The Last Individualists

To the swarming customers headed last week for the glare of the carnival midway in Great Falls, Mont., there seemed nothing special about the husky-voiced man at the refreshment booth just inside the grandstand. "Kids, kids, kids!'' he would cry. "Big kids, little kids, bring your dimes and nickels! Get your ice cream here!" He pushed the hot dogs ("See how long they are!--30-c- to the foot, 90-c- to the yard!"), kept up a steady stream of jingles ("Local bread, pound of meat,/And all the mustard you can eat"), in every way seemed to be just one more concessionaire. But to carnival folk, Witold Krassowski, 35, is now known as "The Professor." A sociologist who teaches and studies at the University of California at Los Angeles in the winter and joins the carnival in the summer, he is a top academic expert on the strange world of the carnies.

When Krassowski first joined the carnival in the summer of 1949, he did not dream that he would ever be coming back again. A veteran of the Polish underground and an alumnus of a series of Nazi prisoner-of-war camps, he was studying at Purdue when a Danish classmate persuaded him to try his hand at running a carnival stand. The two men got a truck from a concession agency and joined the Northern Exposition Shows, "touring Minnesota, Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas. At his "foot-long"' (hot dog) stand, Krassowski not only developed into an authority on carnies, he became a carny--a title conferred only upon those who have been fully accepted by one of the most clannish communities in the U.S.

Beef or Go. Today, says Krassowski, there are more than 400 traveling shows, inhabited by men and women who are in many ways a law unto themselves. To the carny, all non-carnies are "people," whose dull lives arouse both pity and scorn. At first, Krassowski and his friend were people too. The carnies were polite enough, but they were slow to accept the newcomers as part of their world. Then, after dismantling their stand one closing night, Krassowski and his friend offered to help some "ride-boys" take down their carrousel. They worked from midnight until 4 a.m., but they had unwittingly passed an important test. "A carny who refuses 'beef' " (i.e., refuses to help), an oldtimer explained, "is no carny."

As the weeks passed, Krassowski mastered the various ways of keeping the "tips" (prospective customers) coming to his stand. But studying his fellow carnies became his real interest. He interviewed them, examined their code, eventually found that one theme dominates everything they do. "The carnival," Krassowski concluded, "is one of the few remaining strongholds of rugged individualism."

Freaks & Gaffs. Though the carny thinks it only just to fleece a sucker, he is rigidly honest with his own kind. If he needs money, he does not get a loan--he gets a "lift," and it is invariably repaid.

Except in the South, carnies know no racial discrimination. The shows that do discriminate, or tolerate "dunk-a-boy" concessions (in which a Negro boy sits on a perch that drops him into water if a customer hits a target with a ball), are considered "dirty." A "clean" show is not necessarily one that has no naked dancing girls--it is simply a show that gives its customers what it promises.

Natural freaks--the Blue Man, the Half-Man-Half-Woman, the One-Eyed Man et al.--are carnies, and treated as equals. The conditioned freaks are barely tolerated as "gaffs." Among the gaffs, the "geek"--usually an alcoholic who earns his bottle by biting the heads off live snakes and chickens--is the lowest form of carnival life. The Jungle Girl, who must crawl around a cage of snakes and make animal noises, is only a little higher. But sometimes the jungle girls can double usefully as "sticks"--employees who pretend to be tips in order to attract others.

"Hey, Rube!" Unmarried female carnies are chaperoned wherever they go. The single male may indulge himself as he pleases, but once he dates a carny girl, he must go steady with her for the rest of the season. The whole carnival celebrates a marriage or a birth. There are showers for the brides, showers for babies, collections for both. In all his affairs--his religion, home life, the way he brings up his children--the carny is left strictly alone. But if ever he is in physical danger or trouble, all he needs do is shout "Hey, Rube!" and every carny within earshot will come to his aid.

What sort of people become carnies? Usually, says Krassowski, carnies are the children or the relatives of carnies. Others achieve the status by accident. In one town a local carpenter challenged a sideshow wrestler to a bout; when he won, he decided to join the carnival for good. In another town a local auto mechanic was called in to help fix a Ferris wheel, and just never left. A college zoologist worked at a carnival one summer, resigned his job at the college, now runs a snake show. A California social worker is now reading palms in a "mitt camp."

The carny world, says Sociologist Krassowski, is a tempting one: "You work like a wild donkey, you don't sleep and you lose weight. You knock the tents down and put them up and knock them down again. But I'm a carny now. In my stand, I watch the customers come in and I find myself thinking: "Poor people, poor people. They cannot do as they please."

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