Monday, October 09, 2006

Paul Miller Shopping Center Show 1959 #2


Cal Lipes' pit show, very well painted. I am especially impressed with "Big Ben" about to swaller a cow. You don't see that every day.

Posted by Buckles at 10/09/2006 07:11:00 AM

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sometimes I get lumps bigger then a cow in my throat when I look and read this blog. Thanks everyone for being the wonderful circus people that you are. Just like the circus, they don't make um like you any more.

09 October, 2006 09:08
Anonymous said...

I took a Giant Snakes show around to strip shopping centers one winter. I was still in school and malls were starting to make older shopping centers look tawdry, so it was easy to book weekends at places where the anchor stores didn't have much else to lure people in. I built the show on a 10 X 6 frame in my parking space at the trailer park I was living in off Alachua Rd in Gainesville, and my neighbos we're real happy when I painted it to read "Giant Anaconda." (This is a place where the gators in the pond in the trailer park regularly went after small dogs.) As it happened, when I went looking for a big anaconda to put in the trailer, I could find anything larger than about six feet long, so I used a burmese python instead. There was no time for a different banner, but I don't remember anybody ever noticing the difference, a big snake was a big snake.

09 October, 2006 12:38
Buckles said...

With Kelly-Miller years ago, they had a one-legged guy named Prof. Middleton who had a snake show. He was from the Deep South and over the mike in a mono-tone drawl would repeat over and over "Long enough and strong enough to crush a house".
One day in the cook house I asked, "Isn't that a little far fetched, a snake crushing a house?" and he yelled back "A house!, A house! Hell man can't you speak English? A thing you put a saddle on and ride!".
Once a customer complained to him and he jumped down from the ticket box, took a swing at him with his crutch but missed and on his way to the ground yelled "He struck a one-legged man!!!" The poor guy would have been punched out had he could have been been caught.
Til this day if I stumble and fall I yell "He struck a one-legged man!" but but my family members just ignore me.

09 October, 2006 13:16
Anonymous said...

The front of the snake show on Carson & Barnes in 1999 had the line " over a thousand pounds of snakes". A towner walking past one day, said, "sounds like a law firm".

09 October, 2006 17:02
24-HOUR-MAN said...

Somewhere in the "Wilson Archives" I have duplicate snapshots of a snake being held by 21 or 22 men. One has written on the back, "this is the snake we're going to have on the show next year", on the other is, "this snake died yesterday"!

09 October, 2006 17:14
B.E.Trumble said...

Those notations are not mutually exclusive. My dad used to tell a story about a giant alligator on the carnival that died midway through July and continued to "work' through October floating in a tank filled with grain alcohol

09 October, 2006 17:44
Buckles said...

Floyd King once said that for his two car show in 1921 he puchased an elephant from Mugivan and Bowers but shortly after arrival, she fell ill and died on the lot.
He added that he side walled the carcass and made several hundred dollars exhibiting a dead elephant.

09 October, 2006 18:01
Anonymous said...

Hey everyone. You can now visit some elephants at PAWS. For $200.00 you can spend the day with the elephants. How many childred do you think we can afford to take? Zoos are for kids to learn about animals aren't they? OH Children are not allowed at PAWS are they? buckleys right behind Pat. Observation Decks I think she is going to call hers. So much for retirement of these elephants. Much money still to be made off them.

09 October, 2006 20:49
Anonymous said...

My father told me that as a young guy he had the big snake show on Mighty Haag playing in the hills of West Virginia nand a little Mammy Yokum type with a corn cob pip looked at the banner of a scantilly clad broad with a snake wrapped around her. From the ticket box he said,'come on in Granny and see that big snake inside'. She replied,'Hell I just killedone that big commin over the mountain this mornin.'

09 October, 2006 21:10

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