Under the Electric Sky
Page 15
“Nobody else wanted to do the job, so I did it,” he says.
Everybody knew Drummey was from Ontario, but there weren’t a lot of options. The workers had avoided any outside influence on this local, home-grown institution for seventy years, but it was finally time to accept it: The Bill Lynch Shows were over. And, in the end, Drummey wasn’t all that bad. He was more of a numbers guy than a Soggy-style people-person and he was from Ontario originally, but he had lived here long enough to understand what the show was about.
“I had been here since 1979, so I knew a lot of people by then and they considered me a Maritimer,” he says. “And I am a Maritimer now.”
He proved that by maintaining the most sacred of all policies on the show. Drummey organized Christmas parties for handicapped children at the arena on the Exhibition grounds in Halifax. Every year, the rides would be set up inside and up to 3,500 disabled kids from around the city would be treated to a day of wonders, just like other kids had for decades. The Saint Mary’s University football team would volunteer as well, lifting children out of wheelchairs and placing them on those vehicles of joy and terror that would set their imaginations soaring.
“I thought it was a good idea,” he says. “If you’ve ever seen one of those kids do that, you’d know why we did it.”
Drummey ran the show for three years starting the season of 1996. Soggy’s life insurance covered most of the unsecured debt and liquidating $200,000 worth of rides had paid it off in full. The Bill Lynch Shows had a fresh start with no debt, but the economy of the region was still hurting. The GST was a tough drain on razor-thin profits and competition from Campbell Amusements out of Ontario stealing prime spots like Charlottetown and Bridgewater took its toll.
In 1999, Drummey purchased what was left of the show outright from Soggy’s estate, after one unit was sold to Ed Waters, who had run the second unit under Soggy for years. (Waters would eventually sell his show to Pat Hinchey, who still travels it around Cape Breton and nearby spots.) That left two and a half units, one and half of which Drummey purchased, renaming the enterprise Maritime Rides and Attractions. Aside from a few poached locations, the route was the old Bill Lynch Shows’. Maritime Rides and Attractions operated until the end of the 2003 season, at which point Drummey sold what was left of his show after downsizing – around twenty-five rides – to Jack Adams, an operator out of Ontario who had only come east to see if he could hire on a few of his rides with a show. The taxes, mixed with the competition, was enough to convince Drummey the old glory days of the Maritime carnival were over.
“You have the new business ethic out there now,” he says. “It’s not like it used to be. It used to be one for all and all for one. Not anymore. Just like any other business, everyone’s only looking after themselves. And don’t forget Mr. Government gets in there and regulates you to death and taxes you to death. So, it’s a matter of survival...”
Jack Adams is on a survival trip of his own. Not only does he have to deal with the taxes, but there is now the very real threat to the viability of the carnival presented by the high price of gas and diesel. By the third week in May of 2008, Adams had lost a lot of money. He had started in late April so the workers could put six months in for employment insurance eligibility for the rest of the year, but that practice came back to bite him after almost four weeks of rain with only a few clear days to make money in that period.
“It’s a rough way to make a living,” Adams says on a slow, wet day in New Minas. The carnival lot was dead and we were sitting in a truck, pondering the future of the business. Somewhere in his 50s, Adams looks a bit like a missing Baldwin brother in an orange Nike ballcap. He is not a man prone to idle chatter. I have tape of a thirty minute conversation I had with him one afternoon on the lot where he responds to any and all questions with one word answers. But on this day, when nobody connected to the carnival is making any money, he opened up a bit.
“I keep asking myself, why bother, why do this at all,” he says. “I guess I’ve done this my whole life, so what do ya do? It’s too late for me to think about changing jobs or whatever. I don’t know that I could even do that. In this business there’s a lot of freedom.”
Adams is a welder by trade, which comes in handy for running a carnival. His son welds for the show as well. Jack’s wife, Pat, is heavily involved, his daughter owns the cookhouse, his son-in-law helps out and his three-year-old granddaughter spends her formative years exploring the wonders of the midway. Adams started working on the Conklin shows, operating the kiddie rides, eventually purchasing the cookhouse. He sold that a few years later and bought a “dark ride” – the type of ride that travels through a tunnel where imaginary frights jump out to scare passengers. He acquired a few more rides after that and worked as an independent owner on different midways. There is not much of a demand for independent ride owners these days and Adams eventually drifted east looking for shows to work with. Drummey was selling, so after rounding up the down payment, he bought the remains of the old Bill Lynch Shows and the old route, renaming the outfit Maritime Midways.
Some of the old workers stayed on; others tried it for a while and left. The show was not the same. Something was missing and it was more than Adams stopping the practice of putting handicapped people on the rides for free because of liability risks. It was as if the family had been disjointed years ago and never healed properly. The heart and soul of Lynch’s dream was gone and a lot of people trace that back to that grey day in December of 1995.
“To tell you the truth, I love the show business,” says Bill Harroun, a fifty-two-year carnival veteran and Soggy’s former ride supervisor. “But the last couple years, I don’t care if I even go around it anymore. I don’t know, the atmosphere is missing.”
High taxes, inflated insurance costs, competition, lack of reliable labour and other costs of real-world issues finally caught up with the City of Lights. Gone are the days of old showmen with big cigars barking out deals, of professional carnies shaking people down for a few bucks, of magic and danger. Soggy never cared about taxes, as Animal says, and that is the price we pay for living in today’s world of light-emitting diodes, of frozen dinners and plastic Honda Civics. A world that no longer allows a man to drink in public and forces him into dark spots for a cigarette. The fun of living on the road died and a lot of old carnies miss it. The real world, with all of its detestable rules and regulations, suffocated the spirit of the carnival as many here had come to know it. But in the right spot, on the right midway, the spark still flickers.
The one fundamental component of the Bill Lynch Shows, the vital fluid upon which it ran, was always the people of the Maritimes. It was their fling. The carnival lives and dies with them. It was always theirs, whether they wanted to indulge in what it was offering or not. That’s the way Lynch wanted it and that was the way it was run.
At some point between 1925 and today, the carnival ceased to be the meeting place for entire towns on lazy summer afternoons and hot evenings. Now, like the first midway back at the Chicago World’s Fair, the carnival is a lower form of amusement for the poor. The less-fortunate people of the Maritimes have always taken a keen interest in the carnival, as if they were the ones who needed the escape from the real world more than anyone else. The workers understood this. Welfare cheque day was always the busiest and in sometimes rushed fashion, the rides would be in place for it, even if it meant constructing them all night.
Adams has increased prices on the carnival by about two dollars for the all-day bracelets and one dollar more for the games out of necessity, to keep up with escalating operation costs. He says it’s a risk, considering people can’t afford to have fun anymore. That will be the death knell for the carnival here, he thinks.
“For sure it will kill the carnival,” Adams says. “People only have so much. They just can’t afford it.
“But I’ll be dead by then.”
O
ut on the midway in New Minas, a few people are staggering around between the damp rides and the games, trying to get their kicks any way they can. The exhaust from the machines is wheezing in the distance as the afternoon rolls into bright night, reflected by a gleaming atmosphere that sparkles with old-fashioned electrical-filament coloured light bulbs. The rain has cleared and a cool breeze blows through the lot.
Looking around the midway today, it could be 1956. For all of the changes over the years, a lot of it remains the same. The rides still spin, the people still come for their own reasons, the air smells the same, the sounds are like echoes of years ago. The Merry-Go-Round still rolls uninterrupted through the hustle of routine life. As much as time and reality eventually caught up with the Bill Lynch Shows and the people who operated it, the real magic was always too electric to contain and there was never any way to own it. What Lynch created here and Soggy continued was bigger than both of them. They were lucky, on good nights, to channel it and share it with the people who wanted it. The magic of the midway itself is oblivious to any one person. It is that place out of time that waits for no single man, that belongs in the hearts and spirits of anybody who’s felt it for that brief time of year when they could almost smother it in their arms. Kids understand this concept better than most, whether they know it or not. They are the ones with the ingenuous, unsophisticated urge to ride the magic as it stretches out further than they’ve ever been to the place where everything seems possible, where the imagination drifts through clouds and back again, where there is no status and it hardly matters who owns what or how much money is in their pockets.
I wandered around the midway after talking with Adams and encountered a four-year-old boy as his father hoisted him aboard the airplane kiddie ride. He took off in a single plane to unknown destinations as it lifted up through the sounds of exhaust to run its cycle. He had never felt anything like that before; a mortal energy rushed through his veins with such force and intensity all he could do was break down in tears. His father smiled reassuringly from the ground, attempting to calm the child’s nerves. Near the end of the ride, he had accepted that everything would be all right. He sat back and took it all in. It was exhilarating and terrifying all at the same time. Crying was the natural impulse.
The carnival played out its magic until ten p.m. or so, when Adams shut it down for the day. The lights flicked off quickly and the trailer doors jammed closed, as they do every night. The workers rushed through the shadows briskly, with some sort of inherited night vision, on their way to the bunks which were lit by the generator light. But the rides were still and sullen in the darkness. They were too isolated on the lot to be affected by any streetlight or parking lot din, sitting naked in the moonlight.
There is a haunting sensation when the lights go out for the night on the carnival. An eerie spectre lurks in the shadows of the midway – not of death, but life. It is overwhelming and subdued at the same time. There’s an energy to it that is almost chilling. In the day, life had exhibited itself freely throughout the lot, unconcerned with the trifles of existence. People gathered to feel the sounds and hear the tastes and whisper to the air and dirt the miraculous secret of what it means to be alive and human. In the dark now, it is as if the rides are glowing from the inside, the sounds of ghosts scorched on the fibreglass and metal, resonating through space, as if you could put your ear to the curve in the Tilt’s tub like a seashell. The calls of the carnies, the screams of the people on scary rides, the smell of the candy and food – all of it flooding back in one last illuminated blaze through the senses.
The fear has never been death. It was life all along.
© 2012 Christopher A. Walsh
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Walsh, Christopher A.
Under the Electric Sky: the legacy of the Bill Lynch Shows / Christopher A. Walsh
Print ISBN 978-1-897426-17-3
E-ISBN 978-0-988119-40-6
1. Bill Lynch Shows-History. 2. Lynch, Bill, 1903-1972. 3.Carnivals-Nova Scotia-Halifax-History. 4. Carnivals-Maritime Provinces-History. 5. Halifax(N.S.)-Biography. 6. Maritime Provinces-Biography. I. Title
GV1835.3.B54W24 2010 791'.109716225 C2010-905615-9
Cover design by Gail LeBlanc
Front cover photo by Thomas Burke
Author photo by Chloe Jones
E-book conversion by Human Powered Design
From the Print Edition: Pottersfield Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We also acknowledge the ongoing support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada. We also thank the Province of Nova Scotia for its support through the Department of Tourism, Culture and Heritage.