Hello again, I hope y’all are doing as well as possible given all the tragic things going on in the world.
Friends have told me that they like hearing more about my life in the carnival business.
I’m going to drop a few posts about those days and see how people really like them.
For those of you who have watched my What’s Your Excuse? video, you know that my Grandmother put me to work in her cotton candy wagon by age six.
She had me doing things like boxing popcorn & adding butter, scooping snow cones & adding the syrup, sticking apples, and washing the bally cloths.
Changing Vision and Changing Jobs
As I got older and my vision worsened, my family tried to find other things I could do on the midway.
People don’t like the idea of their food being handled because the help no longer has the depth perception to do it any other way.
I could call people into the games really well, but knowing whether they won or lost was often another matter.
And telling bills apart was difficult. Especially at night.
At that time I was only just legally blind, but RP, retinitis pigments, messes with your vision in changing lighting.
Selling Novelties
My Uncle Albert got the idea for me to sell novelties one summer.
He bought a table, stock, and a helium tank.
We did have issues with people stealing stock from me. We solved that by scaling back the display so that I could watch it better.
The problem with that is a novelty stand is usually successful because you spread a whole bunch of stuff out expecting every person walking by to find at least one thing they have to have.
And I was told to only accept one dollar bills.
The neighboring workers were all told to keep an eye on me and to make change for me.
They would usually forget about the change part once they got busy. 🙂
Mickey Mouse Balloons
We did have a few good weeks with the novelty booth that year. Primarily due to my ability to sell those Mickey Mouse ear balloons.
For those of you who don’t remember, a Mickey Mouse balloon was created by blowing up a clear balloon and then blowing up the balloon with the ears inside of the clear one.
They hired a former novelty man to show me how to blow up those famous balloons. But he couldn’t actually teach me how to do it.
He broke quite a few clear balloons and even a few of the mouse ears trying to teach me how.
I was told to blow up the two halves of the balloon separately and sell them that way.
But, no one wanted their balloon that way. Or very few did.
Teaching Myself Balloon Blowing
So, on one very slow day I decided to play around with them and see what happened.
It took a lot of practice to figure out how to put in just the right amounts of helium.
Too much helium and the ears looked too small.
Too little air in the clear balloon and you wouldn’t have room for the ears.
I also had to worry about wasting helium and balloons while practicing.
But I knew that I would have to be good enough to do it at night when I would have to be able to repeat the process with little or no light.
Running Out Of String
I remember one week when we ran out of good string and had to use kite string.
Because it was a last minute idea we didn’t have scissors. I had to tear the string with my wrists and hands.
Man was I sore at the end of that night.
And don’t you know that was the busiest night we had all summer?
Listening To The Parents
Parents would often ask me about tying the balloon around their kids hands.
I was happy to do that for them.
However, most novelty men would use a slip knot making it difficult for the parents to put the balloon on and off their kid’s hands during the day.
So, I made it my practice to have them hand me their wrist so I could tie a square knot.
Can’t tell you how many friends I made that way.
Fond Memories
We only had the novelty stand for one year.
It was a cool experience, but even then it’s something that I knew I couldn’t make a living with.
It is fun to look back and think about how even back then I was finding solutions.
I was deciding there had to be a way and finding it.
But then finding solutions is one of the things I learned from an early age growing up in a family of carnival owners.
Looking forward to hearing some of your stories of finding simple solutions that lead to success.
Thanks and take care out there, Max