The hurricane that devastated parts of Florida after it landed on the West coast just north of my hometown of Tampa this past week brings pleasant and painful memories of my birthplace and my earlier years there living in the small town of Gibsonton, known at “Gibtown,” known as the winter home of carnival workers who spent the winter months working on their rides and avocation.
My mother, a native of Meadows of Dan, Virginia, met a dashing Navy Electrician’s First Mate while working in the gas stamp distribution office at the Norfolk Naval Air Base in 1944 when he asked for enogh extra stamps to ride his Harley-Davidson motorcycle down to Tampa to see his parents while awaiting orders to ship out to fight in the Pacific to serve on the USS Missouri, the massive battleship built to help extract revenge for Pearl Harbor.
They discovered they had a mutual love of riding Harleys. She often rode with a women’s riding group called The Motor Maids. She was dating a local, Joe Weatherly, a champion motorcycle racing rider who would later became a a NASCAR driver and friend of Floyd County’s racing legend Curtis Turner.
Mom told a vivid story the sailor, “Tommy” Thompson, who returned from Florida and ran into her and Weatherly in a Norfolk bar, where he challenged Weatherly to an illegal motorcycle race through the streets of Norfolk. “He beat Joe, which was hard, because he was a national champion on his bike,” she would say proudly. That first date turned into a permanent relationship. She and Weatherly remained friends and I remembered her crying in the bedroom at our home when he died in a NASCAR crash at Riverside Road course in California.
Like many Americans with relatives in the war, my mother feared my dad would not come home from his last deployment on the Missouri, which was headed for Tokyo to be part of that attack that our leaders feared would kill at least 100,000 Americans but was needed to end the war.
The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought an order from the Japanese leader to end the war, over the objections of his military leaders. He surrendered, unconditionally, and my future dad stood, in his dress whites, on the ship when Gen. Douglas McArthur accepted the surrender that eneded World War II.
Tommy Thompson came back to Norfolk, proposed to Ethel McPeak and they were married in early 1946 in Tampa. I came along 14 months later but the father who survived “the war to end all wars” died in a horrific industrial accident at the U.S. Phosphorus plant in Tampa in 1948. I was nine months old.
While I had no reall memories of my dad, I do remember my early years in Gibtown, including a hurricane that flooded most of the town and my mother and I were rescued by the bearded lady and her husband, who came to our home in a boat as he water was rising. I remember pulling her beard to see if it was real.
“Yes, young man, it is real, and it hurts when you do that” she said with a laugh.
The collection of carnival show people gave Gibtown a label as The Sideshow Capital pf The World. The Fire Chief was known as “The Giant,” who was seven feet and four inches tall and was married to a midget. They had normal kids.
During the winter months, the ride operators would set up their attractions in their yards and invite kids to check them out, for free.
The history of Gibsonton’s sideshow community, according to the Showmen’s Museum in neighboring Riverview, goes like this:
In the 1920s, Eddie and Grace Lemay stopped in Gibsonton while on the road to South Florida with their portable restaurant, which traveled the carnival circuit. They caught a fish so quickly that they decided to make Gibsonton home.
They told carnival friends about the town, and in a short period it became known as Sideshow Capital of the World.
Residents included 138 entertainers known back then as human oddities. They included a Monkey Girl, an Alligator-Skinned Man and Tomaini and his wife, Jeanie, called The Living Half Girl due to being born without legs and being 2 feet, 5 inches tall. Together, they were billed as The Strangest Married Couple in the World.
They were also entrepreneurial. In the early 1940s, they established Giant’s Fish Camp, which included a restaurant, bait house and cottages, one of which was their home.
The Sideshow Capital of the World was in full swing when my mother decided to return to her hometown in Floyd County, VA. I was five years old.
My grandparents retired to live in a double-wide on he shores of Lake Panasofkee in Sumpter County, about 50 miles north of Tampa. She was closing in on age 100 when she died in 1994 Thetheir land was sold to a development company and is now part of The Villages, the largest retirement community n Florida.
When mom died in 2010, she wanted her remains to be shred with the two husbands she survived. Her ashes were scattered over the graveside plot with last husband Truman C. Bolt at the cemetery at Buffalo Mountain Presbyterian Church with a fiew of the mountain and I took a historical ride on my Harley from Meadows of Dan to Tampa along the route she took in 1946 to marry first husband William “Tommy” Thompson in Tampa, where the rest of her ashes are with him.
It was my last visit to Tampa and Gibtown.