Violet McNeal - Four White Horses and a Brass Band: True Confessions from the World of Medicine Shows, Pitchmen, Chumps, Suckers, Fixers, and Shills

FOUR WHITE HORSES AND A BRASS BAND: True Confessions from the World of Medicine Shows, Pitchmen, Chumps, Suckers, Fixers, and Shills

by Violet McNeal

Four White Horses and a Brass Band was originally published in 1947

by Doubleday and Co, Inc.

2019 Feral House

ISBN: 9781627310833

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Feral House

1240 W. Sims Way, Suite 124

Port Townsend, WA 98368

www.FeralHouse.com

Design by Sean Tejaratchi

Cover illustration by Mahendra Singh

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

MAKING MEDICINE

B EDBUGS DECIDED MY FATE and changed the pattern of my life.

Quite a few things influenced it, of course, before the bedbugs took over. There were the farm, which I hated, and the dark handsome lady from Minneapolis, and the books by Bertha M. Clay. But it was rebellion against the biting of the bedbugs in a St. Paul tenement that led me finally to Will, whose brain had been tainted by the devil. The bedbugs and a two-line newspaper want ad opened the door to the fabulous world of medicine shows.

It was a swashbuckling world, peopled by a few geniuses and a great many rascals. It was a world in which the romance of the four corners of the world could be found in the flame of the pitchmans gasoline torch. The torches are gone, but the names they led to fame are not. Silk Hat Harry, Prince Nanzetta, Brother John, and Hal the Healer are only a few.

I had never encountered a bedbug when in 1904 I took the train from our little town, bound for St. Paul. I was sixteen years old. My parents believed I intended merely to visit a friend during a Fourth of July celebration. I knew when I mounted the high iron steps of the day coach I was never going back.

Taking the trip had meant scrimping for months. We had always been poor, and everyone in our family had to work at home or work out. I refused to do housework. I loathed washing dishes and cleaning rooms, so I had got a job copying documents at the courthouse.

Most of my work, for which I received fifty cents a day on Saturdays and school holidays, was done in the vaults. My boss was a middle-aged man with baggy pants and a scraggly gray mustache. I thought he was loathsome-looking. He had a habit of patting my shoulder or accidentally touching my hands. I could stand that, thinking of the greasy dishes I would have to wash if I quit. But one day in the vault he put his hand against the bosom of my dress. I slapped his face and left.

Hurrying home, I told my father. He called me a liar and said the man was married and wouldnt do such a thing. It was clear I would have to get another job, so I undertook to mislead my folks and plan my own life. The first move was to write a letter to my friend in St. Paul, asking her to invite me up for the celebration.

At that time I was half child, half woman, and what I longed for most was love and approval. I had not received much attention at home, as my younger sister had diabetes. When company came they always brought presents and exclaimed consolingly over her. I was healthy as a pig and used to stand in the background, longing for someone to notice me.

I used to end my prayers every night with the words, Please, God, make me sick like Sister. To me she was the luckiest person in the world. She always caught every disease that came along. I didnt altogether depend on God to make me sick. When my sister came down with the whooping cough I sneaked into her room at night and got her to blow her breath in my face. I tried to catch the chickenpox from her, but I couldnt even catch a cold.

The only time people noticed me as a child was when I made them cry at prayer meetings. I was honestly religious. I went to church, Sunday school, meetings. I had a good contralto voice and was always asked to sing Come Unto Me at revival meetings. I sang it with such feeling that the congregation would begin to weep and come to the altar. I got a kick out of that, as much because it was I, Vi, making them cry as because they were saved. I was quite an exhibitionist. I took music lessons, and my teacher always had me play the duet with her on recital days. No sniveling or forgetting for me. I always performed best before the largest audiences. I believed in heaven and hell, and my life was patterned accordingly.

In those days girls married early. Nearly all of my relatives and friends had married at sixteen; a girl of nineteen was an old maid, and a woman of thirty was an ancient crone. If we were good girls our beaux could go just so far in their petting. Hugging and kissing by the hour were allowed, but just let them go too far and we would remind them we were good girls, and if they didnt behave we would tell Papa. I firmly believed I must go to heaven a virgin if I died, and to my husband a virgin if I lived. I got on that day coach to St. Paul with fewer fears for my future than I have crossing a highway today.

At home we had three or four books written by Bertha M. Clay, and I read them many times. Invariably the beautiful farm girl was seen by some rich man who fell in love with her virtue and beauty and married her, despite opposition. If she didnt know her knives and forks, so to speak, he provided the proper instruction. All went well, and they lived happily ever after. The fade-out revealed the grandparents and three or four grandchildren playing happily on the lawn.

I was sure I was beautiful, and I knew I was virtuous. I was going to a town where there must be many rich men, so if I could just eat long enough, one of them was sure to lay his hand and fortune at my feet. In the meantime, I would get a job.

My girlfriend had a job cooking free lunch in the back of a saloona fact I hadnt mentioned to my parents. Also, I had a card in my pocket. It was from a lady, dark and very striking, who had come to our town the previous summer. She stayed at the hotel and talked to the young girls. Before she left she gave me and two other girls a card and told us we could make lots of money in Minneapolis. If we got tired of the old home town, she told us, we were to look her up and we would have a job at once.

The train ride seemed endless. I must have gone to the ice-water tank and into the toilet dozens of times. I combed my hair and tried to make myself look more dreamy-eyedsomeone had called me his dreamy-eyed sweetheart once, and I had tried to live up to it from then on. I had some cornstarch in an envelope, and I put a little on my face.

What scared me most on my first glimpse of St. Paul was the number of people, but my friend found me without any trouble. We took my little grip to her home on St. Peter Street. It was the tenement district, but I didnt know it. She and her parents lived in three tiny rooms, with the bath in the outside hall, but the constricted establishment looked as grand as a mansion.