Selling Coloring Books

“I don’t know about you, but I’m out here to make as much blanking money as I can -- not to put on a circus!”

So said a circus owner to me many moons ago while we were out in the middle of nowhere and I had had the temerity to complain to him about the paucity of clown gags in the show and the preponderance of peanut pitches and other commercial come-ons to get the scarecrow crowds to cough up their coin.

He allowed just one clown gag during the whole show -- the rest of the time I had to go out and sell coloring books. They were cheap affairs, made in China, that would embarrass a kindergartner. I sold them for two dollars -- one dollar went to the show and the second dollar went to me. So I spent most of the show wandering up and down the dusty bleachers at rodeo grounds sullenly waving this tsotchke in the faces of emaciated children and played out adults.

We were in a section of the country that appeared to still be harboring vestiges of the Great Depression. Tar paper shacks leaned resignedly away from the wind, with skinny crooked stove pipes sticking out of the roofs as if in a Max Fleischer cartoon. Everyone wore patched overalls. Rusted car chassis sat in weedy front yards. Vicious dogs yapped through the gaps of sad wooden palisades surrounding the better homes -- the ones with indoor plumbing.

I developed a cynical philosophy that season -- no matter how poor someone says they are, they always have money for cotton candy and coloring books. Most of the kids came to the show without shoes on. Their parents were faded, like a silk dress left out in the sun too long. There didn’t seem to be any jobs around, and the dirty streets were filled with listless idlers who looked at our circus posters in shop windows with slack-jawed boredom. This was a part of America I thought had disappeared for good when we got into World War Two.

The circus owner was not satisfied with coloring book sales, even though I usually went through a complete carton of them each day. He thought there was more to be done to inveigle greenbacks from the hicks. So he pulled out the old bicycle trick. I was against it, and told him so -- and was in turn told to hold my tongue and do what I was told or I could pack up my clown trunk and hit the road.

For those of you who do not make a study of mountebanks and charlatans, the ruse is performed by placing blue dots inside all the coloring books. One coloring book is kept out of circulation -- it has a red dot inside. Each show a shiny new bicycle is wheeled out during intermission and the ringmaster announces that the lucky boy or girl who buys the coloring book with the red dot in it will win the bike. The show’s clown, in other words me, stands next to him during this announcement with dozens of coloring books ready to sell. I’m smiling like a maniac. To prove that it’s not a fake, one of the show kids always ran into the ring with the ‘winning’ coloring book with the red dot inside, and wheeled away the bike, followed by the envious stares of all the children in the audience. Of course, the kid gave the bike back after each show. Our plant was the son of the slack wire act. He could really act, racing into the ring screaming with excitement. I hope he made it to Hollywood and changed his name to Brad Pitt or something.

This little trick did, indeed, perk up coloring book sales for several weeks. But then our karma changed.

One miserably hot matinee, after the ringmaster had made his coloring book pitch and I had sold several dozen books, and we were waiting for the show’s infant ringer to come up and claim the bike, a little girl, holding her mother’s hand, brazenly came into the ring with a coloring book -- and inside that coloring book was a RED dot. I showed it to the ringmaster, who in turn showed it to the owner, who turned several deep shades of magenta before bowing to the inevitable and letting the little girl wheel the bike away.

“Change the winning dot to green!” the owner commanded. He would not be slickered again. He went out and bought a new child’s bicycle. And he told the son of the slack wire artists to get into the ring to claim the bike a damn sight faster in the future.

All went well until we hit Ruidoso, NM.

In that town not one, but THREE little children came racing into the ring -- each with a green dot in their coloring book. And one of them was the daughter of the Chief of Police. To avoid any unpleasantness the show owner had to pony up for three brand new bikes, as well as the one he had just purchased.

“Drop the dots!” he said afterwards. “This is costing me an arm and a leg!”

So we dropped the swindle and finished out the season mulcting the rubes in a fairly honest fashion. Of course, had that owner happened to look in my clown trunk at the right moment he might have spotted an opened packet of colored adhesive dots I just happened to have with me. They came in handy during these long and stressful circus tours.