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Most Gibsonton residents don’t want to talk about Lobster Boy with outsiders. But they’re more than willing to talk about other subjects.

The Last Sideshow

“These people could joke about who they were, but they had pride,” says legendary carnival impresario Ward Hall, who runs one of only two remaining traveling sideshows. His “World of Wonders” attraction has an upcoming gig at the Florida State Fair in February.

“I don’t think anything that is going on in this election shows that the politicians have pride.”

Hall, 70, once acted as the carnival barker, standing in front of the theater with a straw hat and cane, shouting, “Hurry, hurry, hurry, see the most amazing sights in the world with your own two eyes …”

But now, that patter is delivered via a tape recorder, and a good part of the World of Wonders exists as a wax museum. The show still features “Howard Huge,” a 712-pound fat man; a fire-eating dwarf; a woman who dances the cha-cha over broken glass; and a man who pulls a wagon of sledgehammers by hooks in his chest and who is known as “Tough Titties.”

“It was a way of life, and a good one,” Hall says. “They got paid and they stuck together. That’s why so many of them lived in this town. It was a brotherhood.”

Hall says it took more than political correctness to put most of the sideshows out of business. Medical science provided corrective surgery and other treatments for many people born with deformities, reducing his potential stable of talent. But the real killer, he says, was economics.

“We sideshows used to work on a 60-40 split with the carnivals,” Hall says. “But then the carnivals started investing in big rides. Once you have a ride, you get all the money and you don’t have to worry about the split.”

Sideshows hit a high point in the 1950s, when more than 100 traveling acts toured the country. States began cracking down on sideshows in the 1960s. Pete Terhurne, Hall’s 3-foot, 7-inch fire eater and a man known as “Sealo, the Seal Boy” (he had hands growing out of his shoulders), challenged a Florida law against exploitation of deformed people, and in 1972, the state Supreme Court struck it down as unconstitutional.