Ringlingville USA

With their 1905 purchase of half of the Forepaugh-Sells show, the Ringlings again proved they were determined to keep expanding their circus. Perhaps this drive to keep growing resulted from a childhood spent in poverty. Perhaps it grew out of their competitive nature. Or maybe the Brothers simply felt as businessmen that there was no such thing as standing still: to succeed, they had to grow.

The Ringlings had once again signed a noncompete agreement with Barnum & Bailey for the 1906 season, giving Barnum & Bailey exclusive rights to show in Canada “and all of the southern states and territory lying east of the Mississippi River and South of the Ohio River, also all of the Eastern and New England States lying east of the Eastern Ohio State line except Pennsylvania.”² The Ringlings would take their namesake show to Pennsylvania, the Midwest, and the South; the Forepaugh-Sells show would play the Midwest and the West.

The Ringling Brothers’ main show opened April 5 in Chicago. Their ads claimed the show now had 650 horses, 1,280 people, 85 railroad cars, and daily expenses of $7,400.³ The show took in $98,634.49 in gross receipts for twenty days in Chicago, an average of $4,933 each day. For the entire season (196 days), average daily gross receipts for the Ringlings’ namesake show were $6,423.47.⁴

In truth, their average daily expenses could not have been anywhere near $7,400. If their expenses were that high, they would have lost money every day they were on the road. Just the opposite was true: they made money, and lots of it.

As usual, the Ringlings’ namesake show was well received nearly everywhere it played. In August in Appleton, Wisconsin, a reporter wrote: “It was estimated that 20,000 people witnessed the show this morning and fully 12,000 people are witnessing the performance this afternoon, while at least 8,000 will see it to tonight, and everyone will say it is truly, ‘the greatest show on earth.’ ”⁶

Some merchants tried to tie their reputations to the Ringlings’ success. A feed dealer in Newark, Ohio, ran this ad in the local paper:

But not all was grand and glorious. Tragedy struck the circus while playing in Aurora, Illinois, on June 29. Frank Parson, manager of the candy and lemonade concession, wrote, “Bad storm struck us at 3 p.m., just as the elephant act was on. [The elephants] ran and people stampeded. Two people killed and several hurt. One candy butcher struck in the back by a pole. Tents did not go down but tore bad.”⁸

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

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 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:

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

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 activity 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 more 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

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.

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 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.

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:

A Baraboo newspaper carried a short article, buried on an interior page, announcing the purchase:

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 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. …

The 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

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.

After examining the railcars, Otto also concluded that some of the forty-thousand-pound-capacity cars were dangerous.

Otto was already thinking about one day putting Forepaugh-Sells back on the road.

From Otto’s lengthy letter of October 26, we learn not only about the rather sorry state of the Barnum & Bailey equipment, we also learn a great deal about Otto Ringling’s gift for dealing with the minutest detail while seeing the bigger picture.

The Brothers suffered another loss in late 1907. August Albert “Gus” Ringling died of Bright’s disease on December 18 in a sanitarium in New Orleans. He was only fifty-three years old. At the time of his death, he was manager of the advertising department of the Forepaugh-Sells show, although he still was not a Ringling partner. He left behind his wife, Annie, and three daughters, Mattie, Alice, and Lorene. The Baraboo Republic reported:

Most businesses hunker down during financial panics, avoiding expansion or anything new or unusual. In 1907 the Ringling Brothers, with Otto and John taking the lead, once again proved their business skill and foresight when they bought the great Barnum & Bailey Circus. At less than a half-million dollars, the price was right, but to outsiders the purchase must have looked foolish and ill-advised, especially considering that the Brothers had to obtain a sizable loan at a time when banks were under financial pressure and the country was in a near economic crisis. But men like Otto Ringling and his brothers saw beyond the immediate. The Ringlings realized that this purchase was one more way for their enterprise to keep growing.

The Ringlings’ fabulous parade dazzled people in rural areas and small towns, as seen in this photo taken in Algona, Iowa. No matter the size of the community, the parade was a powerful advertising tool for a circus. PRINT COLLECTION, CWM

Like the Pied Piper, the circus parade got people’s attention—mesmerizing, entertaining, thrilling, astounding, and above all, attracting them to the circus grounds, where they would plunk down their quarters and fifty-cent pieces for a ticket to the Big Top. The parade was one of the circus’s most powerful forms of advertising.

In 1882, when the Brothers put on their first Ringling Bros. Classic and Comic Concert Company shows, they marched down Main Street of the towns where they were scheduled to play, tooting their horns and pounding on a big drum. The parade of brothers and a few other would-be performers took five minutes or less to pass.

By the turn of the century, the Ringling Brothers’ parade lasted an hour or longer. An ad for the 1900 Ringling circus in a Columbus, Ohio, paper proclaimed:“Big new free street parade in 30 sections, every morning at 10:00. 1,000 people. 500 horses. 100 cages of wild animals. 25 elephants. 20 camels.”1 A writer for the same paper described the parade this way:

Big cities turned out thousands of people to watch a circus parade, as seen in this photo taken in Detroit. When automobiles and streetcars began clogging the way, mounting the circus parade in larger cities became very difficult. PRINT COLLECTION, CWM

The mounted band, the silver chimes, the clowned band; the coucheecouchee music and last but not least, the [clown] straw ride party at the end of the parade, caught the crowd.

There were numerous open cages of snakes, leopards, polar bears, hyenas, black bears and other “creepin” and “crawlin” things that were greatly admired by the spectators who lined the street wherever the toot of the calliope could be heard.

The parade started from the show grounds on St. Clair Avenue promptly on time. First came the route manager and Detective Sergeant Kelly; then a ten-horse chariot with a band. The band was different from other circus bands inasmuch as it played regular marches instead of the rumptar-rarum of the grand entrée. The horses were all white or gray, well fed and well groomed. The cages were all clean and neat and the parade did not seem to be in a hurry to get through. There were equestriennes in neat gowns; the mounted band led by outriders with the flags of America and England; Chasseurs and—well about everything new or novel in the circus line.

The hippopotamus had a mouth on him like the entrance to a mammoth cave; and in one of the cages, a black leopard “rubbered” out to see what kind of town Columbus was anyhow.

At the tail end of the parade came the rubes on their straw wagon. At each stop the [clowns] amused the throngs with acrobatic performances that were at once clever and comical. The camels, of which there was a big caravan, were all nice appearing beasts and did not look as if they had to patronize some dandruff cure.

One of the most interesting features of the parade was the elephants’ act. Each beast grasped the tail of the animal in front of him with his trunk and held on like grim death. Well ahead of the elephants a man on horse back rode by yelling “friends, secure your horses tightly the elephants are about to pass by.”2

Both the sights and the sounds of the circus parade were something to behold, as C. P. “Chappie” Fox, longtime director of Circus World Museum, described:

The deep throated knock of the heavy wheels caused by the slight lateral motion of the wheel when it hit the axle [hub]; the soft shuffling sound as dozens of elephants slid their sandpaper-like feet on the pavement; the clopping of 40 shod hooves as a ten-horse hitch passed by; the rattle of chains on the eveners; the sudden roar of a lion.³ Thousands of people turned out for circus parades. Many had come early to watch the crew unload the trains and set up the tents and now could get a glimpse of what to expect in the show. Circuses prided themselves in having colorful circus parade wagons. The decorations often included gold leaf, intricate hand-carved designs, mirrors, and pictures. Many wagons had beautifully painted sunburst wheels with painted wooden panels between the spokes. For many people the quality of the circus parade and its wagons was a powerful measure of the quality of the circus show itself.

NOTES

1. Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, June 4, 1900.

2. Ibid.

3. Charles Philip Fox, A Ticket to the Circus (Seattle, WA: Superior, 1959), p. 79.

Becoming Even Larger: 1906–1907