Melvin Burkhart, 94; Carnival Sideshow Performer Known as ‘Human Blockhead’

He was the Human Blockhead and proud of it.

He was the Anatomical Wonder who could breathe with one lung at a time, the Two-Faced Man who could frown with half his face and smile with the other, and the Rubber-Necked Man. He swallowed swords, threw knives and gobbled fire. He said he was a freak and was proud of that too.

Melvin Burkhart, who logged more than 900,000 miles to entertain millions of people in more than 100,000 carnival sideshows over 60 years and whose silver tongue and heart of gold made him both the touter and protector of his carny colleagues, has died. He was 94.

Burkhart died Thursday of complications from a stroke in the Tampa Bay area of Florida.

He was the last of the legends living in the little town of Gibsonton, Fla., or “Gibtown,” which once harbored such human wonders as the legless Half Girl, the pincer-handed Lobster Boy, the scaly-skinned Frog Man and the bearded Dog-Faced Lady.

“He was the last of them,” Bill Dahlquist, a friend and fellow magician, told the Tampa Tribune. “It’s the end of the era, it really is.”

To Burkhart, the word and concept of “freak” were never pejorative, but an enviable entree to the show business he loved.

“It takes something special to be a freak,” he told Associated Press in 1985, when he was appearing with seven others at the New York State Fair. “Have you looked up the definition? You can’t just put on some feathers and call yourself ‘Birdman.’ I qualify because nobody can do the things I can do.”

With his added gift of gab, Burkhart was interviewed by every reporter who found his way to Gibtown, from National Public Radio to London’s Mail on Sunday. He toured with Ringling Bros., was in “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not” and was featured in two documentaries, the Learning Channel’s 1997 “Sideshow” and the independent feature-length “Gibtown.”

He loved to introduce his anomalous cohorts onstage, concocting clever spiels to make the audience enjoy what they were seeing.

“We would never get up there and just say, ‘Come in here and see a horrible person,’ ” he told National Public Radio. “You wouldn’t say, ‘You’re going to see a girl with no arms . . .’ but ‘You’re going to see the armless wonder who does fantastic things right before your eyes using nothing but the tootsies on her feet.’ ”

And at home or in the little diners and motels on the road, Burkhart often spoke for them too, unencumbered by the shyness or low self-esteem of many sideshow performers.

“No freak was a freak to me,” he said. “They were my friends, and we were all freaks together. I tried to be their shield against the world.”

Carnival sideshows, or freak shows, declined sharply in the 1960s as medical science learned how to eliminate or reduce genetically caused deformities and as public attitudes changed, prompting state laws that banned exploiting the disabled. Other factors included development of special effects in movies, television and theme parks that could induce greater thrills than a mere peek at a bearded lady.

Burkhart, who relished the limelight, simply reinvented himself as a magician and continued to find audiences at fairs and fund-raisers with his pocketful of trick dice, magic string, rigged cards and disappearing coins.

But he achieved his greatest fame as the Human Blockhead--so designated for his ability to drive a 5-inch nail or ice pick into his face without flinching.

“If it ever hurt me, I wouldn’t do it,” he insisted while performing the trick for a doubting reporter when he was 86, then added his customary line: “This is how I get my iron.”

Burkhart succeeded in the sideshow business because he failed at his first bid for applause--prizefighting. The kid from Louisville, Ky., lost six fights and won none before discovering that his oft-broken nose required surgery to remove 22 fragments of bone. “I found out they had cleared out a small passage,” he said.

Intrigued when he discovered he could stick a nail into that passage, he decided to do, in the words of his daughter-in-law, “what everybody else always talked about doing. . . . He ran away and joined the circus.”

Burkhart the showman always said the operation enabled him to be “not just a good, but a great, human blockhead . . . the top of the human blockheads.”

He met his first wife during a circus tour to Havana and turned her into an accomplished sword-swallower.

Burkhart managed a more normal life than many of his fellow freaks. He and his second wife, Joyce, were preparing to celebrate their 52nd wedding anniversary this month, and he remained close to their three children.

“He taught me how to be a rich man,” said his son, Dennis, a biochemical engineer. “He said a rich man is someone who can make one person smile every day.”