To The Hilt Deep Dive Podcast Ep 1.28 Toni Del Rio: A Sword Swallower’s History of Sword Swallowing

Toni Del Rio was a snake charmer, dancer, fire eater, hypnotist, clairvoyant, and sword swallower. She was also a he.

Del Rio was born into a gypsy family of wire walkers who came from Andorra between France and Spain in the Pyrenees Mountains to Tampa Florida for a circus booking by way of Cuba in the early 1920s. Del Rio was born there on April 2, 1924, as Nilo Garrido. Nilo grew up as a boy, but was a pseudo-hermaphrodite.

An accident on the high wire led to nerve damage in one leg, but being a kid surrounded by sideshow performers, he soon picked up a variety of skills, including

sword swallowing from his uncle.

Before World War II, he took advantage of his natural anomaly and worked with circuses and sideshows as a "Half and Half."

During the war, while serving in the US Navy as a registered nurse in Hawaii, Garrido's breasts began to grow, and he was given a medical discharge. He underwent transgender surgery and according to stories, became the second person in the United States to become transgendered after Christine Jorgensen’s earlier surgery in Denmark in the early 1950’s.

He changed his name from Nilo Garrido to Toni Del Rio and went back to working with circuses and sideshows as “Half-and-Half” and sword swallower.

In the 1950’s Del Rio enhanced her sword swallowing skills under the guidance of Mimi Garneau while in her winter quarters in Gibsonton, Florida. Armed with some of Mimi's personal swords, Del Rio worked as a female sword swallower throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Standing just 5 feet, 2 inches tall, she would often pull a teenage boy from the audience to hold her waist as she placed a 17½-inch bayonet in her mouth. With the snap of a finger, the blade would drop down her throat. A flick of her pinky finger would thrust it into the air. After catching it in her hand, she'd ask the teen if he'd like a turn.

Del Rio performed with Johnny Meah on the Lou Walters Show during this period and trained both Eddie Miller (1963-64) and Red Stuart (1967) in the art of swallowing swords. Del Rio took in the 16-year-old runaway orphan Red Stuart and taught him sword swallowing and all the other sideshow arts in Louisiana in the spring of 1967.

In addition to gulping blades and performing her other acts, she also created her own attractions, such as the "Man Eating Fish." "When people bought their tickets and got inside, what they saw was a man sitting there eating a can of sardines," she told a reporter in 1976. "It was true-it's all in the punctuation." A similar act was billed as "The boy who plays with a pink rattler." Behind the ticket booth, curiosity seekers found a little boy playing not with a snake, but with pink baby rattle.

"You gotta be able to do everything in the carnival," Del Rio said.

She continued doing everything she could into at least the mid-1980s. On April 28, 1987, however, Del Rio suffered a heart attack and passed away at Tampa General Hospital. As for Toni's swords, they were bequeathed to her star pupil, Red Stuart, who dispersed them on to sword swallowers Dan Meyer and Charon Henning in 2003.

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