Soggy Reid was one of these men and the carnival was his mythic place, his El Dorado, The City of Lights. There would be no going back to the everyday world he had known – not now. So Soggy quit school at the end of grade seven and took a job at the Clark Fruit Company, which permitted him to work the hotdog stand during Old Home Week. After two years of learning the ropes at the Michaels’ hotdog stand, he quit the job at the fruit company, bought the stand, and took it on the road for a season with the Bill Lynch Shows. He soon parlayed that into a cookhouse he operated on the number two unit of the show, under the management of Jack Lynch, Bill’s brother. Jack saw potential in this kid with the pompadour and strong arms, but it was the very pugnacity that made him a great boxer that also got him into trouble on the road. Jack knew he was rough and warned him from the get-go.
“If you get in any trouble, back home you go,” he admonished. He liked the kid and he did work hard during tear-down, but there was a business to run here and fighting with the customers would not be tolerated.
Trusting his instincts, Soggy got into a fight with a guy the first day out. The manager was not impressed and threatened him with a ticket home if there were any more altercations with the public. But fighting was in Soggy’s nature and there was no way to properly exorcise it.
The show was in Newfoundland and Soggy kept his cool through Corner Brook and Stephenville, but Bishop Falls proved a final test of patience for him. A big, blonde, moustached man came to the cookhouse, ordered a hotdog and refused to pay for it. He snickered and walked off. Soggy could feel the rage boiling up inside, but the old iron heart kept a steady beat and he let the guy go. The troublemaker went over to one of the games Soggy was managing and tore a plush panda bear to pieces to demonstrate his might and again, the iron heart seemed to paddle away harmlessly. But underneath, it took every ounce of will Soggy had to keep from tearing the man’s head off. The guy then came back to the cookhouse and ordered another hotdog. Against his better judgment, Soggy served it to him. He swallowed it in three bites and told him he wasn’t paying for that one either. That was the breaking point for Soggy, who came out of the cookhouse ready to give the hotdog thief a taste of the fists of steel.
“I’m gonna beat it out of your hide,” he told the guy and they went to it.
The hotdog bandit landed a kick that set Soggy back for a few seconds. When he caught up, he lunged at the man, landing a few direct jabs, some of them with enough force to paint the man’s face with his own blood. Down he went and it was all over. The fists of steel had prevailed and the iron heart beat a merry tune inside Soggy’s chest.
Soggy quickly made his way to the front office to pick up his ticket home from Jack. It was a good run, he figured, and there’d be other things, none quite as spectacular as working on the carnival, but there was always the rail yard or the fruit stand.
“No, it’s all right,” Jack told him. “I saw it all and you took a lot from that guy.”
Jack never intended on sending Soggy home that day or any other for that matter. He was too strong a worker and having a little muscle on the show was a valuable business investment in those days. Carnival workers responded well to guys who scared them; it was the nature of the business. The workers were a tough lot and here was a guy who could handle them. A disposition to fight was not considered a liability in the carnival business; it was exactly the attribute needed to succeed. It was rough on the show and Soggy had just proved his worth in single combat, the way soldiers proved their bravery during war. He wasn’t a thug – not here. Here he was management material.
Soggy flourished on the carnival after that. He acquired more concessions, including highly coveted gambling joints, and learned the business side of things from Jack and the old master himself, Bill Lynch. He became connected with the carnival on a deep level, the same way Lynch had and the old showman recognized it. Both of them had seen the City of Lights and knew there was no going back. These feelings toward the carnival ran much deeper than the ordinary job does for the regular man. They didn’t leave at five to make a commute home for supper. They were already home. It was their life and they breathed it and... it was in their blood.
There were others who shared the same plasma as Soggy and Lynch and none of them could leave the carnival either. They all quickly realized they were struck with the carnival virus and that became the thing to say if anyone asked why they did this kind of work. “It gets in your blood,” most carnies still explain of their careers with personal satisfaction.
But it stood to reason with Soggy that if they all had a common blood condition, then they were all related. It wasn’t a virus at all, but rather a lineage, a bloodline, a DNA that separated carnies from other men. The Bill Lynch Shows was a family, he came to realize and a tight-knit one at that. There were spats between workers on the midway, but it was just like any other family. Everyone could get over disagreements quickly, like two brothers fighting in the dirt and then playing catch an hour later.
Over the years, Soggy became a central figure in the family by force of his personality. The adventure was upon them and Soggy took a lead role amongst the carny brethren. He worked the old charm effortlessly and everyone instantly liked him, the way people had when he was a teenager. He had a down-home sense of humour, an ineloquent pattern of speech and had developed a magnificently rusted out voice caused over years of heavy smoking. He still wore a dark pompadour, brushed forward and down from the top of his head, leaving only a small space for a forehead between his hair and eyebrows. When he spoke, people automatically listened and he always had time for a laugh. There was something real about the man and every carny identified with him. Who else could get away with telling a female carny she looked like she was putting on weight? That was Soggy striking for the heart again and people respected him for it, even if there wasn’t much tact involved. Everyone went along with the adventure and Soggy was at the centre of it, the place he always managed to be.
The boxing ring had provided excitement in the early years, but the carnival was where he belonged and by the early 1950s he had given up boxing to pursue it completely with no regrets. He was a king in the City of Lights and it was everything he had imagined. He was making decent money running a few of the games and having a hell of a time on the grand adventure.
He was a local boy making good in the rough world of the carnival and as he went along he began to understand Lynch’s ethos of a Maritime-run carnival by and for the people of the Maritimes. Not only did he understand it, he was an integral part of it.
By the 1960s, Soggy was second in command on the number two unit, under Jack, travelling from town to town across the Maritimes through the warm, breezy summer air. Anywhere it blew, that’s where the Bill Lynch Shows would appear. Things were looking good for this new king of the lights, but there was always a matter he had meant to deal with back home and it was now starting to wear at him. Back when he was fifteen, he had met a young woman by the name of Eleanor MacDonald at a local dance and of all the coincidences, she happened to live on Dorchester Street as well. Soggy and Eleanor had kept a relationship going for over fifteen years, even though the last few summers had taken him out of town. Eleanor worked at a restaurant in Charlottetown and had two weeks of vacation each year which she spent with Betty, Soggy’s sister, travelling around with the show. The girls would meet up with Soggy and the carnival in North Sydney and travel through to Truro, working the cookhouse or a joint, wherever they were needed. Betty would tease Soggy about the long and yet-to-be-official courtship with Eleanor to which Soggy would reply, “Not until I have a place to live.”
So Betty solved that issue by selling her brother a parcel of land next to her house which, again, happened to be on Dorchester Street, next door to the old home where their mother had operated a convenience store after Frank had suffered a stroke. Soggy built a house with the money he had earned out on the show and he and Eleanor le
gitimized their long-term relationship marrying in 1963.
There are moments in a man’s life that define what type of life he will live from that point on. Soggy Reid’s moment came two years later when Eleanor gave birth to the couple’s first and only child, Frankie. Soggy had been out fishing on the West River Bridge, just outside of town with a friend that day and by the time Betty had located him, Eleanor had already delivered. Soggy made his way to the hospital to meet his son. A couple of days later, the proud parents received the shocking news from doctors that Frankie had been born with Down Syndrome.
It was emotional for everybody involved. Nobody knew what to say or do for Soggy and Eleanor. But Soggy accepted it and understood he had a duty to his son and wife to make things work. He felt the paternal instincts immediately and swore to make his son’s life the best it could be.
Frankie Reid fell asleep as a baby to the whirring of the Merry-Go-Round at night. He was raised on the carnival, tagging along with his parents as they criss-crossed the Maritimes for the summer, a new and welcomed addition to the Lynch Shows family, with carny brothers and sisters who always had time for him. Soggy was adamant both Eleanor and Frankie stay with him throughout the season. He wanted to make sure neither one of them went without. It was a good life and the family – all of them – were happy.
Soggy had strayed from church in the years since joining the carnival. After Frankie was born, Soggy returned, attending service at St. Peter’s Anglican in Charlottetown in the off-season. Soggy had lived hard to this point, but he knew Frankie had been a blessing and a reason to change. The handicapped children he was obliged to fasten to rides for free were always somebody else’s. Now, he understood without doubt what it meant and why it was important. But all of that didn’t go far enough for a man of Soggy’s character and determination. There were other things that could be done to make life better for less fortunate people. And he would see to it that those things were accomplished in whatever form they might come to take.
Soggy Reid became boss of the number two unit after Jack Lynch died in 1970. He managed it through the 1972 season, at which point Bill Lynch took ill. In October of 1972, Lynch passed away at the Halifax Infirmary.
Six months later, Soggy and Jack Lynch Jr. formed a partnership and bought the show from the Lynch estate. Soggy knew he had to take the financial risk and get involved because the fear on the show after Lynch’s death was that a new owner might not run the show the way a Maritimer would. People from outside the region would never get it and there was always a natural, healthy distrust of anyone from Ontario. They would never understand that the Bill Lynch Shows were more than mechanical structures and bright lights, more than a business.
Jack Lynch Jr. was never really “with” or “for” the show as carnies like to say and needed Soggy to handle most of the managing duties. The Bill Lynch Shows had run for forty-eight years and Soggy was not going to sit back and watch it die. It was the Maritime tradition, the place that had given his life meaning and about four hundred others’ – the family couldn’t be let down. He didn’t have the $100,000 buy-in, but his brother Johnny and old friend Bill Michaels had enough each to split the financing and lend him the cash. He repaid it by the end of that first season. More importantly for Soggy, the show was saved and continued in the same fashion Lynch had established: as a family tasked with the inherent duty to small towns and the Maritime people who made them up.
Jack Lynch Jr. sold his interest to Soggy at the end of the 1975 season, enshrining him as the undisputed King of The Road, with a show that rivalled only Conklin Shows out of Ontario for the largest on the continent. The heart of iron was beating loudly and happily and those boys’ dreams were living out in the flashiest way imaginable. Some men spend their entire lives never locating the very thing their heart desires most and here was Soggy Reid at forty-five, proud owner and chief proprietor of the City of Lights. This hard swinging, wisecracking, street-smart east Charlottetown grade seven drop-out, had become the owner of his own fate, the master of the Maritime carnival and he had done it on his own terms. That kind of thing is deserving of respect and Soggy had earned it. He was buying new $100,000 rides and looking to expand the business any way he could. Things were good.
But that first year as sole owner was more than he bargained for. By July, a man was lying dead on his midway. The guilt was overwhelming. The old iron heart was thudding irregularly. It seemed like the whole universe was coming down and there was no escape. It wasn’t a dream anymore. It was a cold dose of reality courtesy of gravity and some cracked metal plates.
The City of Lights Flickers
The province of Nova Scotia has no record of any magisterial inquiry called into the death of the man in Port Hawkesbury ever having taken place. Spokespeople in both the Departments of Labour and Justice have refused to explain where the file might have ended up, and simply admitting they lost it is too deep a shame for those proud and diligent bureaucrats in the province. There are any number of reasons for this and it’s hardly worth speculating about, but it is curious.
According to newspaper reports, the inquiry, conducted by Judge Leo MacIntyre, determined the death was a direct result of a defect in the gate locking mechanism of that particular chair on the Paratrooper. The spring that activated the locking plunger was damaged, resulting in a small discrepancy of distance between the plunger and the plate which, on its own, wouldn’t have been disastrous. But the metal plate on the bottom was cracked and bent and the side plate of the chair was bent as well, which meant there was nothing to hold together the bottom plate and plunger pin.
Allison Tupper, a consulting engineer who examined the ride, testified there were no natural forces at work that would have caused the gate to swing open. The force riders feel on the Paratrooper as it spins is on the rear of the seat, but at times through the cycle there is downward movement that Tupper said could encourage people to shift their legs, potentially moving the bar. The reflex while riding is to grab the bar and if this had happened on that particular chair, at the right time, the gate would have swung open.
The safety inspector for the Department of Labour’s Amusements Division testified that he had inspected that ride earlier in the week for the better part of an hour, but hadn’t inspected every seat and did not notice the strike plates being bent at that time. George Scott added that the only issue he discovered with the main structure of the ride was that nails were used used where cotter pins should have been, but he did not consider it a serious safety issue and told the carnival workers to correct it.
The precise details mattered little to Soggy. It was a defect in the locking mechanism that caused the death; he was sure of that after it was over. The bar had been pushed and the gate had flown open, sending a man into the twilight and, and...
...And it all came crashing down on Soggy. This was never the way it was meant to be. Soggy had been a hard-ass boss, physically disciplining any worker who slacked off or screwed up. Owning the carnival was a dream, but he ran it with the intention of keeping it; it was his livelihood and he had invested too much to watch it destroyed by lazy employees. Nobody on the show had the nerve to piss Soggy off with their incompetence. They knew they had to work hard under this owner or suffer the consequences, which could mean a severe beating and threats of worse.
In spite of his best efforts, the chief proprietor of the City of Lights was looking at the prospect of a large lawsuit. More than that, he couldn’t stomach the thought he may have been responsible for someone’s death. He started drinking hard that summer and his personality shifted as the depression swept in like a rainstorm on an empty midway. He considered his options. The solution, as clear as he could see it, was to sell the show. The family would be disappointed and let down, but none of them understood the intense pressure of keeping the show on the road. The old heart was pumping erratically and felt like rubber.
“He took i
t very hard. He was really upset,” recalls his sister, Betty MacLean. “I got some of his friends to go over and talk to him, but I don’t think it did much good. He was in an awful way.”
Word travels fast in the carnival industry and within weeks Jimmy Conklin had heard Soggy was interested in selling and sent a guy down to the Maritimes to study the books for close to a month. The death had taken place in late June and by the time Soggy and the Bill Lynch Shows pulled in to play Soggy’s hometown of Charlottetown for Old Home Week in August, Jimmy Conklin was there with a group of key people from his outfit. He was fully prepared to purchase and assume control of the show that hot summer afternoon.
And then the carny family – the Bill Lynch family – made their voices heard. Soggy had always been there for them and it was time for them to return the favour. They all shared the same blood, after all, and they knew how hard he had taken the death. It looked like the end of the Bill Lynch Shows as the region had come to know it. Conklin was from Ontario and none of the Maritimers on the show were willing to imagine how the local institution would be run with an Ontarian in charge.
“I was depressed, I was tired,” Soggy told Fred H. Phillips in the August 1982 issue of The Atlantic Advocate. “I almost took Conklin’s offer. Then the carnies came into the picture. They signed a declaration, almost to a man, to the effect that they would walk off the show in a body if I sold it.
“So, no money changed hands, nothing was signed...”
They had rallied around their boss, the head of the family, saving the Bill Lynch Shows and their own way of life.
The gesture meant far more to Soggy than most of them realized at the time. It changed his life and a lot of others, in due course, afterwards. It gave him the strength to continue and the old iron heart glowed.
Under the Electric Sky Page 6