Shocked and Amazed - On and Off the Midway

WH: It was 1977, playing the Lake County Fair [in Illinois], which I played numerous times and they had a new law that was going into effect eliminating the job of county coroner and replacing them with medical examiners. The fellow who had been the county coroner for 20 some years was going to lose his job, so he was going to run for sheriff. And he needed something to get him publicity so they came down down and raided the freak baby show and arrested my partner [Chris Christ]. The charge was illegal transportation of human remains. The idea is that you can't just go out and pick up a dead body and take it around unless you're a mortician. [The county coroner] wanted to get publicity, [but] he didn't know how much publicity he was going to get out of it and neither did we. It was a little local thing, [but] all of a sudden it hit the wire services, so it went all across the country. I had that show the year before at the Ohio State Fair [in Columbus]. I had had it at the Illinois State Fair...

WH: No. Had it all over the country. Big fairs. Now, all of a sudden, the newspapers are calling the fair board in Columbus [for example, asking], "Was this the same show you had last year?" "Well, we think it probably is." "Well, is it coming back?" "Well, we don't think so." Now I had it booked [in Columbus] but then they called me and they said [they] were just afraid of unwanted bad publicity so please don't bring it in so I didn't. Now, at one point in this procedure, we could've pled guilty and paid a hundred dollar fine and the whole thing would be forgotten, but we weren't guilty of doing anything wrong and we weren't about to have that record of guilt. So we fought it. And it cost us a lot of money because it took several trips back there and it went to court. Now, we had had [the show] at the Illinois State Fair and other fairs in Illinois. The original freak baby show, or as they call them in the business, pickled punk shows, was in 1933-34 Chicago World's Exposition. A guy by the name of Lou Dufour had it. One of the biggest exhibits of freak unborn babies is at the Soldiers and Sailors Museum is Chicago, and at the moment we were exhibiting in Lake County, the King Tut exhibit [with its remains] was [also] in Chicago.

WH: So finally the judge ruled that these were not corpses; they were fetuses: they had never been issued birth certificates, therefore, there were no death certificates, therefore, it was legal to have them. But in the mean time they had confiscated the babies. [Fortunately,] we already had molds [of them and I had one of my people] sitting at the rubber factory. We were only out of business with that show for a week, then we had the bouncers. Now I'm going to show you how you cannot win no matter what you do. I had had that show at the Ohio State Fair and numerous other fairs in Ohio. Ohio has a 16 page booklet that gives all the rules and regulations and state laws pertaining to the operation of sideshows and carnival shows at state fairs in Ohio. Very specific. You cannot have a picture on the front that shows blood. You cannot have a torture show. You cannot have a girl show. You cannot have a show where anyone dances under a tent (which means I could not take the Bolshoi Ballet and legally present it in the state of Ohio if it's under a tent). You can't have a ticket box over four feet high. You can't have a show within a show for an extra charge. So the people know that what they see advertised is exactly what they're going to see.

JT: So you're moving with the bouncers at this point. Did you ever get the babies back?

WH: No. I never asked for them back. I didn't need them anymore. At least I thought I didn't need them. But I'm coming to that. So I just closed the show for the season. Now, the next year, we're opening the show, the first spot, at Canfield, Ohio. We had it all set up the opening day of the fair and I'm waiting for the inspector because every show has to be inspected. At any given time there's 50, 60 people standing out in front of the show waiting to go in. Well, the inspector finally got there at 4:00. He's a very nice gentleman. I'd known him for a long time. And a man by the name of Henry [Valentine] was running the show for me at that time. So when the inspector came in, the first Henry said was, "Hello, Mr. (So and So)," and he opened one of the bottles and took out the baby and said, "You see, these are all legal. These are all rubber." And the inspector said, "Well, Henry, when Ward was here before always he had the real ones. Haven't you got the real ones?" Henry said, "No, no, we replaced them all with the rubber ones." And he said, "Oh, Henry, the law is very specific. You cannot have any made-up freak. Now if you had the real ones there'd be no problem. You'd get the license, but I can't license these because they're fake." Now, when we got the [pickled punk] show snatched, we hit the wire services. Preliminary hearing, wire services. The hearing, wire services. And then the county coroner, his name was Mickey, did one more shot. They lined up 12, 14 little coffins. And he had a priest, a minister and a rabbi and Mickey standing there with the coffins at the cemetery having the burial for the carnival babies. This hit the wire services and came out during the New Orleans [carnival trade] convention and the New Orleans paper carried a picture [of the burial] about 4 columns by 8 inches. He got more press than he ever wanted, really, out of this thing. But he did get elected sheriff and we've been back and played the fair several times with sideshows since then, and it's, "Hi, Mickey." "Oh! Hey, glad to see you." Everything is fine. But Mickey died two years ago. He was a good guy. He just did what he was doing. He did his bit.

JT: To get to another subject, you guys caught some heat down in Florida over Stanley "Sealo" Berent, and, I think, "Little Pete" Terhurne and their being on display, didn't you?

WH: There was never any heat. Never any heat. Let me explain this. 1921, I can't tell you exactly, or 1923, a law was put on the books in the state of Florida, I can almost quote it verbatim, "It shall be prohibited to exhibit for profit any human being that is deformed, malformed or disfigured. To present or to promote such an exhibition shall be punishable with a $1000 fine and/or a year in the state penitentiary." Nobody [in the business] was even aware this law existed.

JT: You mean the shows are going on and nobody's even doing anything about it, even with this law on the books?

WH: Nobody knew it and everybody had been working in Florida all these years. Now, [there] had [been] a problem at Raleigh, North Carolina, on the James E. Strates Shows with Slim Kelly's sideshow because a little deformed girl in a wheelchair objected to the sideshow and they went to court there and it got kicked out. During the Manatee County Fair, there was an article in the "St. Petersburg Times" about a frog girl show (which was not mine) and it quoted this law. This was the first time any of us ever knew about it. So our immediate reaction was these people live in Florida, they own property in Florida, they pay their taxes in Florida, and yet they would not be able to work in Florida. So we decided we ought to do something about it. So my company, which was World Attractions Inc., with Stanley Berent - Sealo, the Seal Boy - and Pete Terhurne, we wanted to get this thing cleared up. My attorney at that time was a man by the name of Roy Flagg Jonas out of Miami Beach. Very good attorney. Roy wanted to do this because he knew this case was so unusual that it would put him in the book of precedents, which it did. Roy had formerly been the mayor of North Bay Village, Florida, which is the 79th St. causeway between Miami and Miami Beach, so of course he knew the police there and everything, so he applied for a license for a freak show for North Bay Village, with the understanding that the chief of police was going to turn down the application for the license on the basis of this law. So now we had somebody we could sue. Now at that time, Richard Gerstein was the state's attorney for Dade County and it was going to be tried in a Dade County Court. And Richard Gerstein, also a very fine gentleman, was a member of the Miami Showmen's Association, and he agreed that he would fight this because normally [with] something like this, they'd say, "Oh well, just throw it out of court." But we needed to go to court and we needed to lose. So we went into court in Dade County and we lost the case which now gave us the privilege of going to the Court of Appeals. Now in the Court of Appeals, again we lost, which was what we had to do. This went on till we got to the Supreme Court for the state of Florida.

WH: There are six justices and to make sure that it couldn't be contested later, one judge voted for the law, the others voted on our part. That way it can't be contested. As I understand it, a unanimous decision can be contested in the federal courts. Of course, nobody wanted to contest it anyway. So at that point, the law was stricken and removed from the books. But it's not over yet.

WH: The next year, I had a unit and I had just closed the season at the Texas State Fair and had got home. The other unit was at the fair in Tallahassee. Henry, who had the thing with the baby show and couldn't get open because they were rubber, he was in Tallahassee. We had Dollie Regan, the Ossified Girl, and Dick Brisban, the Penguin Boy. The sheriff came down accompanied by the television news cameras and so forth. And they made a big thing about closing up the sideshow because of this law. They didn't want to put anybody in jail, but it was illegal and it couldn't operate. They shut it down. Dollie was our MC. This will show you how ridiculous this is. They said Dickie can't work at all; Dollie can MC the show, but in such a way that her body would not be seen. They had to wrap a sheet around her so only her head was sticking out!

WH: Yeah! Henry immediately went to the phone and called me. And he says, "I thought we had [this] straightened out." It was ruled that it was a discriminatory law, discriminating against handicapped people who are making an honest living. Nobody was forcing them to be in show business. [It's] the same old thing, especially in television. How many of these handicapped people do you have anchoring the news on television? How many do you see performing in your sitcoms? They want to be actors. They want to be in show business. This is their only outlet. So I said [to Henry], "Go down to the carnival office, and tell Mr. Kaufmann," (who owned the carnival). I was lucky. I had got home and I was sitting at my desk and I happened to have the whole court [decision] right in front of me. So I said, "Here's the number of the case, the date it was tried, etc. etc." So he went down [to the office] but Mr. Kaufman wasn't there; he was out of town. So [Henry] said, "Now what should I do?" I said, "Go to the fair office." And I can't remember the lady's name - she was the manager of the fair, she was also the secretary of the Florida Association of Fairs and Exhibitions. And because this was a state-wide thing, I had kept her informed of every step, so she was well aware of it. So now the fair had opened on Friday night [and we] got closed and now it's late Saturday morning. And Henry went over to the fair office and she said, "Oh yes, Mr. Valentine, I am well aware of that and, yes indeed, that was stricken from the books. And they can't do that to us!" So she got on the phone and she called the fair's attorney and got him off of the golf course.

WH: Well, he was amused, because the Saturday morning's paper had come out about [how] the sheriff had closed this illegal freak show and of course it was on television because they had been there with the cameras. It made the 11 o'clock news! So now they got down there and they called the sheriff. What is was, the sheriff still had an old law book and somebody had called and made a complaint about the show and cited the number of the [old] law and he looked it up and sure enough it was in [his] book and he wasn't aware that it had been stricken. So now the next day, the headline comes out, "Leon County Sheriff Doesn't Even Know What Laws He's Supposed To Enforce." That didn't do us any good either because this put mud on the face of the sheriff. But of course they came down, they apologized, and the show opened right back up.

JT: So how was the sheriff afterward? Was he pretty decent about everything in spite of the bad press he got?

JT: And in the years after, you didn't have any other problems with that sort of thing? You kept playing the spot?