Called to be a carny

Carnies embrace life on the road.
By STEPHEN SIFF
VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF
BAZETTA -- After traveling with a carnival for nine years, Mike Pompeo decided he'd had enough.
He settled in Florida, where he has some family. Got a regular place to live, a regular job as a plumber's assistant. It lasted for three months. That was 15 years ago.
"On my way home one day, they were setting up a little carnival in a parking lot," said Pompeo, 48, who is spending the week on a stool at the Trumbull County Fair, offering to guess the vital stats of passers-by.
"I worked the weekend and left with the carnival," said Pompeo, squinting from behind small blue-tinted glasses. "Nobody knows why we do it. There is a carnival saying: The carnival gets in your blood.
Hard work
The fair is about animals, displays and midway, and the midway runs on carnies. Dozens of mostly young men travel with the games of skill, amusement and chance, sleeping in the trucks, showering on the fairgrounds and eating from the food stalls.
"It's good money, you get to travel," said Chris Klimowicz, a tough-looking Buffalo native with tattooed arms. "It is the carny's life."
Klimowicz, known to everyone as Tonto, says he gets to keep 25 percent of take at whichever game he is working, making up to $250 a day.
When the fair is slow, there is little to do but smoke cigarettes and poke at food. But when the midway is busy, the job is a hustle. If a couple walking down the midway is not invited to bet on a race of mechanical pigs or throw a ping pong ball to win a goldfish, someone isn't doing his job.
But the hours and weeks can be long. Klimowicz, who travels, lives and works with a group that runs eight semi-trailer-size games, says workdays can run from early morning to nearly midnight, from four to seven days a week.
Benefits
Winters, he lives with family in Buffalo and spends the money he's saved.
"I have to work eight months out of the year, and I have four months off," said Klimowicz, who's been traveling with carnivals for eight years. "Why would I work 12 months?"
The carnies working for Tonto's boss and for the other bosses running a couple of games generally don't have their own cars. They travel from fair to fair in the trucks that haul the games. Some of the game trailers have cots out of site. Other carnies sleep in tents or in a bunkhouse RV provided by the boss. Or there's a room in a local hotel.
Why do it? Besides the money, there is the promise of travel, the chance to meet people and the opportunity to be among the hosts of the biggest party in town.
"It is not just the carnival atmosphere," said Klimowicz. "We get to know the people in the carnival, we get to know the people in the rides. It becomes like one big, happy family for the entire summer."