From medicine shows to modern arcades, generations of the Noell family have spent their lives persuading people to part with the change in their pockets.
By ROBERT FARLEY
Published October 10, 2004
[Times photos: Bob Croslin]
Despite the popularity of flashy electronic games, there still is a place for old-style carnival favorites such as Skeeball. The Fun Center has 7 Skeeball games.
DYNASTY OF QUARTERS: The LAX Jr., above and right, is one of the games at the Treasure Island Fun Center, the latest in the legacy of games from Bobby Noell.
Bobby Noell with his granddaughter Jenny Chapman and son Robert Noell Jr. Robert owns the Fun Center, and Chapman, his daughter, manages it.
Robert also installs retail-store games, much like the crane, lower left, that grabs stuffed animals.
Jenny Chapman glides obliviously through the din of thumping music and pulsing lights from amusement games.
As children laugh and shriek in sensory overdrive, Chapman casually stacks boxes of new toys, prizes to be won at the Treasure Island Fun Center, one of the Tampa Bay area's largest arcades.
Chapman, 31, is a natural in this modern incarnation of the carnival midway, with instincts borne of a generations-old family tradition in the amusement world that began when the legendary "Doc" came to town.
Chapman's grandfather Bobby Noell, 70, couldn't be prouder. He misses the old days when you could ride through town with a bullhorn, draw people to the carnival with bright lights, and persuade them to shell out a few dollars to watch the toughest man in town wrestle or box an 85-pound chimp.
Ever the showman, retiree Bobby Noell stands ready to mesmerize neighbors who wander onto his gulf-front dock in Ozona with an amazing array of card tricks, the way he used to draw a crowd when carnival life was a small town's entertainment lifeline.
Chapman can't do any card tricks. And she's not a ventriloquist or juggler, like her great-grandfather. But she has an accounting degree from the University of Florida. And she knows a little something about people and what will make them part with a pocketful of change.
It may be a long way from torches set up beside medicine shows along dirt roads in small Southern towns to the pulsing lights and high-resolution graphics of video games at the Fun Center. But it's not that different, really.
It's a simple matter of evolving and adapting, says Bobby Noell.
"It's all part of the same bright lights and baloney."
* * *
Bobby Noell's father, Bob Noell, the second-youngest of six, was 13 years old when "Doc" Etling steered his horse and buggy up the dirt road that led to the youth's hometown, Cifax, Va., in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Doc strung up the curtains around his medicine show stage and propped up a sleeping tent next to the blacksmith's shop.
Then he lit a few torches. Lights draw people.
This night, they drew five to 10 families. Bob Noell was among them.
It's hard to say exactly what Doc did that night in the middle of the 1920s. He had a repertoire of 10 or 20 bits; free shows to draw a crowd.
Doc was a magician, among other things. He would always pull a kid out of the audience.
"Repeat after me," Doc would instruct the youngster. "I'm about to place myself in the hands of a prestidigitator, and if he should separate my cranium from my anatomy, I'd blame him not."
He'd persuade the boy to flap his arms like a chicken and cluck. And then he'd have the boy lay an egg into a felt bag.
Doc had trained doves that could walk across a ladder. He did rope tricks. He would borrow an audience member's hat and pull item after item from it, ending with a bowling ball. He'd borrow a pocket watch, put it in a sock and appear to bash it to pieces. Then he'd fire a gun into a loaf of bread, and voila, to the relief of the audience member, there was the watch, intact.
With the audience then his, Doc went about the real business, selling salves, oils and liniments.
Bob Noell watched, rapt, and later approached Doc Etling to ask if he could join him on the road, be his apprentice.
Doc visited Bob Noell's father, a farmer, to get permission.
"He probably will learn something from you," the boy's father said.
When the two returned to Cifax a year later, Doc Etling was sick, and so the seasoned medicine show performer and his young sidekick stayed with Noell's family a while.
Many in the family were spooked by Doc and his powers. They even gave serious thought to knocking off Doc because they thought he was a witch. They were convinced he had the boy under a spell because the boy could do things like make women float.
Bob Noell had the powers now, too.
* * *
The lights emanating in the night from the panel truck that brought Noell's Ark Gorilla Show were a beacon in small towns, especially the ones without electricity.
Under Doc Etling's tutelage, Bob Noell had become an accomplished entertainer: ventriloquist, blackface comedian, juggler, balancer, magician.
When medicine shows went the way of vaudeville, Bob Noell adusted and parted ways with his mentor. He started collecting animals. And the stars of the show that paid the bills for some 40 years traveling the eastern seaboard were gorillas (actually chimpanzees, but "gorillas" sounded better).
Posters hung around town teased the locals: "Wanted, athletic men to earn $5 per second by holding 85-pound ape's shoulders to the floor (up to 4 seconds). Also wanted: boxers to earn $1 per minute at the Gorilla Show . . . Every night all week with the carnival."
Not hooked yet? How about this standard qualifier Noell offered: "No show is guaranteed to last over five seconds."
During the day, Noell's sons Bobby and Chris would crisscross the countryside and call out over the truck's speaker system to people working in the fields, "Free show tonight!"
That would typically draw about 200 to 300 people by nightfall.
Bob Noell would usually start things off with his juggling or ventriloquist act, or maybe bring an animal out to show people. Later, there were free 15-minute movies.
Alternated between free shows was the gorilla wrestling.
"Now, who wants to roll this chimpanzee over?" Bob Noell would ask.
Five dollars to pin him. He's only 85 pounds. Easy money. Step right up.
The chimp always won. Always. Many a town tough took an awful beating.
Aside from being agile and quick, chimps are incredibly strong. Bob Noell often used to say, "It takes three men to get ahold of a chimp, and it takes eight men to let go of one!"
Later in the night, they'd sell jewelry and candy, two boxes for a quarter, some with redeemable prizes inside. There were always lots of winners. That was just good for business.
If someone went to everything that night, the Noells would get a couple of dollars out of them.
Many of the animals from the traveling Gorilla Show still live at the former Chimp Farm, now called the Suncoast Primate Sanctuary on Alt. U.S. 19 south of Tarpon Springs.
Bob Noell died in 1991. He is buried in Sylvan Abbey Memorial Park in Clearwater. He shares an in-ground stone with his wife, Anna Mae, the daughter of traveling vaudeville performers, and his lifelong companion on the road.
On the other side is the grave of Marion Ellsworth Etling. Doc.
* * *
Bobby Noell was a grown man in the early 1950s. Married. He was a veteran of the carnival circuit, taking up the family tradition. But he wasn't making any money.
He made his pivotal career move in Clymer, a small western Pennsylvania town where he and his wife, Jean, were traveling with his parents' gorilla show, then attached to a small carnival.
Bobby hadn't committed his idea to paper, but he was able to get the local blacksmith to fashion a long metal track for a high striker, a carnival staple in which the object is to take a mallet, strike a rubber lever with all your might and send the dinger up to ring the bell.
He used a piece of a tractor tire to absorb the mallet hit. He got a spring from a car to propel the dinger up. He bought a ladder from Jimmy Stewart's dad's hardware store in nearby Indiana and a bell from a coal mining car in a junk yard. Then he painted some signs. "Weakling" and "Momma's Boy" at the bottom. "He-man" and "Champ" near the top. With some candy bars and cigars purchased from a drug store to use as prizes, he was ready.
He set up that Saturday night. Step right up. Test your strength. Ring the Bell. Twenty-five cents.
They took in $5 that night. They were in business.
The next week, he got better merchandise for prizes. And he attached lights to the high striker. Lights are critical.
A couple years later, Bobby and Jean returned to their winter home in Clearwater with $10,000 in their pocket; a few years after that, $50,000.
"Then we had a lot," he says.
High strikers were the entry point, but the game that made Bobby Noell's career was a water race. Up to 20 players compete against each other to shoot a stream of water at a target. The water makes a toy car or monkey rise. A light signals the winner.
Here was the beauty: There was a winner every game.
Noell would hold the prize, usually a stuffed animal, high over his head as he handed it to the winner. Everyone around could see it.
There's a term in the carnival business to describe when things are going really well: ginning. "Ginning means you've got a winner out there. If it's really ginning, you've got to count a lot of quarters at the end of the night," Noell says. With a combination of a popular game, prizes and 25 cents admission, Bobby Noell was ginning.
Not bad for a man whose last report card was from the third grade.
"Everybody left my games happy," he boasts. "They almost won, but they didn't win. And they know if they stayed, they would've won."
He proudly remembers watching people leave a carnival in St. Paul, Minn., at closing one night. Nine out of 10 people carrying prizes had something won at his games. And he had only 11 games out of 150 on the lot.
Bobby Noell has a knack for looking at games and seeing how they can be improved. He has made and sold dozens of water race and other games over the years.
Twenty-seven years ago, Bobby Noell sold his trailer and bought a gulf-front lot in Ozona, an old fishing village. He had his house built with $5,000 in quarters.
It has been two decades since Bobby Noell was on the road with the carnival. But he can't get away. It is in him. The hum of generators. The shouts of men hawking girlie shows. The smell of bell peppers and sausage frying. Of popcorn and candy apples.
This year, he and his wife have visited two state fairs and a rodeo in the Midwest, as well as several carnivals on a recent motor-home trip. They have traveled with carnivals in Australia and England.
"There's something about when you do it," Bobby Noell says. "It's kinda hard to describe. You really want to be back out and do it again."
Sure, there have been more floods and blow-downs over the years than he'd like to remember. But when things were ginning, it was very, very good.
* * *
Ten years ago, Bobby's son, Robert Noell Jr., 53, found himself in front of a national retail giant - he doesn't want to say which one - at a career crossroads.
He was watching families stop at the arcade in the store lobby. The games weren't that different from carny games. The prizes were the same. And the quarters they pumped into the machines definitely looked familiar.
And then it hit him.
"This is a midway here."
Robert and his younger brother Chris had knocked around on the carnival circuit almost from the time they were able to make change for a dollar. But at age 26, Robert was the first in the family to step off the carousel. His first business venture, manufacturing and selling carnival games, failed. In the ensuing years, Robert dabbled in a variety of jobs: managing a go-cart operation in Ocala, running water race games at Dollywood, following a circus.
But nothing stuck until it all clicked that day in front of the retail giant. This was a different era from the one in which people relied on traveling carnivals for entertainment. It was a different country altogether. This is where people now came for their retail-tainment.
"I know what to do here," he thought.
He joined forces with an Alabama man to run coin-operated amusement games in the lobbies of large stores. If you've ever tried to pluck a stuffed animal from a machine with a crane, you've played their games.
After 10 years, Robert finds himself as the president, CEO and "Hey you!" of a business that operates several thousand games in the lobbies of hundreds of Wal-Marts, Kmarts and Flying J's.
"We sell plush," says Robert, using the insiders' name for the stuffed animals and other toy prizes that fill amusement games.
The head of Sunshine Vending, a company with 150 employees, comes to work in denim shorts, sneakers and a shirt with antique cars printed on it. His modest, cluttered office sits atop a stairway to the second floor of a Clearwater warehouse filled with amusement games and toys.
His house, the one he was raised in, is a few blocks away. He has had the same phone number since he was 8.
Over the years, Robert says, the most important business lesson he has learned is a simple gesture. He extends a finger and motions toward himself, the international symbol for "Come here." Children are taught that almost from the time they are born. Someone does that, you go over.
"Then you stick out your hand and they'll put money in it," he says. He also learned this about people: They will play a game to win something they would never buy.
"It's a fact," he says. "People like to win something."
Robert shares two other secrets to success, learned from his father. The first: bright lights. "They say bright lights draw bugs and people." The games always have flashing lights.
The second key is plush merchandise, and giving away lots of it.
Their cranes are unique, he explains. With most crane games, you maneuver the claw high above until you think it's over the stuffed animal of your affection, then you hit a button and it drops. On their cranes, you can nudge the claw down little by little and continue to reposition it directly over a toy. Bottom line, theirs kick out more winners than any other cranes in the state, he says.
"There was no crane in the state that would pick up a toy when we got there," he says.
They try to maintain a 1-9 win ratio. At 50 cents a pop, players would have to spend an average of $4.50 to win a toy that might sell for $7 in the store's toy department.
For first-time players, it has to appear that they've got a chance to win the prize or they'll never play again.
"If you're not giving away anything, you are turning people off," Robert says. "And it's hard to turn them back on."
Every week, a train from California delivers two 40-foot ocean containers filled with plush toys made in China. That's 38,880 toys, bagged. They've got about 1,000 cranes. About 400 stores. The average crane gives up about 54 toys a week.
Robert is not a corporate kind of guy, but his job has become so. He works from an office with a computer, fax machine and printer. In technology, his business is downright cutting edge. Routers use palm PCs to log inventory and profits for each game.
Robert complains that he's trapped in his office more than he'd like. His days are largely filled dealing with customers and business associates, keeping an eye on the big picture.
Despite that, it's still a natural step in the family tradition, he says.
"We used to say brights lights and BS, and by BS we mean plush," Robert says. "And that's what this is still."
* * *
The Treasure Island Fun Center is 7,000 square feet of thumping music and flashing lights.
Robert Noell saw the arcade six years ago and had to have it. It so happened that the 31-year-old family-run arcade was for sale.
Robert Noell tapped his daughter, Jenny Chapman, to manage it.
Chapman is no stranger to the family tradition. She spent summers taking money for water race games at amusement parks in West Virginia and Tennessee. In the summer before sixth grade, her family traveled with a circus. Doughnuts and chocolate milk sat on an outside table waiting for them in a different town every morning. They went to small towns most people never see. They had buffalo burgers on the Fourth of July in North Dakota.
"It's been my life," she says. "To a lot of people, that's extremely strange."
But things in her family have taken a turn for the . . . mainstream.
Chapman's daily workload is "generally not that exciting," she says apologetically. There are no stories like a circus elephant stealing a loaf of her grandmother's bread.
She counts the money. Goes to the bank. Makes sure employees have what they need. Stacks and orders merchandise. Arranges birthday parties. Writes work schedules.
"To me, it is a job," she says.
They get offers every week to sell the place. Developers want to build condos.
They all get the same answer.
"The business is not for sale," she says.
"This arcade has been here for 35 years, and it might be here for another 35 years," she says. "People are comfortable here."
"I'm still not sure what I want to be when I grow up," Chapman says.
But for now, the Fun Center is her baby.
Chapman had an idea recently. She noticed at merchandise shows that the prizes always looked better at the vendors' booths than they did under the white lights of her arcade. The secret: black lights.
So she added a black light room.
The prizes inside - lamps, candles, a glowing alien head, plastic animals - practically glow. Instinct.
Still, after all these years, bright lights and baloney.
DYNASTY OF QUARTERS: The LAX Jr., above and right, is one of the games at the Treasure Island Fun Center, the latest in the legacy of games from Bobby Noell. 
