Ringlingville USA

by Jerry Apps

  A local newspaper reported the blow down and the terror that followed:

  The first gusts shook the canvas like a leaf and the next moment the center pole supporting it snapped near the top. Instantly the canvas sagged and the swaying of the guy ropes caused the hundreds of scantlings to swing about in the arena.

  Panic-stricken, the audience of 10,000 attempted to escape, but the women and children were unable to lift the canvas, which had become rain soaked and heavy. Egress was slow at the regular exits, and it was in the crush at these points that many were injured.

  Wild rumors that the whole menagerie had broken loose and was running the woods gained circulation and spread terror in several towns.9

  No matter how large and successful a circus became, it couldn’t outrun the weather. And while it was a rare exception that the tents did not go up on a scheduled show date, it happened several times in the 1906 season. In Sherman, Texas, on October 18, Frank Parson wrote, “Arrived here at 8:30 a.m. and it was raining and road to the lot was very bad. No show. Just fed and layed here until night and went on to Bonham. It cleared in the afternoon.”10

  Employee Compensation, 1906

  In 1906 the Ringlings’ highest-paid performers received up to $350 a week. Thomas Cochran and his performing ostrich received $300 per week. As important as clowns were to the circus, their salaries did not approach those of name performers; longtime Ringling clown Jules Turnour received twenty dollars per week. (Turnour supplemented his income by being Ringlingville’s postmaster).

  In 1906 the ninety women classified as ballet performers were paid from seven to ten dollars a week. The ballet master, Professor Peri, earned forty dollars per week.1

  The workingmen’s ledger for 1906 listed 1,035 employees, but a large percentage of these did not work the whole season. For instance, of the 319 men listed as baggage horse men, 153 did not finish the season and were replaced with other workers. The Ringlings used a holdback incentive in an effort to retain employees throughout the season. For example, baggage horse men’s salary was on average fifteen to twenty-five dollars per month; the Ringlings would pay five dollars on payday and retain the remaining ten dollars until the end of the season. Despite this incentive, only about 20 percent of the canvas-men (who had the backbreaking job of putting up and taking down tents every day, six days a week) worked the entire season from April to November. Some would work a few months; some would work a few days. It was grueling work in the best of weather, but rain and cold made the task miserable, as the men wallowed in the mud with freezing hands, slippery ropes, and unruly tent poles. Add wind to the mix, and putting up a tent was next to impossible.

  Besides their salary, Ringling workers and performers received a bunk on the circus train and three meals a day in the cook tent. The value of three meals a day in 1906 was between forty-five and seventy-five cents (fifteen to twenty-five cents for each meal).2 Many a country boy who “ran away with the circus” had never eaten so well.

  * * *

  NOTES

  1. Ringling Brothers Performers Ledger, 1906, pp. 80–89, Pfening collection.

  2. Candy Stand Book, Ringling Bros. Show, Season of 1906, Frank Parson, CWM, p. 82.

  On November 17 at Little Rock, Arkansas, it “[r]ained hard all day. They put up everything but the rain kept up and it was so muddy they did not parade or show.” Two days later, in Jonesboro, Arkansas, it “[w]as still raining and the lot was so muddy they just put up cook house and horse tents and did not try to show. Paid off the men and went home.”11

  Not all problems in 1906 were weather related. An altercation between two leopards while in Austin, Texas, on November 2 resulted in “such damage that one of the spotted attractions of the show went to the happy jungle.” And a train wreck in Galveston, Texas, on November 5 demolished two cars and killed a horse.12

  The Ringlings faced a string of problems in Duluth, Minnesota. After the Brothers paid the usual license fees to appear in that city, a city inspector found that the calliope had no steam boiler license, and the Ringlings were forced to pay another fee. Then the city sued the Ringlings for $1,000 for tearing up their “new macadam pavement” with their heavy circus wagons. “It was claimed by the city that the pavement was constructed to withstand all ordinary loads and traffic, but that the circus people drove over it with a large number of heavily loaded wagons with narrow tires. It is alleged that some of the loads were in excess of twenty tons.”13 The city held the Ringlings’ Big Top tent as collateral until the lawsuit was settled. Finally, an agreement was reached, the Ringlings made a security deposit, and the circus was ready to pack up and leave for Superior, Wisconsin, the site of their next stand. As the Ringlings left the lot, the city’s health inspector said the circus had left the park “covered with unsightly rubbish” and forced them to clean up the show grounds and the street in front before leaving.14

  The Duluth experience had all the markings of a shakedown, a rather common occurrence on the road. Some city officials tried to get as much from the circus as they could. One way the circus handled the problem was to give certain city officials free tickets; this, too, was a problem, as the more free tickets that were handed out, the less room there was in the Big Top for paying customers.

  Things weren’t much better a few days later in Superior, just across a Lake Superior canal from Duluth. A Duluth newspaper reported:

  Ringling Brothers’ circus has been sued in Superior because its heavily loaded wagons cut up the pavement in a number of places. Proceedings against the circus in that city were instituted yesterday when the city served summons on the proprietors to appear in court, July 20, and show cause why they should not repair the pavement or settle for damage done.15

  The Ringlings were pleased to leave the shores of Lake Superior and be on their way to North Dakota, where fancy paved streets were still in the future.

  The Ringling Brothers Circus closed its 1906 season in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, on October 16. The trip to Baraboo and winter quarters was uneventful except for the severe rains that had settled in the South. All of the equipment had to be loaded in the rain. While the circus was traveling between Madison and Baraboo, one of the old elephants died. A Baraboo newspaper reported, “She was an ancient animal said by Pearl Souder, a veritable encyclopedia on elephantology, to have been at least 80 or 90 years old [a considerable exaggeration as elephants seldom live beyond 50 years]. In her old age she had become petulant and testy, like some people.”16

  Some wag started a rumor that several menagerie animals escaped when the train arrived in Baraboo. The Baraboo News squelched the falsehood with these words: “The wild story that went the rounds of the press regarding the escape of ferocious beasts that afterwards infested the wilds of Juneau County, was a bungling piece of invention. There was not an escape nor an attempt at escape.”17

  Ringling Advertising

  A 1901 Ringling ad proclaimed, “The only giraffe known to exist in the entire world. $20,000 was the price he cost. Not a million. Not a million times a million could buy another. He is the last, the only one, the single sole and lonely survivor of a once numerous race.”1 The actual cost of the giraffe was $4,042.65 ($3,462.95 to Carl Hagenbeck, the German animal dealer, plus $579.70 to the United States Express Company for shipping).2

  Blatant hyperbole was but one of many marketing strategies used by the Ringling Brothers, who by 1900 had become masters of advertising. Their success in large measure depended on convincing thousands of people from near and far to see their circus, during good times and bad. Charles Ringling was in charge of advertising, and Alf T. was responsible for press relations.

  Bill posters pasted multiple-sheet posters to the sides of buildings. The building owners were usually compensated with free circus tickets. PRINT COLLECTION, CWM

  Promoting a circus was a year-round effort. After the Ringlings returned to Baraboo each fall they immediately began planning marketing strategy for the coming season. By midwinter there was a flurry of ac
tivity in the advertising department at winter quarters. As soon as the Brothers knew which acts they would feature in the coming season, artists began creating the lithographs that would announce the show in vivid color. (From about 1880 to 1910 posted lithographs were the primary way that circuses advertised.)

  Lithograph advertising paper was measured in sheets; a single sheet was twenty-eight by forty-two inches, and larger posters were measured in terms of number of sheets. The lithographs could be quite detailed, because people riding in horse-drawn wagons or on horseback had time to read the content as they drove by. Red was the main color used in lithographs, expressing excitement and drawing attention. Lithographs included wonderful examples of exaggeration. Everything was bigger, heavier, the one and only, the smallest of the small, or the strangest of the strange. Large numbers of everything were proclaimed, from horses to elephants to the Ringling Brothers themselves, all lined up in a row.

  Railroad circuses like the Ringling Brothers used railcars to distribute lithographs and other advertising material to communities several weeks before the circus arrived. In 1901 the Ringling show had three advance cars, also called advertising cars, and a “Special Brigade” car, whose purpose was dealing with competition. Gus Ringling served as manager of Advertising Car No. 1. Seventeen bill posters plus five lithographers and two programmers were assigned to Car No. 1, for a total of twenty-seven men. Tom Dailey managed Advertising Car No. 2, with Louis Knob as boss bill poster. Fifteen bill posters were assigned to Car No. 2. George W. Goodhart managed Advertising Car No. 3, with Joe H. Brown as boss bill poster and eleven more bill posters. In addition, seven men were assigned to Car No. 3, with duties ranging from being in charge of lithographs and litho boards to handling banners and programs and making paste. All told, Advance Car No. 3 included twenty men. Finally, Special Brigade No. 4 was managed by W. H. Horton, with James E. Finnegan as boss bill poster and ten bill posters. Altogether, seventy-six men worked on the four advertising cars. Interestingly, these men worked as hard or harder than anyone associated with the circus, yet they never saw the Ringling show. By the time the show arrived in a town, they were from one to three weeks down the road, creating excitement and cranking up business.

  The crew of the Special Brigade advertising car had the main purpose of confronting the advertising of competitive shows, making sure that Ringling posters and other advertising had not been defaced or removed. Sometimes broken noses and black eyes resulted when the men of the Special Brigade car challenged the men of a competing circus who had mutilated or covered Ringling advertising. PRINT COLLECTION, CWM

  A 1903 handwritten document states the duties of the Ringlings’ advertising car manager:

  Make contacts for newspaper ads and supply newspaper with cuts and copy. Paste must be made at night. If have enough cans or barrels, can make two or 3 days supply paste at once. [Bill posters] should telephone the livery man the hour they will arrive and when to have wagons ready to start for the country. Get as many hours in the country as possible. Manager must be sure to order [advance] car out early in morning by notifying station agent so in case of misunderstanding it can be adjusted and not lose a day.3

  The railroad advance car became such an intrinsic part of the business that even after railroad circuses disappeared in the 1950s and the circus had become motorized, the trucks used by the advance were still called “advance cars.”4

  Each advance car was brightly painted silver or red, with large print proclaiming “Ringling Brothers, World’s Greatest Shows.” Advance cars were usually converted railroad baggage cars or passenger cars. Each one contained a small office for the manager, bunks for the crew, a boiler to cook paste, storage for wheat flour used in making paste, and piles of lithographs, banners, posters, and other advertising paraphernalia. The advertising cars were generally attached to the end of a regular passenger train. When the car arrived at the designated town, the train’s engineer placed it on a side track to be hooked up again the following day for its trip to the next town.

  Weeks before the arrival of the first advertising car, an advance man visited the town and made basic arrangements: securing a license for the show grounds and the parade, contracting for billboards, and ordering hay, straw, oats, wood shavings, coal, food for the cook tent, and meat for the lions and tigers (often from slaughtered broken-down horses). He also made sure of a ready source of water.

  Imagine the effect on a small, rural, “nothing much happens here” community when it was invaded by circus bill posters. Their very presence in the community was itself an important kind of advertising. Advertising Car No. 1 usually arrived in a town three weeks before the circus’s arrival. The bill posters fired up the boiler and soon had a cauldron of paste cooking, ready for other bill posters who had already rented teams at the local livery stable and set out on their routes in search of barns, fences, silos—anything on which they could paste a lithograph advertising the circus dates. Generally, there were country bill posters, some of whom ranged as far as forty miles on either side of the show town, and town bill posters, who pasted litho sheets on previously contracted billboards and the sides of town barns, livery stables, and stores. They placed posters in general store windows and barbershops, in hardware stores and blacksmith shops, in grist mills and harness shops. In every instance they asked for permission and usually exchanged free circus tickets for the privilege of pasting up a sign.

  Bill posters had one of the most challenging jobs in the circus—and since they traveled several weeks ahead of the circus itself, they never got to see the show. PRINT COLLECTION, CWM

  They carried contracts for the building owner to sign:

  I hereby agree to allow Ringling Bros. or their agents exclusive privilege to paste their bills on my [livery, store side, etc.] from this date until [the date of the circus], inclusive, the bills not to be covered up or defaced, and no other bills to be posted on said premises until after the date named above. In consideration of said privilege I have received an order for the admission of the number of persons as per coupon detached. … Signed (agent).5

  The bill poster made a record of the agreement, how many tickets he gave out, and where the lithographs were placed. Later, a bill-posting manager, usually on horseback, did a spot check to make sure that bill posters had pasted signs where they said they had. If a poster had been torn down or, worse, covered over by one for a competing circus, the person who received the free tickets would be denied admission to the show.

  There was great competition among circuses for advertising space; here signs for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Pawnee Bill’s Far East overlap those for the Ringling Brothers on a building in Manchester, New Hampshire, 1911. PRINT COLLECTION, CWM

  Just as circuses competed for audiences during the course of the season, bill posters competed for ad space. During the 1906 season the Ringlings often found themselves competing against The Carl Hagenbeck Greater Shows. The Janesville, Wisconsin, newspaper reported:

  According to former plans the Hagenbeck advertising car Number one arrived here today [June 1, 1906] … seventeen men were at work billing the city and surrounding country. … Though the Ringling show does not come until about fifteen days after the Hagenbeck circus it was necessary for the former’s advance men to move quickly in order to secure facilities for a proper advertising campaign. Four [Ringling] billers … all of Chicago, arrived here at an early hour this morning. They called the same liveryman who was furnishing carriages to their rivals. They were out of bed at five o’clock and contracted for four rigs. These started out at six o’clock, just an hour before the Hagenbeck men began work. Very likely the Ringling agents secured the best and largest amount of billing space. This was bought at a high figure, while in some places it was bid for in competition. The Ringling men will continue their country work tomorrow and spend Sunday and Monday in the city. There is no doubt but that every available wall and fence will be hidden behind gaily colored bills and cloth and the decorations will be mo
re profuse than when the Ringlings and Buffalo Bill carried on a similar fight several seasons ago.6

  In the early 1900s circuses began tacking huge cloth banners on the sides of buildings, usually high up. After the show the banners were removed and reused. The men who put up the banners, called “bannermen,” wore coats and ties and were the highest paid of the bill posters.7

  At day’s end the bill-posting crew climbed back on Advertising Car No. 1, a passenger train backed up and coupled up with the advertising car, and the crew was off to the next town to do it all over again. This schedule went on six days a week, replicating the circus’s schedule. (In those cases where the circus played in a town for more than one day, the advance car stayed for the same number of days the circus played in that town).

  A week later Car No. 2 arrived. Workers checked to see if previously placed posters, billboards, and signs were still in good shape. They replaced any posters that were torn down, damaged by weather, or covered up, hung posters in new spots, and erected banners across streets.

  One week before the circus arrived, Car No. 3 rolled into town. Bill posters again repaired damaged signs, continued to look for new sites, made sure businesses were showing their posters as agreed, and checked to see if the competition was making mischief. If competition in a given area was especially stiff, Car No. 4, the Special Brigade, was called into action:

  Every big show carries in advance what is known as an “opposition brigade” with no other duties save to fight the like brigades of other shows. As fast as one circus puts up a piece of billing, the “opposition” attempts to cover it. The result is flying paste brushes and buckets, faster flying fists, broken noses, black eyes, police, jail, bail—and the same thing over again until one side tires and quits, or circus day arrives to end the war of the opposition crews.8