BANGOR – Tyke Frost claims he has the best job in the world. He’s lucky he has taken such a liking to his occupation, because it’s unlikely he could have chosen another.

“My dad was a hitch driver, and both my grandfathers were hitch drivers,” he said last week. “I was born into it.”

Frost, 61, is the driver of the Fernald Lumber Yankee Hitch, a traveling hitch show that performed at the Bangor State Fair this past week.

Based in Deerfield, N.H, the show is on the road 200 days a year from Washington, D.C., to the Canadian border, and from Cape Cod to western Pennsylvania.

From his position on top of his old-fashioned cart, Frost controls six Belgian draft horses, each weighing from 2,000 to 2,400 pounds, by manipulating six leather lines, each one connected to a horse’s bit.

His show is an exhibition of the techniques used by 19th century hitch drivers, especially “yankee” hitch drivers, the drivers who manipulated the six-horse hitches through the crowded city streets of the Northeast.

Frost doesn’t just yank the lines to turn the horses; he has to apply a different amount of pressure on each line to give the illusion that the six geldings are one unit.

Six-horse hitches were originally used to transport goods, but they eventually became major attractions. Before radio and television, the six-horse hitch was one of the best means of advertising available.

“Shortly after the Civil War, companies realized that when they put out a nice looking hitch, everything stopped and people watched and admired,” Frost said Tuesday. “By the late 1870s and early 1880s, hitches became the premier advertising medium in North America.”

The Great Depression, along with radio, ended the era of the hitch. But at one time, hitch competitions and exhibitions were some of the most popular spectator events in the country. According to Frost, one popular hitch driver in 1919 even insured his hands for $50,000.

Frost fondly recalls the first time his father let him drive the family hitch in public.

“It was my birthday present when I was 13 years old,” Frost remembered. “It was the greatest birthday present I’ve ever had.”

Frost worked in the family business for many years before he and his wife, Sue, decided to start their own hitch act and take it on the road in 1981. They had several sponsors before securing Fernald Lumber of Nottingham, N.H. as a sponsor in 1994.

The wagon Frost sits atop during shows bears the Fernald Lumber name. It is an original from the hitch era, built in 1910 by Koenig-Lohrs of Chicago. Frost calls the 4,000-pound, six-spring delivery wagon “the greatest find of my life, next to my wife.”

Frost travels with his wife and assistant, Jessie Perron, to fairs, trade shows and parades, performing for more than 1 million people every year.

They are among just a handful of hitch shows left in the country. Frost estimated that -besides Budweiser’s multiple Clydesdale hitches – there are only six traveling hitches at any given time in the U.S.

Despite the lack of practitioners, Frost still thinks his show has universal appeal.

“The show is fun for anybody, you don’t have to be knowledgeable about horses or love horses,” Frost said. “But it’s nice if [spectators] come and remember that it’s part of their heritage.”

The hitch driver likes to remind people that no matter what their origins, horses are part of their history.

“My father used to say ‘whatever dignity mankind possesses was granted to him by a horse. Without a horse you can’t crown a king or bury a president,'” the driver said.

Frost doesn’t seem like a grizzled vet when he talks about his horses. He gets excited as he describes the nuances of his craft and he is eager to explain how to control the breathtaking animals that Roman soldiers once rode into battle.

“Even after all these years, when I get up there on that seat, thread those lines in and look out over those six horses, my heart soars. It just literally soars,” he said.