Circus Next Door : Sideshow Barker’s Fillmore Ranch Houses Some Unusual Tenants

If it weren’t for the occasional sight of the Bearded Lady and the Ugliest Man in the World, motorists passing by the small ranch in Fillmore might never look twice.

The Bearded Lady lives here with her husband and son in a dusty, white trailer and the Ugliest Man in the World lives nearby with a hairless dog named Tippy.

Just across the yard is Lupe, a five-legged cow usually seen munching away on a shock of hay next to an earless goat.

And there is more--much, much more.

Welcome to Bobby Reynolds’ five-acre ranch on Goodenough Road, where the strange is everyday and every day is very strange.

Even if it weren’t for the animals, something about the diamond-studded ring on his finger and the gold chain he wears underneath the polka-dot cravat tells visitors Reynolds is not your everyday gentleman rancher.

He is, in fact, one of the last pitchmen who still make a living off carnival sideshows and circuses--which means that everything he says isn’t necessarily gospel truth.

“I amuse people. I give them a bearded lady, a sword swallower, a midget,” Reynolds said. “It’s fascinating. Macabre. Bizarre. It’s something unusual, something to complain about if it’s not real, something to wonder about if it is.”

Sideshow men like Reynolds are a dying breed, said Susan Travers, membership director for the Western Fairs Assn. in Sacramento.

“I think Bobby’s one of kind,” Travers said. “You know that saying? ‘They don’t make them like they used to . . . .’ These shows are of another era.”

Reynolds is the stuff of carnival legend. Born 55 years ago in Jersey City, N.J., Reynolds was a street-wise kid who at age 9 was already hawking Chinese waterlily seeds in New York to support his mother and family.

At 13, he was the “World’s Youngest Magician,” working shows on Coney Island and up and down the Eastern Seaboard until, as he recounts his life, he landed a magician’s job with a traveling big top show.

Now the silver-haired Reynolds dresses in a snow-white leisure suit, a shade he says earned him the nickname “Senor White Tornado” when he traveled in Mexico. He claims to have been a millionaire three times, losing it in bad business deals and divorce settlements.

One of Reynolds’ next-door neighbors in Fillmore said life is more interesting with a year-round circus across the fence.

“When I say I’ve got someone that runs a circus living next to me, that’s a conversation piece right there,” said Martin Schreffler, 55. “The bearded lady will come up in conversation. I say, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve got one next door.’ ”

Despite the fame he has earned among his neighbors on Goodenough Road, Reynolds enjoys a reclusive life. He spends most of his time traveling across the country, although he is currently on a self-imposed, one-year leave from circus life.

Locals know him as the man who had nine wives and keeps a colony of sideshow freaks on the ranch. Asked about his nine wives, Reynolds first declined to comment, then broke into a Dean Martin song.

“Everybody loves somebody sometime. . . . “

His current wife, Birdie, professes no knowledge about her predecessors. She said she had known her husband for 35 years before they married on Valentine’s Day this year. Birdie helps manage Reynolds’ other business, a door-to-door ballpoint pen sales operation.

“He keeps me in stitches,” she said.

When his last spouse left him, the separation was less than congenial, one of Reynolds’ friends said.

“The last one . . . sold his two-headed baby,” said Eric Marsh, a Santa Paula real estate manager who managed Reynolds’ properties for 10 years.

According to Marsh, there is another side to Reynolds that extends past a simple fascination with the bizarre. Reynolds is known locally as something of a soft touch, inclined to allow tenants on his property to go for months without paying him and for letting down-and-out acquaintances stay at his farm rent-free.

“He’s strange,” Marsh said. “But under that is a real big heart.”

Reynolds said he does not like being characterized as a sideshow man with a heart of gold. But he admits he has helped out at least 30 carnival associates addicted to alcohol or drugs.

A recovering alcoholic himself, Reynolds takes a harsh view of the circus world today. He likes to complain that the world has changed a great deal since he first started in the business.

“I really can’t hang around carnivals anymore. There’s so much drugs,” he said.

In its heyday, however, circus life was like a family, Reynolds said.

People would travel across the country with the big top show, hitting major cities through the summer. Reynolds said it was in the circus that he was first attracted to the glamour and the illusion of being a magician.

“The sideshow is a true American art form. It didn’t start in Europe with the Elephant Man,” he said.

Though on sabbatical, Reynolds still presides over the colony of unusual people who parade in and out of his ranch during the off-season. Many of them call him “Pop” even though they are not related to him.

One of the year-round residents of the ranch is the Bearded Lady, Michele Welch, 34, whom Reynolds met in San Bernardino.

Reynolds said Welch was a shy housewife when she started out in his company of sideshow curiosities. But Welch said she is now immune to some of the comments she gets about her black, bushy facial hair.

Everyone asks her if she’s a woman, but “that isn’t the rudest thing they do,” she said, covering her bosom.

Bearded because of a hormonal imbalance, Welch said she is married and has an 8-year-old son who attends school in Fillmore, where her son’s classmates know she has a beard.

“It’s a unique job; not everybody can do it,” Welch said.

Jim Webb, 55, dubbed the Ugliest Man on Earth, is a man who enjoys his job.

Since he lost all his teeth as a teen-ager, he said, the only job he was qualified for was being a “gurner,” which is someone who twists his face into unimaginable contortions.

When the public laughs at him, Webb laughs with them, he said. “I get paid for it.”

On the Reynolds ranch live about 100 animals, many of them as strange as their owner. In a pen near his home lives an emu, an Australian bird that looks similar to an ostrich and emits a steady, drumbeat-like sound.

Chickens, some of them an odd shade, run rampant across the front yard.

Not everybody thinks Reynolds’ animals are interesting. He has gotten into trouble with the Department of Fish and Game and the Humane Society for some of the creatures he keeps.

After many years of displaying his “Strange Animal” exhibit, he has stopped bringing his show to the Los Angeles and Ventura County fairgrounds after one Ventura police officer called his show “bunko” and impounded his “100-pound rat,” actually a capybara from South America, because Reynolds did not have a permit to own the exotic animal.

Since his decision to stay off the carnival circuit, Reynolds has been enjoying his ranch and currently is playing the role of a two-bit circus barker in the movie “The Howling, Part VI,” now being filmed in Fillmore and Piru. But he has begun pondering other types of shows.

Reynolds said he is considering opening a traveling wax museum or a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center at his ranch, where he can help other carnival workers resolve their substance-abuse problems.

He said he is unsure what he would name his clinic. Perhaps “Big Top Survivors Group” or the “Greatest Rehabilitation Center on Earth,” he said.

“Why not, if it works,” he said. “I’ll never get out of show business. I’ll be in it till I die.”