Under the Electric Sky (11 page)

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 who 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.

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.