Read Online Under the Electric Sky by Christopher A. Walsh - Free Book Online

stayed at home attending to the children. Shoelaces, razorblades and other essentials became Frank’s staples out on the country beat around the island. He also sold aprons Alice made on the family sewing machine for thirty-five cents. Selling came easily to Frank, who was never content just walking around selling goods. If he was going to move items, then a certain amount of showmanship had to be applied. His cases of goods were like tiny treasure troves, filled with everything someone on the island could get their hands on. At night, the kids would ask their father to show them his wares and he always obliged to giggles and bewilderment from the amazed children. It was like the old man had a general store in the worn, black dispatch box he lugged around. If he didn’t have what somebody needed, he’d find it and be back to their house to collect a modest sum for his troubles. There was no real money in this, but it was good honest work and the kids never starved.
    Dorchester Street is a typical downtown Maritime residential road, with old, brightly painted clapboard homes crammed together a few feet off the sidewalk. There are no real front yards on Dorchester Street, but on the south side of the east end, the backyards stretch down to King Street, a few hundred feet from where the old train yard used to sit. It was here that the Reid boys spent a lot of their summers, playing games and exploring the area. The train coming in was a daily excitement for John, George and Clarence, who would hang around and see if a dime or two could be made by helping unload freight.
    One clear August morning at 5 a.m., as five-year-old Clarence slept in his bed in that old house on Dorchester Street, a whistle blew through the cold dawn as his future came chugging into town. The Bill Lynch Shows had just completed what in 1935 could only be described as one of the greatest and longest carnival transportation efforts ever recorded. The Lynch shows had finished an engagement in Newfoundland and had loaded out of St. John’s on a Thursday, carrying fourteen railcars and roughly seventy personnel to Port-aux-Basques by Friday morning. There they loaded onto a steamship that would take them into North Sydney by Friday night, only to load back onto a train for the jaunt to Port Hawkesbury where they met a train-ferry destined for Mulgrave, Nova Scotia. From there the train continued through Moncton to Cape Tormentine, New Brunswick, where the railcars were loaded once again on a train-ferry and shipped to Port Borden, P.E.I., arriving finally in Charlottetown early Monday morning.
    That was a long haul, but that’s the way the carnival operated in those days and it was the price of doing business in Atlantic Canada. Lynch hired Canadian National Railways to transport his show rather than buying and maintaining his own train, which meant he was operating what was then called a “gilly” show – and a rather large one at that.
    By later in the morning Clarence and Johnny were milling around the railyard, asking questions and watching the carnival workers unload the rides and concession stands. It was an excitement beyond excitement for the boys. It was fantastic to imagine the possibilities this trainload of magic would bring to the city for the brief spell it was here. It was like another world was created in front of them and young Clarence’s heart welled up with emotion... dreaming the dream of a boy ... and life was a round of joy when the carnival was in town. What Clarence was witnessing was like nothing he had ever seen. It had a profound effect on him that he would remember forever.
    The boys would help out every August the show pulled into town. They’d make a dime for a few hours work and if they were lucky one of the workers would wink at them and say, “Come see me and I’ll put you on a ride”. That was as magical a saying as there ever was to the Reid boys, who often couldn’t