by Fred Rosen
Ten
For the remarried Stiles and Newman families, the 1980s were a constant struggle.
Glenn’s tire business failed. One day during a welding job, Glenn fell fifteen feet to the ground and hurt his back. Shortly after that, he began to use a wheelchair to get around. Money was tight.
As for home life, Donna remembers it was a time where there was no real fighting, no real arguing. Teresa would have her mood swings; Donna thought that was just natural, especially considering how much she had to wait on Glenn.
In his younger days in the carnival, Glenn was spry as could be. He ran around and jumped nimbly up into the back of trucks. That was in the past.
“Glenn would have her [Teresa] wait on him because he was so small he couldn’t reach everything,” Donna recalls. And being in the wheelchair, his mobility was cut down even further.
To support his family, Glenn went out on the road with a show he called The World’s Smallest Man. Donna accompanied him, to help out in the carnival.
Teresa stayed home to take care of the kids. On weekends, she’d visit. Unlike Grady, Glenn liked being near home. He never toured more than four hundred miles from their house.
When school finished, she would pack up her kids and go out on the road with Glenn and Donna, and help out in the carnival. She sold tickets, helped to set up and tear down the tent, and took care of the bookkeeping.
It was a hardscrabble life, like any seasonal trade. At some point, the family moved back to Smock, Pennsylvania. Regardless of where they were, Glenn always managed to pay their bills.
Everyone who knows Glenn, or has ever met him, looks upon him as the nicest of human beings. He treated Teresa’s kids as kindly as his own son, Glenn, Jr.
For Teresa, it was the first time in her life she lived in a relatively stable environment, with a man who really loved her.
However, as time passed, Teresa grew restless, tired of having to cater to her husband’s disabilities. “They just couldn’t get along at all,” says Donna.
They decided to seek a divorce. Teresa felt she could have a better life. There must be a man out there who could give her more than Glenn was able to give her. A powerful, successful man—like her former husband, Grady Stiles, Jr.
“I was very angry. I was angry at her for even thinking about talking to him. Because I really hated him,” Donna says.
“Donna, you know,” Teresa continued, “it’s been a long time. He’s probably changed.”
In her bones, Donna knew otherwise, but she held her tongue.
“I still love your dad,” Teresa continued quietly.
Donna just could not understand. How could she love someone that had beaten her up so badly?
Teresa phoned Grady and began to rekindle their relationship. Seeing her interest, Grady tried to buy her back. When Teresa was short of cash, he sent her money. She responded to his charm and assurances of sobriety as well.
The phone calls became more frequent.
“I still wouldn’t talk to him on the phone. And she wouldn’t really talk about him too much with us—with me,” Donna recalls. “She would talk a little bit more to Cathy than to me.”
During the time that she and Grady were becoming reacquainted, Teresa decided to move the family once again, this time down south to Okeechobee, central Florida. Grady, meanwhile, after his divorce from Barbara, had relocated back to Gibsonton.
Soon after they were settled in Okeechobee, Donna was dating a quiet young man named Joe Miles. They fell in love and got engaged.
Joe’s parents owned an eating establishment called the Angus Restaurant. Teresa decided that for her next date with Grady, they’d meet there. It’d be nice and neat. One set of future in-laws meeting another set of future in-laws.
“Donna, can you please—you and Cathy, please come in [the restaurant] and see your dad. He’s not like he used to be. Please, for my sake, do it for me,” Teresa pleaded.
“We both talked to him, Cathy and me, and said hello. And he didn’t drink. That bar was sitting right there and he never had a drink.”
Sometimes, Teresa would take the kids along on their dates. Donna remembers driving over to his house in Gibsonton and going inside.
The place was a total disaster, always filthy, always dirty.
“Mom would come in and pick Dad up, take him out to dinner. The date after the Angus, when we went up to the house, [he] gave her a big kiss and a hug. And he was really nice. He didn’t holler; he talked very softly. They went out holding hands.”
Grady was even nice to Teresa and Glenn’s son, Glennie, the same child who witnessed Grady’s assault on his mother years before. Grady showered the entire family with presents. Donna and Cathy got gold necklaces with their initials carved in gold.
Yet, despite all the hatred Donna felt toward her father, watching him with Teresa, the way she enjoyed being in his company, she decided to give him one more chance.
“I love him, Mom,” Donna told her mother.
“You’re not the same as you used to be,” she told Grady with a goodbye hug at the end of a date. “I love you.”
“I don’t think I ever started loving my father like a dad again. My mom didn’t know that, though.”
While Donna says she never could love her father again, she recalls thinking that she tried to build a “liking” relationship. As for his abstinence, “It scared me. It scared me remembering what he was, what he was like, and then seeing him, what he was doing. It was like Jekyll and Hyde there. I was scared. I was nervous. I was cautious.”
Now that they were a family again, it was time to take to the road. Grady needed everyone’s help with his “10 in 1” show. Donna, in particular, had promised to help him at the Dallas Fair.
Grady rented Teresa a spanking new motor home. On the road, she occupied it, along with Donna, Cathy, and Glennie. Grady and Little Grady bunked in an older trailer. In the evening, Grady would come over, and they’d have dinner like a family. On the nights he worked, he’d eat right on the platform where he did his act.
Meanwhile, Teresa disapproved of the way the relationship between Donna and Joe was progressing, and they rarely spoke about it. Grady, though, was different.
Once again, Donna confronted her father with news of her impending nuptials. A sense of fear overwhelmed her.
“There’s this guy that asked me to marry him.”
Donna showed him Joe’s picture. He was still in Okeechobee.
“I really want to go,” Donna continued. “I know I promised you I would work Dallas for you, but I got to go back [to Okeechobee].”
“I don’t blame you,” said Grady. “Do you love him? Are you in love with him? Does he love you?”
“Yes, definitely.”
“Okay,” Grady said firmly.
He took a wad of bills from his pocket, and peeled off three hundred dollars. It was payment for working the previous date. “And I’m buying you a plane ticket home.”
Was this the same Grady, the one who had murdered Jack? Now, he was not only giving her his blessing, he was putting his money where his mouth was.
Donna was finally won over. Teresa was right; Grady had changed.
After that, Donna and Teresa made up, with Grady acting as mediator.
In January of 1989, Joe Miles married Donna Marie Stiles. It was a new life for Donna. This time, it would work out.
Teresa and Grady decided to live together on Inglewood Drive and remarried soon after.
Grady had done it. He had changed. He had turned over a new leaf. He had sought and received redemption from his family.
Donna noticed the first changes a few months after her parents remarried. She and Joe came down from Okeechobee to visit.
“Where’s Dad?” she asked her mother when they arrived.
“He’s, uh, he’s out.”
“Out where, Mom?”
“A bar. He’s out at a bar.”
“Mom, why don’t we—”
“I don’t
want to talk about it!” And that ended the discussion.
Donna and Joe came to visit again two weeks later. They noticed the half-pint of booze on the countertop, and another one under the sink in the kitchen. Grady had fallen off the wagon completely. He was drinking in the house.
“Mom, if he’s starting to drink again, then he’s going to be mean,” Donna warned. “Why don’t you just say forget it, you and Glennie come back with me and Joe. I can put you up in a trailer in the park.”
“No, Donna,” Teresa replied firmly. “I can’t leave your dad now. I can’t leave him. He don’t got nobody to take care of him.”
After that, Teresa clammed up and wouldn’t talk about what was going on.
For her part, Donna noticed a difference in her father. His eyes, always an icy blue, turned cold as a winter’s day in Chicago. His face took on a hardened look.
Before they remarried, he’d had a ready smile. He never smiled now. Unhappy, he just sat in his armchair, drinking Seagram’s and Coke while the TV droned on. Sometimes, he broke the monotony. He went down to get drunk at Showtown USA. It was like Grady was marking time, waiting for something to happen.
With the booze came the abuse … again. Suddenly, the good times prior to their remarriage were gone, the years with Glenn obliterated, and she was back in the pain again, reeling from Grady’s physical and verbal abuse.
One night during the summer of 1991 while the carnival played New York, Grady was out playing cards. When he returned, he told Teresa, “Fix me a drink.”
Teresa took it to him in the bedroom of their trailer. “This is the last drink I’m going to get you,” she warned.
Grady grabbed a handful of Teresa’s hair, twisted it and pulled her head back, trying all the while to pull the hair out of her scalp. He pulled her head back so hard that she thought he was going to break her neck. He was strong enough to do it.
“Fix me another drink,” he shouted.
“We got no more booze,” Teresa spit the words out painfully. “There’s no more booze,” she repeated.
Grady pressed his claw into Teresa’s throat, just under her jawbone. It was so painful, it felt like he was going to push it clear through her throat. Finally, he let her go.
“Go out and find a bottle of liquor,” Grady ordered. She left the trailer. Outside in the darkness, Teresa remembered feeling she had had enough.
Grady was just too damn mean. What right did he have abusing her and her children? She felt desperate and alone. The trucks they traveled in were parked nearby. They beckoned, with their promise of safety. Yet Teresa chose to stay and endure the abuse.
Eleven
In April 1992, fifty-four-year-old Grady Stiles took to the road to play the carnival circuit one more time. He had begun as a seven-year-old in 1944.
Most of the others, who, like him, exploited their appearance, had either died out or retired. The few who remained were relabeled “physically challenged” by reformers, who urged the public to stay away from their exploitation, despite the fact that it was the only way these “physically challenged” individuals could make money. But nothing had stopped Grady yet—not time, not age, not cirrhosis, not emphysema, not even the law.
Looking forward to a profitable summer, Grady took along the whole family.
Donna and Joe ran the gorilla illusion, where a girl mysteriously turns into a gorilla right before the customers’ eyes.
Daughter Cathy, who had married, and son-in-law Tyrill ran the animal oddities exhibit, which included a two-headed raccoon, and different types of shrunken animal heads. All you had to do was pay the nominal admission price to see nature’s mistakes.
Grady himself ran the “10 in 1.” Lobster Boy was the star attraction. Stepson Glenn, son Little Grady, and wife Teresa helped out wherever they were needed.
By the end of April, they had gotten as far north as Virginia. They were playing Military Circle, a mall in Norfork. It was there, set up in the mall’s parking lot, that Grady realized he needed a new bally man to draw the crowds.
While Joe fronted the gorilla show, someone was needed to do the same for the “10 in 1.” It was a desperate situation.
The “10 in 1” was the family’s biggest moneymaker. Inside, marks could see everything from “The Human Pincushion” and Glennie as The Human Blockhead to a snake charmer and sword swallower. But without an expert enough bally man to get the marks into the tent, the summer of 1992 could be the worst ever.
Luckily, a young performer known as Merman the Magician needed a job and heard about the opportunity from a friend.
Merman drove down to the carnival and met Grady and Teresa. Grady did all the talking; Teresa stood behind the wheelchair, eyeing the magician closely.
Grady liked what he saw. Here was a well-spoken, good-looking guy with blond hair, blue eyes, and sandy mustache. The girls would love him. And he did magic, which the kids loved. “I also eat fire,” Merman added. And he’d had some limited carnival experience.
“Great, we want you,” Grady decided. “You’ll bally the ‘ten in one’ and run it. Do some magic, eat some fire.”
“What’s the wage?”
“Your pay is ten percent of the gate after the rent is paid.”
“Done.”
They each had personal details to work out before Merman came on board. It was agreed that Merman would join the show that June at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, New York an all event indoor stadium, best known to sports fans as the home of the New York Islanders hockey team.
“We had a helluva good spot on the midway there. I worked my ass off,” Merman recalls.
Sporting a tuxedo at night, Merman was the best-dressed guy on the midway.
“I stood there and called people until my voice was gone. I was standing up there with no voice, flagging these people and begging them to come into the tent and, of course, Joe was on the other end. They had the gorilla show going,” says Merman.
Almost immediately, trouble started.
“Joe was jealous of me,” Merman recalls. “See, he was like the head guy until I got there. He ran everything. When I got there, he kinda got pushed to the side a little bit.”
Joe would tell the roustabouts to do one thing while Merman told them something else. That meant nothing got done. Merman told Grady, “If you want me to run this show, get this guy the hell out of it. I can’t tell these guys to do one thing and then have him come in and tell them to do something else. It’s causing too much confusion.”
Grady sided with Merman.
“Joe got bent all out of shape. There was a big fight and he [Joe] was going to take the truck, take the camper, and just drive the hell off and leave Grady there. Grady said, ‘You’re not going to do any such thing.’
“Grady wheeled his chair in between the camper and the truck so if he [Joe] was going to pull off, he was gonna run Grady’s ass over. He pulled the truck right up on him and was pushing the chair. The police came and kinda broke it up,” Merman continues.
It quickly became evident to Merman that the season was being compromised.
“He was having so [many] problems with the family, they had to play a couple of bad spots just because he couldn’t get along with these guys. I mean, the season was screwed, primarily because of the problems he was having with Joe and Donna, but Teresa was taking sides, primarily against Grady. And Grady was stuck. His wife and these other people; he couldn’t do the shit by himself.”
That was a fact. The large truck and campers the Stileses traveled with contained all their carnival paraphernalia, including the huge canvas tent that housed the “10 in 1,” the accoutrements of the gorilla show, Tyrill’s caged-animal oddities, and the exhibition stages that had to be set up at every stop. There was no way that Grady could set everything up. He needed the help of his family.
After the coliseum event, the Stiles caravan made its way to Brockton, Massachusetts.
“Brockton was, like, worse than the South Bronx. Police walking
around fairgrounds in gangs of ten or more. Kids walking with sticks and knives, and pulling blades on gangs of policemen. One guy [a carny] was stabbed because he wouldn’t put mustard on this guy’s hot dog,” Merman says.
It was in Brockton that the open dissension between Grady and his family really started.
“What happened was, they set the ‘ten in one’ and the gorilla show up side by side. And, of course, anytime you run two ballys, the first bally does his pitch and then when that breaks, as soon as that breaks, the second bally starts his pitch.”
Normally, two ballys are never supposed to be set up side by side because of competition. Fairs try to break them up by having a kiddie ride or something else in between. For some reason, that just didn’t work in Brockton, and Merman and Joe were working side by side.
“I would go out on the front stage and call all these people up to come inside our tent. When I was done, Joe’s show was supposed to start their gig and call whoever was left into his tent. That didn’t set well with Joe.
“‘No, no,’ Joe disagreed. ‘I gotta go first.’
“We’re gonna make more money because I’ve got live stuff going on and there’ll be more people that we turn away than you’ll turn away,” Merman pointed out.
Again, Joe disagreed adamantly.
“Fine,” Merman replied with a sigh, wishing to avoid further argument. “Have at it.”
“So he’d [Joe] go and do his pitch,” Merman continues. “I’d start my pitch after he was finished, and before I had even finished my pitch, Joe was back. See, his show only ran five to ten minutes. After his show was over, he’d immediately come right out and start his pitch again. I’d still be finishing up my pitch. It was stupid because most of the money was all going to the same place. It was all Grady’s money. They got their percentage but, Jesus Christ, we all worked for the same person.
“Anyway, he kept doing this shit and then he got all pissed off, and run over and started poking his finger in my face. And then he balled his fist up and took a swing at me, so I clocked him.
