The sympathetic patrons would line up to give her a dime for autographed photos, trying to make amends for such a sad life. Only none of it was true. Alzoria, who went by a few different last names over the years, grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and married twice. She had completed high school, was very much a content person who earned a lot from her condition and the gullibility of the “marks”, as she would call them.
So who was this two-legged man, anyway, with his overwhelming sense of guilt? For the freaks, he was an easy pushover.
Freaks, losers, outsiders, criminals and crazies of all stripes have found the carnival a safe haven. There were never any judgments cast, even by the people who worked on the show who wouldn’t fall into any of these categories. As long as somebody was willing to work hard enough, they would fit in. It was family, after all, and everybody needed a home somewhere.
At one point in the early 1960s, Lynch contracted the services of a mysterious man by the name of Sam Alexander to provide sideshow entertainment for a month or so throughout the Maritimes. Sam was a veteran of the American sideshow circuit, an unassuming slender character at first glance, with dark, sad eyes and a face that seemed peculiar in certain lights. He spoke in eloquent phrases in calm, soothing tones and projected a pleasant persona. But the face. The face was wrong somehow. His forehead and ears appeared normal and his dark hair was tidy and natural. But there were strange lines from the bridge of the nose to below the jawline. It was as if the mouth, nose and chin had been sculpted by an artist, without any consideration given to the rest of the face.
In his twenties, Sam was a talented stage actor with a theatre group in Chicago on his way to the big time. One night, while cleaning out an empty gas tank, an explosion burned the bottom part of his face beyond recognition. The wounds became infected and doctors were forced to cut the skin around his mouth, nose and chin until all that was left was pus and teeth and jawbone. After more than a year in hospital, Sam was sent to a home for the destitute.
The depression associated with such a trauma offered no hope of returning to polite society, doctors believed, and having his looks taken away came as a tremendous grief for the actor. He soon met a nurse at the home whose husband was a doctor specializing in prosthetics, who agreed to sculpt a mask to conceal the deformity. Around this time, Sam was trying to beat the depression and figured the best way to feel useful again was to get a job, but having to endure stares and scorn from the public while attempting to lead a normal life would have been unbearable. But he had to do something.
It was then that he read an ad in the local newspaper for a carnival opening up for a stay near the home. He took a shot and found Pete Kortes, the man who provided the sideshow for Lynch for years. Sam pulled off his face one day on the lot and Kortes found his new star attraction. The haunting visage underneath was spectacular. Sam’s act was sealed forever: The Man with Two Faces.
He travelled throughout North America revealing himself to onlookers in shady tents across the continent. Behind exaggeratedly painted 115-foot banners blowing in the breeze depicting the freaks to be found inside, Sam Alexander would hold an audience captive with his story. The performance would start with Sam facing the audience, looking dapper and almost handsome in the shadows, as he recounted the terrible and unfortunate circumstances that created the Man with Two Faces before them. The story, told in an unwavering, sober tone, outlined Sam’s start as a promising actor and the role fate would play in his own life tragedy, the night the explosion burned his face. He explained all of this in a calm, detailed monologue, as if it were professional theatre. At the end, Sam would turn his back to the audience, remove the prosthetic mask and face them once more with the whole bottom of his face missing. It was terrifying. Women would cry and others would faint. Stomachs would turn. It was exactly the type of freak show people wanted to see. Kortes quickly made Sam the headline attraction at the ten-in-one (ten sideshows for one admission) with a stern warning that the show was “not for the faint of heart.”
Sam had found a purpose and direction in life thanks to the show. The money he made was spent on corrective surgery over the years, but after over seventy operations hadn’t garnered the results he was looking for, he gave up trying to look like everyone else. Near the end of his life, Sam abandoned the mask and confronted the everyday world with his real face exposed.
But he had found acceptance on the carnival and the sideshow in the early years when it mattered.
“I probably would have ended my days in an institution,” he once said of the sideshow that saved his life, as recorded by Shirley Carroll O’Connor in her book Life is a Circus. “A whole new world opened up for me. I belonged. I was independent and that feeling was shared by all the so-called ‘freaks’ who, like me, would have been warehoused in institutions or hidden away by their relatives.”
They were freaks, yes, but there was dignity in it. The same human desires that appeared in “regular folks” also existed in their deformed bodies. They suffered from that universal malady known as loneliness, but had found purpose and belonging behind the tents.
By the 1960s when Sam was running his own ten-in-one sideshow for Lynch, his world was slowly ending. Sam persevered and brought in the Elephant Skin Boy and the Knotty Knot Man, with bumps all over his body, and the German Giant, but the days of the big tent freakshows were numbered.
Watching the sideshow die for Sam Alexander was as sad an occurrence as there was. It was like his whole existence was questioned. It was hard to let go.
“Do I think our type of attraction will survive?” he said in an undated interview in Fredericton one year. “Well, yes. There’s still human curiosity.”
Back on the Frex Grounds in 1956, the curious myth of the two-legged man was getting to everybody. What did it mean? Who was he and what did he want? It was as if implying that the strangest living creature was in fact a regular, functioning human had violated something sacred.
When the Bill Lynch Shows pulled out of town a week later, over 120,000 legs had passed through the gate, resulting in the Fredericton Exhibition being touted by local newspapers as an overwhelming success. Even Time magazine carried a three-sentence blurb about the mysterious case of the two-legged man. The gag advertisement had worked, the Gleaner affirmed, commending Lynch on the excitement he had created with the ad.
In this latest bit of whimsicality has Bill Lynch reminded Maritimers of a unique facet of their own peculiar heritage? Leavening the more craggy, the more dour aspects of the Maritime character, there has ever been a fey kind of humour that may not be found elsewhere. Are Maritimers losing this saving grace of humour... Are we beginning to take ourselves too seriously? May it never be so.
The greater part of the show was on its way to the Fisheries Fair in Lunenburg and another unit to the fair in Stanley, New Brunswick. The third and fourth units were scattered through Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland. Lynch had started with nothing more than that old steam-powered Merry-Go-Round in 1925, but had managed through good business sense and fair practices to build his shows into the mighty mechanical maze and fabulous fairyland that dazzled a wide cross-section of Atlantic Canadians every summer.
Lynch was a ride enthusiast in the end and the bigger entertainment acts never really appealed to him. Although the Lynch Shows were widely regarded as being of the best on the continent, he was criticized by old showmen for lacking strong tented attractions. In fact, Lynch flew to Salem, Oregon, earlier in the spring of ‘56 to purchase the brand new Round-Up ride – a giant wheel with individual cages that lifted thirty people into orbit by centrifugal force around the axis on sharp angles – billed at the time as the “world’s most exciting ride, a space sensation.” Rides that stretched the mind further than ever before was Lynch’s passion and it all went back to that rickety carousel from McNab’s Island. Rides were the very vehicles that delivered people from the insipid world to The City
of Lights. Lynch had seen it as a kid on the island and he was sure that’s what people wanted here.
“Sure, I could get a lot of the big shows,” he told the Atlantic Advocate in a 1957 interview. “But they come with a big payroll. And where ya gonna get the big dates down in this country? Look, there are about five in a season – Halifax, Sydney, Moncton and the fairs at Charlottetown, Fredericton and Saint John. But ya gotta pay those people if you bring them in here. I know this territory.”
So Lynch focussed on the rides and amassed over fifty of them that he stored at Mount Uniacke when not on the road. That, mixed with the concessions, put him in the same league as major American carnival outfits, ultimately resulting in contract offers for fairs in New England and Quebec. His rides were varied and in top mechanical condition and the sheer number of them put Lynch second on the list of carnival owners in the world behind Conklin, who at the time held the contract for the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto.
Lynch was running a rare show, in that everything on it was “office owned,” meaning that Bill Lynch actually owned near everything on the midway. This was uncommon in the old days of showmen throwing their name on a banner and contracting out rides and joints from independent owners. Lynch actually owned the show on which his name appeared, personally ensuring things were run to his standards. He knew this territory and it was where he wanted to be, fulfilling the fair dates for most Maritime service groups who requested his shows in their communities. Lynch would pull his show into town and stimulate local economies after an invitation extended by the Legion, local fire department or any community group wanting the famed Bill Lynch Shows to spread a little magic and mystery in their town.
“We got good people down here, smart people,” he once said. “We can do anything here they can do anywhere else. Why do we need to go sendin’ to the States for shows when we got just as good right here?”
Lynch’s deep affection for the Maritimes was prevalent in everything he did with his business. He turned down contract offers from the States because he felt strongly that staying here was critical to his success. He saw himself in the same category as successful twentieth-century Maritime business tycoons like K.C. Irving, automobile giant Fred Manning and manufacturing entrepreneur Senator F.W. Pirie.
“They got their money here and they invested it right back into the country,” said Lynch.
That was how he patterned his own successful business. It always made sense to him that people would come to the show. He never felt he was selling them anything or putting them on and a lot of people responded.
Other carnival outfits from Ontario and the United States attempted to enter the region unsuccessfully over the years. In one documented case, an American outfit set up shop and played New Glasgow in 1953. Lynch and his boys moved into Truro that week, bringing with them the fluorescent City of Lights: bigger rides, a couple of free shows, games and the essential music that was the Bill Lynch Shows. Many Nova Scotians drove the sixty-four kilometre distance between towns to accurately gauge the difference. The American show did not return to the region.
People here wanted the Bill Lynch Shows because they knew what they were getting: an honest showman with a show of unmatched magnificence. They were his people, after all, and he was offering them escape, however brief, from the diurnal world of human anxieties and insecurities. More than that, he was sharing his slice of heaven the way he had seen it and felt it on McNab’s all those hot nights decades before. On some perfect days, the calliope whistled its haunting tune in his eardrums while the smell of white spruce and dirt floated past as kids piled in to his show, as adults laughed and clamoured like children themselves, everyone in an ecstatic frenzy of excitement and wonder, the way it had been, only better.
Time was suspended on the fairground; people drifted into realms of infinite impossibility. It was the fountain of youth. Fact was traded back for wonder and nobody was asking for a receipt. You could smell it in the air, feel it on your skin. The heart raced faster to keep up, the lines blurring in the summer breeze as the carnival spun its fantastic tune. The two-legged man in his element, feeling life and celebrating the humanity all around, lost in the glow and innocence of what it meant to be alive. It was only for that brief time of year when the magic appeared one day in your town... And the people were beautiful in a way you never knew before. The carnival was the abstract place in a dream the imagination could never properly sketch.
The human heart has been known to create rising waves of rapacity, causing men to keep their own private paradise to themselves. But selfishness never entered Lynch’s bloodstream. He understood everybody deserved the chance to experience the magic he felt at least once.
“Some people consider amusement of a superficial nature,” he told The Maritime Advocate and Busy East in 1946. “Personally, I can’t subscribe to that. Escapism, make-believe, the search for even a momentary relief from the monotony of everyday living – these are pretty fundamental characteristics of human nature.
“If you look into the past you will find that the wandering minstrel was a welcome visitor at the hall of the medieval lord; the foreign fellow with a trained bear and a curious monkey came early to the village green; acrobats and jugglers at fair and marketplace were familiar to Chaucer. So I believe that the man or woman who spends an hour on a midway in 1946 is motivated by the identical force which created Greek drama and prompted the Romans to build the Circus and the Coliseum. Escapism, make-believe – they’re pretty fundamental springs of human behaviour... or so the psychologists tell us.”
If Irving and Manning were Lynch’s business ilk, then his spiritual kin were men like R.B Bennet, Lord Beaverbrook, Sir James Dunn and Izaak Walton Killam – self-made Maritimers who never forgot where they came from even after earning millions in different pursuits. They were better known for their philanthropic gestures than the money they made and Lynch fashioned his life to that same tune.
“If I am to be remembered, I want to be thought well of for my gestures,” he said in an interview with the Halifax Chronicle Herald shortly before his death in 1972. “You just can’t take it with you, so I figure you have to leave something behind in the way of good will.”
He felt more comfortable hanging out in all-night diners with guys like carnival cookhouse owner John Goldie than sipping scotch from behind giant ascots with high-society big shots. Lynch’s face was more likely to appear in the newspaper on a clown’s body in an ad for the show than in the society pages. He never mingled in the wealthy, elite circles his money afforded him, choosing instead to live amongst regular folks. Or nobody at all.
Lynch was a solitary man with no documented social phobia, but definitely not a person who craved attention. He would walk around his midway, stopping to chat at Goldie’s cookhouse or to toss balls at bowling pins on one of the joints occasionally. But he was always changing trajectories, like one of his rides in the afternoon, and had the propensity to be absorbed in business at all times. He had friendly relationships with a few of his foremen, local politicians and community leaders all over the Atlantic provinces, but his private life remained private. He was married to Marjorie MacFarlane for thirty-four years, but the two never had any children of their own and nobody can say for sure why not. Lynch always shared a special affection for children and went out of his way to make life better for them.
Most of the old workers who remember him do so with vague thoughts of the cigar smoke and the notion of the man everybody respected.
“If his handshake was there, the deal was done,” recalls John Morris, one afternoon at the Halifax Exhibition Grounds. Morris started working for Lynch in the 1930s. “The patrons never had any problems with the show. Bill was very sticklish about that. They were right and we were definitely always wrong, even though we had our own opinions.”
Bill Harroun, a ride supervisor for Lynch, recalls his former boss as a quiet man wh
o kept to himself.
“Some people probably thought Bill Lynch was a bit of a weird man,” he says on a breezy late spring afternoon from the porch of his home near the old warehouse in Mount Uniacke. Now in his eighties, Harroun recently retired from the carnival business because he didn’t like the way it had changed. “We never saw him all day. He never came around the show until after everyone was closing up at night-time. Then he’d stay there until three or four o’clock in the morning before he’d go home. On rainy days he’d relax a bit, but mostly he was all business.”
Writer Fred H. Phillips knew Lynch on a somewhat personal level, working with the showman on different projects over the years concerning the Fredericton Exhibition. Phillips also worked with Lynch on some occasions as a press agent for the shows. He once wrote that Lynch’s success was due to “the determination of a proud, shy man to excel in his own territory.”
He added that Lynch was “a loner by nature and a great off-season traveller. Bill knows more about the remote corners of Central America and the lesser islands of the Caribbean than his friends realize.”
Lynch remains mysterious in a number of ways. There are sparse documents or photos of the freak shows in circulation for the obvious reason that photos and stories would have given the mystery away and the carnival has always maintained a secretive air above all else. Lynch, himself, remains in the same light. He’s the man who invited people into his world and then disappeared when they approached. He understood it was never about him and was happier in the shadows. The night offered his own escape, away from the crowds.
It was only after his death in 1972 that the true picture of Bill Lynch became a shade less foggy. Everyone knew Lynch picked sooty-faced little urchins off the midway and plunked them down on rides for free, or how disadvantaged kids would be blessed with free tickets to the show, but nobody knew the real depths of his benevolence. Those are the kinds of stories of a man’s life that only get revealed after death.
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