This is David sitting on "His Bucket" beside our truck that is parked behind one of our tents.  Notice the tent pipes lashed to the side of the truck.

This is a picture of my Mother, Myrtle Gordon, holding my little brother David. She is sitting in back of one of the burlesque tents and next to the tent truck that we lived in.  After pulling into the lot where the carnival would be, the roustabouts would empty the tents out of the trucks and then pull down the murphy table and benches from the inside walls.  We, of course, had no running water or toilets.  We did, via a drop line, have electricity.  We ate our meals with the other carnys in the cook tent.  My Mom washed our clothes by hand in a metal wash tub using a scrub board.  We also took our baths in this tub and for some reason David loved to sit on it in the sun.  My Mother was and is my Hero.  I miss her very much.

Part of the time when we were with Hennies Bros. Shows we traveled by train.  Our trailer would be on an open flat car and we would be in the railroad cars.  One of my first memories is  of uncontrollable terror when going from one railroad car to another.  I had such fear about falling between the two cars that someone had to carry me. Even as an adult traveling on trains that had covered couplings, that fear was always with me. Staying with the same carnival for a long time meant that you acquired carny "Aunts and Uncles" along the way.  Some of these aunts and uncles came in off the road and settled in Houston, Texas, and went to work for my father after he became a concessionaire.  I was closer to them than I was to my blood aunts and uncles on my mothers side of the family that I only saw several times in my life.  I have never met any of my fathers relatives even to this day.  I do not know if his family knows that he died in 1958. 

Baby Picture of Betty (Becky) Gordon

This is the only picture I have of me as a baby.  At one point in time we were living in a tent that burned down and all of our baby pictures were lost.  My Mom was able to retrieve a few copies that she had sent to relatives.  I was told that I was a good baby and that my older sister, Judy, treated me like a doll.  She was 18 months older than me and for a short period later in our lives we looked like twins and were dressed alike.

First Memories

I am not a writer but I want to leave a record of my childhood for my children.  My Daddy was a "First Born" Russian Orthodox Jew from New York state and my Mother was an Irish and Cherokee Indian girl from Louisville, Kentucky.  For reasons never known to us, my  Daddy left home and joined a carnival much to the dismay of his family.  When he met my Mother he was still in contact with his family.  They met on the midway of the carnival when it came to Louisville, Kentucky, to play and got rained in on the grounds.  My Mom and some of her girlfriends had come to the carnival the first night and she later would tell us that when she saw my Dad on the bally she thought he was the most handsome man she had ever seen.  He was dressed in a suit and tie, had on a hat and was pitching with a cane for emphasis.  My Mom, I have been told, looked like a young Maureen O'Hara, who was a beautiful green-eyed, red-headed Movie Star and my Dad looked like Edward G. Robinson.  It was a mutual instantous attraction.  The carnival was rained in for several days and my Mom was there as often as she could sneak away.  When the carnival finally left, My Mom left with it and she and my Dad were married in the first town where that was possible.  They were married until he passed away in 1958 from a heart attack.

This is a picture of my dad, Louis C. Gordon, known as Lew.  He was dressed for the bally on the girl show, Broadway on review.  This is the only time that he wore a suit, a long sleeved shirt and a tie.  He looked and sounded just like Edward G. Robinson.  I loved him very much.

Hello, My name is Becky McKeehan.  My father owned two burlesque shows on a carnival, and my mother was the wardrobe mistress.  My father, mother, sister, brother and I lived in the back of the canvas truck.  When I was five we settled in Houston, Texas, on the grounds of Playland Park, in the shadow of the Roller Coaster.  My mother ran the "mug joint" on the midway, which was a "get em while you wait" photo joint where you could get a picture of yourself in jail, etc.. My father ran the concession stands, and over the years, became the concessionaire at all of the public venues in Houston, so I grew up attending Broadway shows, rodeos, baseball games, wrestling, car races, etc..  I lived the childhood that most kids dream of, and I knew it at the time I was living it.