Ventura County Fair : Lives of ‘Carnies’ Not Always Fair

For many locals, the Ventura County Fair means 12 days of fun, games and cotton candy under a burning August sun.

But it is also Tracy Burt’s stolen vacation.

Ron LaTour’s big chance.

And one in a seemingly endless succession of destinations for weary Joyce and Lex McKnight.

All four have landed at Seaside Park this August, joining a traveling hodgepodge of faces, personalities and lifestyles that each morning at 11 a.m. bring the locals their annual county fair.

Fair officials report that there are about 300 “carnies” working the carnival this year, and 260 concessionaires on the fair grounds, hawking everything from face painting to deep-fried egg rolls. Some have been returning to Seaside Park every year for the last quarter century. Others, like Ron LaTour, made their debut on Wednesday.

Or in LaTour’s case, make that Thursday.

This fair was supposed to be LaTour’s big chance, the largest fair he and his gleaming gold and silver cart have been in since joining the circuit last year.

Then, just before the extravaganza opened Wednesday, the health department found his cart unsanitary and ordered him to construct a plastic case around his coffee-making device.

“Oh, don’t get me started on the Ventura County Health Department,” he said, grimacing as he whipped up an iced latte Thursday afternoon. “I didn’t open yesterday. Just spent the entire day building this trap.”

LaTour taught special education in Visalia for 14 years before the entrepreneurial bug hit him in the early ‘90s.

“I really enjoy hard work, but I was getting all this time off and not enough gratitude for the work I did,” he said of his time as a teacher. “But now, people love my product. They get very excited. I’ve had people come to me and say, ‘I had to come to the fair to get the best cup of coffee I ever had.”’

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A satisfied grin spread over LaTour’s angular face. He’s ready to pour espressos and cappuccinos ‘till he drops, for this kind of appreciation.

“What keeps me traveling is the opportunity to do 500 drinks per day,” he said.

Joyce and Lex McKnight used to get excited about the fair. They can still remember the day 19 years ago when a friend came to their apartment, snuggled deep in the snows of a cold Pennsylvania winter, and asked them how they’d like to spend the summer in California.

“I was building houses, my wife was waitressing, we were both in dead-end jobs,” Lex McKnight, 43, recalled. “It sounded like a pretty good deal to us.”

The McKnights headed off for the bright canopies and searing grills of a traveling West Coast hotdog booth, and never looked back.

Nearly two decades later, they own the orange and yellow striped concession that advertises “Crispy Golden French Fries” and “Delicious Sausage.” They travel up and down California highways all summer, peddling their delicacies at a dizzying merry-go-round of fairs and expositions. They can fry corn dogs leaning over a burning pan of oil in the 106 degree heat of Victorville and not faint once.

But they are getting weary.

“I don’t mind the work,” Lex McKnight said the day before the Ventura County Fair opened, snapping a vinyl awning onto their booth parked alongside the agricultural barn. “It’s the traveling I get tired of. We’ve been to some places year after year. It’s not like we’re seeing new places all the time.”

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In the evenings, the McKnights sleep in a house trailer they transport across the country. During the winter, when the fair season shuts down in most parts of the country, they retire to Florida, where they work a few winter fairs and cook up a storm in their home near Ft. Myers.

The McKnights’ living arrangements are not unusual for concessionaires, many of whom make enough money to maintain a permanent winter home in addition to their migratory trailers or the series of motel rooms they pay for all fair season.

But the carnies are a different story. Joanna Bray, 46, joined the carnival circuit in September, 1992, when the Los Angeles County Fair came to Pomona, and she’s stayed with it ever since. She even married a fellow carnie, Russ Bray, 34, and together they travel from town to town, festival to festival.

Money is tight for the migrant Brays. Most nights, their carnival attractions become their bedroom. Joanna Bray works in a Ping-Pong toss booth. When the gates close and the visitors go home, she and her fellow workers roll down the awnings to make walls around the otherwise open concession. Bray lies down on her portable air mattress and falls asleep.

Nights that the Brays feel particularly flush, they rent a hotel room and enjoy the luxury of a bed and the privacy of a closed door. On their time off from the fair circuit, they stay with Joanna’s mother in Gardena.

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They say they were born with a wanderlust they still can’t shake.

“I think the kind of excitement you feel when you are a child and going on vacation, well, that’s what I feel every time we go to a new town,” Joanna said over dinner with Russ one evening in the cut-rate, carnie concession stand nestled into a far corner of the fairgrounds.

“No matter how long the spot is, you are always ready to go,” Russ explained, digging into a meat and bean stew.

“And you are looking forward to the next spot,” Joanna said, finishing his sentence.

The Brays try to travel light. But some carnies carry a load of baggage with them from town to town. Howard Hilliard, a thin 6-foot-6 Texan who loves to work in Kiddieland, lugs two huge suitcases, a couple of bulging shoulder bags, a waist pouch, a briefcase and a card table from stop to stop around California, loading them onto the semi-truck of the carnival company that employs him.

“The other guys tell me I should get my own truck,” he said, laughing.

Hilliard used to carry nine barbecue grills with him as well, but finally discarded all but one in an attempt to conserve storage space.

Many women take their infants and toddlers with them on the circuit, either persuading a friend or relative to travel with them and serve as a baby-sitter, or trusting other workers to look after their children as they rotate through their breaks.

Tracy Burt needs little in the way of baggage, thank you. She left that all at home in Santa Rosa--the four children, the husband, the volunteer responsibilities and the studies in bookkeeping she is but one month away from finishing.

“This is my summer vacation,” she said. “I had to do something for me.”

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These days, Burt sits high atop the fair, at the peak of the Super Slide, laying out burlap sacks for kids to sit on and glide on down the wavy yellow plastic.

“Last one down’s a rotten egg!” she called out one sunny afternoon as three children raced, screaming with laughter, down the long slide.

“Yeah, it’s kind of ironic, isn’t it?” she said, noting how she’d left children behind only to be assigned to a ride in Kiddieland. “But they keep me in line. I have a lot of fun with them.”

Burt’s fair saga began back home in Santa Rosa, when the fair came to her town and an idea came to her head. Within a week, she had left her four children, ages 9 months to 8 years, with her sister, told her husband to deal with things for a couple of weeks, and hopped into a friend’s car, bound for Ventura and the fairgrounds.

She can’t remember the last time she had a vacation. It feels great, she said. She wears a bathing suit under her T-shirt and shorts everywhere she goes, and on her breaks, she strolls over to the ocean, whisks off her top, and sunbathes on the sand until it is time to return.

Two days into the fair, she missed her kids so much she gave up part of her precious breaks to call her sister’s house to check on them. But she said she has no regrets. As much fun as the crowds at the midway are having, she is too.

“You know, I went to the store last night, and these kids said, ‘Hey, I remember you, you’re the lady from the fair,”’ she grinned and shook her head. “Boy, that put a smile on my face.” * FAIR SCHEDULE: B2