George Bailey's Got Nothing on Me: A Narrative History of the Holliday Family

By Cy Holliday

Growing up on a traveling carnival and surrounded by a host of real life Damon Runyan and O Henry characters has proven to be a truly wonderful life. The author’s paternal grandfather, father, and mother were instrumental in providing him a firm foundation for all of life’s challenges. From Broadway to carnival midways to the Atlantic City Boardwalk, these stories speak of a simpler time, but the life lessons are as applicable today as they were in the past.
Mom was a Broadway star who worked with all the big band leaders of the 1930s and ‘40s. Dad was a carnie that grew up during the depression and lived by his wits. Grandpa was a carnie and a prizefighter. They and their friends formed the basis of what became the author’s life story, and a fascinating look at a different time in our country.
Covering seven generations of the Holliday family from the 1700s to today, George Bailey’s Got Nothing on Me takes the reader on a unique genealogic ride with characters that are far from perfect and certainly not “politically correct.” Filled with individual triumphs and tragedies, it is as interesting a family memoir as you are likely to find.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cy Holliday
• Release date: May 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370827350

Cy Holliday

Born and raised on a traveling carnival, Cyrus E. (Cy) Holliday is a retired Army officer living in Hot Springs Village, Arkansas. On the carnival, he traveled throughout the United States and Canada and has visited all fifty states and six of the Canadian Provinces. In the Army and later as a defense contractor, he traveled throughout the world, visiting more than thirty countries on six continents. A holder of multiple college degrees, he attributes most of his life’s learning experiences to his upbringing in the carnival and amusement park businesses. His father taught him that no matter what you do in life, you’re going to have to get along with all kinds of people. As he said, “In this business, every day you deal with the town mayor, and the town drunk, and everybody in between, and you have to learn to deal with each of them on their level.” Cy married Deborah J. Holliday in 1983; the couple has one son, Cyrus Robert Holliday, born in 1995.

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George Bailey’s Got Nothing on Me

A Narrative History of

the Holliday Family

Cy Holliday

George Bailey’s Got Nothing on Me

by Cy Holliday

Copyright 2017 Cy Holliday

Smashwords edition

Freeze Time Media

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other — without the prior permission of the author.

To all the members of the Holliday family, past, present and future. It has been a wonderful life.

Acknowledgments

This has been a collaborative effort from the start. I want to thank the members of the Hot Springs Village Writers Club and their Critique Group, especially Maddie Young, John Swinburn, and Mickey Jordan. I also want to thank my wife, Debbie, who has encouraged me throughout the process; without her patience, this work would never have been completed.

Contents

Prologue

Big Cy

Dad

Mom

Military Tradition

The World of Mirth

Free Acts

Monikers

Teddy the Elephant

Mr. Best

West Monroe, Louisiana

Meeting Mr. Best

Fish Stories

Million Dollar Pier

Ferris Wheels

The Draft

Mountaineers & Irishmen

Mr. Gandolfi

Doctor Dad

The Monorail

A Bad Day

A Very Bad Day

Epilogue

Prologue

It’s A Wonderful Life is one of my favorite movies. I first saw that film in 1960, when I was twelve years old, and I haven’t missed watching it at least once a year for the past fifty plus years. George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, is the central character in the 1946 film. He comes to discover that when all is said and done, he has had a wonderful life.

That’s me on the cover in 1952, taking a bath in a number five washtub on the World of Mirth carnival. As I reflect on my upbringing and the life I’ve been able to lead because I was raised by a caring, loving (although far from perfect and certainly not politically correct) family, I can honestly say that old George Bailey has nothing on me when it comes to having had a wonderful life. You are about to be introduced to the three people who made me what I am: my grandfather and namesake, Cyrus Smith Holliday; my father, Charles McLain Holliday; and my mother, Pearl Olive Beatrice (Hales) Holliday.

Big Cy, as Grandpa Holliday was known, lived from 1887 until 1959; my dad, Charlie, from 1907 until 1973; and my mom, Pearl, from 1921 to 1992. Each of them was unique in his or her own way, and each had a profound effect upon my life. This is really their story, along with as colorful a cast of characters that anyone can imagine. They came in and out of our lives through our association with the World of Mirth carnival and later, the Million Dollar Pier in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Most of what I describe in the following pages I can vouch for firsthand. Some of it is Holliday family oral history, passed down to me by family members, friends, and acquaintances over the years. I have tried to recreate their stories as faithfully as possible. Any errors in fact are both unintentional and solely those of the author.

When our only child was born in February 1995, nine months before I retired from the Army, I started to get serious about my family’s genealogy. Thomas Holliday, my great-great-great-grandfather, was born in the Annandale valley in Scotland in 1766. He arrived in America in the 1780s, ending up in South Central Pennsylvania. He first shows up in the 1790 U.S. census in Pennsylvania. The Somerset County Historical Society places him and his wife in Somerset County in 1803. Thomas had eleven children, one of whom was my great-great-grandfather, Andrew.

Andrew Holliday was born in Somerset in 1811. He also had a whole houseful of children, one of whom was my great-grandfather, Cyrus, born in 1847. Andrew and two of his sons, Cyrus and Jeremiah, fought for the Union in the Civil War. Andrew and Cy (our preferred shortened version of Cyrus) were in the same unit, H Company, 3rd Battalion, Potomac Home Brigade, and Jeremiah fought, and died, with the 6th West Virginia Cavalry.

Cyrus had a large family as well. His second son, my grandfather, Cyrus Smith Holliday (Big Cy) was born in Somerset, Pennsylvania, in 1887. He only had one child, my father, Charles McLain Holliday, who was born in Morgantown, West Virginia, in 1907. I, Cyrus Ernest Holliday, came along in 1948, one of three children. My son, Cyrus Robert Holliday, was born in 1995. This book is for him.

Chapter 1

Big Cy

My grandfather was one of several Damon Runyon characters I was lucky enough to grow up with. A big, tough, good-looking guy, Cyrus Smith Holliday, or Big Cy, was always considered something of a ladies’ man. In the winter, or off-season for the carnival, he worked in a glass factory and did other odd jobs in Morgantown, West Virginia, where the family had settled in the late 1890s. That family consisted of his father, Cyrus; his stepmother, a stern Irish woman named Bridgett Ellen (Deveany) Holliday; and seven children. Big Cy was the youngest.

His dad was a shoemaker by trade. He contracted rheumatoid arthritis during the Civil War and never really recovered from its crippling effects. He was a strict disciplinarian and did his best to keep his children in line. With Big Cy, that was often more than he and Bridgett could handle.

In the spring of 1906, Big Cy was nineteen years old and going with Morgantown’s belle of the ball, a sassy little half French, half American Indian gal named Jenny Pethel. To make a long story short, she got pregnant sometime around the time Big Cy left to go on the road with the carnival. When he returned, six months later, Jenny told him about her predicament, and they decided to get married at some point in the future.

One of Big Cy’s favorite off-season jobs was working in a local dance hall on Friday and Saturday nights. He was a combination host, bartender, dancer, and bouncer. Jenny was always there with him, and she reveled in what passed for nightlife in this little one-horse coal-mining town. As the story goes, it was at one of these Saturday night dances that Big Cy almost ended up in prison.

Jenny was wearing a dress designed to hide her pregnancy. It was a red dress with a large, decorative bow in the front that tied in the back. One of the locals, a coal miner who had probably had a little too much to drink, decided that it would be an interesting experiment to see what would happen if he came up behind Jenny and untied her ribbon.

Jenny failed to see the humor in any activity that would reveal her pregnancy to anyone sober enough to notice. She launched a string of profanities designed to make a sailor blush and threw her drink at him. Now, no self-respecting, half-drunk coal miner was going to let that pass, and he drew back to hit her. And he would have, too, but just when he got his right arm cocked to take a punch, Big Cy hit him like a freight train, driving him into the wall.

Apparently, it wasn’t much of a fight. Big Cy picked him up, dragged him out the back door of the dance hall, and as he later told me, just hit the guy once. That must have been the case — at least that’s how the corroborating witnesses testified. When Big Cy knocked the guy down outside, his head hit the railroad tracks that ran past the dance hall, and he never recovered consciousness.

Big Cy spent the rest of that night in jail. He was arraigned the following morning — a Sunday morning court appearance was something of a rarity. The judge, a card-playing buddy of his, decided this was simply a case of a man defending his honor.

My dad, Charles McLain Holliday, was born about two months later, on February 8, 1907. Then, maybe because of the pain of childbirth, or maybe because she and Big Cy couldn’t get together on a date, or for whatever reason, Jenny left town. This left Big Cy with no wife and a bouncing baby boy that he was absolutely incapable of taking care of as a young man of nineteen.

Big Cy’s dad, Cyrus, adopted Charlie and raised him as his son. At the time, two of Big Cy’s maiden sisters, Ide and Nell, still lived with their father, and they took on most of the child-raising chores. In March, Big Cy left to go back out on the road.

Many years later, when Charlie turned twenty-one, Big Cy finally told him who his real father was. By that time, the two of them had become fast friends, as Charlie and Big Cy left Morgantown for the circus and carnival life when he was fourteen years old. They traveled together on carnival and circus routes off and on for the next thirty-five years. After my dad had our family settle down by buying into an amusement park in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Big Cy and I shared a bedroom in the first house anyone from our side of the Holliday family had ever owned.

There was a reason they called Grandpa Holliday Big Cy. While