John Corliss of North Syracuse was making his way toward the exit of the Great New York State Fair in Geddes on Monday afternoon when he heard something that made him stop.

‘Age, Weight, Birthday?’ asked a Southern-accented voice over a microphone. ‘Any prize you want. I’ve got to guess it right or I’ll give it to you.’

Corliss pulled $3 from his wallet and sauntered toward the man with the microphone who stood in front of a ‘Fool the Guesser’ sign and a comically oversized scale. He challenged the man, Randy Houston of Jacksonville, Fla., to guess his age-give or take two years.

‘Most people can’t guess my age correctly,’ Corliss said. ‘So I figured it was a good way to win my kid a prize.’

Houston then gave Corliss a once-over and wrote a number on a piece of paper. He showed his written-down guess to an onlooker, Corliss’ wife Pearl, who immediately began to smile.

‘People look at him and automatically think early thirties,’ she said, laughing.

And that’s just what Houston had done. He guessed that 26-year-old Corliss was actually six years older.

‘You’ve got to ease up on him, honey,’ Houston smugly offered to Pearl Corliss as an excuse for the loss. Then he handed Corliss’ son a plastic toy samurai sword and the family walked away from the booth happily.

The Corlisses had no clue they had been pegged as winners from the moment they’d stepped up to Houston’s booth. Houston, his boss Jimmy Trott, and M. Goldberg and Associates, the company they work for, intentionally lose seven out of every 10 games they play, regardless of their ability to guess accurately.

For Houston and Trott, it’s one way for them to help keep some integrity in the game.

‘I don’t feel bad about it,’ Trott said while cooling off in the shade next to the prizes at his booth. ‘You actually can win this game.’

Trott and Houston are just two of the thousands of traveling fair workers that spent the past ten days in Geddes for the Fair. On Monday, the two packed up shop for the four ‘Fool the Guesser’ stands set up around the Fairgrounds and prepared their eight-person team for the next destination: Nashville, Tenn. for the Tennessee State Fair.

For traveling fair workers like Trott, leaving one fair and the friends made there and heading toward another is not a sad experience.

‘I see these people all the time,’ Trott said. ‘It’s like a family.’

The 30-year-old Trott calls Tampa, Fla. his home, but is only there for four months out of the year. Still, it’s a welcome break from carnival life. His daily schedule from Thanksgiving until March? ‘Sit on the beach and drink margaritas,’ he said.

For the past 11 years Trott has traveled across the country, living on the road and jumping from fair to fair. At just 19, he dropped out of the University of South Florida to make his living guessing weights, ages and birth months at three dollars a pop.

What had started as a summer job turned into his mother’s nightmare. As time passed, his mother’s shock eventually faded, but the two still talk constantly about Trott giving up the fair life and possibly heading back to school to finish earning his degree in marketing.

For now, Trott is just having fun. If he wasn’t, he would have been back at school a long time ago, he says. Something keeps him coming back each year and living the carnival life.

‘I am a carnie,’ Trott said. ‘There’s no way I can deny that. But I have all my teeth, I don’t live out of my truck, I take a shower every day and I make money.’

In fact, Trott said that he makes more than the average American income on his eight-month tour of the country’s fairs and carnivals. Despite the steady cash flow, it’s a rollercoaster of a ride. In his exploits, Trott’s been hit, slapped and even kissed by those with enough personality and guts to put their pride on the line and try his game. The secret, Trott said, is learning how to be comfortable around the customers.

‘It’s not a job everybody can do,’ Trott said. ‘You’ve got to have the gift of gab, the personality. I’ve always had the mouth.’

Even though his own mother has trouble understanding what keeps him returning to run his game each year, Trott says his reasoning is simple; the money and the memories make all the traveling, hard work and reputations worthwhile-and not as weird as those on the outside might think.

‘We’re a little different,’ he said. ‘Everybody thinks that because we work out here that we’re that carnie that your mom warned you about. But we’re not all that way.’

Published on September 7, 2004 at 12:00 pm