CarnivalMidways.Com

By DEENA WINTER – Lincoln Journal Star

When your parents own a carnival, you can ask for bigger-than-usual presents.

Like a Sky Wheel – a sort of double Ferris wheel.

Mary Panacek’s son, Charles Jr., wanted one when he was a teenager, so she and her husband bought it. Which worked out well because they owned an amusement ride company and could put it on the midway.

That very Sky Wheel will be spinning passengers and churning tummies when the Nebraska State Fair fires up for the 140th year today.

Mary will survey the scene from her lawn chair perched between two huge tractor trailers that contain the offices of the midway operator, Belle City Amusements.

And Charles Jr. will be running around making sure the carnival operates smoothly.

“He’s the boss,” Mary explains. “I do the PR.”

She’s 84 now, and her husband died years ago, so now mother and son continue the company Charles Sr. started at age 18 after he visited a county fair in Wisconsin and saw the pony rides. His family had ponies, so he started giving pony rides at fairs in the 1930s.

He added more rides, and by 1948 he’d incorporated the company.

Which is why Charles Jr. has lived in a carnival all his life.

On Thursday, his T-shirt was covered in dirt as the midway came to life. Workers were attaching gondolas to the Giant Wheel, washing seats on the Sky Wheel, mopping the floor of the Tilt-A-Whirl and testing lights on the Typhoon.

Every summer, Mary, Charles Jr. and his family leave their homes in Florida and travel the country with a crew of about 60 to about 28 fairs.

They finished the Iowa State Fair on Sunday and headed to Nebraska for the first time. They have more than 100 semi-loads of equipment, but they can set up the whole carnival in a day and a half and take it apart in 10 hours.

Charles Jr. says running a midway is getting tougher, with high diesel prices and increasing insurance, parts and maintenance costs.

Although Mary is hesitant to talk about how expensive the rides are, she lets slip that the “glass house” cost a quarter-million dollars and the Himalaya $750,000.

She is on a one-woman crusade to erase the image of carnies as people with “nasty teeth” and long, dirty hair.

Belle City employees undergo drug testing and background checks; are required to wear uniforms; and are banned from having hair below the collar or facial hair beyond a trimmed mustache.

As if to illustrate her point, a woman in a tie-dyed Sturgis T-shirt and a scraggly-haired man hugging a Big Gulp wandered by, asking to see the boss about a job manning “the kiddie rides.”

Mary pointed them toward her son, but whispered that they’d never get a job there, then asked the Lord to forgive her for saying so.

Every time they set up the midway in a new city, they clean all the equipment and replace burned-out light bulbs.

They analyze which rides are most popular by weighing tickets every night. In Des Moines, the Giant Wheel was the most popular.

This year, Mary was going to sit out the season, but ultimately, she couldn’t resist joining the carnival again.

“It was boring,” the matriarch said. “You just miss it. You miss your friends along the route.”

But she never rides the Scorpion or takes a spin on the Yo Yo.

“I would love to,” she said. “I get motion sickness.”

By Dennis Yohnka – The Daily Journal correspondent

Michael Snow is hooked on his brand of show business. At 54, he’s still playing the same circuit he joined 37 years ago, but he loves what he does.

“I couldn’t imagine any other life,” said Snow as he prepared to bring his “Century Wheel” to the midway at the Will County Fair. “I started as the third man on the bumper cars. Now, I drive the semi and I’m mostly a teacher, showing the other folks how to put these rides together and keep them safe.

“I never dreamed I would have been in this so long, but I guess I’m like those people that visit Florida and once they get that sand in their shoes, they just keep going back for more.”

So, for 37 years, Snow has spent seven months of each year on the road. He learned how to cope with a sense of homelessness that others couldn’t endure.

“The movin’ every week … you get used to it,” he said. “It’s like people who live by the airport. They don’t notice the planes. But the visitors are duckin’ under the table. It’s all what you get used to.”

Snow is also used to the six-hour ordeal of erecting a Ferris wheel; the five-hour process of taking it down; and working with five to eight guys they call “green help” (noncarnival workers) to get the jobs done.

“My whole family was teachers, and I guess that’s what I wound up doin’,” he said. “But I never got married so I can do this. It’s not a good thing for a family. You gotta be all in to do this.”

The work has kept Snow in pretty good shape. He stands 5-foot, 10-inches and weighs in under 200 pounds. That’s pretty amazing for a guy who could have eaten like a “carni-vore” — with elephant ears, corndogs and lemon shake-ups daily — since he was 17 and convinced his parents that he would be OK on the road with the carnival.

“I did eat like that for a while, but I started developing high blood pressure when I turned 50,” he said. “The doctor told me to go with more chicken and turkey and I eat cantaloupe or watermelon just about every day.”

Snow said the road crew for the Luehrs Family Amusement Company feels like family to him. He still has his parents, four sisters and a brother back in O’Fallon (near St. Louis), but many more hours are spent with co-workers.

“Some of us bunk together in the crew trailers,” he said. “They’re like little hotel rooms really. Restrooms. Icebox. TV. Bed. Shower. They’re comfortable enough, but I have a camper now.”

And what about your treatment on the road?

“I love some of these towns, especially Peotone,” Snow said. “I enjoy the people. I like the food and the fairgrounds. I even like the folks at the little hardware store I go to.”

And a little farther down the road?

“I really don’t think about retirement,” he said. “It may sound unusual, but I’d like to do this right up to the end. I get to work with hydraulics and plumbing and electrical. Heck, I was once even asked to be like a groupie. Sawyer Brown was playing at the event where we were set up and the boss paid me to go to the show and buy some CDs and get them autographed.”

One more thing: Do you still get a sense of job satisfaction, even after all these years?

“Yes, there is a satisfaction of setting up a ride; washing it; replacing some light bulbs; and then giving the people an enjoyable ride,” he said. “And then when you teach someone else how to do all that … well, it’s like they kind of become a man when they learn how to do it by themselves.”

The annual Will County Fair opens its five-day run in Peotone on Wednesday. Snow arrived on Monday to set up his ride.

Will County Fair

WHEN: Aug. 26-30

WHERE: Peotone-Wilmington Road, Peotone

COST: General admission $3; children under 10 free. Grandstand admission is listed with every event. Must have a ticket if you are occupying a seat.

ENTERTAINMENT: Demolition Derby Aug. 28; carnival rides $1.50 or 16 for $20 daily, Aug. 28 Dollar Day when all rides are just a buck until 5 p.m.

FUN: Baby show 1:30 p.m. Aug. 30.

YUM: Carnival food; beer tent, air-conditioned restaurant.

DON’T MISS: WVLI “The Valley” 95.1 sock hop at the entertainment tent 3-4:30 p.m. Aug. 28.

INFO: (708) 258-9359, www.willcountyfair.org

WCCO-TV

Shanghaied Henri’s at the Minnesota State Fair wants everyone to know about their latest offering: Summit on a Stick.

The company said it’s the first time there will be beer on a stick at the Fair. The treat will be sold at the Summit booth at the Summit stage in the International Bazaar at the Fairgrounds.

They add that the stage features daily shows, including “Bazaar After Dark” bands performing evenings.

By Zac Taylor, Observer-Reporter.Com

Mark McGrath watches attentively from his control panel as the cylindrical carnival ride he is operating rapidly spins several giggling, screaming children at a 45-degree angle some 15 feet in the air.

“They don’t put nobody on this machine that don’t know how to operate it,” McGrath says as he slowly brings the ride to a stop and watches as the children dizzily stagger off, shoving and laughing as they go.

McGrath, a 20-plus year veteran of the carnival business who is working this week at the Washington County Fair, said the commonly held belief that carnival rides are hastily erected, poorly maintained, dangerous contraptions operated by unqualified workers is largely unfounded.

Complicated, fast rides that leave the ground like McGrath’s “Round-Up” – a merry-go-round on steroids that spins fast enough to generate the G-forces needed to keep the occupants standing at its sides from flying out – require at least 18 months of operator training, said McGrath.

Some parents remain fearful of carnival rides.

“I don’t feel they’re safe,” said Robin Dunley of Washington, who was attending the fair Wednesday. “I’m a nervous wreck when I come down here.”

Dunley said that despite her worries, she still allows her children to ride some of the rides. She’s skeptical that the rides can be safe when it seems they are “put up and torn down too fast.”

According to the state Department of Agriculture, the governing body that regulates carnival ride inspections, carnival rides must be inspected by a state-certified inspector each time they are erected, and each time they are deconstructed for storage and transportation.

Companies such as J&J Amusements, the company that is operating the rides at the fair, keep state-certified inspectors on staff who inspect the rides both on erection and deconstruction, and also every morning before operation.

“You’re in more danger in a car,” said J&J ride inspector Matt Pierce.

Pierce said he inspects the rides thoroughly every morning before opening to the general public. Any problems he finds, even minor ones, are reported and fixed immediately.

“The only people I’ve ever seen get hurt on a ride was through their own stupidity,” Pierce said, recalling instances of riders jumping out of their seats before the ride was over, sustaining minor injuries.

McGrath has seen worse.

A man riding a Round-Up at a major theme park at which McGrath was working tried to climb out mid-flight. The man fell into the center area of the ride, snapped his neck on the support bars and died. The man was later found to have been suicidal.

McGrath said such serious accidents are rare, and can be avoided if riders simply heed the instructions of the operators.

“As long as they listen, it’s safe,” he said. “If they don’t listen, they’re going to get hurt.”

Bobby Moran runs the game stand “Tubs,” which involves throwing a softball-sized rubber ball into a plastic tub four feet away.

Moran used to be a ride supervisor, but asked for the change because the job was too intense.

“There is a lot more to it than you would expect,” Moran said, adding that the yearly inspection school, near-encyclopedic knowledge required of the complicated rides and rigorous inspections wore on him over the years.

For McGrath, the training and constant inspections are worth the enjoyment he gets from the carnival life.

“I’ll be honest, I Iove this job,” McGrath said as he pulled the lever to the Round-Up, and sent another gaggle of giggling kids spinning through the air.

The P.T. Barnum of our time: Mr. Ward Hall, retired president of The International Independent Showmans Association, shares his thoughts on the heydays of The Ohio State Fair