Under the Electric Sky

by Christopher A. Walsh

  Lynch again sought the shadows when it came to his charitable donations. He was a regular contributor to children’s organizations, but never publicized any of it. (The Bill Lynch Memorial Fund, administered by the Halifax Herald was established after his death to continue donating to some of his favourite charities.)

  His sister, Gladys Conrad, told a few stories after Lynch’s passing, ones that are still told today – stories that demonstrate precisely Lynch’s deep devotion to the people of Atlantic Canada. They’ve been adopted over the years by carnies as sacred parables.

  In Newfoundland one year, Lynch found a little girl with tears in her eyes wandering the fairgrounds by herself. A crying child on his midway was not in keeping with the world he had created. He quickly discovered the girl had no money and notified his operators that she was to be allowed on any and all rides of her choosing for as long as she pleased. He then left the girl to her own imagination and made some inquiries about her. Lynch stopped in at the little girl’s home to find other small children living with their mother after their father had abandoned them. For the rest of his life, he would make regular visits and send gifts of money to the family to help them along.

  In other cases, he would visit hospitals throughout the Maritimes and pay the bills of some of the more impoverished patients, without any recognition. Never did he feel the need to let people know of his philanthropic deeds. It was the right thing to do, so he did it.

  In some Maritime communities the silver-haired showman would burst into orphanages throughout the countryside chomping down on the cigar, and abduct all the kids to the fair for the day free of charge. There’d be buses outside and too many wonderful pleasures for the children at the end of the ride. It was always children that made Lynch happy. He had seen how it could be and remembered what life was like as a child at the fair: the wonder, the excitement, the magic that made everything seem possible, if only for a few glorious hours.

  An article in the July 14, 1934 edition of The Sydney Post informs the people of Glace Bay that next Wednesday afternoon was designated as a free kids’ day:

  …the children of the town, whose parents are not in a position to give them any money to pay for a ride on the Merry-Go-Round or the other amusements at Lynch’s shows now playing on the common... will be the guest of manager Bill Lynch, who is going to treat the less fortunate kiddies to a two hour picnic, during which they will be given free rides on all the rides, and admitted free to the other amusements suitable for children.

  And always – always – handicapped people would ride free on the rides whenever they pleased. That went without saying and the workers knew it. That was bringing joy to people who didn’t have a lot of it and Lynch made sure there was time for that.

  There is no way to measure the effect Lynch’s generosity had on the region, but he had certainly accomplished his goals on his own terms. He had managed to change the face of the carnival and create an entertainment experience like nothing anyone here had ever seen before. He also left a legacy of goodwill behind and not just in the form of money. Although his will offered strict instructions that his money – estimated to be around $3 million (not counting the value of the show) made in different pursuits, including the stock market – be donated to his favourite handicapped and children’s charities, he had changed lives in other ways, too, and the reverberations are still being felt today.

  I Yam What I Yam – Halifax, 2009

  It’s a cold, damp, late April afternoon in Halifax as I approach Gordon B. Isnor Manor on Cornwallis Street in the heart of the North End. The building is one of the largest regional housing authority’s residences, a giant sixteen-story concrete monstrosity overlooking Citadel Hill on the east side, filled to the top with poor and elderly Haligonians on the inside. The smell in the hallway at night is a sickly sweet odour of poverty.

  While struggling as a freelance journalist in Halifax years ago, I took a job with a security company to supplement my almost non-existent freelance salary. On a few separate nights I was dispatched to Isnor Manor for the midnight to seven a.m. shift. I’d make rounds every hour through the halls and on more than one occasion discovered deeply offensive odours seeping out from behind heavily painted doors. In some cases an acrid, wholly human scent would creep up my nostrils, generating a tinge of panic. I have never had the misfortune of smelling a decomposing body, but I imagine the stink permeating from some of those apartments is as close as I’ve come. I contemplated whether or not to notify higher authorities on certain dark nights there but thought better of it. Nobody ever complained and I figured they had grown accustomed to it.

  On this foggy spring day I was back at the building to talk to one of its residents. I rang an apartment on the ninth floor and a man named Popeye buzzed me up. We had met the year before in Dartmouth when the carnival was at Penhorn Mall but had never managed to connect for a longer discussion than the few words we shared while he ran the Alligator kiddie ride.

  When I stepped out of the elevator, the smell was neutral. To the right, through a large floor-to-ceiling window, was downtown Halifax and the Hill. Behind the buildings sat McNabs Island, resting peacefully in the harbour like a forgotten, forested suburb in the fog. Popeye greeted me in the hallway and we went inside his apartment.

  He looked different a year later, out of context. The eyes that had once popped with flickers of sparks on the midway were tired somehow. He appeared contemplative and his mood was more sedate than I remembered. It was difficult to distinguish between the man before me and the big guy with a Maritime Midways ballcap resting on the top of his head with tufts of hair from the side jumping out around the bottom of it like an old clown’s hairdo, while he teased kids playfully on the lot. He was smiling that infamous carny grin like a man possessed with meaning in the sun that day.

  “You two aren’t married, are ya?” he had shouted at a pair of toddlers as they hopped aboard the giant alligator. They looked puzzled, but their mother was laughing and the children told ol’ Popeye, no, they’re not married with a little kiddie giggle. This is what Popeye lives for. He’s been working on carnivals for over thirty-five years and has a natural showman’s charm on the lot. Kids remember him and parents know they can trust him to make sure nothing happens to their children.

  Popeye’s been doing it so long, parents remember him when they were kids, when he would secure them into a ride while cracking a few jokes.

  “I must be doing something right if they can remember me for so long,” says the introspective Popeye at his kitchen table. “I still have people coming up to me: ‘Popeye, man, I remember you when I was this high.’ Well, good, I’m glad I’m doing something you can remember.”

  He smiles casually and lights a cigarette, cracking the window for air. It’s obvious he cares about proper ventilation and I doubt any bad smells originate from his place. The smoke swirls out of Popeye’s lungs in strings and flutters out the window in a wisp. Carnies are beautiful smokers, like the cigarette is an extension of some part of their personality that needs to be emitted every few minutes as a cleansing ritual.

  I light a cigarette and look around his small apartment. The walls are decorated in various Popeye the Sailor memorabilia, including a large plastic figurine and a neon clock. The floors are linoleum, the same kind found in sanatoriums and elementary schools. Popeye sits back in his chair as the fog outside creeps up to the ninth floor, obscuring the view.

  “I’ve been a tramp my whole life. Just a plain ol’ ordinary tramp,” he spits out. Over the years, Popeye’s itinerant habits have led to long-term connections with people throughout the region. He’s had a place to stay in nearly every town the show played. Sometimes a local would charge a few bucks for a warm bed for a night and a meal, but most would just invite him home for the company. “Won’tyacumhome,” expressed properly, was usually the start of a series of gestures ultimately resulting in early
morning suppers in strange homes throughout the Maritimes and a few good laughs with a friendly soul. And, of course, he also had female acquaintances in “every port.”

  “I’m luckier than a lot of carnies because of the fact of my personality. A lot of people have got to know me. I’m accepted as Uncle Popeye, some of the kids have adopted me as their dad, I’m the brother and everything else. That means a lot to me.”

  Skilled as a cook, a sailor, a welder and able to tackle engineering work, Popeye figured if the carnival business never panned out he would leave and have enough options to fall back on.

  “If I wanted I could have went back to the real world anytime and got a job being paid a lot more than we were there,” he says. But the carnival held a special place in his heart. He could play out the part of his personality that would lay dormant in those other positions.

  “The pay was more of a bonus. I told them many times before, if it ever started to look like a job, I’d quit and go back to the real world.”

  But thirty-five years later, there isn’t a lot to fall back on.

  “If they could put my body in a coffin in the back end of the truck, I’d probably go to another spot,” he says. “When they finally pronounce me dead, I know some of my kids and a lot of people will probably want a second opinion.”

  Popeye does have biological children of his own, although marrying was never an option. It wasn’t fair to any woman, he says, because he would be on the road most of the time. Sacrificing the traditional family type of existence was just a necessary forfeiture to live the life of a carny. Looking out for yourself was far easier than worrying about a family. He wriggles a bit in his chair and looks around, like something is on his mind.

  “Planned parenthood was never in the grand scheme,” he finally lets out. Then he says something about people possibly coming close on a guess as to the number of kids he has, but not close enough. So, after a few seconds of contemplation perhaps spent working out a mathematical equation, he sets the record straight.

  “It sounds almost like bragging – and it’s stupidity on my behalf – but I’ve got seventeen kids by fifteen different mothers.”

  Something about the declaration was not surprising. The kids are the result of a nomadic life spent sailing with the navy and touring with the carnival. I would have been more surprised to hear he had two kids, a wife and a mortgage. He lights another cigarette and leans back in the chair.

  “I’ve remained friends with the mothers of the kids, but I don’t see them much,” he says.

  While it is coincidence Popeye was in the navy, he says his carny nickname was bestowed on him by a child on the lot unaware of his past.

  “I had a four-year-old come up to me one day and haul on my shirt,” he recalls. “I turned around and said, ‘What do you want, little buddy?’ And he says, ‘I seen you on TV today, Popeye.’ The cartoons were always on back then. That name stuck. Granted, I’m happy it was that name because there’s a lot of names you really wouldn’t want to be stuck with.”

  The kid thought he sounded like Popeye the Sailor, not because of any physical resemblance like a missing eye or freakishly large forearms. The voice is close if one had a vivid imagination, but this Popeye has a deeper tone than his cartoon namesake and it’s doubtful he has a can of stimulating leafy vegetable in the cupboard.

  I ask what the carnival means to him and it becomes clear why he’s subdued today. The carnival, for everything it means to different people, is his spinach, the stimulant that gives his life purpose. In the off-season he’s the shy loner who lives day to day without much excitement. In a half hour, he’s heading down to the local church to volunteer for a few hours.

  “When the lights go on, I am a showman,” he explains. “I’m a hundred percent different from the person I normally am. I want to show people we’re fun and loving and actually care that they’re having a good time on the show because I do. You gotta love working with people or you’re not gonna make it.”

  Popeye’s first glimpse of the carnival came as a five-year-old boy in 1956, the same year the two-legged man was spotted in Fredericton. His father had left his mother to raise three boys on the $25 a week she brought in. She couldn’t possibly support her sons on that, so she would leave them at the orphanage in Saint John for weeks at a time. It was the only way they would be looked after properly and fed. One day, a man named Bill Lynch swept into the establishment, chomping down on a cigar, telling the fat old lady at the front desk that he was taking all the kids to the fair for the day. No expense, ma’am, it’s all on the show. Popeye and a dozen or so other kids were taken to a place they had never imagined existed. Not even in dreams could a place look like this. It was...the City of Lights.

  They spent the most glorious of all days caught up in ecstatic wonder as they took turns on the twin Ferris Wheels and the Chair-O-Plane, stretching their minds to the breaking point. Their veins almost burst from sugar and grease. And their little orphan souls filled with something nobody had given them to this point: the sense that anything was possible.

  “This was really something big for me because it was the first time I had ever been on a carnival,” recalls a fifty-eight-year-old man at a kitchen table, his chin pushed forward, the bottom lip touching his grey moustache. “I never saw anything like it. All these big rides, ya know? It was a major playground. In one way you could say I got hooked because I liked what he was doing.”

  Popeye went back to the orphanage that night but never forgot the feeling that twitched through his nerves as he tried to sleep. Twenty years later, after being discharged from the military, he arrived back in Saint John where the Bill Lynch Shows happened to be playing. He asked for a job and impressed Soggy Reid during tear-down.

  “I started working with them and got hooked. I liked the job, I liked working with the people,” he says. “I know a lot of people who would never be able to handle that stuff. It’s not as easy as you think.

  “But I love working with the kids. I like making them happy.”

  There is no doubt Popeye likes working with kids, entertaining them for hours as they loop around the track inside the giant alligator. He has a natural ease with children and enjoys making them laugh while providing the best time they’ve ever had at a carnival. Despite other career options, he had found his life’s work and stuck with the carnival.

  But Popeye’s comment about making kids happy has been adopted by just about every carny on the lot these days as some sort of ill-conceived and hollow mantra. Every guy I asked why he chose to work on the carnival would come back with some variation of “You know why I do it, man? Because of the look in the kids’ faces. It’s the little kids and it’s pretty cool...” After a few weeks of this, I was beginning to believe these guys had missed their true calling as daycare attendants or wet nurses.

  By the time I heard that refrain from a twenty-two-year-old with a pierced face and a drink in his hand I was tired of it. There was no logical reason for him to be out here “for the kids”. None of them started at sixteen because they took delight in watching giggling children ride around in circles on fibreglass horses. They started because they wanted to leave home and had no other options. What does a Maritime boy do when he drops out of school and has nothing to fall back on, no individual set of skills that sets him apart and makes him valuable? Some will take menial jobs at fast-food joints or manual labour where they can find it. The rest – the adventurous breed – will either join the military or the carnival. Or become truck drivers.

  Today’s carnival is littered with stories of guys joining up with stars in their eyes. It was rock and roll in their hometown when the carnival showed up. It represented something none of them could put into words. Here it was in all its shining, whizzing, flashing beauty: a ticket out of town. An easy and exciting way to leave behind your miserable upbringing, the abuse or poverty or whatever it was th
at made you want to get out and live by your own rules. They became a part of the happening, a part of the thing that would change their lives forever and give it purpose.

  It was never reality, but that was what they needed. It was escape from life, for people with nothing else working for them. The unintended consequence of Lynch offering “escapism and make-believe” was that it attracted certain people who couldn’t let go. People who wanted it all to go on forever so they never had to face the real world or come to terms with the insignificant position they had carved out for themselves on the social totem pole.

  It was impossible to dislike the gig, as one guy told me, because “where else do you get to throw a party for hundreds of strangers every night?”

  There’s a certain type of reckless freedom that comes with a carnival job and a lot of them cannot give that up. You get working the magical, rock-and-roll, City of Lights as a kid; drinking and doing drugs and fighting and partying every night and you get caught up in it all. It becomes your life, not a job in any sense. Then one day you wake up and you’re 35 and a breeze of cold reality brushes your adult face and things are different.

  A lot of carnies, as young as their thirties, have already given up on the notion of pursuing other lines of work. They’ve done it for most of their lives and have resigned themselves to sticking it out until they die, with no regrets. Nothing they would be qualified for would come close to satisfying their ingrained itinerant condition the way the carnival does.

  “It’s all I’ve done my whole life, so I’d kinda like to keep doing it. What else is out there for me?” Bill offers on the lot one day.