The Prophet and the Picker

The Prophet and the Picker is the banner name for Roy Laferty and Theodore Daniels’s tent show with Billy Bradford Family Amusements. It packages Roy’s grisly preaching about the End Times as carnival entertainment, with Theodore supplying the music and Roy drawing a crowd by eating insects during the sermon. The act’s title sits at the junction of religious performance and the makeshift business that sustains the two fugitives on the road.

The banner and the performance

The tent advertised THE PROPHET AND THE PICKER. Inside, Roy preached his version of the End Times while Theodore provided background music. A quarter bought admission, but religion had to compete with more exciting, less serious attractions only a few yards away. Roy responded by adapting his earlier spider act: every few minutes he stopped preaching, took a wriggling worm, crunchy roach, or slimy slug from an old bait bucket, and chewed it as though it were candy. Business improved.

The performance was physically costly as well as theatrical. Roy and Theodore gave four or sometimes five shows each evening, alternating with the Flamingo Lady every forty-five minutes. At each show’s end Roy hurried behind the tent to regurgitate the bugs, while Theodore followed in his wheelchair. Waiting to go on again, they smoked and sipped from a bottle, with the audience’s drunken calls to the Flamingo Lady audible from inside the tent. The act’s mixture of sermon, spectacle, and bodily ordeal made religious entertainment part of the carnival’s competition for attention.

The touring life behind the name

By 1963, Roy and Theodore had been with Billy Bradford Family Amusements for almost four years. From early spring until late fall, they traveled through the hot, humid South in a retired school bus packed with moldering canvas, folding chairs, and metal poles. The carnival set up in dusty towns whose attractions included creaky rides, flea-bitten jungle cats, and a tattered freak show. In that modest circuit, Roy’s insect-eating innovation helped turn a difficult-to-sell sermon into a paying act.

The returns remained meager. On a good night Roy and Theodore could make twenty or thirty dollars; the Flamingo Lady and Flapjack the Clown received most of what remained after expenses for alcohol, bugs, and food at the hot-dog stand. Their title therefore named not just a show but a precarious place in a traveling enterprise, where religion itself had to be refashioned to earn an audience.

Fugitives on the circuit

The carnival route also kept the pair far from West Virginia. Nearly fourteen years had passed since Roy and Theodore buried Helen Laferty and fled south, and they had stopped bothering to change their names. They could scarcely imagine the law in Coal Creek reaching so far. Against that fugitive history, the tent’s public banner gives their improvised life a stable, repeatable identity: each night they could step into the same advertised act, even as the carnival moved from town to town.