Sideshow led to a friendly reunion

It’s fair week.

And back in the day, fair week not only meant 4-H and harness racing and a midway, it also meant sideshows and “hootchie-cootchie” dancers.

So now seems an appropriate time to finally share with readers the tale of how my great uncle happened to have dinner with the Wild Man of Borneo.

Great Uncle Calvin Haynes appears in every old photograph as a sour and grumpy fellow. But he must have had another side, because he was my mother’s favorite uncle. Maybe he just assumed a dour countenance when the cameras came out.

Calvin was a brother to the inventor Elwood Haynes and to my grandfather Edward Haynes. He was a bachelor and for a time ran a grocery store at High and Meridian streets in Portland.

But as a kid growing up in rough-and-tumble Portland at the turn of the century he was anything but a sour-faced bachelor and must have known everyone.

Among those he knew in his youth was a character nicknamed “Warty.” It was an unfortunate and cruel moniker. “Warty” had some sort of skin condition that transformed him into a Caliban-like figure and probably an object of ridicule. But apparently Uncle Cal was on good terms.

At any rate, after Elwood’s success with the automobile, Uncle Cal’s life turned pretty much upside down. 

Because he was a good bookkeeper — this was the era before adding machines, when someone who could accurately add and subtract and “do sums” was as invaluable as a computer — Uncle Cal was asked by his brother to move from Jay County to Kokomo to help with the growing automobile manufacturing business there.

He wasn’t the only family member drafted into higher service. The late Elizabeth Starbuck’s father was recruited from his banking job here to become the company’s treasurer.

As for Uncle Cal, he saw other opportunities and at one point became the sole Haynes Automobile dealer for the entire West Coast. He was based in San Francisco, where he lived — with typical Hoosier Presbyterian frugality — in a boarding house rather than buying a home.

Uncle Cal took his meals in neighborhood restaurants rather than cook at home.

But he apparently enjoyed the city and took in its sights.

This was post-earthquake, post-Gold Rush San Francisco. It was wild around the edges and still trying to figure itself out as a city.

You never knew what attractions and diversions might appear.

One of them was a circus. A circus with a sideshow.

As my mother used to tell the story, Uncle Cal enjoyed the circus. He liked the show people and the excitement it generated.

So it was probably no surprise that he paid the extra fee — a nickel or a dime? — to go into the sideshow.

He found the usual oddities: Midgets, the bearded lady, odd bits in jars of formaldehyde.

And — in a cage, stamping his feet and growling at the crowd — the Wild Man of Borneo.

Uncle Cal made the rounds, looking at the attractions. Who knows what was going through his head at that point?

But it was when he was standing by the cage of the Wild Man of Borneo that the rest of the ticket-purchasers must have moved on, leaving him momentarily alone beside the cage.

That’s when he heard it: “Pssst!”

And again, “Pssst! Mr. Haynes! It’s me, ‘Warty!’”

There is no record of their conversation, but dinner was on Uncle Cal that night. 

As for me, I’d like to think that Warty enjoyed a nice thick steak and the two of them talked well into the night about old friends, home towns and the surprising moments that can bring us together.

Enjoy the fair.