With The Fair, carnival comes to town
August 18, 2005
By Dan Cabot
Bright lights and loud music, dizzying rides and happy screams, cotton candy and fried dough. Step right up! A prize every time! Step right up!
The Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society’s Annual Cattle Show and Fair is a festival of farming and rural skills, with an arts and crafts competition thrown in. Pigs and chickens and quilts and pickles. Draft horse pulling and the women’s skillet toss. Watercolors and dish gardens and the tallest sunflowers. Clam chowder or tempura or hamburgers from the firemen.
But the price of admission also gets you into the hustle and glitz of a genuine carnival, with rides and games and cotton candy and fried dough. Ag Fair purists may tell you they never set foot on the midway, but for many the fair means that the carnival is in town, and the carnival is what they come for.
Cushing’s Amusements is a family-oriented carnival. Manager Darrin Cushing and his mother, owner Marion Cushing, insist on that. The staff all have to have CORI (criminal offender record information) background checks, the same as school teachers. The rides are clean and freshly painted, inspected by the state at every stop. While fried dough and cotton candy may not be especially healthful foods, the stands have to pass inspection by the town board of health agent.
Larry and Marion Cushing started the carnival in the 1970s with just a couple of rides. Their first shows were school fundraisers, in the same way the West Tisbury and Edgartown schools have used Circus Smirkus. From the beginning, they were a family show. In the 1950s, the carnival that came to the Ag Fair at what is now the Grange Hall was run by a man named Colbert. Mr. Colbert brought his house trailer a week early and took a vacation in West Tisbury. It was a reasonably happy alliance, though it was sometimes suspected that the top shelf-prize was impossible to win. But when Mr. Colbert sold his carnival to Fiesta Shows, it became Colbert’s Fiesta, and the agricultural society shortly became dissatisfied with its emphasis on games of chance. Larry Cushing promised more rides and fewer games.
Darrin Cushing, the youngest of five children, took over running the carnival when his father died about ten years ago. His mother still travels with the show, and for the first time in many years his older brothers will be back on the Vineyard for a family reunion. Larry Jr. runs a heating oil company, and John works for Verizon. The boys and their sisters all grew up with the carnival, but Marion and the children returned to Wilmington, Mass., after labor day every year. Their father insisted that all the children finish high school, and all five have at least some education beyond high school. “My father always stressed education,” Darrin told the times. Darrin’s grandfather was a teacher in Wilmington, and the gymnasium there is named after him. The carnival still makes its home base in Wilmington, and a few of the staff work through the winter months there repairing and refurbishing the rides and games. The show is on the road from March through November, with a Christmas lights version at the Stoneham Zoo in December. Although a few small children travel with the carnival today, as the Cushing children did years ago, there are few families. Most told The Times it would be a hard life for a person to be separated from family over the long season.
Who works for the carnival?
Colbert’s and Colbert’s Fiesta used to hire local help just for the run of the show, but Cushing’s Amusements does not. The main reasons are the difficulty of doing CORI checks and training workers to meet Darrin’s standards.
Darrin Cushing is proud of his staff, many of whom have been with him for several years. He has no patience with alcoholics, drug users, and troublemakers, and even if a problem employee gets through the CORI check, he generally doesn’t last long.
Young as he is, Darrin takes a fatherly interest in his crew. Walter Bressette, 20, is in his first year with Cushing Amusements. He says, “Darrin is helping me straighten out my life. When I came to ask for a job, I had hair down to my shoulders.” The long hair was not in itself the problem. A high school dropout, Walter had worked off and on for other carnivals since he was 14, where for low wages he had lived in poor housing and eaten bad food. That carnival didn’t even provide a way for him to wash clothes or go to a grocery story. He was having relationship problems with the mother of his son, now 2, and generally felt his life was going nowhere.
“It’s like Darrin is everybody’s father,” Walter says. “He gets on us when we make mistakes, but he tells us when we’re doing good.”
Darrin is helping Walter get a driver’s license, and continuing his father’s emphasis on education, he hopes to help Walter earn a GED high school equivalency certificate.
Randy Tobin has been with Cushing’s Amusements for eight years and is the show foreman, third in command after Marion and Darrin. He comes from a carny background; his father had a string of ten carnival rides, and Randy has worked on repairing carnival rides since he was old enough to turn a wrench. He is grateful for the mechanic’s skills he learned working for his father, but he describes him as abusive, and when Darrin observed how things were, he offered Randy a job with Cushing’s. Randy has now severed all ties with his father.
Randy grumbles about the state ride inspectors. Since the death of a customer at an amusement park last year, state inspectors have been pickier than Randy thinks they need to be, closing rides down for infractions that are not safety related. Randy, a licensed ride mechanic, feels unfairly treated when he is sometimes required to replace a part that he knows shows only normal wear. He carries a truckfull of spare parts for each ride, but prays that the inspector won’t demand an inconsequential part he doesn’t happen to have on hand. However, he concedes that tougher inspections will drive the really unsafe operators out of business, creating new customers for Cushing’s Amusements, which he says inspectors in Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire have told him is number one for safety in New England.
Darrin says that the crew constantly meets the stereotype of the carnival worker as an ignorant, foul-mouthed drifter of questionable morals. Like its the rides and games, the Cushing crew has to be spotless. Cushing employees are neatly dressed in uniform shirts, and the men have to have short haircuts. Profanity in front of the customers is forbidden. “We’re not perfect,” Marion says, “but we try really hard to be.”
Many of the employees are well educated. Randy mentions one woman, a high school teacher in the winter, who was reading a book at her post on a slow afternoon. A passerby remarked, “Oh, you can read?” She replied, “Yeah, I just learned how last week.”
Darrin’s wife, Paula, was a licensed hairdresser before she left her career to marry Darrin and travel with the show. Were her parents upset that she ran off to join the carnival? “Oh no. They’d both worked with the carnival in the past, and they knew how successful Darrin’s business is,” she said.
Jesse Stow is a high school graduate with a semester of college, studying music. Would he like to make a career of his music talent? Well, yes, it’s something he’s thinking about, but he likes the nomadic life of the carnival, meeting new people and seeing new places.
Chuck Muncie joined the carnival when it came to Holton, Maine, along with his cousin Jesse. For 20 years, Chuck was a heating and ventilating installer, “a tin knocker,” he calls it. “I just got tired of it,” he says. “So I cashed in my profit-sharing, and decided to try something new.”
Everyone of a certain age has a stereotyped image of a carnival like the one in the HBO series “Carnivale,” the backwater town where the potbellied sheriff is on the take, the carny games are all rigged, and the girls in the hootchie-cootchie show are no better than they should be. When Marion Cushing says, “The carnival has something for everyone,” she means rides, food, or games, not the sleazy enticements portrayed on “Carnivale.” Cushing’s Amusements is a family-oriented show.
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