The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins by Dean Jensen Page A

Mary’s or Edith’s sight. “Carl Lauther, my manager, also kept constant watch over me and had the same rule. I’m sure the twins’ manager was only trying to protect them. Probably he was worried that someone might try to kidnap them. There were a lot of crazy people on the outside, do-gooders who felt they had a religious mission to rescue the children of the sideshow.” 21
    The summer of 1918 turned out to be one of the most challenging seasons of all for the outdoor entertainment industry. By then, the United States had joined with Great Britain and France in a war against Germany. Such great numbers of roustabouts were raided from carnivals and circuses by the military that the shows had trouble putting up and taking down their shows. And the demand for coal, steel, and other resources used in the manufacture of armaments meant the railroads became so overtaxed that they often denied passage to the carnivals.
    By August, when the Johnny J. Jones Exposition was touring the South, the show was battling a new adversary. An epidemic of influenza was spreading across America, and thousands were perishing from the scourge each week. In a massive effort to slow the wild-fire spread of the disease, health officials everywhere ordered the closing of public gathering places, including beaches, movie theaters, and state and county fairs.
    By midsummer, according to
The Billboard
, 90 percent of the traveling shows had already limped back to their winter quarters and “the carnival business … is almost at a standstill.” Although the cancellations of contracted dates caused the Exposition to bleed money in torrents, Jones tried to keep his show rolling. He finally had enough when one of the carnival’s most profitable stands, the Georgia State Fair in Augusta, was expunged from the 1918 season. He directed the crew of his thirty-seven-car train to pilot the caravan to the show’s home base in Birmingham, Alabama, and kept the whole agglomeration in mothballs until the pestilence had come to an end and “the Kaiser has abdicated and leaves for parts unknown.” 22
    With a war raging and a deadly plague spreading, not just in the United States but in Europe as well, Myer Myers felt sure it would be a long time, if ever, before the carnivals rolled again. With a wife and child who were dependent on him for survival, along with a mother-in-law and Siamese twins, what was he going to do now?
    It was not a question he had to ponder for long. By October, the Allied Forces began to win all of the major battles overseas, and on November 18, 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II gave up his throne and fled to The Netherlands. The influenza epidemic eventually claimed more than six million lives, but in the United States, at least, it had run its course by late in the year.
    Soon after the start of the new year, Johnny J. Jones stepped out of a chauffeur-driven sedan at his carnival’s winter quarters inBirmingham and issued a directive to his staff. They were to round up as many laborers as possible and start spit-shining the train and all the rides. The Exposition was going back out on the road in 1919.
    The rigors of gypsy life—cold rains, muddy lots, searing heat, and dust storms—had finally taken their toll on Mary Hilton. She was now stooped over and could walk only by leaning on two canes. Mary had long ago ceded the decisions concerning the twins’ exhibition to Edith and her son-in-law.
    But Mary was a carny through and through. Such souls seem to have a kinship with migratory birds. When spring comes, they are stirred by some unappeasable instinct that impels them, sometimes even against their wills, to leave one place and, with others of their species, travel to another. Mary was aboard the shiny green train of the Johnny J. Jones Exposition when it pulled out of Birmingham.
    Mary Hilton died in Atlanta Hospital at 3 A.M. on April 20, 1919. The cause of her death, according to the death certificate, was an acute infection of