by Jerry Apps
The Special Brigade car had no schedule. It went wherever it was needed and was usually alerted by telegraph reports from the managers of Cars 1, 2, and 3 as they did their work.
By the 1910s the advance man’s job had become increasingly difficult. He negotiated license fees with city officials and was often in charge of “adjusting” any small claims made against the circus. The advance man often provided tickets to local police, elected officials, and other public figures as a way to try to keep license fees low and avoid unnecessary trouble when the circus arrived. Examples of license fees and ticket provisions in 1911 were one hundred dollars plus fifty reserve and twenty general admission tickets in Holyoke, Massachusetts; fifty dollars plus forty-five reserve and twenty-five general admission tickets in Poughkeepsie, New York; two hundred dollars plus twenty-five reserve and twenty-five general admission tickets in Spokane, Washington.
Sometimes local officials tried to shake down the Ringling advance man. When the show played in Bloomington, Illinois, in 1911, the local sheriff tried to collect an additional fifty-dollar county license fee beyond the usual fifty-dollar city tax. The advance man refused to pay the additional amount, telling the sheriff, “There is no law covering a county license fee.” The Ringling journal does not say whether the advance man slipped a few reserved seat tickets into the sheriff’s hand to avoid any trouble.9
As any good advertising person knew, people needed to see or hear about something at least twice, if not four or five times, before they acted on it. For the circus, local newspapers were the next front in the advertising war. In 1901 the Ringlings had five press agents, led by Alf T. Ringling. A couple weeks before the circus arrived in a town, a press agent visited the local newspaper, talked with the editor, took him over to the local saloon for a drink, bought him a good meal, handed him a clutch of canned news reports that lauded the virtues of the Ringling Brothers Circus, and even provided a ready-made display ad. The press agent gave the editor some free passes to the circus and agreed to meet him at the Big Top door and sit with him during the performance. From all this effort, the press agent expected to see an advance story in the paper and a positive review after the show pulled out of town.
Some editors were accused of running inflated stories about circuses and began preceding the press agents’ stories with a disclaimer. A Newark, Ohio, editor wrote, “These notices are furnished this paper by press agents of the respective companies, and the Editor is no wise responsible for the statements made herein.”10
With their immense popularity, the Ringlings received many requests for joint advertising efforts. For example, the advertising manager of a large clothing store in Allentown, Pennsylvania, wrote to the Ringlings:
We enclose a copy of a special ad we propose to insert in over 32 newspapers covering a radius of 25 to 30 miles surrounding this city and which will reach a reading population of over 250,000. We should be pleased to promptly receive your best terms in furnishing us with a thousand or more tickets for your exhibition while in this city. … We think we should have better terms than fifty cents a ticket.11
A representative of the Ringling Brothers wrote in reply, “Must advise that we cannot furnish tickets in the manner you desire in any number whatever. Every ticket issued is licensed admission for the purchaser only and we must decline to provide the tickets requested.12
Competition no doubt fueled the rampant exaggeration in circus advertising—every circus wanted to sound as good as or better than its competition. Circus advertising writers also became expert with alliteration.
Real and royal races for reward, huge heroic hippodromes, … superb struggles for success and supremacy between the short and the stout, the tall and the tiny, the fat and the frail, the mammoth and the midget. … [E]lephants in ponderous, pachydermic progress, camels in cross and comical cantering, horses in hurricane hustling for home, donkeys in deliberate, dragging, drone pace …13
A poster advertising the Ringlings’ Saxon Trio, “The Greatest German Giants of Strength,” provides just one example of alliteration in circus ad copy. PRINT COLLECTION, CWM
Circus owners—and the Ringlings in particular—took advertising very seriously. They invested enormous amounts of time and money in getting the word out, and their efforts clearly paid off, with thousands of people enjoying circus day in their towns.
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NOTES
1. Ringling Bros. Circus ad in Columbus (Ohio) Press-Post, June 30, 1901.
2. Hagenbeck to Ringling Brothers, April 13, 1901; Hagenbeck to Ringling Brothers, June 15, 1901; invoice, United States Express Company, April 27, 1901, Fred Pfening III, private collection, Columbus, Ohio.
3. Ringling Bros. Business Records, Advertising, May 4, 1903, CWM.
4. Richard J. Reynolds III, correspondence with the author, December 6, 2002.
5. Outside billing forms, Ringling Brothers, Pfening collection.
6. Janesville (Wisconsin) Daily, June 1, 1906.
7. Reynolds, correspondence with the author, December 6, 2002.
8. Courtney Ryley Cooper, Under the Big Top (Boston: Little, Brown, 1923), p. 8.
9. Ringling Brothers, Standard Daily Journal, 1911, Pfening collection.
10. Newark (Ohio) American Tribune, April 24, 1904.
11. Koch Brothers Clothiers and Haberdashers advertising director to Ringling Brothers, May 17, 1910, Pfening collection.
12. Ringling Brothers to Koch Brothers, May 20, 1910, Pfening collection.
13. W. C. Thompson, On the Road with a Circus (Self-published, 1903), p. 236.
The Baraboo press continued to applaud and proclaim the virtues of the city’s most widely known business.
All four sections of the Ringling Brothers’ show are in Baraboo and the animals are safely housed for the winter. The arrival and unloading was devoid of incident and the denizens of the cages took to their permanent quarters as naturally as they would to their native jungle, if that luxury was again theirs.
This morning was all hustle and hurry to get the paraphernalia out of the wagons and into the store rooms; the dining hall was garnished, the tables set and life again reigns in Baraboo’s greatest suburb, Ringlingville.
Out of an unbroken series of success, the season of 1906 stands as one of the most agreeable and prosperous. … The Baraboo product is of so high grade that the whole world strives to pay its tribute and admission fee.18
The Ringling Bros. World’s Greatest Shows had one of its biggest seasons ever. Receipts for the 1906 season totaled about $1.3 million ($25 million in 2002 dollars).19 Meanwhile, the Forepaugh-Sells show, which closed November 17 in Water Valley, Mississippi, had also had a profitable season, although the exact receipts are not known. For the two shows, the Ringlings cleared about $800,000 in profits.
At the end of 1906, another competitor, the Hagenbeck Circus, was coming up for sale. In December, the Ringlings struck a deal with the Hagenbeck people. But just before the deal was closed, the Ringlings discovered that ownership of the Hagenbeck name was in question, and the Brothers quickly called off the deal. In 1907 the Great Wallace Circus purchased Hagenbeck, and the circus became known as Hagenbeck-Wallace.
The question of whether the Ringlings would one day leave Baraboo was always present. The Brothers appeared well settled in Baraboo, with new homes, new buildings in winter quarters, and generally good feelings from the city (at least from the press’s perspective). Nevertheless, a November 1906 news article reported that the Brothers had purchased fifty acres with the intention of buying forty more on the east shore of Lake Mendota, near Madison, for new winter quarters. They were purported to have paid six hundred dollars an acre for the property.20 The article and others like it continually raised the question of the future of the Brothers and their connection to Baraboo. The five Brothers were quite tight-lipped about their plans and activities, and thus the press was left to speculate about what the Ringlings might do.
The year 1907 began on a sad note for the Ringlings
. Their mother, Salome Juliar Ringling, died on January 27 at the age of seventy-four.
The Brothers had a fairly uneventful 1907 season. The Ringling circus opened in Chicago on April 4, 1907, and closed at Fulton, Kentucky, on November 15. The Forepaugh-Sells show opened in Columbus, Ohio, April 20 and closed November 16 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The bigger—much bigger—event of 1907 was the Ringlings’ chance to make their biggest expansion ever.
Economic times had been good since the 1893–1898 depression. But the economy began to falter in late 1906 and took a nosedive in 1907. At first economists thought the country’s banking problems would stay on the East Coast, but the trouble soon spread to the rest of the country. As one reporter noted:
[T]here’s nothing in the condition of general business to account for a panic, and so far, it is apparently confined to financial circles entirely. … Some people think that the gang down in Wall Street rocked the boat until they got scared themselves. … When things began to look squally in New York, Chicago and Milwaukee banks and all other centers that had balances in New York, began to pull them down.21
There was a run on the bank in Baraboo in the fall of 1907. Al Paschen, whose grandfather ran a grocery store across the street from the Bank of Baraboo, remembers his grandfather describing people lined up to draw money out of the bank. Charles Ringling was said to be in line with the others, carrying a large satchel. People thought he intended to stuff the satchel with all the money he hoped to draw out of the bank. But Charles Ringlings’ satchel was already filled with money—which he deposited. As the story goes, this single action prevented an even more major run on the Baraboo bank.22
It was in the midst of these gloomy economic conditions that the Barnum & Bailey Circus came up for sale. The Greatest Show on Earth had been struggling since James Bailey’s death in 1906. Otto Ringling, who by now had become one of the greatest businessmen in circus history, and John Ringling were in favor of purchasing the show. The other Brothers were less enthusiastic about borrowing money to buy what many still considered the number-one circus in the world. The Brothers argued long and hard before coming to an agreement; the deal became official on October 22, 1907.23
Soon after purchasing Barnum & Bailey, the Brothers decided to take the Forepaugh-Sells show off the road for the 1908 season so they could concentrate on managing two big shows. They would put Forepaugh-Sells back on the road for the 1910 and 1911 seasons before permanently closing the show at the end of 1911.
Once the Brothers agreed to buy Barnum & Bailey, Otto went looking for a loan. The amount the Ringlings needed surely exceeded the lending power of the Bank of Baraboo. After finding no success with St. Louis bankers, he finally convinced a New York bank to lend the Brothers $360,000. Otto, on a first-name basis with several bankers, agreed to accept $355,000 on account, with $5,000 to come later. Otto later explained the difficulty in obtaining a loan in 1907:
I do not know whether you have realized the true panicky condition that prevails here at this time. … [I]t will be a marvel if the country gets through without a crash. The depositors are like wild beasts and thousands who have nothing in a bank help the thing along. … [T]he bankers of all the big money centers like St. Louis were watching the private wires for news from New York and were no doubt badly scared. A demand for such a sum ($360,000) at such a time when they needed every penny [appeared nearly impossible].24
A Baraboo newspaper carried a short article, buried on an interior page, announcing the purchase:
Barnum sells to Ringlings. New York, October 23. The announcement was made at the Barnum and Bailey offices yesterday that it was Ringling Brothers of Baraboo, Wisconsin who had secured possession of the “Greatest Show on Earth,” that henceforth it would be run in connection with other arenic enterprises. The sale was made in London yesterday. The transfer places Ringling Bros. at the head of the circus business in America and leaves them practically without a real rival in the world.25
Why the Baraboo paper did not run a headline story on the purchase of Barnum & Bailey remains a mystery. It was clearly a huge story in the entertainment world—the biggest story of the year, if not the decade. Was this an indication that the city of Baraboo was no longer as infatuated with its famous sons as it had once been? Had the city’s perception of the Ringling Brothers shifted from “our boys” to “rich visitors” who had a business down on Water Street?
Billboard magazine carried a long article revealing that the Ringlings paid only $410,000 for the Barnum & Bailey show. The purchase included “all livestock, both horses and wild animals, and all real estate and buildings in this country and in England, owned by the company for show purposes.”26 The Ringlings apparently paid an unrevealed additional amount for the use of the Barnum & Bailey name. The sale also included the Barnum & Bailey holdings, the interest an English stock company held in Barnum & Bailey, and the physical equipment of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.27
A reporter for The Show World, a national entertainment magazine, summarized the impact of the Barnum & Bailey purchase on the circus world:
The extent to which the Ringling Brothers now dominate the circus world may be realized by a review of their various holdings. First, there is the circus enterprise which bears their name, with long trains, elaborate equipment, 658 horses, an extensive zoological collection and winter quarters in Baraboo, Wisconsin with great brick stables, training barns, hotel and animal houses; the Adam Forepaugh and Sells Brothers circus with up-to-date equipment and extensive quarters; the Barnum & Bailey circus with main offices in New York, the leasehold for terms of years of the Madison Square Garden, vast winter quarters at Bridgeport, Connecticut, the trains, equipment and winter quarters at Stock-on-Trent, England, and lastly the owners of the physical equipment of the Buffalo Bill’s Wild West which they have leased to Col. W. F. Cody.28
Al Ringling’s Home
The Isenberg brothers completed Al Ringling’s Baraboo house in 1906. It was—and likely still is—the most palatial home in Baraboo. PHOTO BY STEVE APPS
In December 1906 carpenters completed Al and Lou Ringling’s new home in Baraboo. It was the largest and most imposing home in the city at the time, reflecting both the Ringlings’ taste and their exposure to grand homes during their travels. Contractors Carl and George Isenberg managed the construction.
The house built of Superior brown stone from Port Wing, Wisconsin, was seventy-one by eighty-one feet and had a tower on the northeast corner. A reporter for the Baraboo News described the house:
The main entrance is upon Broadway and is at once imposing and beautiful. The vestibule is in English style with paneled wainscot on marble base with a tiled floor. The English effect is continued in the great hall with massive oak staircase and oaken pillars. On the walls the coloring is in dull yellow tones relieved by a floral frieze in shadowy blues. At the left of the entrance or at the southeast corner is the reception room. In design the decorations follow the French style the time of Louis XIV. The fireplace is of Mexican marble and the wood is finished in white enamel, with trimming of mahogany. The walls and ceiling are beautifully decorated; the French styling is carried out in the panels. … The rugs and furnishings for this room are all of French design and manufacture and harmonize perfectly with the mural decorations. The library is white oak. There is a beamed ceiling, a fireplace and scenic effects, all in keeping with the general design. The walls present an unbroken panorama of views in old Dutch days.
The stairs ascend at right angles to the hall and the conservatory is found slightly raised above the stair landing. Convenient seats are placed on the landing, the whole being in the design of an English staircase paneled in stained white oak.
On the second floor is found a red room at the northwest corner, a green room at the southwest, a yellow room at the northeast, and a green at the southeast. The bathrooms to all of the bedrooms are provided with sliding doors and the walls are of white enamel. … There is also a bathroom for the help. …
Th
e floors throughout are of quarter sawed white oak, varnished. The walls bear three coats of adamant, a covering of canvas and made beautiful with the artist’s brush. … In the attic there is an immense room and cozy quarters under the tower. In the basement is found a ballroom 30 by 50 feet, laundry, steam plant with Johnson regulator and other conveniences.1
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NOTES
1. Baraboo (Wisconsin) News, December 12, 1906.
Immediately, Otto Ringling climbed on a train for Barnum & Bailey winter quarters in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to examine the Brothers’ new holdings. In an October 26 letter to his brothers in Baraboo, he described the equipment and made many recommendations about how they should combine their three shows’ inventories. He suggested selling some of the horses. “If we can dispose of the horses at good prices … it will save us lots of money. It will not be necessary to buy much of anything except canvas for Ringling Bros. and B & B,” Otto wrote.29 He also recommended selling several elephants.
Elephants are the most expensive luxury we have. I would sell some. If Bronx Park or other parks want the African elephants, I would let them have them at a good price of course.30 They will sell best to parks. In dividing them I would sell all we do not need as they are expensive to feed.
After examining the railcars, Otto also concluded that some of the forty-thousand-pound-capacity cars were dangerous.