A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show.
If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife .org.
The state of Iowa has a little more than three million people, one million come to the state fair.
We're going past the swine barn and the kids' talent show stage and the lemonade shakeup stands and the many, many corn dog stands and the Central Iowa Railroad Club exhibit building and the chainsaw art and the live snakes and the vast, slowly moving rivers of people.
Every one of those million is here on their own personal quest for what they want out of the fair.
It's stuff they want to do, it's stuff they want to see.
Everybody has their own mission.
Declan and Killian, for instance, seven to nine years old, brothers from the suburb of Des Moines, they want to see the giant bull.
Killian, the big brother, talked to my coworker, Diane Wu.
Why are you so excited to see the bull?
It's one of my favorite animals.
How come? They can see red and red is my favorite color.
What? You say it was black, like, every day.
That's a little Brother Deck one with a fact check about Killian's favorite color being black.
Another fact check?
Bulls can't actually see red.
The boys wander around the outside of the cattle barn, looking for the right entrance.
Super size bull. That way.
The bull's name is Teddy Bear, and it weighs 3 ,060 pounds.
Signs duct taped onto the pen say, do not touch the bull, which is like, yeah.
What do you think? That's cool.
And big. I thought it would be smaller.
It'd be smaller, okay.
A little bit. When you see a giant animal, if you're a kid or an adult, what is there to say?
Other than, yeah, okay.
That's about right.
Elsewhere. Cowboy mounted shooting is one of the fastest growing equestrian sports in the country.
It's a timed event where we use two .45 single action long colt pistols.
In the cowboy mounted shooting competition, each competitor is on horseback, and they ride a course, shooting burning embers from their guns.
They try to pop five balloons with one pistol, then they change guns, shoot five more balloons with the other pistol, and gallop to the finish line all without stopping.
Some of these runs we're going to be doing today are going to be nine seconds.
That's less than a second per shot with a gun change.
It's a lot happening all at once.
Adam Ross is actually ranked sixth in the world at this sport, but somehow he has never won first place here in his home state of Iowa.
That's his mission for this year's fair, to my co -worker, Ike Shreese -Kanderaja.
I'm naturally competitive.
When everybody else puts their horses away in the winter, me and my wife take our horses to the barn, and we ride all winter long.
We try to outwork every one of our competitors.
When you survey this room of competitive riders in your level, who's the one you're most keeping an eye on?
I look right in the mirror at myself.
I know that I'm the fastest one here.
I have the horses the most proven here this year, so as long as I don't beat myself and I go out there and run my match, I know that there's nobody that will compete with me.
It's a slightly slower pace over at the replica of Iowa's first church.
The original was built in 1834.
It's a cozy log cabin where the goal is to reflect on God's goodness right in the middle of a gigantic, noisy carnival that holds services twice a day during the fair.
Well, Iowans are not officially permitted to pray, but they are, the guy leading the service says, allowed to sing prayers.
High above nearly everything at this fair, looking down on everyone, stands beyond them, age 11, on the giant slide for her very first time.
It is a massive metal slide that you fly down on a felt mat, and she has a simple goal of her own.
So, we're going to go on the slide, and I'm very terrified right now, because one of our moves, and I'm done.
Then, she and her sister are Sally, grab their mats, and push off.
The buried industry's building is an enjoyable mismatch of t -shirts and household stuff for sale, but also expensive devices to help your blood circulation or your horse's blood circulation, plus a guy on one of the more surprising missions at the fair, I thought.
Marty Golden, in an neatly pressed blue uniform and navy hat, who was standing in front of a booth promoting the USS Iowa battleship, a World War II era ship that's now a floating museum.
This restoration paid for in part by grants from the state of Iowa.
We want to make the citizens of Iowa more aware of the battleship Iowa, and let them know that anybody that's a resident of the state of Iowa gets on board the Iowa battleship for free, and if they let us know they're from Iowa, we'll take them behind the scenes to places that are not open up to the general
public. But there's a catch.
Iowa happens to be landlocked.
The ship is Dr. Los Angeles, hence Marty's mission, to get Iowans out there.
Marty did two years in the navy, 30 years in the reserves.
He served on a ship right off the coast of Havana during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
He's also a marine biologist who studied ocean life, retired now.
But he loved the navy enough that now he's a tour guide on the Iowa, which again is in the port of Los Angeles.
Marty is not an Iowan.
He lives out there.
I missed the navy so much that I volunteer now about once a week down in the battleship Iowa.
And they flew you out here?
More or less. Oh, you flew yourself out here?
I contributed a substantial amount of the effort to get out here.
So basically you said, let me go and do this.
It'll be fine. And they're like, great.
They probably would have covered all of my expenses, but I believe in the ship.
The ship is always struggling to bring money in, to keep operating.
So you didn't want to take any money away that could have gone to the battleship?
The Iowa State Fair began in 1854, just eight years after Iowa became a state.
They hadn't even picked a location to build their state capitol building yet.
But they wanted to come together for a fair.
Reasons that aren't that different from why we do it today.
And what are they? I think at a state fair, so much of what's on exhibit is us.
We come. The animals we raise, and our pies and sewing projects, our spelling bee skills, and our expertise at shooting balloons from horseback, and our love for a navy museum battleship.
And we think others would love also if we could just tell them about it in person.
We take in the exhibits, and we are the exhibits at a state fair.
It's just so different about a state fair from everything else.
Today we hang out with some of the one million people at the fair, and see if they get what they wanted and dreamed of in the fair this year.
I'm WBC Chicago, this is American Life, I'm out of glass, stay with us.
This is American Life, Act One, Carney Confidential.
So Bailey Levitt has a different relationship to state fairs and carnivals, for most of us.
It always feels good to be back on a midway.
When I come out here, I smell it, it just feels like home to me.
Bailey grew up in carnivals, comes from a family of carnies.
Wait, I'm smelling, what is the smell you're talking about?
So I smell turkey legs, for sure.
I could smell the cotton candy, that burnt sugar smell.
And there's always like an underlying kind of grease smell, the diesel smell from the rides and from the generator, which is giving power to all the rides.
It's so comforting to me.
Bailey read on Instagram that we were going to be doing this show about state fairs, and she wrote in.
Talking about her family's life on the road as carnies, mostly out west.
I thought it would be fun to walk through the midway with her and see it through her eyes.
Because she notices all kinds of stuff, big and little, that you and I don't know enough to notice.
She grew up with a different vocabulary for everything around us here.
She calls all the games joints.
Well, it's a four -sided joint, but then three sides...
Cotton candy stands are poppers, food stands are grabs, prizes are flash.
Carnival's themselves are shows, as in...
He's actually still on that show, and I think he's managing rides now.
A bunch of different shows, 13 independent companies provide the games and rides for the Iowa State Fair.
We're welcome to do a balloon game that must be, I don't know, 20, 25 feet tall, a structure made from aluminum scaffolding with flags and prizes hanging everywhere, and two giant banners saying, bust one wins.
Bailey gives it once over, which is impressed.
You can tell that they take good care of the joint, because you see how clean all this stuff is, where all those connection points are?
You're pointing to the frame of the stand itself.
Yeah, the joints where different pieces link up for this game, all that stuff is really well -maintained.
Bailey tries to spot who's green help and who's a 40 miler, that means it's just there for a bit, and who's a genuine carny.
If I met Bailey, I honestly wasn't so sure if people still use the word carny, or if I had some sort of derogatory, old -timey feeling to it.
She told me some carneys hate the word, but she and her family embrace it, with pride.
These days, Bailey works for a little software company that her mom started, but two of Bailey's brothers and her sister are still on the show, and her dad and stepmother run a show in Alaska that her dad tries to pull her back into now and then.
Bailey has happy memories growing up, running around carnivals and state fairs.
She could ride any ride or play any game for free, surrounded by adults, her parents' employees, or get their eyes on her.
Their incredibly special day is like Stock Day, when the stuffed animals for the fair, the stock, would arrive on a giant semi -trailer truck.
And it was a giant pile of toys that I could literally jump in and swim in, like a ball pit, but with stuffed animals.
That was my favorite.
Bailey started to work in the fair, for real, when she was 10, working on a goldfish game.
The four -sided center joint.
Bailey's mom, Tina, joined us for a while in the midway.
She was watching Bailey's baby while Bailey and I walked around.
Tina Coman is a family carnival for years, and jokes that her kids learned to count by counting money.
She says Bailey was great at drawing a crowd, loved the attention while performing.
When she was little, her flaw as an employee, she did not care about convincing people to spend more money on the game.
She would sit there and talk to people, and sometimes she would get in trouble, because if she's talking to people, she's not actually making money.
She's just talking to people.
But then as she got older, she focused a little bit better, but weird that your child labor didn't pay off like you thought it would.
Child labor laws do not apply to family, and they learn that very young.
Is that true? It is true.
At least that's what I told them, and they believed me, so.
Sounds like you're right about that one.
Something you don't think about too deeply as a civilian fairgoer, looking for fun, is that for the people working the fair, it really is all about money.
How much you can make, and how quickly and efficiently you can bring it in.
Among other things, the state fair is a collection of small businesses attracted by the massive crowds, and among the people like Bailey, who work games and rides, the workers who make the most money are called agents.
The word agent means different things in different regions of the country among carnies, but where Bailey was a carny, agents were just the best there was.
So good at getting families and guys trying to oppress their girlfriends to throw money at games, the carnival owners would pay them more than anybody else, and they would jump from show to show, they're agents as in free agents.
As we walk through the fairgrounds, the thing that Bailey wanted to show me more than anything was an agent.
Yeah, so an agent is someone who can do what we call putting a mark to sleep, where they're going to be able to kind of put you in this state where all you want to do is continue playing their game.
You want to work towards whatever prize they have you working towards, whether it's popping balloons or knocking over milk bottles or whatever.
You're going to spend way more money than you planned on at that game.
And whenever you get somebody in that state, if you're able to do it really well, it's called putting a mark to sleep.
Bailey and her stepdad once watched an agent who put a mark to sleep so well that he spent all of his money, left the game and then came back with more money.
I'm getting chills as I talk about it.
I've never seen anybody do that.
Once a mark leaves your game, usually they're awake and it's done.
I wanted to see this.
I wanted to see an operator put somebody to sleep.
So we headed out in search of an agent.
There's going to be a lot of agents here.
We head over to a game where there's a row of 14 chairs in front of 14 targets.
The way this game works is you sit and fire a water pistol at the target when you hit the bullseye.
The water goes into a tube, filling it up.
First player to fill their tube wins the stuffed doll.
You got number one.
The song pauses your hearing.
Bailey disapproves.
Alright. This guy's trying to get people to sit and play the game.
Three players sit. Alright.
And a fourth. Ten seats are empty.
Last call for this race at the sound of the bell.
The water will start.
Everybody ready? In three, two, one.
Here we go. Go, go, go.
All the way to the top.
Keep your eye on the dot.
Don't work off this water.
The water is chasing the day.
Number eight. Winner, winner, winner.
So what do you think of him?
He's okay. He's not the best I've seen, but he's not the worst.
He's doing good at trying to engage people and make them play, but he's had a lot of pauses where he's not talking at all.
Bailey knows this particular game well, the water race.
She's been the one on the mic, running the water race for her dad's carnival in Alaska.
She was taught to do lots of rhyming when you were on the mic.
Lots of alliteration.
Like watch him race him, watch him chase him.
That's what she did.
This guy does not do much of that.
Also. He's only getting three to four players each time.
Do you think he can be pulling in more people?
Absolutely, yeah. It's a nice game.
It has great stock.
The joint looks really nice, really clean, but they could be making a lot more money, in my opinion.
Do you think this guy is an agent?
No. Definitely not.
We cross the fairgrounds to find another water race game.
And this one's huge and beautiful.
26 seats instead of 14 like the first one.
That's what Bailey calls a double -sided joint.
There are two rows of chairs facing each other, and the guy on the mic stands in the middle on a platform, between the two rows.
Huge fluffy prizes hanging everywhere.
And the guy on the mic...
Get ready, get set, go, go, go, go, go.
Alright, don't waste a drippity drop trying to get to the tippity top.
So watch and see who's it going to be, and the winner is...
Right there. All about rhyming.
The alliteration. The alliteration, yeah.
Winner, winner, winner.
He's constantly talking.
He's using a lot of alliteration and rhyming and like catchy things to drop people in.
Even I can tell. This guy's got charisma.
He's a stocky bald guy with five o 'clock shadow.
When he's on the mic, you cannot look away.
And that great gruff rock and roll voice.
Get ready, get set, go, go, go.
Who's it going to be?
Stop watching. See, oh man, it's close.
It's neck to neck, it's toe to toe, don't waste a drippity drop.
Winner, winner, winner, winner, winner, winner, winner, winner, winner, winner, winner, winner.
Chicken dinner. Yeah, this set up is great.
They've got really like hyped up music, flashing lights.
They've also got their mic turned up so his voice is a lot more clear than that other guy.
And he's playing off his customers.
He's joking around with them.
Do it again? Yeah he's good at what he does.
Look, brother. Bailey's mom, Fort McConaugh, a manager, she's watching him too.
He's not a 40 miler, he's a carny.
I do get the guy to talk to me, and go to snatches for conversation while winners are picking their prizes.
His name is Jeremy Bouvier.
How long have you been doing this?
24 years. How many months of a year do you work?
All year. Work all year.
If you have a house or apartment somewhere that's your home.
I had an apartment up until January.
I got tired of paying for it, because I'm always gone.
I'm buying a motor home in November.
So if you have a motor home, then you just take the motor home with you as you travel?
Yeah. What city was the apartment in?
Lewiston, Maine. That's where I'm from.
And who do you travel with?
I go. I bounce around.
That's right. So this isn't you don't have to travel with a motor home.
