Travels With Geeks, Freaks and Dad
In "Carnie," a recollection of his family's traveling carnival, orthopedic surgeon Les Bodnar looks back from a distance of more than 80 years upon a boyhood spent among geeks, grifters, shills and "Mongo, the Wild Man from Borneo." It's an ambivalently affectionate memoir, tinged with regret at the thought of Mr. Bodnar's father, whose personal decency was sometimes compromised by the "spurious values" of the family business. (more after the break)
In its heyday just before the Great Depression, the Calumet Amusement Co. featured eight rides, 10 shows and as many as 20 concessions as it toured the Midwest county-fair circuit. Twelve-year-old Les, the son of the owner-operator, ran the kiddie airplane ride, helped to rig bingo games and hung out with his cousin in the fun house. Mr. Bodnar also sampled church suppers in Indiana and festivals of cheese in Wisconsin—slices of Americana that gave him a sense that there was an unshady side of the street, too. He was awed by 4-H exhibits and impressed by little places where "people seemed to know each other better."
Mr. Bodnar confesses to "considerable embellishment" in telling certain tales, but then strict adherence to fact is not the carnie way. The typical carnival worker, he recalls, was fleeing something: debts, a bad marriage, maybe even an arrest warrant. But he or she also "worked as hard and reliably as was required from time to time without over doing it." Carnies were vagabonds, men and women who had somehow become untethered. Like wild geese, they disappeared in winter but come spring those not in jail or the cemetery would suddenly reappear, ready to hit the road.
Les's favorite carnies had names like Dumbie, Shine and Dago Louie. (The Calumet Amusement Co. was no place for the easily offended.) Over the course of a carnival season, these misfits became a family of sorts, albeit a family that included sword-swallowers and fire-eaters and a "fat lady" who rocked contentedly while shoving chocolate- covered cherries into her maw under the gaze of gawkers.
Writing in his 94th year, Mr. Bodnar can still hear the "buoyant" organ music of the merry-go-round, and his heart still breaks a little over the memory of Eddytha, his first love, a Catholic-boarding-school girl who helped her mother cheat the rubes at the "fishpond" game and prayed afterward for forgiveness. The petty dishonesties of carnie life gnawed at young Les. His parents were "hard-working people," with "hopes for a better life" for their children, but they were also fleecing the marks. How to reconcile this? People, as a man once sang, are strange. Mr. Bodnar's father disapproved of drinking and profanity and whoring, yet he presided over fixed games of chance, paid off the cops and exploited those unfortunate stars of the freak show. (Or did he enable them to earn a living and participate in a community?) The carnival owner's values, says his puzzled son, were "kaleidoscopic."
Even Mongo was a fraud. Come showtime he wore an animal skin, climbed the walls of his cage, growled fiercely and sprayed the blood of decapitated chickens over his naked chest. But the feral Bornean was, in fact, a failed drama student from the University of Wisconsin. As Mongo poured out his tale of woe and deception to young Mr. Bodnar one day, the boy was overcome "with revulsion" and resolved to live a more ethical life.
The Calumet Amusement Co. was finally laid low by a personal-injury lawsuit that made the carnival as luckless as a rube at the fishpond. Les Bodnar graduated from the bright lights of the midway to those of the gridiron as the physician of the University of Notre Dame's football team. If not as dizzying as a ride on the Tilt-a-Whirl, "Carnie" is pleasingly, ruminatively mellow, like eating taffy on the Ferris wheel.
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