They lined the road like hedges—dozens of men funneling the caravan toward the fairgrounds. As the trucks went by, the men would jump onto the back and ride the bumpers and trailers to what they hoped would be a job. Johnny White rode in the cab of one of the semis, watching the excitement folding in around him like the view through a kaleidoscope. He was 11 years old, and this life—the carnival life—was all he had ever known, but that exhilaration of a trumpeted arrival, of ushering in the action, never waned.
The ensuing 24- to 36-hour span was when White’s mettle was forged. The men who had fastened themselves to the trucks like burrs lined up for Johnny and his older brother, Wayne, to select 10 of them to be the carnival’s crew for the week. Then it was time to work. Rides were assembled, booths erected, temporary employee housing hooked up to generators. A day or two later, tired and dirty, they were looking up at a carnival—their carnival. The smell of funnel cakes being fried, the pinging of midway games, the blinking lights—it was the most glorious of rewards.
“It was always a tremendous battle, no sleep, and even though we were kids, there was no regard for our age,” White remembered. “It was all in. The entire group gives everything they have to make it happen. So, that whole hustle right there was fascinating to me.”
White, known by many around central Kentucky as Johnny Pipewrench, is now 42 with a family of his own and a successful plumbing business. He lives within walking distance of Wayne and a short drive from his mother in Lawrenceburg, both of whom have moved on from the lives of their past. Despite the life White has built for himself, that feeling of victory—of the first shower after making the opening and washing the grease out from under his fingernails—has kept him coming back even after the carnival life dealt him and his family a litany of devastating blows.
In the summer of 1958, Paul Edwin “Ed” White passed a carnival on his way to work at Elm Hill Meats in Nashville, Tennessee. White was always looking for ways to add extra income, and the carnival piqued his curiosity.
“He liked that action—he found out real quick,” explained Johnny, Ed White’s grandson. “That’s kind of the way the carnival business is: When you get a little taste of it, you can stand on the outside and look in and buy tickets and ride rides and eat funnel cakes and corn dogs your whole life at the county fair and festivals, but if you go on the inside and get a little action, it goes through you like ice water in the veins.”
With a family and a new son (Wayne, Johnny’s father) to support, Ed took up part-time work at the Guess Your Age and Weight booth while keeping his job at Elm Hill. When the booth’s proprietor left the show, Ed came into his first booth. Over the next two decades, he would acquire everything from game booths to Sky Fighters, merry-go-rounds and kiddie rides. One of his best friends, Buddy Brooks, owned a mummified woman named Hazel Farris who became a sideshow. Ed never owned his own show, always “booking in” with others.
Elm Hill transferred Ed to central Kentucky not long after Wayne was born. He worked both his full-time job at Elm Hill and his carnival gig until 1972, when he went out on his own as an entrepreneur, opening a slew of coin laundromats to supplement the money coming in from his growing fleet of rides and booths. Just after Wayne Sr.’s second son, Johnny, was born in 1979, Ed decided to call it quits with carnival life. Rather than passing all of his rides to Wayne, who had grown up around the carnival, Ed sold them all.
“That left my dad standing there with the carnival dream and the sawdust in his shoes and no toys to play with,” Johnny said. “I lived that life, too, and that’s a weird place to be, whenever you grow up and think, ‘This is what I’m going to do.’ And there’s not another thought in your head, and then it’s gone.”
In 1980, Johnny’s dad started a carnival in Kentucky with his own equipment called the Heart of the Bluegrass Shows. It was where Johnny and Wayne Jr. spent their summers, learning how to hook trailers and wire lights while their classmates were at the lake. Although Wayne credits their childhood on the road for characteristics that have stuck with both brothers, he said it was apparent early on that Johnny had a particular knack for the work.
“Anything that we had, he would be working on it,” Wayne Jr. said of Johnny. “Whether he was painting it a different color, or if he was taking it apart and fixing it if there was something wrong with it, he was always working on something, always creating something, always had an idea.”
Mark Zerof
But the family business hit turbulence in the early 1990s. “Ultimately, at the end of the day, there was no more carnival,” Johnny said. “We weren’t doing very good financially, [my] parents ended up in a divorce, and there was no more merry-go-round music.”
Wayne threw himself into sports, becoming a standout basketball player at Anderson County High School and then Oakland City University in Indiana. Johnny tried other avenues, helping his mother, Dianne, mow lawns, but he never could shake the need for the music, the lights, the action. During his senior year at Anderson County, Johnny withdrew from school. He purchased a school bus, sawed off the top of it, and filled it with water. He built a towering 30-foot platform high above the water and had a massive, albeit dangerous, dunk tank. It was his ticket back into the show.
“I built this crazy thing and headed to Kingsport, Tennessee, and I booked in with a show,” he remembered. “When I pulled on the lot, they all looked at me like I was an idiot. I tried it, and it lasted about three days before the bus wouldn’t hold water. And it all fell apart on the fourth of July, and I was out of business. The first weekend was my first week out. That would have been 1997. All my buddies were graduating high school, and I was down there in a school bus wallowing in my self-pity.”
Even without the bus, Johnny was able to latch on in other capacities until the music stopped again in 2011. He was married with two young daughters and a growing plumbing business. He became Johnny Pipewrench, tinkering with the carnival rides he had acquired and still owned only when he wasn’t plumbing or being a dad. When he moved his family from Lexington to Lawrenceburg in 2015, there was a building on the property big enough to hold his rides. It was the perfect home base for a carnival, his own show. Memories of tribulations past hung heavy in the workshop, so he kept the venture a secret until the summer of 2016, when he officially launched Fox Creek Amusement Company, named for the road in Lawrenceburg where he was raised. The show consisted of just five kiddie rides in year one, which the White family hauled to seven shows. This summer, they will play 20.
White continues to run his plumbing business and takes in extra work repairing and restoring rides for other carnival professionals, all while slowly growing his own show. The summer of 2021 marks Fox Creek’s fifth, after the COVID-19 pandemic canceled its 2020 campaign. The operation has grown to include 11 rides, along with food and game booths. Johnny’s daughters, Daisy and Summer, are now living the life he and Wayne did decades ago, doing everything from pouring funnel cakes to operating the ticket booth. It’s the work ethic that Johnny said he feels has given him a leg up on his “blue collar competition.”
“They are learning the skill of hard work, that you have to work hard and that there are times it pays off and times it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t, you just keep working hard, and it will pay off in the long run,” said Johnny’s wife, Katy, a teacher at Tates Creek Middle School in Lexington.
Wayne remembers the first time he attended one of Johnny’s shows, purchasing tickets from his nieces and stepping onto the blinking midway. He felt nostalgic and proud looking up at the skyline of rides that belonged not to his grandfather or father but his younger brother.
Mark Zerof
“It’s amazing, honestly, to see all this take place almost exactly the way he dreamed about it and talked about it,” Wayne said. “What he took from our childhood and what we experienced—he took those lessons and turned it into what his dream was. His dream was always to entertain and to provide entertainment for people.”
Come early June, Johnny and Katy will embark with their equipment, two daughters, two golden retrievers, and roughly 15 employees on a four-month tour around Kentucky and Tennessee. The caravan hauls mobile housing for the workers and a temporary office for Johnny.
Johnny Pipewrench’s clients know they will have to wait until the fall for a house call, for he has an opening to make and a heritage to preserve.