American OZ: An Astonishing Year Inside Traveling Carnivals at State Fairs & Festivals: Hitchhiking From California to New York, Alaska to Mexico

Mike Comerford, an already outstanding and daring reporter, takes his skills to the limit and introduces us, at his own personal and financial risk - I can't believe I'm about to write this - to the pimps, clowns and freaks of the traveling carnival world, across America. You know carnivals as places to take your kids on rides, win 'em a "Kewpie" doll and get 'em a corn dog and cotton candy. Never in my wildest dreams did I believe these lifestyles existed on a full-time basis. I always thought these "Carny" guys worked the carnival circuit and went home after the summer. No. The "Joints" in California, the "Possum Bellies" in Oklahoma and the "Ride Jockeys" in New Jersey are doing this as a career, stuck in a lifestyle of no escape, in hock up to their eyeballs and dependent on each night's returns for a cheap motel room in which to sleep and a meal to consume. Imagine being down to your last dollar in mid-America somewhere, with nowhere to sleep, nowhere to turn and no one to turn to. I imagine right now, I certainly hope, they're casting for the movie version somewhere in Hollywood. I don't want to be in it but I sure want to see it. Congratulations, Mike.

The next book on my reading docket this summer was the recently published American Oz, a book by journalist Michael Sean Comerford. The tale is described on the book cover as “An astonishing year inside traveling carnivals at state fairs and festivals.” And it is.

Comerford was not so naive or ultimately as frail in purpose as the peripatetic McCandless (featured in the book Into the Wild, John Krakauer). He tore into his journey to work at carnivals with patent determination. He chronicles the doubts this decision created at times yet stands as solidly as one could imagine almost every situation he encountered. Such are the challenges and joys of immersive journalism.

Those were not days filled with comforts. Working at traveling carnivals is a nomadic existence on its own. Traveling between caravans was even tougher. Comerford learned how to live lean. Beyond that, he learned to make do in often depressing circumstances.

He was robbed and had precious bikes stolen. His life was even threatened at times by co-workers. But at 6'5" and possessed of a cutting sense of humor, he avoided potentially fatal confrontations. He was his own form of badass.

Perhaps the best parts of the book are found in the man’s ability to laugh and sing his way through life. Standing on a roadside for hours at a time, even days on end, the author sang to the skies. On the carnival midway running games and rides, he turned his resolute humor into a sales pitch. Along the way, he created and immersed himself in the fantasyland in which people long to be deceived in order to be entertained.

In this respect, Michael Sean Comerford bridged the gap between what America once was and what it has now become, a playground of half beliefs disguising themselves as eternal truths.

The grittiest part of American Oz is its unflinching look at how economics, race, and culture collide at the seams of existence. As one rightly imagines, carnies are not the most stable population of people in the world. Many exist entirely on the money they can earn week-to-week. Others hide from their past. Yet some embrace the peregrinations of carnival life for the exact reasons most of us would shun it. It asks everything from you, and in a raw sort of way, gives everything in return.

That is just one of the lessons one takes away from American Oz. As Comerford swings from south to north, east to west, he sees the country for what it is: a mixed-up and often conflicted carnival of misperceptions and fateful illusions.

As it turns out, some of the most reliable and organized carnival workers are Mexican by heritage. They travel north on well-documented visas organized by a trusted manager back home. They work for months on the carnival circuit. When the season is over, they travel back home to mix with family and see how badly the drug cartels are messing up lives in the mountains.

They are some of the most inspiring survivors and providers you’d ever want to meet.

The compassion with which these tales are shared is remarkable and honest at the same time. Comerford clearly grew to appreciate people of all kinds. He embraced their quirks and flaws. He followed their stories back to the roots of their upbringing to discover how people badly wounded by life can still make it work somehow.
Those principles of appreciation are especially strong when eyes are cast upon the carnival attraction called the Freak Show. One might think such public displays are banned entirely in the age of the politically correct. Not so.
Yet ironically, the lives of the people who work the Freak Show are the least deceptive of all. They are folks making the most of their condition in a money-making proposition. Let us never forget that Munchkinland was the first stop made by Dorothy on her way to the Emerald City. American Oz is no exception. If you’ve never noticed it for what it is, Keeping Up With the Kardashians is a freak show all its own.

By way of revealing my connection with Michael Sean Comerford, we once worked together at a newspaper in Illinois. I recall our lunchroom conversations as wry exchanges about the vicissitudes of the changing industry in which we were both long employed. Soon enough, he’d be launched from his profession like so many other American journalists. I took my own wild leap into the world of marketing, joining an agency that could best be described as a carnival of speculation and Kabuki theater.

So reading American Oz was, for me, a shared journey of sorts. I think you’ll find many moments of shared insight as Comerford hides nothing about his own complex challenges as a human being; a father away from his child, a writer seeking some form of truth, and a journeyman through the American Oz in which we all live.

American Oz by Michael Sean Comerford

American Oz is an evocative, unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime odyssey filled with countless larger-than-life characters, not least of whom is the author himself. Mike Comerford, intrepid adventurer, award-winning journalist, and inveterate, consummate, storyteller, sets out to capture the stories and souls of the people who literally make an American institution—our carnivals and state fairs—come to life every year.

Traveling from coast to coast, north to south, from Alaska to Mexico, Comerford works ten carnivals and fairs in ten states in a single year. He goes deep with the carnies, working side-by-side with them for long hours and low pay, getting to know their stories and the owners, showmen, hustlers, and other walks of humanity who populate this little-noticed subculture of American life. Along the way, he earns the carnies’ respect and admiration (well, except for a few who wanted to kill him), and experiences firsthand their loves, dreams, heartbreaks, addictions, dysfunctions, family separations, and all the pathos and melodrama of a group searching for meaning while teetering precariously on life’s razor-thin edge. Just as Upton Sinclair learned in the slaughterhouses of Chicago in his 1906 novel, The Jungle, Comerford (himself a Chicago native) discovers that “living the life made writing about the life come to life.” (p. 126)

But carnies are only part of the American Oz story. Equally as compelling are Comerford’s adventures as he crisscrosses America, mostly by thumb but also by bus and train. Stretching his carny wages to the bone, he encounters numerous unforgettable characters as he rambles, outwitting (and more than once winning over) overzealous state and local police, enduring all kinds of weather and outdoor sleeping arrangements, blogging in all-night diners and all-you-can eat pancake joints, and living a life of exhilarating freedom. Such freedom is clearly not without stress, and it comes at a cost—the book’s most poignant moments are the author’s occasional on-the-road reunions with his delightful and precocious now teenaged daughter, Grace, who is herself an accomplished author and storyteller. But Comerford pulls it off with a panache and spirit that are uniquely his own. The book’s surprising conclusion reveals the keen analytical eye that the author developed during his decades as an investigative journalist.

Listen up, people. You won’t be able to put this book down. Reminiscent of The Big Fish and the gritty writings of Studs Terkel and John Steinbeck, with a dash of Jack Kerouac, Tony Horwitz, and even Hunter S. Thompson thrown in, American Oz will take you on the adventure of a lifetime. It will kick your COVID blues, give you the vacation that you maybe couldn’t take, and, I daresay, give you a very clear picture of what it’s like to “run off and join the carnival”. Who doesn’t occasionally just want to chuck it all and hit the open road? Thanks to Mike Comerford, you don’t have to. Just like the carnies and Midway goers who came to love him, you will quickly realize that you’re in the hands of an irrepressible master storyteller. Buy this book now, and grab extras to give as birthday and Christmas gifts. Your family and friends will thank you. Review by Steve Reddick Oak Ridge, TN

If you do not have much close experience or connection to American carnival life, this book fills you in on a great deal about it as personally experienced by the author. It is written based on his experiences working as a carny for an array of American carnival companies from California to New York to Alaska, Texas, Minnesota, Florida and others. The author brings to light, many of the labor inequities of the carnival worker and the conditions in which they work. He makes an effort to balance out these with right to work realities, but there is not much perspective given from the carnival owners' viewpoint. Poetic and cleverly insightful at times, this is a worthwhile read for those with some spare time.

I haven't had this much fun with a book in years. A lot of us have enough leftover little-child in us to take special pleasure in this insider's look at life on the midway. Mr. Comerford combines his kinda wacky road adventures across the entire length and breadth of North America with excellent descriptions of life as a carny. The book is fun, but it's also surprisingly sensitive, with insights about life for those who are committed to this lifestyle. Very well done.

Is there a carny buried deep within you? Do you have a longing to hit the road and be a carnival gypsy, setting up the Ferris wheel, the Gravitron, the Merry-Go-Round?
Then Michael Sean Comerford’s new non-fiction, “American Oz: An Astonishing Year Inside Travel Carnivals at State Fairs & Festivals” is a book you’ll want to read. And even if you don’t have those yearnings, it’s a wild ride into a world of eccentric characters, crazy journeys, and what might be America’s most misunderstood and maligned business community.
Comerford chronicles his year spent traveling across the lower 48 and Alaska, much of it by hitchhiking, working in what can only be described as a nomad community populated by the fringe of society and occasionally a college student off on an adventure. Meet Angel who sold souvenirs on the midway.
“Ghost’s girlfriend was Angel, a quick-witted white woman in her twenties… ‘I wanted to be a veterinarian. Now look at me, right? I’m going back to get my GED. I’m going to college. I’ll major in business so I can open my own joint in a carnival,’” Comerford writes.
Did she? No, she disappeared with Ghost one night, moving on to somewhere, just like Comerford did.
This is a great read, fascinating and colorful, filled with crazy scenes and touched with sadness about people who still hold dreams, but have no rainbows.

I grew up next to a county fairgrounds and every year when I was a kid I'd go find a job with a carnie. Ever since then I've been interested in old school carnivals and the lives of the people who run them. American Oz was recommended to me after I watched HBOs Carnivale and after I purchased it, I quickly found out it was one of those books you couldn't stop reading but didn't want to end. It's like a modern day On The Road. You'll never look at the people who work the carnivals the same way again after you read AO!! Highly recommended.

I read this book in one afternoon. I literally could not put it down except for a little food and a few bathroom breaks. What a wonderful glimpse into the behind the scenes world of carnivals and carnies. Ray Bradbury’s “Sonething Wicked this way Comes” has been one of my favorite books since the age of 10, when I stole it from my father’s library, and I am so happy to see it referenced by the author. I grew up with summertime carnivals and heard terrifying stories of carnies when I was older, probably they’re all true. Thank you, Mr. Comerford, for an entertaining respite from unpacking boxes.

Michael Sean Comerford is an excellent writer who takes you on a journey you won’t soon forget, immersing himself in carnival life across the country and Mexico. His characters are colorful and his writings bring an understanding and compassion for a little known subculture. You will have a greater appreciation for your fellow man even if their life path is much different than your own.

Lose yourself in a world that is seen but not really SEEN! What a great book and what an adventure the author took us on. Thank you for sharing your travels and for introducing us to the brave, stong and heartbreaking people of the carnival world.