Strates Shows link Orlando to America’s midway past
“Run away to the carnival for a day,” invites the website for Strates Shows Inc., an Orlando institution with a near-century-old history. Begun in 1923 by James E. Strates, a young Greek immigrant who grabbed hold of the entertainment world as a professional wrestler, the business has wintered in Orlando for decades.
Strates Shows ruled the midway at the Central Florida Fair for 46 years, ending in 1996. It continues at Florida venues in the spring, including the Seminole and Lake County fairs, and then heads north for the summer. This year, the Erie County Fair in Hamburg, New York, advertises a Strates midway for the 97th year — a “highly anticipated event for fairgoers and enthusiasts of Americana.”
Traveling carnivals are indeed part of Americana, taking hold after the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and its Midway Plaisance — a mile-long electrified linear park and the original midway. It featured the world’s first Ferris wheel, games of chance and shows including the famed “Little Egypt” — the stage name of a Syrian dancer, Fahreda Mazar, whose performances caused a sensation (although now they would be considered pretty tame).
An estimated 27 million people visited this 1893 extravaganza in Chicago. Folks who heard or read about it longed to experience its midway delights in person, and traveling carnival shows sprang up across the country.
Rugged showman
The Strates Shows’ founder, James E. Strates, entered this world of traveling shows in upstate New York in the early years of the 20th century as a professional wrestler. He had emigrated from Greece as a teenager in 1909 and learned his skills at a YMCA. After also working in cotton mills, shipyards and hotels, he had saved enough money to buy his own show in 1923. It started out with a merry-go-round, a Ferris wheel, an athletic show, 15 concessions, three sideshows and five trucks. It took 24 hours to move the show 22 miles from Bath, New York, to its first stop in Wayland, New York.
The show had grown considerably by the time it began to winter in Central Florida about 1950. Now it had its own railroad train, parked first at the Pine Castle Air Base on sidings owned by the city of Orlando before the base was reactivated. In the early 1950s, Strates Shows moved to DeLand for a couple of years and, in 1953, purchased a tract south of Taft as its winter headquarters.
Before his death in 1959, Strates had become an admired figure in Central Florida business as well as national carnival circles. He presided over a company that by the late 1950s traveled in 50 railroad cars (eventually 61) and employed as many as 1,000 people. His son, E. James Strates, took over the business and still operates it today, according to the company’s website, along with other family members.
Special magic
For Orlando-area kids in the decades before theme parks arrived, the world of the Strates midway, with its bright lights, daring rides and sideshows exuded a special magic. My brother, Bill, recalls hanging around the midway after middle school with his friend Carl Perry during setup at the Central Florida Fair; they’d help hammer tent spikes in place and soak up the sights and sounds.
Time, a lot of time, and COVID, have brought changes, and in 2021, Strates Shows went on the road in trucks, not in its trademark train, to the disappointment of folks in towns where the train’s arrival has been a big deal for decades.
The carnival business has undergone other changes, too, since the days when midways featured wild animals, burlesque shows and “unusual people,” as the Sentinel in 1947 described acts such as the Alligator Man. Those began to disappear in the 1960s along with the burlesque shows. The rides have changed over time and have become more high-tech and complex.
But there are some things about a carnival midway that may seem unchanged since the days when a Sentinel writer described them in 1955. “Hear the music, the hawkers,
the sound of people having fun all jumbled together,” he wrote. “Buzz right up and grab a footlong hot dog, popcorn, twirl cotton candy spun on a cone. You are on the midway.”
To learn more
The Seminole County Fair opened March 25 and runs through Saturday, April 2, at a new location: 440 Hickman Drive in Sanford. For details, visit seminolecountyfair.com. The Lake County Fair (April 7-16) celebrates 101 years this year; it takes place at the Lake County Fairgrounds, 2101 County Road 452 in Eustis. Visit lakecofair.com. More Strates Shows history is available at stratescarnivalcompany.com, on the Strates Show Facebook page and on YouTube.
Joy Wallace Dickinson can be reached at joydickinson@icloud. com, FindingJoyinFlorida.com, or by good old-fashioned letter to Florida Flashback, c/o Dickinson, P.O. Box 1942, Orlando, FL 32802.