There have been many banner painters over the years. Despite the fact that a good portion of them were reasonably proficient artists, few were outstanding and even fewer could be classified as unique. Fred Johnson and Snap Wyatt were unique. Danny Cassella although somewhat obscure due to lack of national exposure, (his work was almost exclusively for New York's Coney Island), was also unique.

Each Of these artists had a distinctive style. My favorite was Cassella. His work bordered fine art, with subtlety graduated wet blends and minimal hard living. Next was Johnson, who managed to create an aura of weirdness approaching the ominous with curious color combinations and lavish brushstrokes. Wyatt's strongest suite was speed. He created tons of banners over the years using a bold cartoonical style. Although lacking Cassella's muted blends or Johnson's eye-catching composition, they were still unique in their own brash way.

Interestingly enough, my awareness of these three men came in the same order that I've just described them. Even more interesting, my least favorite artistically, Wyatt, was directly responsible for my own early emergence as a banner painter.

It wasn't as though I'd never seen pictorial banners before. Connecticut in the 40's hosted many traveling circuses and carnivals, all of which displayed these colorful advertisements. That June night in New Britain, Conn., However, was the first time I ever saw them in a way that would eventually guide the direction my life would take. I not only saw them, I drank them in huge gulps, savored them as though I was satisfying a hunger that I was hitherto unaware of. The banners were painted by Fred Johnson. His name appeared over a stencil in the lower right cover proclaiming that they were made by the O. Henry Tent and Awning Co. of Chicago, Illinois. They hung in front of Whitey Sutton's sideshow, touring that year with the James E. Strates Shows, an enormous railroad carnival.

Earlier that year I had become aware of Danny Cassella via an article written about him in the New York Herald Tribune. Titled, "He Glamorizes The Freaks at Coney," the story was accompanied by a photo of a banner depicting various vertebra and turn his head around facing backward. (To add a footnote of sideshow trivia, in the titling of banners, men were always "boys" and women were always "girls" regardless of their actual age. One attraction, a man who had peculiar little arms and legs and, at age fifty, worked as "The Frog Boy", was regressed to infancy by artists cashing in on the thalidomide panic and re-titled "The Wonder Drug Baby".

Cassella was probably the last note worthy artist employed by Millard and Blusterbaum, a pictorial studio that serviced, among other clients, the sideshow operators of Coney Island. A number of artists passed through the Millard and Blusterbaum art mill, including Johnson and Wyatt. Besides portraying pinheads and Penguin Boys, the talented hands of that company all took turns rendering the giant mustard and relish festooned hotdogs of "Nathan's Famous," a Coney legend that still endures.

As closely as I can recall, Snap Wyatt, or my awareness of his work, came a year or two beyond the Casella/Johnson experience. Much like the other two individuals, that awareness was the result of first seeing his work on various show bannerlines. (As another quick side trip, Wyatt's first name was David, the nickname, "Snap", came from sign shop vernacular. When a hungry sign painter hits the highway grabbing whatever work is available it's known as "snapping signs". Evidently Wyatt did enough itinerate work to earn him the title that would, for most of his life, replace the name on his birth certificate.)

In 1956 I was, for a brief period of time, performing with Leola's sideshow on the Ross Manning show carnival. "Leola", (Actually Homer Tracy, a female impersonator who worked as "Leo-Leola", Half Man, Half Woman") was a "suitcase operator" who managed the carnival-owned sideshow. Each year the carnival owner would buy a new set of banners, a rather minor expenditure in those days. Apparently chickens were pretty scarce in the Manning camp that year, so when Leola discovered that, beside my repertoire of acts, I painted, she set me to touching up the previous year's banners. They were Wyatt pieces and I approached the project with the mixture of reverence and trepidation one might expect from an art restorer at the Louve. My own artwork was still in it's formative stages and most of my painting at that point was sign lettering. Leola, however, expressed great delight with the work-due largely, I suspect, to the fact that it cost her nothing. There were eleven banners in all and when completed she asked me if I'd design a set of "Fat Show" banners for a second, smaller show that would feature-what else-a fat man.

Altough the thought of painting a banner of my own scared the daylights out of me, drawing them was an easy assignment. I turned out what was to be my very first set of scale drawings for banners in an afternoon and presented them to Leola who was-once again-both delighted and financially unencumbered. Leola told me that she was sending the drawings to Snap Wyatt to be transformed into banners. I personally regarded that as submitting my humble scratchings to God for his approval. I seem to recall that, for a fleeting moment, I had an urge to say "Why don't you let me paint them?," but the words never quite made it out of my mouth, attributable to my common sense winning a quick one-rounder with my ego.

The following week a letter came from Wyatt accepting the banner order and heaping praise on the artist who'd done the drawings. I was hooked. The Grand Poobah of Painted Peculiarities had praised my work!

Shortly after receiving Snap Wyatt's letter I left Leola's show and joined a small circus where I remained to the close of that season. Although I was unaware of it, the new fat show banners never made it to Leola's hands, for that matter, the fat man never showed up either. In the spring of 1957 I rejoined Leola in Kingtree, South Carolina, where the Manning show was wintering in a tobacco warehouse. According to Leola, the banners that Wyatt had painted the previous year languished on some railroad express platform for lack of payment and were, subsequently, returned to Wyatt who peddled them to another operator. "What a shame," I told Leola, "I would have like to have seen my drawings produced as banners." "Ah, but you will," the sideshow operator replied, "You're going to paint me new ones," at which point Leola produced a set of raw canvas blanks! So I began my career as a banner painter. Come to think of it, I didn't get paid that time either.