Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
Two women ran through the game booths at the Palouse Empire Fair Thursday night.
“No walking!” A voice called out from the Beer Bust game. “Ladies, no walking!”
They looked over, confused. Then giggled, and slowed down.
It was just one of the smiles brought to the face of Frank Black that night, a game man for North Star Amusement, whose journey with the company started just south of here.
Across from the Mean Machine, in the shadow of the Zipper you’d have found him.
“I was living in Albion and got my heart broken so I joined the carnival,” said Black, now 23.
He started in June, riding a Greyhound bus from Spokane to Gillette, Wyo., where his older brother set him up with a job.
On the opening day of the fair, Black got a promotion to Break Man, the person who fills in at any game during others’ breaks.
“This is the best job I’ve ever had,” he said. “I was afraid at first. I didn’t think this job was made for me. It turns out this job made me.”
The once shy Black toiled in assistant positions until one evening in Faith, South Dakota.
He got put on the Beer Bust game on a slow night. For the next four days, his booth made the most money of any other at the carnival.
As Palouse Empire fairgoers walked by Thursday night, Black showed what got him there.
“Come on man, throw it hard! Like it owes you money!” he called out to a 10-year-old boy and his friend aiming baseballs at the brown bottles to win a prize.
Some women walked by.
“Ladies can throw baseballs too you know!” Black said. “Hey this time if you break something you won’t get in trouble!”
Before Black’s time in Albion, he worked in Pennyslvania and North and South Dakota after dropping out of Spokane’s University High School during his junior year.
“I wanted to go out into the real world,” Black said.
It was 2005. He got his G.E.D. and made his way to gas rigs in Indiana, Pa., then to a job on the roustabout crews for oil rigs in the Dakotas.
“Drill, clean, swab and dig,” Black said of line producing for gasoline. He also lifted gas pipelines for seven months.
It turned out to be related experience for his job at the carnival, since many of the rides Black and his workmates set up fit together like piping.
“It’s like all my jobs combined into one,” he said.
In 2009, he returned west to stay with a surrogate family in Albion. He got a job taking care of animals at the WSU veterinary hospital.
Then he met a girl.
When it was over, it hit him hard.
“I was really down and depressed,” Black said. He called his brother, and soon bought a ticked for that bus to Wyoming.
His mother, Linda Shield, ran restaurants and did catering work in Spokane. She still lives there.
Black never knew his father.
“I’ve always been trying to find my own home and for once, a home found me,” he said.
Black and his co-workers go to each location for usually one week, which makes for three days of setup and four days of working with the customers.
They stay in trailer bunkhouses.
“Like on the oil rigs,” Black said. “It’s kind of small and cramped but it’s better than having no place to stay at all.”
After the Palouse Empire Fair, they have two fairs, two towns left in the season.
Where Black is going next came together one night at the carnival’s prevous stop, in Hamilton, Mont.
He was working the worn grass at Add ‘Em Up Darts when she walked by.
“She was like an angel, I’m not kidding,” Black said.
So Black will go east and hope for the best with the girl from Hamilton.
As he reels in contestants one more night under the lights at Mockonema, there’s a chance that that certain girl from Albion might walk up.
What if she did?
“I’d just smile and pretend she’s another customer,” Black said.
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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