As a tyke holding my mother’s hand, while walking onto a grass lot, I saw my first canvas tents in the air with flags flying. I heard the tinny voice of the side show barker over a loudspeaker mix with the distant sounds of roaring lions, the exotic smell of elephants, cotton candy and popping popcorn.
While taking in this sensory overload, I heard my mother confide, “Your dad would love this.”
I was sold on the spot!
I was inspired by my dad’s love for many things. My dad loved railroad trains, photography, dirigibles, and the civil war. Later, I would hear about the circus of his youth. I savored the stories about the remarkable sights he witnessed during the summer when he was a boy. He woke before sunrise to gather with the other boys at the railroad tracks to wait for the circus train to arrive. When the distant headlight first appeared, its piercing light provided the first spike of excitement.
He told me about the early morning feast for their eyes as the circus train moved into position and started the unloading process of wagons, horses, trucks, elephants and special equipment from the flat and stock cars. This process took place with amazing fluency. He watched an incredible enterprise populated with hundreds of people, portable objects of wonder and animals of all kinds unload destined for the show grounds.
A beehive of activity resulted in a canvas city rising into the air before noon. An entire spectrum of preparations were completed by a predictable time. The two shows; a matinee and an evening show were given the same day. After the second show, the entire aggregation was taken down and reloaded on the train. When complete, a steam locomotive began to pull this amazing collection of everything wonderful out of town and into the dark toward its next destination.
Although not the big railroad circus, this version traveling on a fleet of trucks that came to our town was amazing none the less. After seeing this big top circus, I became keen about seeing it every year. When summer came, I began to look for circus posters in store windows and on telephone poles.
Imprinted with the same love my dad had for the circus, I began my pattern of getting up early to see the morning arrival of the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros Circus, the large canvas big top truck show that made a regular visit to our fairgrounds.
As I grew, I became able to get a job helping set up the tents early on circus day. Then after seeing the show, like my dad before me, I was inspired with the idea of producing an even greater circus production in our backyard.
I created apparatus for my backyard circus and painted the decorative advertising that goes with such a production. I was shaped by new thought, old tradition, love and enthusiasm to find adventure with my creative outlet.
Each summer I produced a different revue. The usual circus performance was made up of children recruited to perform various acts – clowns, trapeze and acrobats. One year, I made cigar box guitars and a potato chip can drum set for a Beatles concert.
After receiving a chemistry set and becoming familiar with several sensational experiments, my best friend Arnold Vila helped me create a show called “Chemistry Magic.” Working with limited resources didn’t slow us down. One demonstration aptly called; purple smoke was produced by cooking iodine crystals over a Bunsen burner. Because we used the same beaker later in the show we had to cook off all the crystals until gone and the cloud of smoke produced almost asphyxiated our audience.
Even though I felt my shows were worth every bit of the dime I charged, my mother always served Kool-Aid and cookies to everyone who attended, so she knew they got their money’s worth.
A blend of these creative activities coalesced in all sorts of childhood endeavors that included display building and painting artwork on virtually everything that moved. After discovering my dad’s boyhood model circus wagon building efforts, I began building my miniature circus from scratch.
Letterfly Writes 