Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles (42 page)

computer cabinet and a wooden credenza. A picture of the Last Supper

laminated onto wood with scalloped edges hangs over the television.

Only a few small photos and awards on a shelf and a wad of promo-

tional T-shirts in a corner hint at their careers. It’s clean, comfy, and

thankfully, air-conditioned.

Chris turns down the volume on the news and warns Ward that he

only has another half hour before he needs to leave to see Little Pete in

proof

the assisted-living facility. Ward looks at the clock and says we’ve got

an hour. Chris doesn’t argue and sinks back into the couch.

Ward and Chris have been together for more than forty years. Chris

is tall in a lumbering, gentle-giant way with thinning wavy brown

hair and a quiet reserve, a yin to Ward’s yang. He’s about twenty years

younger than Ward and was a sideshow knife thrower when they met

shortly after the death of Ward’s longtime partner Harry Leonard

“Leonardo,” who was also a knife thrower. I’m not sure what that says

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about Ward’s taste in men. His sexuality is one of the few things Ward

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rarely talks about.

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Settling into his easy chair, Ward says he saw his first sideshow for

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a dime when he nine years old. He only remembers the magic act and

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that the magician sold little bags of paper magic tricks for a quarter,

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which Ward couldn’t afford. This was during the Great Depression,

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and Ward lived with his dad in a Denver boardinghouse. A few years

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later when his dad got a better job, he gave Ward enough change to see

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another sideshow. This time Ward left with a bag of tricks—spinning

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paper dolls and folded coin hiders—and plans to create and sell his

own. He couldn’t afford paper and had to resort to palming it from

hotel lobbies. At night he’d cut out copies of the tricks and stow them

away for the act he one day hoped to have. At fourteen, he worked in

the summer as a circus prop boy. The next spring he took a job as a

clown with the Sun Brock’s Super Colossal Wild West Show & Holly-

wood Thrill Circus. “I didn’t know anything about being a clown, and

when I started, I greased my face with Crisco. The show was really bad,”

Ward laughs. The circus as a whole had problems and was shut down

after only two weeks; the owner was jailed for false advertising and a

string of code violations. Someone wasn’t happy about the discrepancy

between the bally and what they found inside the tent.

Afterward Ward spotted an ad for a circus sideshow magician and a

fire-eater in
Billboard
magazine. “I did not have a clue how to do magic

tricks, and I did not have a clue how to eat fire,” Ward says. He didn’t

confess this or that he was only fifteen to the circus owner. Not that

it would have mattered. America was at war and there was a shortage

of able-bodied young men to keep the shows running. The Daily Bros.

Circus welcomed him to their winter quarters in Gonzales, Texas.

Ward says he read up on magic tricks and eating fire at the library.

“I bought some gasoline and went up on the roof of the boardinghouse

proof

to practice about every two to three days because I would burn myself

every time and it would take two or three days to heal up,” he says.

Saving tips from waiting tables, he bought bus fare to Texas. Then he

was off, on his way to join the circus with only two dollars, a steamer

trunk filled with handmade paper magic tricks, and a thirty-five-cent

fancy jacket he’d picked up at a thrift store.

Fortunately for him, the show’s opening was delayed, and he was

able to learn enough about magic and fire from other performers to

pass come opening day. Even at fifteen, Ward seems to have been

more interested in being a salesman. “From the first day I stepped on

a sideshow stage, I was in business for myself selling packages of the

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magic tricks I had made from the stationery in the hotels,” he says grin-

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ning. He sold the bags for twenty-five cents apiece; as he got better, he

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started selling them for a dollar. “I really started making some money

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after that.”

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A showman was born.

He says he picked up other acts as well from veteran performers. By

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season’s end he knew some ventriloquism, marionettes, and a music

act playing a cross saw and whiskey bottles. Harry, who became his

friend and partner, taught him knife throwing.

Looking back, Ward says, “I think they probably would have fired me

when they took one look at me, but I was willing to do anything that

they wanted me to do, and I worked like hell. That year my call was ei-

ther five in the morning or when the train got in, whichever came first.”

In addition to performing, he helped put up and take down tents and

did whatever backbreaking manual labor was needed. “I worked very

hard, but I was doing what I wanted to do. That’s the main thing. I was

with the circus.”

The phone on the kitchen bar rings. Ward answers in his matter-

of-fact phone voice. It’s clearly a business call, and he’s off in less than

two minutes. “They want me to emcee a show at Lincoln Center in New

York,” he tells Chris calmly, as if this is an everyday occurrence.

Chris apologizes to me and reminds Ward again about Little Pete,

how the home’s workers leave at 4:30 p.m. and there’s rush-hour traffic

to consider.

Ward ignores him. I’m not sure he even heard Chris. He sits back

down and for the first time asks if there’s anything I’d like to know.

There is one thing—Florida’s anti-freak-show law.

The story he gives says more about showmen’s craftiness and their

proof

juice in Florida than it does about the law itself.

Ward says none of the showmen knew about the law until it was

mentioned in a
St.
Petersburg
Times
article about various arcane state laws. “When I read it I said, ‘we can’t have this.’ This is where those

people live, this is where they have their homes, this is where they pay

their taxes. This law would now prevent them from being able to be on

exhibit.”

Were the law enforced, show operators like Ward would be the ones

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sent to prison, not the human oddities. The penalty was a thousand-

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dollar fine and/or a year in the state penitentiary. Ward had good rea-

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son to be concerned. Around this time in the 1970s, freak shows faced

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increasing cries of exploitation by the “do-gooders.” Although Florida’s

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law had never been enforced, similar laws in other states had been. Yes,

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something had to be done, and Ward, also a longtime board member of

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Florida’s Outdoor Amusement Business Association, led the charge.

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The legal maneuvering was a sideshow in itself. Ward says that in

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order to sue, they had to get someone to enforce the law. They hired

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the former mayor of North Miami Beach as their attorney, and he was a

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good friend of the chief of police. Voila! The city turned down the World

of Wonder’s permit application.
World
of
Wonders
, Poobah, and Sealo

the Seal Boy sued.

Conveniently, the Dade County state attorney belonged to the Mi-

ami Showman’s Association and was an acquaintance of Ward’s. He

played along and prosecuted. Ward, Poobah, and Sealo’s attorney lost

the case as planned, and the showmen’s group appealed it all the way

to the state supreme court.

Winning at the state’s highest court level was no sure thing, Ward

says. So he and other operators devised an outlandish plan of theatrics

should they lose. They would protest and shut down the Miss Universe

pageant that year in Miami. It was to be aired live on NBC television.

The showmen’s lawyers had already drawn up the legal arguments and

the time to present it had been set—fifteen minutes before broadcast.

Their argument: “We said these people were going to violate the law be-

cause the women were malformed because, in our opinion, their mam-

mary glands, their breasts, were larger than the average woman’s.”

Well played.

The state supreme court overturned the law the week before the

pageant.

Yet another instance of Ward Hall saving the Florida sideshow.

proof

The clock shows 3:30 p.m., and Chris speaks up again. “I’m sorry

to keep interrupting,” he says. “But Mr. Hall could go on until 9:00

o’clock.”

Ward doesn’t say anything, but pops up out of his chair as if he’s

just remembered there’s some place he needed to be five hours ago.

He welcomes me to come again and puts on an enormous pair of black

shades that fit over his glasses like a welder’s shield. He is out the door

so quickly I have to hustle to say good-bye. By the time I catch up, he’s

climbing into a hulking, bright-red pickup in his black-and-white sad-

dle Oxfords. With a wave and a smile, he backs out and is off to see his

dear old friend Little Pete, Poobah.

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Showtown’s last showman is on the road again.

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Fringe on Fringe

proof

The website images from the previous year’s Butt Naked Biker Bash

promise an unusually rowdy weekend. A stark naked biker, griz-

zly white beard and cue-ball head, and his topless Old Lady rumble

through the campground. With the bike still in motion, the woman

opens her mouth wide and then bites off the end of a hotdog dangling

overhead from a string. The length she bit off will be measured against

her competitors, who do the same.

The Bite the Weenie contest ranks with thong pulls and coleslaw

wrestling in the catalogue of crude biker entertainment. Throw in nud-

ism, and you have a mutation of Florida fringe in full-throttle glory.

You have to ask: Why isn’t being a hard-core biker or being just a nudist

enough? And of course, the more intimate question: Aren’t they wor-

ried about burning their most tender body parts on sun-sizzled seats?

The Bash is this weekend, and an employee at the Riverboat Nudist

Campground and RV Park says to expect as many as two hundred bik-

ers. This sounds like a grand way to kick off my tour of Florida’s nudist

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communities. I have three on the agenda.

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My husband, James, and I load up the SUV with cameras, camping

gear, and cooler, tenuously hanging to the possibility of pitching a tent

for an around-the-clock immersion into the world of nude bikers. It’s

clothing-optional. Dressed in shorts and T-shirts, we have no intention

of stripping down.

We set out for the heart of nude America, Pasco County, a cow coun-

try with strip malls and fourteen nudist communities. Only 20 miles

north of Tampa, Pasco has so many residents who prefer daily living in

the buff that it’s been dubbed the “Nudist Capital of the World” by the

American Association for Nude Recreation (AANR), which, interest-

ingly, is headquartered just across the interstate from the Holy Land

Experience in Orlando.

There’s no official count of how many nudists live in Pasco County,

but there are enough that when a group lobbied for a nude polling

place, the idea wasn’t immediately dismissed by the county elections

supervisor. Nudist organizations say it’s hard to track their numbers

because so many live outside the confines of official nudist communi-

ties and a large number are seasonal residents, primarily retirees. There

are also countless part-time nudists from the Greater Tampa Bay area

who have club memberships or pay by the day.

And then there are the nude tourists. Pasco County tourism offi-

proof

cials haven’t tracked them, but the county has spent a modest amount

of taxpayer dollars to lure them, specifically European nudists; nudist

promoters called it the Eurobird campaign. By conservative estimates,

100,000 vacationers a year come to Pasco County for a sunny holiday

in the raw.

Residents and guests alike do everything in the buff, and I mean

everything. Even things that would seem infinitely more comfortable

with a little cloth support here and there. They play tennis wearing

only sneakers, run 5K races in nothing more than jogging shoes. They

pull weeds from their flowerbeds donning only gloves and a hat, ride

bicycles with just a small towel separating them from their vinyl seats.

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Their only consistent covering is sunscreen.

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The communities themselves vary widely. Some appeal to natur-

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ists, who shun sexual overtones; others welcome swingers. They range

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from small hippie campgrounds to massive walled-off upscale neigh-

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borhoods with world-class resorts. You can spot children waiting to

catch a school bus outside their gates. And if a local nudist develop-

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