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Sunday, January 2, 2005 10:10:16 AM

http://www.cleveland.com...04672626254600.xml?ebrev 

Siman & Schuster 244 pp $23.

Learning the ropes of scams and cons

Sunday, January 02, 2005
David Walton

Special to The Plain Dealer

Eyeing the Flash," Peter Fenton's likable, illu minating history of his education as a carnival con artist in the late '60s, opens with what has to be this year's best disclaimer: "Names and identifying characteristics of the alibi agents, rideboys, lot lice, flatties, marks, schoolteachers, compulsive liars, gamblers, police, hanky-pank degenerates, outraged citizens, sideshow operators, friends and others mentioned in this book have been changed."



That serves, too, as a Cast of Characters for this droll coming-of-age story.

Fenton was a smart but unexceptional kid at Mineralton High School, 20 miles west of Detroit, when his math ability caught the eye of classmate Jackie Barron, younger brother in the family owners of Party Time Shows.



The ability to calculate rapidly turns out to be key for a successful carnival operator. And Party Times Shows, whose press releases claim the company is "winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Family Entertainment," is as elaborately rigged and gloriously disreputable as any scene in literature.



Most of the rides don't work, the Free Circus has only three animals, and the candy and concessions are all shelf clearances. The celebrated "13-inch hot dog" is a standard footlong in a shorter bun, and house policy is "keeping a wiener until it was sold, whether that took a day or a week."



But the rides and concessions are only a draw. Party Time Shows is a games show, writes Fenton, a traveling carnival that "deservedly earned its rep utation as a rackets show."



On his first visit, Peter encounters a man spraying gray paint on two tan Irish setters for the new trained wolf act and meets Dinkie, the ringmaster, who tells him, "I was ringmaster for the Baker & Teasdale Circus, but I quit over creative differences. They stopped creating my paycheck."



Fenton's story, which takes place before he graduates from high school, is a good, old-fashioned scoundrel-on-the-make story.



Jackie Barron bills himself "The World's Younger Elephant Trainer," and Peter travels around Ohio and Michigan as assistant trainer for Wanda the Elephant, a job enlivened by "the gymnasts who'd been forced to take the stage after I'd only partially removed Wanda's manure in Cleveland, [and] the Akron party store owner who paid us five bucks when we bet him that we had an elephant in our trailer."



Step by step, Peter works his way up the hierarchy of carnival games, rising from "sloughing the joint" to working the "flat shops," where the unwary throw six dice with a collective high count in a game where gains are assigned only to numbers 37 through 48.



"Why didn't marks [customers] notice this?" Fenton asks. "Probably greed. Probably because everything happened too fast. Probably because they barely understood the game except that they'd earned 99 yards in a matter of minutes, and how much more could it take to gain that extra yard and take home a color TV?"



The "flash," by the way, is the array of prizes behind the game board, the color TV, the "Bolivia" watches. "Eyeing the Flash" is a pleasurable con and offers plenty of flash. I hope it will confirm in bookstores the philosophy Peter Fenton learned on the fairway: "There was plenty more money to be made."



Walton is a critic in Pittsburgh.



To reach David Walton:



books@plaind.com
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