Polish Navy & The trials and tribulations of a candy butcher

My friend Jack was living on a houseboat near Sarasota with a Circus family . One of the brothers in the family got the bright idea one day while watching some neighborhood dogs turn over some trash cans to invent something to stop the dogs from overturning them. He made a circular form and molded some cement rings that the trashcans would fit inside. He had about fifty made and went out to pitch them. Nobody was interested, they were awkward to handle and not very pretty. So after a few months he still had them stacked up in his back yard. One morning at breakfast he was staring out the back window at them and he said, "What can I do with these things?"
 Jack looked at them, they  resembled giant cement doughnuts. He said, " Maybe You could sell them to the Polish Navy as Life Preservers".
 We went out on the Beatty Show and Jack wound up on seats and I got the Snow Joint. My friend Tommy got the Floss stand. We had been on the road a couple of months and were playing in Hempstead, New York. After putting the show up, cleaning up and eating breakfast we started preparing stock for the show. The midway was filling up, I was grinding ice and Tommy started making floss, after a couple of minutes smoke started pouring out of the floss machine. I thought , a short in the floss macines head, this will happen if a piece of metal happens to get into the sugar, or it could be sabotage, someone could've thrown a penny into the head. Tommy stopped the machine and emptied the head, there was nothing in it. He restarted it and smoke poured out. The front doors of the big top opened and the crowd entered our seat agents were waiting for their stock. I gave my boys their snow and they went to work. Tommy went to the Concession truck and pulled out an extra floss machine and replaced the one in the stand, he had 3 machines altogether. He filled up the head  and cut on the machine. Smoke started pouring out of it. Now he was cussing and sweat was  rolling down his brow. His agent was saying "What the hell's wrong?" Webster the Concession Manager came out and said, "I'm I going to have to send you to Cotton Candy School or What?" Pico went and got the last machine, plugged it in and filled it with sugar and cut it on. Smoke started pouring out of it. "Damn it" he said. Sweat was pourig down his face, he was under pressure.  He had floss on his arms that was melting from the humidity, he took his arm and wiped his face and his eyes got as big as saucers, he took a handful of sugar from the sugar cane and tasted it. "No good sonsabitches", he said, "somebody has put salt in the sugar can".  So he threw out all the tainted sugar and replaced it and everything started working fine again. I saw the hot dog man snickering in the corner and believe that he may have been the culprit.
 So it took awhile to solve the problem but Tommy lost about an hour of the first show.
 Jack liked working the seats, He said, "Maybe I get less money but at least I can take a nap between shows, once you get a joint it's like being married, you have no time to rest".
 I worked every stand you can think of on the Circus. I came on the show late one year and couldnt even get on seats, so I wound up as a helper on the Grease Joint for Paul Fisher. They called him the "Rehash King", He told me, "Give me a thousand people in the bigtop and 50 cups for coke and I'll serve all of them and turn in 49 cups at turnin." The managers knew something was going on but couldn't pin him down. They had a choice, Fire him and put some first of may in charge that couldnt handle the TIP or leave Paul in Charge and make three times as much even though he was swindling them. So he stayed in charge.  To try and stop him they had cups with the legend printed on them, "Destroy cup after using".
The town suckers never read that. So they put a sharp spike on the stand with a sign, "Place cups on spike". Paul would take a clean cup and place it over the spike and the suckers would place their cups over it. Paul loved it , it drained them and they were ready to use. Until one day some kid came up with an empty cup and slammed it on the spike and it went through his hand. Lawsuit...that was the end of the spike. Fisher showed me a lot of tricks about running a joint, he said," You have to be like a bartender, always working, if the suckers arent buying, look busy, always wiping the counter. Never sit down, people will think you dont want to wait on them. If you have to sit get a high stool, it looks like your alert and ready to wait on people."
 There was another old butcher on the show named Duncan the Fox, he told me, "People are like mules, first you have to hit them over the head with a two by four to get their attention." He didnt mean literally but he would get right in their face and yell as loud as he could.
As I mentioned, I never said we were angels.