Shocked and Amazed - On and Off the Midway

If you want to climb the highest mountain, you go to Mt. Everest. If you want to talk to the King of the Sideshows, you talk to Ward Hall. Around longer than virtually anybody in the business, involved in just about every aspect of it as well (and in a lot of attempts to break the barriers between sideshow and mainstream venues), it's little wonder that his name ends up on every showman's and performer's lips if you talk to them long enough. Grind shows? "You talked to Ward Hall?" Freak shows? "You oughtta talk to Ward Hall." Sideshow history? "Ward Hall was on 'Nightline' for that. You seen him yet?"

When I first spoke to him, it was by phone, at the start of my work on SHOCKED AND AMAZED. During our brief conversation to set up an interview, he pretty much told me that sideshows, especially freak shows, were a thing of the past and that I should be writing my book in a library somewhere. Knowing this was not the way to start my book, I told him I'd like to see and talk to him anyway. I suppose that at that point, I sounded to him like every other nit wit writer who ever thought he'd spook his editor with some Halloween or July 4th tomfoolery.

The Florida Citrus Festival and Polk County Fair in Winterhaven, Florida, where I met Ward in person, was another matter entirely. The World of Wonders show was there, as Hall had said his show would be, in all its glory, a massive banner line across its face as in the days he'd told me were long gone. And if it harked back to an era now past, at least it did so with the flash you'd expect. Ward Hall or some other "professor" wasn't working the front, out on the bally platform giving the gathering crowd the spiel, tossing them some morsel from one of the performers (maybe a quick sword swallow, a blast from the fire breather at twilight), getting ready at just the right moment to go from their bally to the grind and, thereby, turn the tip. There was, though, a mysterious figure, its head covered in a black cloth bag, sitting out front, a silent lure to the passing fair goers to step right up. And of course "Little Pete" Terhurne, the dwarf performer who's been with Hall four decades, a performer who's nearly a 10-in-1 all by himself, Little Pete was acting as ticket seller.

The days of multi-act, multi-performer shows at nearly every carnival, the old 10-in-1 shows, may be gone. Certainly, Ward Hall thinks they are, killed as much as anything by the economics of the carnival and fair lots themselves. As he told me over the phone that first time we spoke, he wasn't mounting the huge shows with massive overhead he used to put together. His current show is more of a museum, which is how he has the World of Wonders billed on the banner line, an outrageous mix of gaffed and for-real taxidermied freak animals, Egyptian giantesses, wax museum figures, live pythons. He told me that at least with a museum he didn't have to pay the mannequins. Truth be known, Ward and his long-time partner in the business, Chris Christ, still had the show on the road and still have some performers working the World of Wonders in the '94 season in spite of the difficulties.

When I first talked with him at length, Hall's stories of the business started where many a discussion with showmen and performers starts, how you just can't win. I don't remember whether I asked him how his current show was going or what, but he cut real quick to 1977 and the the Lake County Fair in Illinois when he played the spot with a pickled punk show, a common carnival show over the years, a display of fetuses in jars. He told me he'd played that spot numerous times without incident, but politics was to change that.