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Dead illusionist lives on

Famed for driving nails into his head, Melvin Burkhart, who died in 2001, has become a "spiritual godfather" to up-and-comers.

By BEN MONTGOMERY
Published November 10, 2006

Melvin Burkhart is gone five seasons now from the tents of Coney Island and the dusty American midways and the stool at Giant's Camp restaurant here on the south bank of the Alafia River.

On Oct. 8, 2001, he performed at the wedding of magician Todd Robbins at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village. He followed a lariat man and the Fantastics and a stripper called Dirty Martini, and he earned three standing ovations that went on and on. Afterward, he held court uptown for the working magicians past midnight. Then he boarded a plane for Tampa and was dead by Nov. 8 that year at 94.

One of the last originals of the vanishing sideshow culture, the newspapers put it, noting that anyone who had ever hammered a nail into his head owed a debt of gratitude to Melvin Burkhart.

Then something happened, something bizarre.

He lived on.

- - -

"I never have died before. I'm kinda curious about that. I wouldn't care if I dropped over dead the next minute or two. Of course, it'd shock the hell out of you, but it wouldn't bother me at all."

- Burkhart, months before he died

The legend of the Human Blockhead began on an operating table when a doctor removed cartilage from the nose of a busted-up boxer with a 0-6 record.

When the procedure was over, Melvin Burkhart found a new opportunity in his enlarged nasal cavity. What does one do with a big hole in one's face? Drive a spike into it, came the answer.

Robert Ripley of Ripley's Believe It or Not coined Blockhead when he drew Burkhart for a never-published cartoon.

The act went well with the other specialties of a young man who'd found an identity in the sideshow: sword swallowing, breathing with one lung, sucking his stomach so far in that his backbone was visible from the front, smiling with one side of his face and frowning with the other. At one point during the Great Depression, he was nine of 14 acts at a one-ring circus.

Over the years, he became known for his patter, mixing a Borscht Belt-style comedy into stunts that appeared painful. To that end, he gave up sword swallowing because it made him hoarse.

"In my opinion, he's the best that ever did it," said Ward Hall, the great impresario and co-owner of one of the few sideshows left today. "He had such great lines."

- - -

"He would drive spikes into his head that, I swear to God, were as big as your thumb."

- James Taylor, publisher of Shocked and Awed

"This is how I get my iron."

- Melvin Burkhart, hammering a spike into his nose

In the early 1950s, Hall said, there were 75 professional oddities living in Gibsonton. And in November, when the carnival season was over, they'd get together at Giant's Camp, one of a slim few stops along U.S. 41 between Tampa and Sarasota, to catch up. The conversations dragged past dark.

"There was a time when if you went into Giant's Camp late at night, you'd see some mighty strange things," Hall said. "I always said that if somebody had been drinking and stopped in, that would sure sober them up."

That was the zenith of the sideshow, Hall said, when there existed some 104 10-in-1 acts traveling the country.

Around that time, Burkhart joined Whitey Sutton and Slim Kelly in the James E. Straits show and performed 10 times a day, seven days a week for the next 30 years. He sent his earnings home to his family.

But Whitey died and the sideshow was sold, and the Human Blockhead wound up at Coney Island as a shadowy slice of Americana faded into history.

The country was turning away, Burkhart was getting old and the friends around him were passing. Pricilla the Monkey Girl, the Lobster Boy, the Ossified Lady, the Half Girl.

The last season Burkhart really worked was 1989, said Robbins, the magician, but that wasn't the end.

The years that followed Burkhart spent teaching his art to visitors, plying his tricks at the magicians guild in Tampa, grocery store and post office lines, inside his mobile home for visitors. It was as if he was passing himself to the next generation.

- - -

"Melvin just put it all out there. So when he died, he wasn't really gone. He's one of the most alive dead guys I ever knew. You just can't get away from him because he's always there."

- James Taylor

A few months after Burkhart's death, a strange thing happened.

A package arrived for Robbins. It contained the old man's belongings. His hat. His peel-away shirt lined with Velcro. His big dice. His hammer. His nail. His ice pick.

Then came another package from Florida: the old man himself. On what would have been his 95th birthday, Robbins and a few others stood at sunset on the Steeplechase Pier on Coney Island and sprinkled ashes into the ice-cold wind.

They planned a series of workshops to keep Burkhart's legend alive and in the years that followed his death, up-and-comers learned his techniques.

Just this week, Robbins and Dick Zigun, president of Coney Island USA, welcomed Blockhead wannabes for a weeklong session on sideshow skills.

"You could populate a mid-sized American city with the number of people Melvin taught the Blockhead act to," said Taylor. "He's become the spiritual godfather to the whole new sideshow movement."

"It's amazing when you see all the younger performers now," said Marc Hartzman, author of American Sideshow, who visited Burkhart outside Gibsonton a few months before he died. "They all borrow his routine."

"He was a high water mark in the field of human sideshow," said Robbins. "Five years later, he's still an inspiration."

On Feb. 17, on what would have been Burkhart's 100th birthday, a group of people - maybe a hundred or more, Robbins said - will gather on the pier at Coney Island. They'll put spikes in their nostrils and raise their hammers and whack away in honor of the man who outlived himself.

Ben Montgomery can be reached at bmontgomery@sptimes.com or 813 661-2443.

[Last modified November 9, 2006, 11:20:30]