Terror at the Fair

Chapter Twenty-Seven

To my pleasant surprise, the “voice” of Paul Bunyan turned out to be an entertaining interview. The old fellow, named Nils Ericsson, had himself been a lumberjack, hewing away in the forests of Northern Wisconsin and Minnesota beginning in the early years of the century.

Ericsson, who looked like he could still swing a mean axe, seemed a born storyteller, and despite being “in the neighborhood of the upper seventies” — he resolutely declined to give his exact age—had a strong, clear voice with a slight Scandinavian tinge, an asset for one acting as Bunyan’s alter-ego and describing the fictional giant’s adventures to fairgoers.

“My daddy was a lumberjack too,” he declared as we talked at a picnic table under a tree near the Bunyan exhibit. “He died at ninety-four, still as strong as a bear, but he almost didn’t live to see thirty-five.”

“Hmm. Something to do with a falling tree, I suppose?”

“No, no,” he rumbled, waving my question away with a meaty and calloused hand. “He was too smart for anything like that to happen. It goes back to the fall of ’71, same year as the big fire you had down here. Well, Wisconsin had some powerful strong fires of its own at the very same time. The worst one happened in a little place called Peshtigo, horrible thing. Said to be the deadliest fire in American history. Some claimed as many as 2,500 may have died, nobody ever knew for sure. Lots of them got buried in mass graves.

“Anyway, my daddy happened to be in the very same neck of the woods at the time, working for a big lumber outfit out of Appleton, I think I heard him tell. They did some cutting up north of Peshtigo, near the little burg of Menominee, Michigan. Well, at first it seemed as they were at a safe distance from the fire, but then the wind shifted and the flames moved north fast, and I do mean fast. Daddy and his crew of three or four had all they could do to get themselves on foot over to the shore of Green Bay about the time it started to get dark.

“A fishing boat lay about a quarter-mile off shore. My daddy said the fishermen on board watched the flames. He and his men hollered and waved their arms and jumped up and down until the boat finally came in and picked them up. Not a moment too soon, you might say. Them flames eventually went right up to the shore, and it was said the water in Green Bay got downright uncomfortable.”

“A close call.”

“Yessir, very close. They was among the lucky ones.”

Ericsson spun more tales—about his life as a lumberjack, a general store owner, a semi-professional wrestler, and the operator of a small carnival that moved from town to town around the Upper Midwest.

“Them carnies can be a mean darn bunch sometimes,” he said, “but they never messed with me, I can tell you. I made sure they knew about my wrestling days as ‘Sven, the Savage Swede.’ I had a beard back then, and I dyed it yellow, along with my hair.”

“You must have been quite a sight.”

“Or quite a fright,” he said, roaring at his own cleverness.

Now that Ericsson had been wound like an alarm clock, he kept on going, regaling me with tales of his wrestling adventures and the bizarre cast of characters he had to ride herd on while running his ragtag carnival. I finally told him I had plenty of material, plus a deadline coming up fast. I had asked for a photographer, and sure enough, it turned out to be none other than Phil Muller, who made some shots of Ericsson grinning, hands on hips, with the Paul Bunyan robot looming behind him and wearing a grin of its own.

“Somehow you look different today,” I told Muller.

He grinned. “Took you a while to notice. Shaved off my mustache. The wife got tired of it, said it made me look like an old-time movie villain.”

“I think she had a point. It seems like you’re around almost every day now,” I told Muller after Ericsson had gone back to spinning yarns at the North Western exhibit.

“Snap old pal, I saw what a damned sweet deal you have out here, so I decided to hitch my wagon to your star. Besides, I grew up around trains; I come from a railroad family.”

“I guess I never knew that.”

“Yep, my late father worked as a brakeman, both on the B&O and the Milwaukee Road.”

“You might say my late father had a train connection, too, in a sense. He was a Chicago streetcar motorman for close to forty years.”

“Hope he got treated better by his bosses than my old man did,” Phil said quietly, packing up his gear. “Keep finding good feature subjects here, Snap, and I’ll find ways to wrangle the assignments. We make a good team, you know. A damned good team.”