Sunday, October 15, 2006

Bertram W. Mills' Circus 1926-27 #11


Chaffer's Midgets, except when performing in the circus, will be found in Tiny Town.

CHAFFER'S MIDGETS are mostly from the Austrian Tyrol. They are all bright up-to-date people. Stature is the only thing wherein they differ from the rest of us. One of the ladies speaks seven languages. They have traveled from Riga, Latvia.

Posted by Buckles at 10/15/2006 06:12:00 AM

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Schaeffer was the correct spelling of the Austrian impresario that at the time dealt with those "lilliputians", that was and are mostly from Latvia. Still today, Russian circuses have many of them doing comlpete shows. Schaeffer displayed in fairs and museum a complete "Tyrolean Village", with small houses and everything. Different existing postcards shows it. At Olympia, the village was built in the indoor midway between Mill's "Fun Fair" close to the menagerie (Olympia used to have a sideshow too, mostly of the freaks coming from Ringling, as for exemle the Ubangis). One day, an elephant incidentally crashed one of the little houses. Press reported "Elephant destroy the home of little peoples, now homeless". Many troupes like Scheffer's was booked in Usa in 1938 by MGM for the shoothing of Wizard of Oz, and many stayed in Hollywood in the movies.

16 October, 2006 19:02

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