“Freaks, wonders, and human cock-oddities, the likes of which your eyes have never seen before,” Ken Harck calls from a four-foot-high platform on an expanse of hot pavement in the Midwest Bank Amphitheatre. This is what’s known in the sideshow business as the “grind”–a stream of chatter meant to lure passersby into the tent–and he keeps it up all day long in a nasal drone. Harck’s dressed for the part: white shirt, vest, and pants and a black fedora with a feather. “If you’re in line, you’re just in time. Everybody goes in now. Showtime at the circus. Everybody goes in now. When you walk through that canvas threshold, you walk into another world, another realm, another dimension.”
The colorful banners that advertise the Bros. Grim acts are hand painted using a process from the 1920s, and next year for musical accompaniment Harck plans to add a self-playing 1905 Gavioli organ that’s taken nine years and more than $100,000 to restore inside and out. The show features a revolving roster of “freaks” both born and made: at Ozzfest the former included Jessie the Half-Boy; a “wolf-boy” from Mexico dressed in a charro suit and sombrero; and the aforementioned Punkin Head, aka Scott the Cyclops, who capitalizes on his empty eye socket with various props including, as Harck promises, his own tongue. But at Ozzfest it’s the made freaks that get the biggest reaction from the crowd. Zamora the Torture King sticks skewers through his arms and face and breathes fire. Lucky Diamond Rich, who holds the Guinness world record for most tattoos, climbs atop a stretch unicycle and juggles machetes and an apple, which he simultaneously eats, spewing slobbery chunks of fruit. In past runs Harck has employed the puzzle-tattooed Enigma and his wife, Katzen, formerly with the Jim Rose Sideshow, and Slymenstra Hymen, formerly of Gwar, who breathes fire and shoots “lightning bolts” from her fingertips.
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On the way back from gigs in Minneapolis in his 20s, he’d try to talk his bandmates in Off Broadway into stopping in Baraboo, Wisconsin, to visit the Circus World Museum. Eventually he became a regular. “When I first started going there, my god, the old-timer collectors and the people that worked there, they thought that I was like Charles Manson or something,” he says. By the time he was around 30, though, “they started realizing I wasn’t gonna go away. Some of them right from the beginning were very friendly and would encourage me, and some of them would sorta get pissed off when they would realize I was starting to get good stuff that maybe they used to get. And I might’ve had more energy than somebody else, and all of a sudden you kind of get to the point where you’re an advanced collector and it forces them to respect you.”
“I started collecting this headhunter stuff and got really intrigued by it,” he says. “It’s pretty over-the-top. And then as you’re searching around, you find these other great finds.” He says he procured a blessed mala bead necklace, allegedly made from 120 ground-down monks’ teeth. “I’ve been warned by people, ‘Don’t go showing that around, you’re not supposed to have that.’ If true Buddhists knew I had that in the collection there’d be 40 of them chanting on my front lawn,” he says. “And the thing is, I’m not making this shit up.”
Henry Carrier’s grandmother (and P.T. Barnum’s great-grandaughter), Nancy Barnum Carrier, divided her Barnum inheritance among five grandchildren. Prior to Harck’s visit Carrier had thought about loaning his share to the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, Connecticut, or the Ringling Museum. At home, he figured, they were vulnerable to hurricane damage and the humid Florida climate. Carrier says he sent queries with photos to both museums but never received a response. When Harck showed up, Carrier says, he was impressed by his enthusiasm and agreed to sell him some of the heirlooms. Harck says at first Carrier was hesitant, but then he tracked down the rest of the Carrier grandchildren and they all agreed to sell. “Within two weeks I’d rounded up all of it,” he says.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/A. Jackson, Marty Perez.
