It's Over And The Fat Lady Didn't Sing

The place was never much, although you wonder how many thousands of people must have said something as they drove by the old fish camp through the years and wondered if there really were a giant inside.

The other day I pulled into the dirt turnoff that led to the fish camp on the Alafia River at the edge of U.S. 41 going into Gibsonton. There is wire fence around much of it as the phosphate company that owns the land decides what to do. In the late afternoon heat nothing was moving. Even the flies were hiding somewhere. I peered into a broken glass window on the remaining square block building, at the darkened room where the restaurant used to be. All you can see is the old black-and-white vinyl floor and a few broken cabinets.

A Slow Death

A story last week said the old place was going to be torn down, along with wooden cabins next to it. The bait house is already long gone, as are most of the cabins.

But then the Giant's Camp, like the strange and unusual customers it attracted, has been dying for years, an anachronism in a sterile world of fast-food wrapped in Styrofoam boxes and shoved at you from "drive-thru" windows.

Al Tomaini, the giant, had come this way with his new bride Jeanie, a woman born without legs and whose arms were deformed, in 1936 to visit the circus "Fat Lady," Ruth Pontico. Tomaini, depending on which press release you read, was 3 or 4 inches either side of 8 feet tall. Jeanie measured 2-foot-6. They billed themselves on the carny circuit as "The World's Most Unusual Married Couple."

They liked what they found in the laid-back river community where so many carnival people came to winter and three years later - at the urging of Frank Lentini "The Three-Legged Man" - decided to build the fish camp. Tomaini, who loved to fish, did much of the work himself, clearing away the palmetto scrub.

For years, the restaurant and fish camp became a gathering place, not only for fishermen but for the carny workers and performers, who had a place where they could hang out without the constant gawks.

Not that they didn't understand how to make a buck. There was the huge ring the giant wore that tourists would stare at and offer to buy at the register.

The giant would reluctantly part with the ring for a few bucks and then - after the happy tourist was gone - reach under the counter and dig out another.

There was the shtick where the giant would pretend to get angry with his wife and stick her up on a shelf, where she would wave and holler angrily until he let her down.

After Tomaini died, Jeanie continued to run the camp with a feisty determination and grit.

Have You Seen This One?

I would occasionally stop by for breakfast with my friend Melvin Burkhart, "The Human Blockhead." He was also known as "The Two-Faced Man" and had the ability to smile on one side of his face and look sad on the other. I told him he would have made a great politician. His grand finale was when he would take a long spike and hammer it up his nose. You don't get that with too many other people over breakfast.

They are all gone. Even the Tomaini's adopted daughter Judy, who was known as the "Shady Lady" when she ran stock cars and kept an albino python named Vanilla at the camp, where she also operated her own cemetery monument business, has slipped into retirement.

The Giant's Camp was part of another time and place in our world and you won't be seeing its like again.