perfected a spiel that was sufficiently audacious. "Come in, you win" was the standard line we all used, but Frookie tacked on "free, free, free". Then, faking a speech impediment, he would quickly add, "One for a dime, free for a quarter."

Another Frookie innovation was directed at any young couple. He would say, "Hey buddy, bring your sister over and win her a prize." Usually the response was a surly "She's not my sister, she's my girl," but we would have their attention and often we had a player.

As part of the Gooding show, Anderson would have his I Got It game on the other side of the tunnel at the Midway entrance, and would be working his own spiel: "Sit right down—you're just in time for a new game—any five in a line gets a nice prize."

Unlike us, he had a microphone, a major advantage. "There were only certain attractions that could use a microphone," he says. "You had to be considerate of nearby games. In fact, there was an arbitrator with Gooding who would go around making sure nobody was drowning out their neighbors."

Bozo Bills and 'Hey Rube!'

Some of the most popular miked attractions were the clowns who sat over a tank of water and dared participants to knock them in with a baseball thrown well enough to strike a bullseye, dumping them into the tank.

"They were called Bozo Bills," Anderson says. "And they were the original insult artists, usually picking out a particular physical feature and then riding that to heat up the thrower so he would keep paying out his dollar for three throws. If the guy had a big nose, it would be, 'Is that your nose or are you eating a banana,' or maybe they would comment about him being skinny or fat.

"Often at closing time a bunch of us would have to go escort the Bozo because one of the throwers would be waiting to settle up. We'd surround the Bozo, maybe talk to the customer, get right in his face, and change his mind."

If there was trouble on the Midway, the cry that let the other workers know that help was needed was "Hey Rube."

"That generally meant there was a fight and you tried to get right to it," Anderson says. "You'd find the ringleader and get him away from the crowd. We always had plenty of uniformed security, off-duty officers. Because of that and because of the communication, we made sure the Midway was always a very safe place."

"Hey Rube" is just one piece of a distinct carnival language. "If you wanted to talk with someone so that other people couldn't understand what you were saying," Anderson says, "you'd 'crack carny'. You'd take the first letter of a word, add iz and then put the rest of the word back on. For example: 'Lizets gizo to the cizook hizouse'—Let's go to the cook house.' (The tent where the workers ate.) Then there's one of my favorites, 'gizzoonie', someone who's goofy."

Another common term is 'bally'. The bally talker is the person working the microphone.

"I still remember one bally line from the motodrome show," says Anderson: "'It's the drome of death where they rip, ride and drive those high-powered racing motorcyles.' It has a great rhythm.

"But one of Gooding's best bally talkers was Gary, who worked the burlesque show. He got 10 percent off the top, so it was in his best interest to fill up the tent.

"He'd always start by drawing the customers' attention to a half-dollar—getting them to move in close so the tip—the carnival term for crowd—didn't block the Midway. Then he'd bring the girls out one by one with a little introduction, usually full of double entendres. After they were all on the stage they'd do a short number and go back inside, hopefully with a large part of the audience following."

Gary's spiel included detailed descriptions of each dancer's specialty, and, though the girls might change year to year, the specialty was just transferred to the new dancer. One memorable perennial was "Tondolaya, who does the famous Dance of the Kookanoognas."

The Midway also included another review, an all-African-American show that was reputed to be hotter and raunchier than the white burlesque. One of the more famous was Nate Groves' Harlem Nights, which was part of the Knoxville Midway for several years.

"They would have the Midnight Ramble," Anderson says, "which was when the music got hotter, the jokes raunchier, and the costumes skimpier. It wasn't for the Sunday-school folks."

The burlesque shows, at least in the '50s and '60s, included a lot of old vaudeville stars—Sally Rand was one. And Harlem Nights produced at least one later star.

"We were playing in Peoria, Illinois," Anderson says, "and this skinny local kid joined Nate's show. He cracked up everybody in the cook house and around the lot. It got so that all the workers were going to the cook house if they knew he was there. It was Richard Pryor."

When Anderson was 24, Link gave him a carnival to run. "It was called the World of Pleasure and I was the absolute, living-end boss. I was elected to the board of directors of the Outdoor Amusement Business Association and put on the committee that ran the conventions."

It was in that capacity that Anderson had an encounter with Colonel Tom Parker, the ex-carny and notoriously hard-nosed manager of Elvis Presley.

"For one of the Las Vegas conventions, he sent me a box of Elvis cards with instructions to set one out at each place at the big dinner. Well, some of the other acts objected, and it made sense not to favor one over another, so I sent them back.

"Then I got a call that he wanted to see me. When I walked into his room I reminded him that I had met him when I was a kid, in the office of Sheik Rosen, a Nashville show owner who was a friend of my dad's. He looked at me and said 'Yeah, you were a snotty-nosed kid then and you're a snotty-nosed kid now'."

Anderson spent about a dozen years running carnivals for the ACA, living in Knoxville during the off-season. Then he took over Boblo Island, a large amusement park outside Detroit. He also managed the concessions for the Detroit Grand Prix when it began in the early 1980s.

Then, in 1989, he came back to Knoxville and opened Steamboat, where the sandwiches are made with what he calls High Mountain Bread, his own patented recipe. He has franchised operations in Tennessee, Alabama, and Indiana.

And he always attends the fair, making the rounds of the Midway, seeing old friends. Nowadays, the Tennessee Valley Fair's Midway is contracted to Cumberland Valley Shows. And it's bigger, spilling over to the lake side of Magnolia.

"They do a wonderful job," Anderson says. "It's a beautiful show, extremely clean and safe. They're very professional and everything about the show is first-class.

"Used to be a big carnival might have 30 rides. Cumberland Valley has up to a hundred, none duplicated. A lot of the rides are from Germany, and really sophisticated. The Matterhorn, the Flying Bobsled, the Cortina. Today the Midway is less win-a-teddy-bear and more sophisticated rides and exotic foods."

And, he adds with a grin, "it's still a heck of a lot of fun."