A Tale Of Love In 'Gibtown'

When Delores first set eyes on Jody, he held her future in his hands.

He was the 16-year-old girl's last hope, this cocky little boy who was all of 10.

Delores was born the second child of 13 to a mother who just couldn't handle them all. The girl came up rough, a battered pinball ricocheting from foster home to foster home, raped at 9, feeling loved by no one.

No matter what Podunk place she bounced to, she lived for the days the carnival came to town. As a youngster, she worked her way into the good graces of the barkers, earning herself a nickel for every wayward ring she retrieved from the ring toss game, using the money to sample the midway's delights.

And, oh, what a life! The lights, the laughter, that wonderful food. Maybe it seemed fake and cheap to others, but to her, its garish happiness beat anything she ever had known.

As a teenager in the 1950s, she was a moody thing, prone to sitting and doodling for hours. One day, she overheard her foster parents discussing plans to put her in the lunatic asylum, a thought that terrified.

Nobody cared for her, so she didn't care, either. When the carnival returned to town, the 16-year-old packed her little bag and ran.

She got a job making popcorn, but because no one showed her how to work the machine, she burned it and got fired. She wandered over to the sideshow, the place good boys and girls didn't go.

A sign said "Dancer Wanted."

Let's see what you've got, said one of the women. Delores couldn't do it. She was shy, and there was no music. Somebody found a radio, and she did the two-step, the only dance she knew.

You gotta move your hips, the women laughed. Finally, one of them said it was up to Jody. That's when she met the little kid.

He eyed her, said sure, he would hire her. She could dance. But because she was underage, she had to wear a veil, a mask and a long, dark wig. When the cops came down the midway, she, along with other girls hiding from the law or mean husbands, had to duck out of sight.

Jody, nee Joseph Hilton III, helped keep lookout. Born in a circus traveling trailer to an unmarried 15-year-old who took off when he was a baby, he grew up thinking his father was Joseph Hilton Jr., who performed magic and ran the midway's freak and grind shows.

Years later he would learn his birth mother went on to become a famous trapeze artist. That was OK. The only parents he had ever known treated him right.

By age 6, Jody was working with elephants, a stint as an animal trainer he would return to through the years, with scars on his arms to show it. By age 9, he was helping Joseph Jr. with the girls. He took over at 14.

The show featured dance revues to popular music as well as burlesque. Delores never had to take it all off. She learned to move those hips, though, for a sexy bump and grind. During the bally, Jody would come out front, followed by the mysterious Delores in her veil and mask:

She shakes it in the east! She shakes it in the west! She shakes it down south where the shaking's the best!

Delores' suggestive little bump got the men in the tent.

Sometimes they disgusted her. They tossed condoms on the stage, some plugged with coins. She and the girls got the better of the townies, tossing all the refuse in a vat of boiling water to extract the sanitized money.

If some of the girls left the stage to mingle with the men or accept pay for photos or whatever, people looked the other way.

For a time, stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, then in her late 40s, joined the traveling show. To the girls, she was Mom. She taught Delores how to shake her pasties in opposite directions - it's all in the muscles, she would say.

Sometimes, Delores was the Rubber Girl, who crawled into a box and contorted herself around the swords or knives the showman slid in.

When Elvis was a 1960s heartthrob, romancing Ann-MargretÖ on the big screen in "Viva Las Vegas," Jody swiveled his hips and sang while Delores shimmied as the girl with the red dress on.

But Delores didn't have eyes for Jody, no, not then.

The first time she saw Lucky, he was a debonair motorcycle stunt man, 14 years her senior. A total and complete dreamboat. Good-looking, short, quick on his feet. When he took the final death drop in the motor drum, her heart pounded and her stomach dropped, too.

They married when she was 20.

The couple moved, as so many carnival folk do, to the Gibtown area of south Hillsborough County in 1964. They continued to take to the road from March through November. Jody and Lucky became best friends, and sometimes Jody lived with them. They partied with him and whatever young thing he was hooked up with at the time.

Life was fun but very tough. Lucky was jealous and had a temper, and got Jody into scrapes. Manhandling even the kiddie rides, at 300 pounds, was brutal. The sun baked, and snow greeted them up north. Delores remembers sitting in strange towns so lonely and dead she wondered what she was doing there.

She gave birth to Lucky's daughter while passing through Dallas, and did she count her toes and fingers? You bet she did.

But then came the awful day Lucky was driving to another nowhere place and got sick. Delores jumped out of the truck and tried to revive him by the side of a freeway. It was the emphysema that got him, and he drowned that dark day in his own fluid while Delores cried and pounded his handsome chest.

Lucky once told Jody he wanted him to take care of Delores if something ever happened to him.

Six years ago, Jody took a knee and asked Delores for her hand in marriage.

She had two questions: Would he give up the womanizing? She knew he had eight daughters and no wives. And would he really retire with her, never again to run off for the circus?

He answered the right way.

Delores, who had a gentle way with the scariest circus animals, tamed Jody, too. They have gained some pounds, lost some teeth. When Jody leaves for his job as a school crossing guard, they smooch each other, full on the lips. They reminisce and they laugh - a lot.

The couple share a small, rust-colored trailer in Tropical Acres, an old neighborhood filled with carny and circus people. His bally voice is reserved for the pulpit now, and they warble Christian duets at nursing homes.

When people ask them about the old days and if they recommend that life, they agree: No. Don't do it. It's just too dad-burn hard. It wears you down, wears you out. They have lost so many friends.

But Delores, now 69, believes that the day she two-stepped her way into the carny world she was where she was supposed to be. From that perch on the stage, she did right by the other girls who came by, feeling unloved and thirsty for something new.

Go home, she told them. This is no life for a sweet girl.

Not everybody gets lucky. On the midway, not everybody learns to laugh and love.