Keeping the Fair Square : Backstretch Mayor Mothers Carny Flock

Like a tumbleweed blown in by a bad desert breeze, he arrived at the DelMar Fairgrounds out of prospects--hot and tired from days on the road, without a dime in his dirty denims.

He was a career carnival worker who had hitchhiked west from Texas for this next stop on the Midway Circuit. It was after dark when he finally arrived at the dusty racetrack backstretch where the other carnies stay.

He needed a place to sleep for the night. But it took a $5 deposit to get a room, and he wouldn’t earn his first day’s pay until the sun came up. Then his luck changed. He found Cookie Sullivan.

“I gave him the $5 for the deposit,” she recalled. “Some of the other fair workers laughed at me. They called me a softie, a real sucker. But he was there the next night to repay the loan--just like I said he’d be.”

Meet the Mother of the Midway. The Mayor of Carny Town.

Each summer, out behind the garish games of chance and odoriferous animal barns, a movable city of sorts springs up in the shadows of the county fairgrounds--a place populated by rough-and-ready carnival workers, concessionaires, ride owners and 4-H families who have hauled in from God-knows-where with their hand-fed calves, ponies and little lambs.

It’s the land of a thousand tents and trailers, teeming day and night with people, commotion and problems. It’s also the stomping grounds of the 50-year-old, gravelly voiced Lakeside schoolteacher who serves as housing supervisor for the fair’s working class--the soda jerks, game-callers and ticket-takers--and anyone else who temporarily calls the fairgrounds home.

Her title is a misnomer. Because, for most people, Cookie Sullivan is really the unofficial money lender and no-nonsense dispute resolver, the fairest at the fair. The mayor of the gritty backstretch.

Every June, within days of leaving her regular job teaching emotionally disturbed children, Sullivan loads up a rented, 18-foot truck-trailer and heads for her regular spot on the backstretch--within eyeshot of the spinning Ferris wheels--in the midst of the carnival action.

Until the fair folds up its tents three weeks later, the trailer will become her round-the-clock home as she presides over a makeshift community of 5,000 residents. Forget Maureen O’Connor. Walkie-talkie in hand, Sullivan patrols her grounds in a golf cart, dispensing instructions and advice, a down-to-earth mayor without reelection worries.

“This place really is like a city,” she says during a walking tour of the backstretch. “It has everything a city has--different neighborhoods and their problems, a police force, sewage removal.”

Like any Gotham, there are poor areas. On the backstretch, it’s a place known as Tent City--home to the carnival workers who can’t afford a trailer or pay the $50 a week to rent a room in the racetrack’s jockey quarters.

And the jockey rooms are little better. The barren 8-by-8 apartments come equipped with only a sink--no bed or furniture--and each are often home to a half-dozen carnival workers forced to team up to save money.

Then there are the wealthy and middle-class neighborhoods--the $100,000 mobile homes inhabited by wealthy concessionaires, ride owners and families whose children come to compete in the fair’s livestock competitions.

Like any mayor, part of Sullivan’s job as peacekeeper is to reduce the tension between the haves and the have-nots.

“I keep the 4-H kids as far from carny families as I can,” she says. “The two lifestyles just don’t mix. It’s like a 180-degree difference. Mixing them would be like playing with fire.”

At first, some of Sullivan’s friends didn’t like the idea of her living in an area dominated by loud music, heavy drinking and, at times, fistfights among characters with nicknames like Slank, Buffalo, Cruk and Cheapskate--not exactly a schoolteacher’s terrain.

Sullivan just shrugs her shoulders. “None of the nightmares people envisioned have come to pass,” she says. “Sure, there’s rowdy guys, and some noses get broken, but that can happen anywhere. I have no fear of walking around this place alone at 3 a.m. None.

“And not just because we have security guards. Because, if one guy tried to hurt me, there would be seven more who would help me out. It might be a brainless way to be, but I’m confident here. Nobody knows these people like I do.”

One of the carnies she has befriended is the 300-pound Samoan nicknamed Buffalo. The first day she met him, Mutautia Aau was riding a tiny motor scooter toting a pulsating 20-pound boom-box.

She had a talk with him about the noise. They’ve been friends ever since.

“Cookie’s well-liked here,” he said, taking a break from his concession stand. “She’s fair with people. But, even if you’re her best friend, she’ll straighten you out real quick if you cross her line.”

Added another carnival worker, a cigarette drooping from her lips: “Control, that’s the key with Cookie. She’s in control.”

Nobody knows this, but Cookie’s real first name is Mary Anne. Her dad nicknamed her after Dagwood and Blondie’s daughter in the Blondie comic strip. Forty years later, she still maintains that down-home 1940s friendliness.

A mother who accompanied her three children to the fair each summer while they competed in the livestock competitions, Sullivan began her job eight years ago when officials asked her to coordinate the accommodations of other competing families. Soon, her responsibilities spread to include the carnies and concessionaires.

Officially, her duties are to make sure people pay for their accommodations. But, with Cookie Sullivan, there’s so much more. She sleeps each night next to her radio to monitor the security chatter and often goes out three and four times a night to quell disturbances, assist a heart attack victim or guide late-night fair-goers to their cars in far-off parking lots.

“Cookie’s a tough lady, but she’s got a big heart,” said Sue Applegate, the fair’s commercial manager and one of Sullivan’s supervisors. “She’s a problem-solver. She gets things done in an often difficult atmosphere because people respect her.”

For Cookie, the respect goes both ways. Many midway workers, she says, suffer unfairly from the stigma associated from being a carny. “All you have to do is say the word, and there’s a strong image that comes to mind.”

That image, Cookie says, is someone unwashed, uneducated, prone to crime.

“They’re not people you’re going to take home. Or people you’re usually going to socialize with. But they’re good people, many of them. They’re just unfairly labeled. It’s like the disturbed children I teach at school. They get labeled. It’s something they have to live with.”

At local restaurants come fair-time, she hears the hoarse voices of the game callers as they relax with other workers. It’s a croak that goes beyond a sore throat, a sound that comes from years of calling out to the passing throngs of often unhearing ears.

“The image is just unfair,” she says. “Sure, there’s an odor to a guy that works in grease under the hot sun all day. When he gets a 15-minute break and comes into the office to pay me, he’s dirty and he smells.

“But it’s no different than how a mechanic might smell. Because this carnival worker travels light. He hasn’t got many clothes. And he can’t always find a Laundromat. And so, while to many people he might smell like a carny, to me, he smells like a man who works hard for a living.”

Many carnies don’t own cars. Instead, whole families will travel with friends by the busload--old rattletraps that break down routinely. Or they hitchhike.

“It’s a sad life,” she said. “Like modern-day Okies--something out of a Steinbeck novel. These guys barely make enough working at one fair to pay for their food and board, so when the midway closes up shop, they’ve got no money to show for their efforts--some not even for dinner.

“But there’s no time to feel sorry for themselves. They’ve got to run and catch the next fair.”

The saddest aspect of the carnival life is what happens to the children, she says. She sees the babies, the children who are often raised in an atmosphere of alcohol and drug abuse. Many carny kids have scattered schooling--or none at all.

“The bottom line is that you don’t see a lot of future for them,” Sullivan said. “They don’t see much of the outside world to know that there is a society out there aside from the carnivals. Their parents are here for 21 days, and they work every hour they can.

“And so the kids are often left back in tent city--an 8-year-old left to care all day for his younger sister.”

The image that sustains her is the one of the 10-year-old girl she saw sitting on the hood of a car engrossed in a book. On the third day, she stopped to question the child. “She said she was studying because she wanted to get an education someday.”

Even with the dire situations many carnival people live by, there are few crimes committed on the backstretch--or the other areas of the fairgrounds where officials squeeze the sundry collection of trailers and mobile homes.

Instead, most of her calls are for disturbing the peace. Guys who have had too much to drink. Or fights that break out between couples that disturb a half-dozen other people sleeping in the crowded jockey rooms.

“I tell them to get to their rooms, to get to bed because Mom says so and because they otherwise might not be able to get up in the morning,” she said, describing her routine with late-night partyers. “And, you know what? They usually do go to bed. Because they know I’m looking out for them.”

To keep the noise levels down, the fair this year began a program to punch holes in the licenses of late-night offenders. The second hole punch means their license gets revoked.

As she walks through the backstretch, carnies hold up their licenses, “See Cookie,” they call. “No holes!”

But Cookie is too busy to look. She’s more concerned about the line of overflow fair traffic that’s been routed through the backstretch area--and the danger it might pose to small carny children running into the street.

Sometimes, though, her jack-of-all-trades reputation means some sleepless nights. Like the 3 a.m. call she got one night when a security guard reported that a bull had gone after a newborn calf in the stables.

She lay in bed, listening to the static chatter as the guard described how the bull was close to goring the hour-old calf.

“Well, go in and get the thing,” the security dispatcher said.

“If the bull doesn’t want the calf in there, I don’t think it wants me there either,” the guard responded.

“I know,” the dispatcher said. “Let’s give Cookie a call.”

Despite the bags under her eyes, or the overflowing laundry basket she keeps in the driver’s seat of her truck, Cookie relishes her job. The county fair, she says, is her only chance to see many characters for a whole year. Buffalo and the boys. People like the parking lot striper working his way through college.

“You get hooked,” she said, “on the place and the people.”

When the fair ends Sunday, Cookie Sullivan will head back into her other life--her home in El Cajon, the work on her master’s degree in special education, her position as a high school girl’s softball coach.

And yet, for the Mother of the Backstretch, the last day of the fair is always the saddest day of the year. “You get this terrible feeling when they start tearing down the rides,” she said.

“The trash starts to build up. It’s depressing the way the place looks, like the end of the world. There’s just one thing that saves the day. That you know it will all be back again next year.”