Gibtown
Produced by: Joe Richman
Broadcast on SoundPrint and NPR's All Things Considered (1995)


LARRY MASSET, HOST: Welcome to SoundPrint, I'm Larry Masset. Here you are on a crowded highway, crawling through a strip of shopping malls, fast food joints, multi-plex movie theaters, gas stations. Somewhere behind the mall are suburbs with names like Maplewood and Ravencrest. The questions is where are you. The answer is anywhere in America. Maybe if there are snow-peaks on the edge of town you might be in the Rockies. If it's corn, could be Iowa. But it's much the same anywhere you go. In the old days, people tell, towns were different. Each one had a character of its own. X was slow and friendly, Y was fast and mean, Z was just plain goofy. And Gibsonton, Florida - where producer Joe Richman takes us now - Gibtown they used to call it, that was... well let's take a look.


JOE RICHMAN, REPORTER: Melvin, the human blockhead, lives with his wife, Joyce, in a small trailer home just outside Gibsonton. In their living room, there are eight clocks, all set five minutes fast, and a porcelain sign on the wall that reads, `God bless this mobile home.'

[sound of TV and chatting]

RICHMAN: One thing to know about Melvin is that if you want to visit, the best time is in the afternoon because, he says, he doesn't like the soaps.

MELVIN BURKHART, HUMAN BLOCKHEAD: I watch The Price is Right in the morning and then we have the- Judge Wopner, you know. And then I watch Perry Mason. See what else is on tonight. Oh, Picket Fences. Yeah, I won't be watching no movie tonight. That's one I- one I really like, Picket Fences.

RICHMAN: Melvin Burkhart is 86 years old and for most of his life on carnival midways across the country, Melvin was known as the human blockhead. Being a blockhead means tilting your head back and hammering nails, spikes and ice picks up your nose.

Mr. BURKHART: You want to see that?

RICHMAN: I'd love to see that.

Mr. BURKHART: OK, watch. Here's a 20-penny spike, 50 cent hammer and a no sense head. I'm going to drive this spike in my head. Watch. [sound of hammer hitting spike] You can see that it's only entering a little bit there. But then, as you hit it and control that hitting, it's going further and further, see?

RICHMAN: Oh, gosh.

Mr. BURKHART: You've got it in there now and then you just control actually how far it's going to go.

RICHMAN: How far is it in now?

Mr. BURKHART: That far.

RICHMAN: What's that, about four inches?

Mr. BURKHART: I'd say we're near five. You want us to measure it? [laughs]

RICHMAN: The spikes are real. The trick is they go from Melvin's nose down into his throat passage. As a teenager, Melvin was an aspiring boxer, but after no wins and six losses, Melvin's nose required an operation. Thirteen bone fragments were removed. It ended his boxing career, but Melvin says it allowed him to become not just a good, but a great, human blockhead.

Mr. BURKHART: Everybody else now tries to imitate me. Don't get me wrong, I'm still considered the top, see, of the human blockheads.

[sound of calliope music, then fades to black]

[sound of highway]

RICHMAN: Gibsonton, Florida lies on Highway 41 south of Tampa. The people who live here call it Gibtown. It's a pretty small place - two gas stations, three restaurants and a lot of mobile homes. It would be hard to tell that at one time it was considered the oddest town in America. The fire chief was Al Tomaini the giant. The second deputy of police was a dwarf. The sideshow fat man was also the town's auto mechanic and Gibsonton still boasts the only post office in the country with a special counter for midgets. If you want to understand how Gibsonton became the carnival capital of the U.S., the place to start would be the Giant's Camp, a combination restaurant and bait and tackle shop. It's the first thing you see when you drive into town.

[sound of bait shop]

RICHMAN: A sign on the wall advertises sardines, frozen squid and live shrimp. Over by the cash register is Jeanie Tomaini, who runs the place.

JEANIE TOMAINI, Half-Girl: Don't help me or I'll fall down.

RICHMAN: When she's sitting behind the counter, Jeanie Tomaini looks perfectly normal. A new customer walking in for bait and pepperoni sticks would have no idea that Jeanie spent most of her life working as a sideshow attraction.

Ms. TOMAINI: Jeanie Tomaini, the world's only living half-girl. That's all there is. There ain't no more.

RICHMAN: Jeanie is 2 feet, 6 inches high. She was born without legs. Jeanie was married to Al Tomaini the giant, who stood 8 feet, 4-1/2 inches. Together, they were billed on carnival midways as the world's strangest married couple. In 1936, the Tomainis began spending the off-season in Gibsonton. At that time, says Jeanie, there wasn't much here.

Ms. TOMAINI: Oh, it was just all swamp land is all it was. The whole place had to be cleared and some had to be filled and it was a lot of work, but we moved down and all of our gang that was on the show with us and everything moved down - sword swallower and a fat lady and a midget and, you know, sideshow people. And then they spread the word to other friends of theirs and they all just decided they liked it. I guess you could say we were attracted to each other, because we all sort of stick together.

RICHMAN: Every winter, the population of Gibsonton would double, as thousands of carnival workers came in off the road at the end of the season. They came for the warm weather and the fishing and especially they came because the town had voted in a unique zoning classification called residential show business, which basically meant that everything, from concession stands to elephants, could be kept in the front yard. But over the years, Gibsonton has slowly become less of a winter quarters and more of a retirement village.

[Melvin Burkhart arrives]

Mr. BURKHART: Well, Jeanie.
Ms. TOMAINI: Well, hello.
Mr. BURKHART: Hello, good looking, what's cooking? How are you, honey?
Ms. TOMAINI: I was just coming over there to meet you. How are you doing?

RICHMAN: When Melvin the human blockhead comes over to Jeanie's for a visit, the conversation always leads to two things; their health and the old days in the sideshow.

Mr. BURKHART: [chatting] And they found out it was real and they confiscated it. Who was it had that- the famous half and half out on the West Coast?
Ms. TOMAINI: Well, you remember Esther Lester? Frieda Fred?
Mr. BURKHART: Frieda Fred? No. Esther Lester used to tickle the dumplings out of me. He used to come- `Ladies and Gentlemen, on this side I am a woman. On this side I am a man.' [laughs]

RICHMAN: They trade stories about Grady the lobster boy and Priscilla the monkey girl. Melvin remembers the time he got Bill Durks, the two-faced man a date with Mildred the alligator woman. The two ended up getting married. And, because I'm there, Melvin and Jeanie talk about how they first got into the business, show business they call it. Jeanie started before she could even spell her name. Her father was an alcoholic. He ran off and left the kids behind and so 3-year-old Jeanie became the family's bread-winner.

Ms. TOMAINI: No matter what you made back then, it was big money and when you had a whole flock of kids, like my mother did, big money sounded good. And I would do a little acrobatic routine. I don't do it any more, don't ask me. And I'd go from Indiana, Ohio, Michigan - all around there, those little fairs. That's how I got started in it, when I was three. So many people say, `Oh, how horrible, how terrible.' You know, I was three years old and people came in and- being- no legs, I was about yay high, and they thought that was great and they'd bring me dolls and candy and gifts. And one of the men that had a miniature pony used to come out after we closed at night and he would let me ride his pony. That was heaven to me - any kind of a horse. So I had no problem with it. I enjoyed it.

RICHMAN (to Tomaini): Did you continue to enjoy it as the years went on?

Ms. TOMAINI: Yeah, I did. I did. Even when we were on the road. We used to look the people over and say, `Well, this one looks like a doctor. This one, he must be a butcher,' things like that. Because you had to keep yourself entertained. You couldn't just sit there all day long and stare into outer space. We had a lot of little methods like that that would take our minds off of whoever was staring. You know: the crowd looks at the freaks and the freaks look at the crowd. And that's about how it is. You'd be surprised how many weird looking people you can find in an audience. They think they're perfectly normal.

RICHMAN: But around the 1960s, it began to get harder for the freaks and human oddities to work. Florida and other states started enforcing old laws barring the commercial exhibition of people with deformities and, around the country, more and more people were objecting to the sideshows. They said the performers were being exploited. In Gibsonton, these people were given a name: "the Do-Gooders". And to this day, that's still the worst slur in town.

Ms. TOMAINI: Well really, the Do-Gooders didn't do any good, coming in to try to run our lives for us. They don't even know what they're doing.

Mr. BURKHART: And it hurt a lot of show business careers, because at one time we had a little man, called Otis Jordan, that could roll up cigarettes with his lips and light it, you know, and he had little skinny arms and he had legs that were all- all screwed up, you know, scrooched up like that. He couldn't move them or couldn't walk on them or anything. But he did a hell of an act and he was excluded from our show. He couldn't work at all because the Do-Gooders had said he was being exploited. And he had been on our show for about- about 10 years. He didn't have any place else to go. You know, he couldn't understand it: "Why in the hell are they doing this to me?"

Ms. TOMAINI: Every once in a while, Mother Nature makes a goof and produces one or the other and then where are they going? What are they going to do? But on the show, they could earn their livings and very, very few of the sideshow people I ever heard of asked for food stamps or anything else for help. I'm very proud of the people I know that they do stand on their own two feet.

Mr. BURKHART: I had no qualms about introducing myself as a freak. It's the way we would be presented to them, you see. We would never get up there and just say, "Come in here and see a horrible person." We would put up there like, "The fattest girl in the world. She doesn't do the hula, she does the hoochie-koochie on the inside." And you excite their curiosity to get them in, see. You wouldn't tell them you're going to go in and see a big fat slob of a woman. You wouldn't go in there and say, you're going to see a girl with no arms doing everything with her feet. [puts on his carnival voice] "You're going to see the armless wonder who does fantastic things right before your eyes using nothing but the tootsies on her feet."

Ms. TOMAINI: I don't know if it's a matter of they feel sympathy or if it's a matter of they feel superior because they're not that way, you know - there but for God go I, something like that - but people like it. They definitely like it. I think right now if I was shapelier, in better health and all and went on the sideshow with the same acts that we had, I think we would make a good living and earn good crowds. I really do.

[calliope music, then fades to black]

RICHMAN: Less than a mile down the road from Jeanie Tomaini's bait shop is the Showtown Lounge. This is where most of the old-timers in Gibsonton still come to hang out. Tuesday night is Karoke night. Wednesday is the all you can eat spaghetti buffet for $3.95 and every Saturday morning, a table is reserved for the Widow's Club. There are six women at the Widow's Club this morning, sitting around a big table with biscuits and coffee. When I first arrive, just before 9 a.m., it's pretty quiet. But they all say, "Just wait 'till Monica gets here." And pretty soon, she does.

MONICA BARESS, Fmr. Stripper: Rain, rain, go away. Come again- well, hello. How are you? [laughter] Coffee with ice, please. Hey, you got your hair colored.

1st WIDOW'S CLUB MEMBER: Well, I told you he cut it. He wasn't satisfied.

Ms. BARESS: What did you get your hair colored for, may I ask you?

1st WIDOW'S CLUB MEMBER: Yeah, because it's gray.

Ms. BARESS: So, what, are you on the make for somebody? Why can't you grow old gracefully like everybody else? [laughter] It's the best your hair has ever looked, I'll tell you that.

RICHMAN: Monica Baress is the matriarch of Gibsontown, Florida and she presides over the Widow's Club. She's 75 and, like all the women at the table, Monica is retired from the carnival. In fact, this small woman with big glasses, wearing a dress that's just a few steps removed from a bathrobe was, for 40 years, a carnival stripper. The Flame of New Orleans, they called her. But don't bother asking about it.

Ms. BARESS: You take your clothes off. What the hell more do you want to know?

2nd WIDOW'S CLUB MEMBER: [laughing] Look at Bill.

BILL: Let her show what she used to do.

Ms. BARESS: Yeah, he was on the show with me. Remember that? Yeah, they used to line up and get their tickets and they'd run out after the show, get in line, get another one, back in again. [laughs] Those were the days. Those were the days.

RICHMAN: Over the course of a two-hour breakfast, Monica goes through nine cigarettes, three cups of coffee and an order of hash browns. And, in between, she talks a lot about Suki, her Pekenese.

Ms. BARESS: My dog, when he gets his dog food, he- he looks at me and he looks up at the microwave. He looks at me. He will not touch that food 'till it goes in the microwave for 30 seconds.

RICHMAN: Everybody in Gibsonton talks a lot about their pets. In a town that over the years has been home to the alligator man, the monkey girl, the seal boy, the frog man and the lobster family, people here treat their animals extremely well. Monica's dog, Suki, for example, gets French vanilla ice cream once a week.

Ms. BARESS: Show people are very, very good to animals - very good. Lot of people always say, `if there's a reincarnation, I want to come back as a show person's dog or cat. And it's the truth, isn't it? It's the truth. They come first.

RICHMAN: In Gibsonton, they love animals, but they're suspicious when it comes to people. Especially outsiders. Especially outsiders who are reporters. For decades, the media has come into this town to take their pictures and write freak town stories. The latest is a tabloid TV dream come true.

[TV show sound]

ANNOUNCER: This is Hard Copy for Wednesday, June 30th, 1993.

`HARD COPY' REPORTER: On a cold November night in Gibsontown, Florida, Grady Stiles was shot and killed in his own living room. Not by some fluke of fate but, police say, by a hired assassin. Hired, they say, by Grady's own wife, Mary, and his step-son, Harry Glenn Newman. The horror that was Grady's life as lobster boy had ended in a hail of bullets fired at point-blank range. [TV show fades under]

[Widow's Club chat continues]

Ms. BARESS: Let me ask you something Connie. Lobster boy. In a wheel chair, arms and feet like- like a lobster. How the hell could he beat the hell out of somebody? They said he did. I don't know. I heard he was mean when he was drunk. Now he's pushing up daises.

RICHMAN: The death of Grady Stiles, the lobster boy, has created a bit of a divide in Gibsonton. Between those who eulogize him and those who think he had it coming for, they say, abusing his wife and children. But there's one thing everybody in town would agree on. With Grady Stiles gone from the sideshow circuit, there are really no more human oddities still out on the road. The lobster boy was the last of the true sideshow freaks.

[Widow's Club chat fades to black]



[sound of birds and animals inside a house]

GRADY STILES III: Um, my thumb and pointer finger- whatever that's index, I think, is webbed and they're short because of that. And there's a very large space between- I think that's my pinkie. We haven't really figured that out yet. And it's got a very wide gap in it and it closes like a lobster's claw or a clamp. It doesn't close like a fist.

RICHMAN: Grady Stiles the third is 17 years old. The lobster condition - limb reduction, it's called - has been in his family for over 150 years. Grady's father - the lobster boy - his grandfather, his great-grandfather, and his great-great-grandfather all had it and it's being passed on again. Grady's sister, Cathy and now her 3-year-old daughter, Misty, also have the deformity. Misty has claw-like hands and no legs, just a toe coming out of each hip. Both Grady and Cathy grew up in the carnival and did their time in their father's lobster boy tent. But now, like a lot of young people, neither has any desire to continue in the family business.

CATHY STILES-BERRY: To stay inside of a show is just boring, basically, because you sit in there and you have nothing to do but perform. And I don't like that. I move around too much.

RICHMAN [to Stiles-Berry]: It has nothing to do with, like, people looking at you and-

Ms. STILES: No.

RICHMAN: -and you exhibiting yourself?

Ms. STILES: They do that when I go to the store. So that- if that was the reason, then I would stay hibernating in the house 24-seven. But I go out. I go to the movies. I go swimming. I do anything there is. So them looking at me because of the condition has nothing at all what to do with it. It's just boring.

[house sounds fade to black]


[sound of a train horn]

WARD HALL, Sideshow Entrepreneur: That's the show train heading home. You know what they say? The season came. The season went. All my money, I have spent. No cook house. No job. November.

RICHMAN: Back in the late 1940s and early '50s, this country had more than 100 10-in-one sideshows, 10 acts, one admission. And Ward Hall had some of the great ones: The World Fair Freaks, the Congress of Oddities, the Pygmy Village. With his trademark white suit, red carnation and cigar, Ward Hall became a sort of Zeigfeld of the corn field. A renowned sideshow entrepreneur, which, as he says, rhymes with "pile of manure".

Mr. HALL [in his carnival barker voice]: Now ladies and gentlemen at this time we are going to present, behind this curtain, one of the strangest sights in all of the world today. Cashmere Sing from Misore, India. Four ears, four eyes, two noses, two mouths, two complete heads on just one body.

RICHMAN: Ward Hall's first sideshow act was the two-headed baby. He bought two rubber dolls from a toy store, attached the heads together, slapped on a coat of paint and put the thing in ink-tinted water inside a Tom's peanut jar. Forty years later, Ward Hall says he remembers being at the Texas State Fair in Dallas when he suddenly realized he was running a traveling old folk's home.

Mr. HALL: I had elderly people working in that show. Oh, my God. In a very short space of time, I lost Emmett Blackwater, the turtle man - it was just getting too much for him. And Bill Cole, the quarter man, he died. The one tattooed lady died. Sealo, the seal man, died. The one giant I had, Dave Ballard, he passed away. So I lost a lot of attractions in a period of a very few years there.

TAPE OF CARNIVAL BARKER: Christine, the girl with the alligator skin. Francisco Lantini has three legs...
[fades under]

RICHMAN: These days, Ward Hall still leaves Gibsonton every May to hit the state fairs and midways from Maryland to Missouri, through Indiana, Tennessee and Mississippi. But his World of Wonders Sideshow is mostly just a museum now - shabby mannequins and wax figures of sideshow freaks from days past. Ward's only touring live attraction is Little Pete, the fire-eating dwarf with a hearing aid in his left ear. Even the carnival barker has been replaced by a taped loop.

TAPE OF CARNIVAL BARKER: ...the pig-faced man and the mule-faced woman. Betty Lou who had her baby sister growing from her abdomen. Christine the girl with the alligator skin. Francisco Lantini has three legs. They're on the inside now on display. There is no waiting.

RICHMAN: In the early 1980s, the Smithsonian Institution marked the disappearance of the sideshow, calling it a uniquely American art form. But people like Ward Hall and Jeanie Tomaini will tell you the sideshows have not really gone away, they've just moved.

Mr. HALL: Jesse Raphael. Oprah. Donahue. Geraldo. To mention just a few. Human oddities today are extremely commercial - more so than ever.

Ms. TOMAINI: They only thing that's different, they have so much garbage on TV that they don't need to leave home to see anything. You know, people used to be so hungry for entertainment that they would go out on a circus lot or a carnival lot and they would wait in the dirt, mud, anything to see it. That was the entertainment. And when the circus came to town, it was the main event of the year. And now it's, "oh, there's the circus. So what?" They're too sophisticated, people are, I think.

[carnival barker tape fades to black]


[sound of outdoor park]

Mr. BURKHART: Hey. I'm a magician. Anybody here want to see a trick? [crowd of kids cheer] Okay.

RICHMAN: On one sunny Sunday afternoon, Melvin the Human Blockhead goes to an outdoor park in downtown Tampa. He's volunteered to do some magic tricks for the kids at a local fund raiser. Melvin reaches inside his cloth magic bag and pulls out a large pair of dice. He can make the dots move and disappear right before your eyes.

Mr. BURKHART: What's the two numbers right here on the dice.
CHILDREN: Five and five.
Mr. BURKHART: What's here on the back?
CHILDREN: Two and two.
Mr. BURKHART: Now, if we knock the middle spot here and here so it comes out over here and here, we'll have two threes, won't we?
CHILDREN: Four and two.
Mr. BURKHART: Four and two?
CHILDREN: No, five and three.
Mr. BURKHART: You're mixing me all up. I better do it one more time so you won't be confused here. Now, boys and girls remember-
1st CHILD: How do you do that?
Mr. BURKHART: I think there's a trick in it.

RICHMAN: Over the course of his life, Melvin has logged over 900,000 miles, performed in more than 100,000 shows and entertained millions of people. He's been a sword swallower, a fire-eater and a knife-thrower. He toured with Ringling Brothers. He was in Ripley's Believe it or Not. And Melvin was famous in hayfields across the country as the Human Blockhead. But no one here today has any idea.

Mr. BURKHART: You want to see another one?
CHILDREN: Yeah.

Mr. BURKHART: Like the little ones that run around, you know, chasing around after me. They're just out having a good time. They're not impressed with an old geezer that's got a backlog, you know, going back to years and years in show business. After all, 86 years old, you know, you don't have a lot to look forward to in the way of performing. So I figure I'm very fortunate to get to this point. But my future is all behind me. I don't see anything to look forward to in the strict sense of the word. Just hanging around to see what's going to happen next, that's all.

[park sounds fade to black]

[sound of thrown knife hitting a target]

RICHMAN: Later that evening, Melvin is in the back yard with his 40-year-old son, Dennis, and a box of old knives. Daggers, actually. The ones Melvin used to throw in his early days in the carnival.

Mr. BURKHART: Right in the nozzle. Right.

RICHMAN: The two of them stand side-by-side. Melvin draws the knife up to his eyes, squinting at the target 10 feet away. Thirty years ago, Melvin was throwing these same knives on stage at his son. Now the target is a weathered slab of oak wood with the outline of a body painted on. And that's a good thing, because frankly, they're both a little out of practice.

Mr. BURKHART: Watch the head. [throws knife]
DENNIS BURKHART: Ooh, that would have hurt him. [another knife] That would have hurt him worse.

RICHMAN: Melvin taught his son how to throw. And he taught his grandson. He says it's nice to think that some things will carry on. And then Melvin snaps his wrist. Fast. The knife spins in the air and sticks. Dennis does the same. And they go on just like that for about an hour. Until it starts to get too dark.

Mr. BURKHART: Well, we better- we didn't leave any laying out this time, did we?
DENNIS BURKHART: No, Pop.

[music] [production credits]



© Joe Richman, 1995