Education: The Last Individualists

To the swarming customers headed last week for the glare of the carnival midway in Great Falls, Mont., there seemed nothing special about the husky-voiced man at the refreshment booth just inside the grandstand. "Kids, kids, kids!'' he would cry. "Big kids, little kids, bring your dimes and nickels! Get your ice cream here!" He pushed the hot dogs ("See how long they are!—30¢ to the foot, 90¢ to the yard!"), kept up a steady stream of jingles ("Local bread, pound of meat,/And all the mustard you can eat"), in every way seemed to be just one more concessionaire. But to carnival folk, Witold Krassowski, 35, is now known as "The Professor." A sociologist who teaches and studies at the University of California at Los Angeles in the winter and joins the carnival in the summer, he is a top academic expert on the strange world of the carnies.

When Krassowski first joined the carnival in the summer of 1949, he did not dream that he would ever be coming back again. A veteran of the Polish underground and an alumnus of a series of Nazi prisoner-of-war camps, he was studying at Purdue when a Danish classmate persuaded him to try his hand at running a carnival stand. The two men got a truck from a concession agency and joined the Northern Exposition Shows, "touring Minnesota, Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas. At his "foot-long"' (hot dog) stand, Krassowski not only developed into an authority on carnies, he became a carny—a title conferred only upon those who have been fully accepted by one of the most clannish communities in the U.S.

Beef or Go. Today, says Krassowski, there are more than 400 traveling shows, inhabited by men and women who are in many ways a law unto themselves. To the carny, all non-carnies are "people," whose dull lives arouse both pity and scorn. At first, Krassowski and his friend were people too. The carnies were polite enough, but they were slow to accept the newcomers as part of their world. Then, after dismantling their stand one closing night, Krassowski and his friend offered to help some "ride-boys" take down their carrousel. They worked from midnight until 4 a.m., but they had unwittingly passed an important test. "A carny who refuses 'beef' " (i.e., refuses to help), an oldtimer explained, "is no carny."

As the weeks passed, Krassowski mastered the various ways of keeping the "tips" (prospective customers) coming to his stand. But studying his fellow carnies became his real interest. He interviewed them, examined their code, eventually found that one theme dominates everything they do. "The carnival," Krassowski concluded, "is one of the few remaining strongholds of rugged individualism."

Freaks & Gaffs. Though the carny thinks it only just to fleece a sucker, he is rigidly honest with his own kind. If he needs money, he does not get a loan—he gets a "lift," and it is invariably repaid.