Grandpa Letter 7

Thursday, November 19, 2015              9:52 a.m.

Provo  Utah 

My Dear Ohen;

I’m kinda bored of The Magic Thrift Store story, so I won’t be continuing it in this letter. If you want me to continue it in another letter sometime please let me know.

It was good to see you this past Wednesday. I hope you’re feeling better, and that Lance doesn’t throw up on you!

I have enclosed 2 photographs from my days with the circus. The first one shows a circus barker in front of the STRANGE THING tent. This was called a look-see joint. The yokels paid 50 cents to go inside and see “The strangest freak of nature you have ever laid eyes on, ladies and gentlemen! Is it fish or fowl, mammal or reptile? It has baffled scientists for many years. This is the only one of its kind on exhibition anywhere in the United States, so don’t miss this opportunity to see something that may never come this way again! Parents, please do not let your small children enter this tent – the creature on display is so terrifying, so mystifying, so utterly weird, that it may give them nightmares for many years to come and stunt their intellectual growth! Hurry and step this way!”

I’m sorry I don’t have a photograph of the Strange Thing itself. I can’t remember now why I didn’t take a picture of it. Maybe because it was very dark inside the tent and my camera wouldn’t work in there (back then I only used a disposable camera – I thought it was very artsy-fartsy to do so.)

Anyway. The so-called monster was in a small glass cabinet that was dimly lit with a red lightbulb. It appeared to be part stuffed alligator, part latex Halloween mask, and part mummified carp.

The psychology behind this fraud was that once you had paid your fifty cents to see it, and realized you had been suckered, you didn’t want to admit to anyone else what an idiot you had been, so you told all your friends and family that is was “fantastic” and encouraged them to go inside themselves – which they often did. They would feel the same way you did, and so tell all their friends and family the same malarkey you had told them, and eventually hundreds of people each day would go in to look at the thing. And since they only lost fifty cents, they never complained – it would have been too embarrassing!

The other photograph I have included may seem rather mundane; just a road sign. But if you look carefully you will see some small arrows at the bottom of it that read “C&M”. That stands for Culpepper & Merriweather, a circus I worked for. They were the work of the 24 Hour Man. This was a key position with mudshows – which is what small traveling circuses are called.

The 24 Hour Man traveled ahead of the show by one day, hence his moniker. His job was to make sure the next day’s circus lot was cleared of trash and mowed. And that it hadn’t flooded during a recent rain. He also made sure all the appropriate food and animal licenses were paid for and in force. (In some towns you had to buy a license to display elephants and tigers, or to sell hotdogs.)

But most importantly, it was his job to map the route from one circus lot to the next. This was back in the days before GPS was available. Our circus traveled around a hundred miles each morning from one lot to the next, never on freeways but always on country roads; the 24 Hour Man had to find the quickest, safest route between lots for us, and mark it with arrows he taped onto road signs, telephone poles, etc. He had to avoid roads that went under low bridges, because some of our tent trucks was too tall and wide. He also checked to make sure none of the roads were flooded or closed for repair. In the photograph I have included, you can see that he has put up directions indicating that we were to turn left on 18. Without those directions circus drivers would have had to figure out the route all by themselves with maps, and probably get lost on the way.

Some towns, especially in the Midwest, were just plain ornery and would send someone out to tear down the 24 Hour Man’s signs after he put them up, because, they said, it was against the law to put anything on a road sign or a telephone pole. Circus people had a description for people who did that – crab apple.

So, Ohen, make sure you never become a crab apple!

Yer Pal,