O HBy Jaed Coffin W S Photographed by Gabe Souza

BUSINESS AFTER HER HUSBAND DIED IN 2013, JEANETTE GILMORE TOOK OVER

SMOKEY’S GREATER SHOWS, AN INSTITUTION ON THE MAINE FESTIVAL CIRCUIT. BUT IN 50+ YEARS OF FAIRGROUNDS, FERRIS WHEELS, AND A FLUCTUATING WORKFORCE, LIFE ON THE MIDWAY HASN’T GOTTEN ANY EASIER. WELCOME TO THE .

Jeanette Gilmore, Smokey’s impresaria. Facing page: A carnival worker mans the on the opening night of the Fryeburg . 84 DOWNEAST. COM AUGUST 2017 85 Last year, I did not get one response. Most I’ve ever had was four.” Though she didn’t comment on how much pay she offered in her ad, the $10/hour that her Mexican employees now earn working for Smokey’s has significantly changed the local economy back in Tlapacoyan. I found Jeanette sitting on a bench outside the fairground offices between Roy Andrews, president of Fryeburg’s 167-year-old fair, and Glenn “Bear” Zaidman, a tattooed and bearded Bridgton selectman, who oversees the fair’s finance committee. At 63, Jeanette stands just over 5 feet, with shoulder-length hair that she wears straight and blonde. That afternoon, she wore a turquoise Smokey’s ON A SUNNY THURSDAY late last September, Jeanette polo. More often than not, she also wears red Gilmore’s 40-foot Friendship G7 motorhome sat in the lipstick, shimmering eye shadow, dark middle of the Fryeburg Fairgrounds, surrounded by the eyeliner and mascara, a gold cross around her various artifacts of the fall of 2016: cornstalks; big orange neck, and several gold rings and earrings. Her pumpkins; a large, red-white-and-blue sign in support of nails are finely manicured and shiny, and her presidential candidate Donald Trump. Jeanette, the owner “I PUT AN face can go from distressed to scrutinizing to of Smokey’s Greater Shows carnival company, had been AD IN THE sincere and maternal, sometimes within the living out of the motorhome since April after driving scope of a glance. That afternoon, her face north from her home in Siesta Key, Florida, to run the NEWSPAPER showed little interest in speaking to me. business she once co-owned with her late husband, Bud, FOR 40 At the time, Jeanette was wary of the son of the eponymous Smokey. That afternoon, the G7’s POSITIONS,” media. The year before, Maine newspapers only occupant was Jeanette’s Yorkshire terrier, Buddy. JEANETTE had reported on two accidents that occurred Nearby, five female Smokey’s employees were cleaning on Smokey’s rides at a carnival in Waterville, a concession stand in preparation for the weeklong TOLD THE and Jeanette felt some of the coverage was Fryeburg Fair. All five were Mexican and had come to WASHINGTON needlessly unflattering. The accidents — one Maine that June, at the end of a seven-day trip that started POST IN the result of a mechanical malfunction on a 3,000 miles away in their home city of Tlapacoyan, in the LATE 2013. children’s coaster; the other caused by a rider southern state of Veracruz. From Tlapacoyan, it had taken “LAST YEAR, removing her safety restraint on a them a day-and-a-half to arrive by bus at a border — occurred in the second season since Bud’s crossing in Nuevo Laredo. There, after two days of I DID NOT death, when Jeanette was still learning to run processing, the women had been granted status as some of GET ONE Smokey’s on her own and feeling vulnerable. the 66,000 foreign workers who entered the U.S. last year RESPONSE.” Jeanette sat between the two old friends of under the decades-old H-2B temporary visa program. The Bud’s, and as I introduced myself, they seemed women now lived in a collection of caravans beyond the to act as a kind of protective buffer. I was the fairgrounds, which Jeanette sometimes calls “Mexico City.” magazine writer, I said — I’d left a voicemail? When I asked if they’d seen Jeanette — who they refer Jeanette nodded. Right, she said, her tone to as patrona — the women pointed me towards the fair- noncomittal. The thing was, Smokey’s biggest ground office, a short walk through a garden of partially event of the season started in three days, and assembled Ferris wheels and Thunder Bolts and Spiders she had a lot going on. I could try to catch her Facing page: Smokey’s and Sky Divers, all being worked on by teams of men during the fair, Jeanette told me, and we could doesn't own midway from Tlapacoyan. games like the basket- talk more when it was over. We shook hands, At the time, the conspicuous Trump sign behind ball toss — only rides and she dissected me with her eyes. The men the Tlapacoyan workers seemed counterintuitive, what and concessions — but on either side of her glowered. with 2016 well on its way to becoming “the Year of the independent game Wall,” a year full of campaign rhetoric about “hiring vendors can join Smokey’s to share a Americans first.” But some three years prior, in a eanette’s path to patrona began with stretch of midway for Washington Post article titled “The New Face of the all or part of a carnival Roland Gilmore, a man she never Carny,” Jeanette Gilmore joined several other carnival season. Top left: met, who was born in rural Vermont owners across America proclaiming the necessity of Jeanette laughs with in 1913 and died 14 years before she hiring Mexican workers in an industry that has a hard longtime friend Rene married his son. After leaving home time recruiting Americans. “I put an ad in the news- Piche in the Fryeburg as a young teen, Roland earned the nickname paper for 40 positions,” Jeanette told the Post in late Fair hospitality tent. “Smokey” for his ability to wiggle free smokes 2013. “Travel. Work on weekends. Live in a bunkhouse. out of a cigarette machine. His son later

86 DOWNEAST. COM AUGUST 2017 87 Clockwise from top left: Rafael De La Cruz Dominguez, from Tlapacoyan, in Mexico’s Veracruz state, mans a midway ride in Fryeburg; Jeanette, with Smokey's manager Robby Driskill; Berto and William, a father and son from Tlapacoyan, share a bunkhouse at Smokey’s temporary HQ in Topsham; Levit Licona, of Tlapacoyan, works on ride components in Topsham; Anna Kelly of Syracuse, New York, has worked on and off since she was 19; Smokey’s workers take a break while setting up for a festival at Brunswick’s Bowdoin College.

Top: Samantha Kuhns, of Lewiston, Pennsylvania, watches children bounce on a ride in Fryeburg. Bottom: Independent concessionaire Paul Blaise lights a cigarette as his wife, Jennifer, walks by.

88 DOWNEAST. COM APRIL 2017 89 A boy waits for his turn to ride Smokey’s Greater Show’s on described him as a hustler throughout most the Fryeburg midway. of his adult life, and his carnival empire started with a hot dog stand that he brought around to New England . In 1952, Smokey Gilmore bought a small woodlot in Strong, Maine, which he logged during the winter, and he inherited his first carnival rides around 1960, as payment for a debt. George “Bud” Gilmore, the second of his two sons, joined the family business as a boy, and after a Navy stint and a college degree from UMaine Farmington, he took over the carnival in 1970, following Smokey’s death. Bud was 27 when his dad died, Smokey just 57. By then, Smokey’s Greater Shows had become a stable business, and the farm in Strong had grown to some 4,000 acres. And yet, Bud used to say that his father remained a con to the end: upon a post- mortem examination of his dad’s birth certificate, he learned that Smokey was not, in fact, named “Roland” but “Ronald.” Bud knew Jeanette tangentially from the New England carnival circuit. She was a self-described “Florida girl” who’d left home at 18 to “go on the road and twirl .” By the time Bud approached her at the Litchfield Fair in the early ’80s, asking her out to dinner, Jeanette was 30, divorced, solo parenting a 3-year-old, and working for her father’s ice cream concession. An old friend of the Gilmores told me Bud’s initial attraction to Jeanette had to do with the particular and apparently sensual way she scooped ice cream in her concession booth. They married in 1984 and together raised Jeanette’s son and Bud’s own four children from a previous marriage. “Right from the beginning,” Jeanette told me, “we were a team.” Together, they spent the three decades managing as many as 50 rides ( to Tilt-A-Whirls to Gravitrons) and 15 concession booths (cotton candy to candy apples to fried dough). And together, Jeanette says, they watched their industry change, from a loosely regulated affair based on hand- shakes to an heavy on contracts, insurance forms, zoning approvals, and other red tape. In the early 2000s, citing rising fuel costs, the Gilmores scaled back Smokey’s reach, from five northeastern states to just Maine. In 2003, they started participating in the H-2B temporary worker program, hiring their first batch of employees from Tlapacoyan. Then, in November 2013, Bud died at age 70, following a series of complications that

90 DOWNEAST. COM APRIL 2017 91 arose after a heart valve replacement. “We call it ‘grinding,’ ” Jeanette in her motorhome, now parked in a In a sense, he died as he lived: on said. Carnival-speak for “resilience.” vacant fairground in Topsham, the road, returning to his Florida Since Bud died, Jeanette has been between a demolition derby track and home after closing out the carnival grinding harder than ever. The last few a livestock corral. With several season, just weeks after celebrating years, she told me, have been full of “so southern Maine fairs on the schedule, Smokey’s 30th appearance at the many firsts”: Her first time pulling up to Smokey’s was using the Topsham site Fryeburg Fair. the Gilmore farm in Strong without Bud as its temporary headquarters. When I by her side. Her first time laying out stopped for a visit, Smokey’s was just rides without his knowledge to guide wrapping a festival in Portland and N DAY FIVE of Fryeburg, her. “I had to ask my boys,” she said, prepping for a weeklong carnival in I found Jeanette again, meaning the Tlapacoyan men, “you Auburn. Outside the G7, Buddy the sitting inside a hospi- remember where any of this stuff goes?” terrier was bathing in a kiddie pool, tality tent, hidden from occasionally hopping out to play the fairgrounds by chicken with a group of woodchucks several fence panels, where she and TOGETHER, JEANETTE living under a nearby barn. her carnival colleagues gathered SAYS, SHE AND BUD I found Jeanette sitting at a small each night for dinner. The tempo- WATCHED THEIR INDUSTRY desk behind the driver’s seat, making rary quarters had all the comforts of CHANGE, FROM A LOOSELY calls to Maine’s Washington delegation. home: a roaring woodstove, REGULATED AFFAIR BASED She was urging them not to restrict the sunflowers and bowls of candy on ON HANDSHAKES TO AN H-2B visa program, a hot topic this the tables, a well-stocked bar, and, ENTERPRISE HEAVY ON summer, given the Trump administra- on the back wall, hung like a tion’s “Hire American” sloganeering painting, another bright-blue CONTRACTS, INSURANCE and murky stance on foreign worker Trump sign. Sitting next to Jeanette FORMS, ZONING APPROVALS, programs. All of Jeanette’s 55 visa was Rene Piche, a food concession- AND OTHER RED TAPE. requests had already cleared — she’d aire and longtime friend of the started the paperwork nine months Gilmores. Over coffee and donuts, prior — but she was concerned about Piche reminisced about the nights subsequent carnival seasons, not to when he and Bud used to stay up mention her colleagues in the industry. playing cards with their carnival Jeanette shook her head. “I used to curse Already, the bunkhouses behind her friends. “We used to call ourselves him for all the things we had to do, but I trailer housed some 30 Mexican The Rat Pack,” he said wistfully. think he knew that one day . . .” She employees, and the patrona hoped the These days, Piche lamented, it’s trailed off, then seemed to collect rest would arrive by July. hard to get a start in the carnival herself. “I think he knew I could do it,” But that morning, Jeanette’s long- business — one reason, he suspects, she said, finally. term concerns about the visa program why Smokey’s has trouble attracting were background noise to the day-to- American workers. A Ferris wheel day challenges and financial obligations costs half a million dollars in 2017, EANETTE spent last winter that attend a traveling carnival show. he pointed out. “Used to be that a in her beach house on Siesta She needed more LED lights for her young man could buy a hot dog Key, near Sarasota. About Ferris wheel. She had a pair of genera- stand and slowly start building a 1,000 miles away, across the tors in the shop, both of which were business,” Piche said. “Now, you Gulf, her seasonal employees needed in time for a show in Houlton can’t do it without an angel.” returned to Veracruz, arguably Mexico’s in early July. She was in the process of Then, of course, there’s the most dangerous state, thanks to ordering a new concession stand from stigma, Jeanette offered, the carica- corruption and ongoing cartel wars. Pennsylvania. She had two trailers that ture of the gap-toothed, subliterate She and Bud visited there several times, needed fixing (failed cooling system, carny. She sipped her coffee and to see how their employees lived in moose collision). She was still reeling sighed. “We’ve got teeth,” she said. Tlapacoyan. “It’s like we’re family,” from having sunk nearly $25,000 into “Most of our kids, they go to Jeanette told me, a statement that rebuilding her motorhome’s engine college.” She gestured outside the seems especially poignant with Bud earlier in the year. tent, towards a woman working the gone. Jeanette’s own son was killed in a Meanwhile, as I lingered in the G7, games out on the fairgrounds. car accident in 1998, when he was 17, Jeanette’s phone did not stop ringing “She’s a real estate agent, but she and Bud’s kids are long since grown. (her ringtone is a Mariachi trumpet). A keeps coming back.” To hear “I’m so blessed to have these boys,” she jewelry vendor from Africa called to Jeanette tell it, the skills one learns said. “They’re like my kids. Sometimes ensure that he and his wife could be at a carnival apply to other aspects they call me in the winter. If they need guaranteed the same space in the of professional life — chief among something? If I can help them, I do.” Smokey’s lot they’d had the year them: selling and selling, often for By June, most of Jeanette’s “boys” before. A young mother called, long hours, and never giving up. were back in Maine, and she was back children wailing in the background,

92 DOWNEAST. COM SEPTEMBER 2017 93 asking what time the rides would Zoe, who lives with Ana’s mother start and exactly how many rides during the five months her parents would be running at the Auburn spend working in the U.S. carnival. When I suggested that Ana and Levit invited me to join posting her cell as the only contact them for a dinner of Papa John’s number on the Smokey’s website pizza, over which they explained the might not be the most efficient compromises of working so far from model for business communication, Tlapacoyan: Back home, Levit used Jeanette said, “If I want their 20 to work overtime at his body shop to bucks, I’ve got to be the one to talk make ends meet, 12 hours a day, six to them.” days a week, which rarely left him Then she sighed. “The hard part time to spend with Zoe. Coming to is that this is still a man’s world. Maine, he and Ana can make as People call, they still want to talk to much money in six months as they a man.” She shrugged. “I think they just miss Bud.” Her phone rang again — a longtime vendor of conces- COMING TO MAINE, sion parts, from whom she was LEVIT AND ANA CAN ordering a burner. “You know, my MAKE AS MUCH MONEY husband passed away, and I’m all IN SIX MONTHS AS alone,” she told the vendor teasingly. THEY DID BACK IN After hanging up, she laughed. “I use TLAPACOYAN IN A YEAR. that line all the time.” Around noon, a delivery van pulled up in front of the motorhome and dropped off $800 worth of paint, which Jeanette had did back home in a year, leaving ordered at the request of Levit them six months in the off-season to Licona, a 25-year-old from dote upon their daughter. Earlier that Tlapacoyan in his fifth season evening, they’d gone shopping at a working for Smokey’s. When I nearby TJ Maxx store, and Ana held walked over to see him, Levit was in up the dress she’d picked out for Zoe the process of repairing — grinding, — a red-white-and-blue sundress sanding, and repainting — a set of she’d bought for three dollars. Levit miniature cars hanging from a shrugged. Being away from Zoe, he twirling ride called the Spider. In acknowledged, was probably harder Mexico, he works in a body shop, for Ana than for him. “She is the doing custom paint jobs. mother,” he said. Then he wondered As banda music drifted whether, by the time they got back to through the fairground, and as a Tlapacoyan in October, the dress few of Levit’s compatriots washed might be too small. their clothes and dishes in outdoor After dinner, Levit and Ana sinks, he showed me the camper introduced me to their friend and he shares with his wife, Ana, who’s coworker Berto, who’s worked in also from Tlapacoyan. The couple the American carnival industry for met five summers ago while well over a decade (and who asked working for Smokey’s. While Levit me to withhold his surname). He sat tends to stay back at HQ doing in the staff’s shared outdoor maintenance, Ana works the kitchen, where he and many of his concessions, selling lemonade or coworkers eat communal dinners cotton candy. At night, they often each night. Carnival work is hard, pass the time watching movies on Berto said, and the living isn’t glam- Levit’s phone. He likes superhero orous, but working in the U.S. flicks and Ana does not, although comes with obvious privileges. In he wondered whether they might Mexico, Berto said he often has to find some common ground in pay bribes to policemen. Particularly Wonder Woman. The couple’s in Veracruz, with its powerful drug- primary nightly ritual is Skyping trafficking cartels, tranquility is with their 2-year-old daughter, hard to come by. But that night, he

94 DOWNEAST. COM SEPTEMBER 2017 95 gestured at the tall pines surrounding thin. Ana stood in her lemonade the fairgrounds, to the pink and stand with another woman, arms purple sunset. crossed, staring at her feet. In the “This is very peaceful,” Berto children’s section of the park, said. Songbirds — veeries, wood where there were no lines, William thrushes — called out behind him. ran a spinning called Da In his bunkhouse he shares with Bears. Berto manned the ’s his son, William (“like Shakespeare,” gate, ushering children the age of William introduced himself), Berto his grandkids onto plastic horses. showed me photos of his family on a Jeanette had parked her Volvo SUV pilgrimage to the Virgen de behind the Thunder Bolt roller Guadalupe in Mexico City. He and coaster and sat inside, talking on William tried going to mass at her phone. Brunswick’s St. John the Baptist By the time it was dark, things Church for a few Sundays, but they had picked up somewhat: groups of couldn’t understand the sermons. Berto’s proud of Tlapacoyan. On his phone (even as William I WAS 5 YEARS OLD THE chastised him for wasting data), he FIRST TIME I WENT TO TO played me a video of a religious THE ST. JOHN’S BAZAAR. parade through the middle of IN HIGH SCHOOL, I WENT town. Then he clicked over to TO WATCH THE LOCAL another video: Tlapacoyan’s mayor, KIDS FIGHT AND RIDE THE proclaiming on television his WITH MY CRUSH. commitment to protecting citizens from drug cartels. After it was over, Berto gestured around his quarters, at the bunk bed he shared with William and the room teenagers were doing the Cupid not much wider than he is tall. Shuffle and the Electric Slide in “Very peaceful,” he said again. front of a stage, and lines had formed for the Thunder Bolt and . Some nine hours into her N FATHER’S DAY shift, Ana was still on her feet, weekend, Smokey’s selling lemonade. William remained brought their rides to at his post at Da Bears. I found Berto the St. John’s Bazaar, a gazing up at the Ferris wheel, its carnival on the grounds neon lights against the dark sky, of a Catholic school Brunswick, my twirling in front of the steeple of the hometown. Every Mainer has his or Catholic church. He held up his her own localized Smokey’s phone and snapped a picture, then nostalgia; mine is set at the St. looked at the image and smiled. John’s Bazaar. I was 5 years old the Jeanette, meanwhile, was still first time I went, with my father, parked in the same spot, still on the who had come from out of town for phone, only now she sat in a visit. In high school, I went to darkness, and when the spinning watch the local kids fight and ride lights momentarily ignited her the Zipper with my crush. Twenty windshield, she looked as though years later, I returned with my two she were conversing with some daughters and noticed that the men invisible companion. who operated the rides weren’t the carnies I remembered — scruffy white men who danced to AC/DC in NE MORNING later that front of the Gravitron — but instead week, back at the a quieter group of Spanish-speaking Topsham fairground, men, considerably more reserved Jeanette sat in the G7, and professional. again on her phone, It was a gloomy day and humid. trying to order something called a Come noon, the bazaar crowd was mulligan wheel from a woman on

96 DOWNEAST. COM SEPTEMBER 2017 97 the other end who didn’t seem to know found a moment to shower. “Haven’t what it was. DESTINATION done anything with my hair,” she told “It’s on a gondola,” Jeanette grunted me. “It could probably use an oil into the receiver. “Your husband might SMOKEY’S change.” With so much going on in the know what it is. Bill Mulligan invented it.” DON’T LET THE SUMMER COME TO A present, it was hard getting her to talk Alongside her was Robby Driskill, a CLOSE WITHOUT RIDING A SMOKEY’S about the future. She’s thought about 47-year-old carnival veteran from GREATER SHOWS FERRIS WHEEL selling her house in Siesta Key. She’s Illinois, who Jeanette hired last year to AT ONE OF THE STATE’S CLASSIC thought about getting a new truck. Levit help her manage Smokey’s after two LATE-SEASON AGRICULTURAL FAIRS. recently repaired a dented fender on her tough seasons without Bud. Robbie had BLUE HILL FAIR old one, a 2005 navy-blue F150. He’d been in Biddeford the night before, August 31–September 4. bluehillfair.com shown me the truck earlier that week, setting up for the La Kermesse festival, told me he and his coworkers still call it LITCHFIELD FAIR and he hadn’t gotten back until 1:30 a.m. September 8–10. litchfieldfair.com “Bud’s truck” or “patron’s truck.” Inside, Jeanette had started calling him at 7:30, I saw Bud’s company ID card still OXFORD COUNTY FAIR and he was tired. Transporting a hanging from the rearview mirror. It was September 13–16. oxfordcountyfair.com carnival to a new site, he said, was like sun bleached, the image of Bud’s face “building an entire city in a day.” FARMINGTON FAIR almost entirely faded. Working with municipal bodies to meet September 17–23. In 10 years, Jeanette told me, she farmingtonfairmaine.com codes and standards could be tedious hoped to still be in the business. But her and time consuming. “They expect us to FRYEBURG FAIR more immediate hope was that the be like Six Flags or Disneyland,” Robby October 1–8. fryeburgfair.org federal government will “get this visa told me. “But we’re not. We’re a trav- program straightened out.” In mid-July, eling carnival.” the Department of Homeland That night, Jeanette was expecting Security announced it would another van of workers from Tlapacoyan, issue an additional 15,000 and soon she’d be driving the motorhome temporary foreign worker visas 260 miles to a festival in Houlton, while in the second half of 2017, a Robby stayed on the midcoast to run the one-time bump that drew criti- Heritage Days carnival in Bath. All of the cism from conservative pundits Smokey’s infrastructure would have to be and seemed to muddy some of divided up: rides, bunkhouses, genera- the Trump administration’s tors, ticket booths. And even as they messaging. The long-term puzzled through the logistical snarls, future of the H-2B visa program Robby brought up another potential is still far from certain. crisis: a state budget crisis was hurtling “Without my boys, we can’t Maine towards its first state government do anything,” Jeanette says. “We shutdown in 26 years. All of Smokey’s can’t move. I cannot find 50 rides require state inspections, and if a workers. And the regulations, budget wasn’t enacted by the end of June, they just keep coming and Robby said, there might be no state coming.” She looked out her employees to perform those inspections motorhome window at her — and hence, no carnivals over the 4th of stable of rides, all disassembled July weekend. for the trip up north. Above her Jeanette was incredulous — a govern- desk, a picture of Bud looked ment shutdown? — but there was no down at her. time to dwell on it. She still had a gener- “I’m slowin’ back a bit,” she ator to pick up. went on. “But I’ll be here. I’m “I don’t like splitting up,” she said, as only 63 — too young to retire. her new partner got in the car to head “Yes, ma’am,” the young man said. This is more of a life than a career. We back to Biddeford. The Illinois plates on He was willing to travel. been doing this forever.” Buddy barked. Robby’s SUV read “CARNY.” Jeanette told the Texan she was all set She threw him a tennis ball. “I mean, Moments later came the sound of for now, but that he should call back in what else are we gonna do?” mariachi horns from Jeanette’s pocket. August, when they were prepping for Her cellphone showed a call from Texas. Fryeburg. Then she hung up. Jaed Coffin is an assistant professor of English at It was a young man looking for carnival “Sometimes,” Jeanette said, “they just the University of New Hampshire. He’s the work, wondering, if Smokey’s was hiring. want me to buy ’em a free bus ticket, author of the memoir A Chant to Soothe Wild “You know we’re in Maine, right?” then they never show up.” Elephants and the forthcoming Roughhouse Jeanette asked him. By afternoon, Jeanette still hadn’t Friday. He lives in Brunswick.

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