By ERIC C. RODENBERG
AntiqueWeek Associate Editor

TAMPA BAY, Fla. - Today, within our massive mass media, business people often speak of “the great competition for the entertainment dollar.”

Well, that is nothing new. Ask Johnny Meah; he’ll tell you it was as tough – if not tougher – in earlier days.

Over the past half-century, Meah has carved out a niche for himself as the “Czar of Bizarre.” Meah – along with other legendary names like Snap Wyatt, Fred Johnson, Jack Cripe and Jack Sigler knew the importance of shock and awe.

Their job was selling Huey, “the Pretzel Boy,” Flip, “the Frog Man; or Blockhead, the maniac who drove nails up his nostrils.

Theirs was commercial art jacked up on steroids: from The World of the Girl from World War Zero, to The Dance of Death (by Fred Johnson), the single object was sell, sell, sell.

“We knew exactly what we had to do,” the 73-year-old Meah recalled. “Each of the show fronts was about 100 feet long. We knew that the average stride of a man was about three feet, at about a second a step. During those 331/3 strides we had to slow down, stop, and make that customer reach into his pocket … if he got to the end of the line, we knew we had lost him.”

And the “sign snappers” and carnival “talkers” pulled out all the stops. The combination of the talkers fast-cadenced patter, coupled with the mind-numbing art worked to befuddle the midway stroller – at least long enough for him to stop, reach into his pocket and pull out money for a ticket. That was the long and short of it, Meah said.

“When, the people walked in after paying their money they were all in a complete fog,” Meah said. “After looking at all the paintings, listening to the talker jamming away outside, once they entered the show they were in another world. Some, of course, were grossly disappointed; but, usually, those would go back outside, look at the paintings and feel better.”

Back in the 1920s right up into the 1960s, the carnival sideshow business, featuring “freak shows,” was one of the few forms of entertainment for small-town America. Today – of course – the “freak” business is dead; due as much to television as to “political correctness.”

But, those paintings – the more lurid the better – are now worth money.

Mosby & Company Auctions will feature 50 of these original sideshow banners, in addition to more than 200 circus posters from 1908-1998 in a mail, phone and Internet auction that starts Nov. 2 and ends on Nov. 17.

At that auction Mosby & Company owner Keith Spurgeon will have three Meah banners, in addition to carnival banners done by Wyatt and Johnson. In the past Spurgeon has sold a Fred Johnson poster – The Human Mocking Bird – for around $6,200.

“They’re getting harder to find,” Spurgeon said. “Especially, the old ones in nice condition. They’ll start around $100 and for a “real killer” you can get up to $15,000, $20,000 or even more.”

The banners – are big, colorful and full of exaggeration. Take for example; the Popeye banner by Snap Wyatt that Spurgeon has up for sale: painted in the 1960s, it measures 120-inches wide by 136-inches tall, showing a man with extending eyes, several inches from his head. It’s a typical exaggeration, according to Meah, who knew both “Popeye” and Snap Wyatt well.

“The term “Snap” was a term we used for a painter who wasn’t contracted to any of the big outfits, but ran up and down the highway, ‘snapping signs,’ or painting for circuses and carnivals,” Meah said. “And Popeye, well he had something of a drinking problem. He’d get out on the road, and he’d get in some kind of trouble or be hard to manage, so they would always send him back to Riverview (Park in Chicago).”

Meah calls himself “the last of the Mohicans;” or the last of the old banner painters. At the tender age of 9, his father - an editorial cartoonist - started him out on the fair and exposition circuit as “The World’s Youngest Portrait Artist” in the 1940s.

From the last of the 1950s to the present, Meah estimates he has painted about 2,000 canvases. However, very few of those older banners revered by collectors exist today.

“They were generally regarded as disposable advertising in the 40s and 50s,” he said. “It was not uncommon to see old banners used to catch oil leaks from trucks or to cover equipment deemed far more important than the banner itself. ‘We’ll buy more’ seemed to be the attitude … which pleased us at the time.”

In his book, Freaks, Geeks and Strange Girls, the 73-year-old Meah has compiled much of what is known about the history of carnival banners.

Meah not only painted the carnival, he lived the carnival. From the age of 14, he spent his summer vacation with the celebrated Hugo Zachinni, the original “Human Cannonball” until the late 1980s when he was “clowning” with a small circus in Texas. In all, Meah once carried as many as 17 different acts in his repertoire, including sword swallowing and eating fire. Those were the skills that kept him alive once the painting was done.

But, artwork and clowning were his favorite gigs.

In the 1970s, a few astute collectors began to recognize the banners as a true slice of Americana. In 1980, Meah was at the Smithsonian Institution doing a “Celebration of Outdoor Amusement Art.” Shortly afterward, Meah and his art was a centerfold feature of the still popular Life magazine.

By the mid-1980s, the old banners became scarcer – and the sideshows were dying – while a few astute private collectors began battling for the spoils. For the most part, the collectors had independently decided to allocate outdoor amusement art into the folk art niche.

“I was incensed,” Meah, who completed art curriculum at the Rhode Island Institute of Design,” said. “I mean my idea of a folk artist was someone down in Arkansas drawing on a shovel with a crayon. These guys – Wyatt, Johnson, Sigler, and I hope myself – were true artists rendering an image to sell a product … I’ve since made peace with this silly notion of mine … I’m OK with it now.”

Today, Meah lives across the Tampa Bay, from the Florida town of Gibsonton, where many of his friends – fellow artists and sideshow “freaks” – spend, or have spent, their winters. It’s more than likely the only town in America where the local police chief was a dwarf and the former fire chief was over 8-feet tall.

Now many of the last group of sideshow “freaks” from the past is dying off.

“They were all my friends,” Meah said. “You would be amazed at how much money some of them made. One typical winter day we are sitting around talking, and the question came up, ‘why do people buy tickets to see us?

“Really we thought we ought to be paying to see them. I mean, we used to get some audiences that were equally as goofy, or goofier, than we were … we’d have some people who would buy a ticket in the morning, and then spend all day there looking at us … it was weird.