Fair Opens Today : Carny Life: Drifters on the Midway

They are travel-stained magicians who show up once a year to build dreams with their rough hands, take in some money and have a few nights on the town. Then they pack up the dreams and move on.

They are the carnies, the horse trainers, the concessionaires, the trinket sellers and the fortune-tellers. Together they help create the Los Angeles County Fair.

“You build it up and you take it down,” said Lillian Majel, who helped build the game booth she will work in during the fair. “That’s my favorite part. That’s when everybody gets together.”

The scene was one of controlled chaos earlier this week as carnival workers hurried to erect game booths, Ferris wheels, merry-go-rounds and a host of other stomach-churning rides before the fair’s opening today. Feeders, riders and trainers worked to prepare their horses to run on the fairgrounds race track each day at 12:30 p.m. Craftsmen hurried to finish art, floral, commercial and agricultural displays in the fair’s cavernous exhibit halls.

Haven for Drifters

Located on a 480-acre lot between White Street and Ganesha Boulevard in north Pomona, the fair will run through Sept. 29. It opens at 10 a.m. on weekdays, 9 a.m. on weekends, and closes at 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays.

The carnival, one of the most exotic facets of the fair, is really a small, self-contained world on the fair lot where drifters who are shunned by most of society can take refuge. It is made up of those who build and run the rides, and game masters who try to entice “marks” (customers) to spend money playing the “joints” (game booths).

“It’s a miniature town; a town overnight,” said Earl Butler, part owner of Butler Amusements Inc. The company runs 27 of the 162 rides and games that will make up the amusement midway at this year’s fair.

As the games and rides were being erected this week, Butler could often be seen driving his battery-powered cart around the premises, giving orders over a walkie-talkie to teams of carnival workers and their supervisors.

Butler hires, fires and disciplines his staff of carnival workers, which he said may number in the hundreds by the time the fair ends. Many others will not get hired, despite their desperate petitions to Butler, because there are more applicants than jobs.

“I usually try to see who’s on the ball,” Butler said. “They have to be able to stand long hours.”

Nomadic Life

The carnies usually live and work on the lot, staying in their own trailers, tents and cars or simply moving their sleeping bags from one dwelling to the next. They move between two-week dates when carnivals are in season and fend for themselves the rest of the year. Most of those in Pomona are working the California circuit this time of year.

They acknowledge that the hours are long, the pay sometimes dependent on the number of customers and the work often dusty, hot and thankless. But all seem to share a passion for life on the road and the world of colored lights and cotton candy.

“It’s a trip traveling around,” said Ferris wheel operator David Walton, 25. “It’s nice to see all different places and live like a hobo with money in your pocket.”

There are those who have been at it a few years and like it. And then there is the “green help,” the “40-milers.”

“They call them 40-milers because they make it 40 miles down the road and then they’re gone,” Walton said.

One of those who made it farther was Curly Wagner, 43. Wagner, whose son and daughter have been brought up in the carnival world, said he got into the carnival business to help support his family when he was 12. “I ran away and joined the carnival,” he said with a grin.

He’ll Guess Your Age

Wagner, whose good-humored face is dominated by searing blue eyes, said he runs a game called tic-tac-toe. He also said that for a nominal fee he can tell you a thing or two about yourself.

“I’ll guess your age within two years, your weight within three pounds, the number of years you’ve been married, how many years you wish you were--anything you want.

“Hustle is the name of the game in this business,” he said. “I been all the way to the top in this business and right back down to the bottom. People rip you off.”

Wagner explained that he once owned a stable of concession stands, but that employees he thought he could trust took so much of his merchandise that he had to give it up. Now his wife, son and daughter help him do what he has done most of his life--make “pitches” to “marks.”

But Wagner said the old ways are beginning to disappear among carnies.

“It used to be if you were hungry carnies would always feed you and take care of you,” he said. “But the people that work here now are a pretty wild bunch. Most are people you would call ‘would-be’ carnies. The would-be’s will just tell you to go your own way.”

Hard Work Earns Respect

Still, some of the younger carnies speak fondly of the sense of community Wagner says is disappearing.

Jo, 18, left her family in Tennessee to join a carnival four months ago. She now runs carnival games. “I got a better family here,” she said, asking that her real name not be used.

Hard work earns acceptance here, the carnies say, regardless of anyone’s past.

Mark, 24, got out of prison a few months ago. Like Jo, he is afraid that publication of his last name would mean the end of his job or the return of old associations he is anxious to shake.

Mark spent 20 months in prison for stabbing a man he said owed him money. After he got out, he went to play a game of pool with another man, he said. The opponent liked his game so much he was invited to a nearby carnival.

“They threw me in a joint on opening day and I liked it,” Mark said. “It’s like a thing that gets in your blood. Once you get it in you can’t get it out.”

While the fair is a sanctuary, many carnies say they are given hard treatment in the outside world. “People on the outside look down on us,” Jo said. “But we’re just here to entertain them.”

She said many carnies have a strong appetite for drink and good times when they knock off work at midnight, but are sometimes shunned by tavern owners and others when it’s their turn to be entertained.

Another insular world that comes together each year on the fairgrounds is that of the “horse people”--the trainers, who own stables full of horses, and their employees, who groom, feed and exercise the horses. Many follow the horse-racing circuit from town to town, running their animals at county fairs and race tracks and trying to win enough to keep their businesses in the black.

Pomona’s races are expected to gross about $41 million in the two weeks the fair is in town.

Some horse people, like Wallace Conley, 82, have been training horses most of their lives. His job has taken him through much of California, Arizona, Nevada and Oregon, he said. “I move around a lot,” said Conley, who broke into the business when he was 17. “Wherever there’s a race. I used to like it pretty good, but it gets old.”

It’s harder to win these days, he said. “Now there’s so many young horses coming up you can’t find a horse to bet on,” he said.

Others, like Richard Gillespie, 25, are relatively new in the racing trade. Gillespie said he has been exercising horses since he was 18.

“We get poor pay for the work we do,” Gillespie said. “It’s like being a private nurse. You take care of all their cuts and bruises, take their temperatures. You walk your rear end off, and it’s a seven-day-a-week job. There’s only one reason you do it--because you love it.”

But Gillespie said there are many reasons why people begin following the circuit in the first place. “Some people are down on their luck. Some people come to hide out.”

One of those is Sandra, who is trying to escape a life many would envy. Sandra said she was a regional manager for a Texas retail firm when she decided she had had enough of the “politics and ramifications” of life in the world of business.

Now she is a groom, and she spends a lot of time cleaning horse stalls. She sleeps in a tack room and wears jeans. Three years ago, she slept in a two-bedroom townhouse in Texas, wore dresses of an expensive cut and spent much of her time discussing business deals with clients over three-martini lunches.

“I needed a new set of values,” said Sandra, who asked that her last name be withheld. “The old values were too shallow.”

She hopped a bus to get away from her former life in 1982, tried work as a sales clerk and a bartender and hitchhiked across California before she stumbled on the racing circuit last year.

She said her new-found co-workers, despite wearing mud-caked clothes instead of well-pressed suits, are far more real to her.

“These people are much more honest, much more from the gut,” she said. “How you dress yourself, how you present yourself, if you are poised or charming have nothing to do with how you’re accepted. It’s if you’re honest, if you work hard, show up on time, are quick to learn and can keep your mouth shut.

“Anybody can get lost in a race track. It doesn’t matter what you are or where you’ve been. They don’t know my background and they’ve never asked. I’m as proud of being accepted here as I was of moving up the social ladder.”