Gibtown
Produced by Joe Richman/Radio Diaries.
GIBTOWN is a visit to the place where the carnival sideshow has come to retire. A town where being different has always meant being normal. Less than a mile down the road from Jeanie Tomaini’s bait shop is the Showtown Lounge. This is where most of the old-timers in Gibsonton still come to hang out. Tuesday night is karoke night. Wednesday is the all you can eat spaghetti buffet for $3.95 and every Saturday morning, a table is reserved for the Widows’ Club. Monica Baress presides over Widows’ Club. She’s 77 and, like all the women at the table, Monica is retired from the carnival. For 40 years, she was a sideshow stripper: The Flame of New Orleans.
Gibsonton, Florida lies on highway 41 just south of Tampa. The people who live there call it Gibtown. It’s a small town: 2 gas stations, 3 restaurants and a lot of mobile homes. But at one time this was considered the oddest town in America. The fire chief was Al Tomaini the Giant. The second deputy of police was a dwarf. The sideshow fat man was also the town’s auto mechanic. And Gibsonton still boasts the only post office in the country with a special counter for midgets. For half a century Gibsonton has been the off-season home for thousands of carnival and circus sideshow performers. But the sideshows are mostly a thing of the past. And Gibsonton has slowly become less of a winter quarters and more of a retirement village.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Joe Richman is an award-winning independent producer and reporter for public radio. He is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Before becoming an independent producer, Joe worked for many years as a producer on National Public Radio programs All Things Considered, Weekend Edition Saturday, Car Talk and Heat.
