Growing up in the Midwest, there was a yearly visit to the State Fair that — during my childhood, at least — was always tempered with a tremendous terror.

For many months, there was a story in the newspaper about a young boy who visited the Nebraska State Fair in Lincoln and then disappeared.  He was continuously searched for on the Fairgrounds and communities in the area would get together and search other pockets of the city so the boy might be found.

A long while later, the boy’s decomposing body was discovered stuffed inside an empty train tank car in a faraway town.  The thinking at the time was that the boy had run into a carnival worker — a Carny — and something horrible happened and the boy was killed and stuffed, and sealed, into the tank out of convenience since the railroad ran straight through the Fairgrounds.

Continue reading → The Modern Fairway Carny: Itinerant Street Vendors