Joe Rollino, muscle man dies at 104

With the sad death of a fabled strongman who performed at Coney Island, an aspect of amusement side shows comes to light again. Joe Rollino, 104, a certified member of Coney Island’s side show history where Charles Atlas once ruled, died recently when he couldn’t stop a Ford minivan as he stepped off a Bay Ridge curb in mid-block.

While we still accept the muscle man image as part of our social makeup, other, less attractive aspects of circus side shows have faded from memory. Out of the Coney Island freak shows that attracted as many as 20,000 daily visitors in 1915, only the revived Freak Show at Dick Zigun’s Coney Island USA still pushes on.

Side shows began in 17th century Europe with “Siamese twins” and “Elephant men” in traveling shows and circuses and attracted audiences of “normal” people who thrilled at seeing “rarities” or deformed, obese, diseased, anemic, genetic mutations, even mutilated people (and disfigured animals) on exhibition. Not only were strongmen, tattooed men and sword swallowers in this class but also natives of foreign climes—such as pygmies, head hunters, Zulu warriors and “Esquimeux.” In the 1930s visitors could see a 5-legged calf and a 6-legged sheep on Surf Avenue.

America caught the fever in the 19th century when P.T. Barnum introduced Tom Thumb among other “oddities” to New York, while Coney Island capitalized on the craze in the early 20th century. Outside the metropolises, traveling circuses brought the attractions to the rural areas. Of course, some acts were exposed as hoaxes.

The so-called “dime museums” of the Victorian Age featured freak shows as their main attraction of the side show, which also included acrobats. The first Coney Island freak show opened in 1880. Dreamland’s Lilliputia, a “Midget City,” opened in 1904 with 300 midgets. In 1905, Dreamland manager Sam Gumpertz imported 212 Bantocs from the Philippines and 18 Algerian horsemen. When the amusement park burned in 1911, Gumpertz continued the Dreamland Circus Side Show starring the Human Cannonball.

“Professor” Sam Wagner started his World Circus freak show at Coney Island in 1922. To legitimize the show, articles about the diseases behind the oddities appeared in the popular press. Steeplechase Circus Big Show entered the competition in 1925 with a 10 platform freak show. Other boardwalk shows appeared at the Strand Museum in 1928 and Humbert’s Museum later. Rosen’s Wonderland Circus Side Show in 1930, featured the Two-Mouthed Boy from Texas (but he was secretly from Brooklyn.)

Harry Houdini (Erich Weiss) began his public life as a strong man in traveling circuses but then focused on magic. Charles Atlas (Angelo Siciliano) became a Coney Island muscle man in the 1920s. Spike Howard, featured in the Dreamland Circus in 1930, pulled a truck with his teeth. Warren Travis joined the World Circus Side Show. Lou Ferrigno, later “The Hulk,” worked out on Avenue U alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger. Joe Rollino not only demonstrated superhuman strength, but had also been a boxer under the name Kid Dundee and was an active member of the Polar Bear Club. However, some “strongmen” weakened phone books by baking them before tearing them in half.

While strongmen and acrobats attracted many, the more unusual “displays” became the big moneymakers for circus managers. So dwarves joined Jolly Irene (689 lbs.) and Lady Olga (Jane Barnell), the bearded lady with a 13 inch long beard; Jean Carroll, with 700 tattoo designs on her body; and Percilla, The Monkey Girl, who married Benjano, the Alligator Boy. In 1941 Ramona was billed as Europe’s “miracle sex girl.”

Some exhibitors were contortionists; Julee-Julian was a hermaphrodite; the Gibbs Sisters were conjoined; Edna Price became a “neon tube swallower”; Zippo and Pippo “pinheads,” had sub-normal intelligence; and Capt. Fred Walters, the Blue Man, ate silver nitrate.

In 1938 Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, who previously restricted side shows to Coney Island’s Bowery, brought Wagner, Rosen and Fred Sidell into court in an attempt to rid the amusement park of side shows, but the next year Wagner returned with “Uncle Charlie Pascansas,” a 130 year old who had married 17 times. By the 1950s, interest in exploiting “freaks” faded until Zigun opened his Sideshows by the Seashore in 1983, prompting resurgence at traveling circuses across the country.

The entertainment industry saw a profitable angle from side shows. In 1932 Tod Browning’s film Freaks told the story of a traveling freak show. The film, Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo tells of a maimed World War I veteran who requests to be put in a freak show to demonstrate the inhumanity of war.

A well-received 1997 Broadway musical, Side Show, re-tells the story of conjoined twins, Daisy and Violet Hilton, who capitalized on their malformation to leave the circus act and become entertainers in the 1930s. In the novel, Phantom of Manhattan, a sequel to Phantom of the Opera, by Frederick Forsythe, the phantom flees to America in 1906 and hides in a Coney Island side show. It will soon be an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Love Never Dies.

So the life of the unusual may not be enviable but audiences still crave to be enthralled by the strange and abnormal—which may explain today’s fascination with “reality” shows.