Probably his best-known picture from the Hagenbeck-Wallace days was this Harry Atwell shot, apparently made at a fair date. The lion has been identified as "Nero" one of his star performers and the boss of the lion contingent. It was Nero who bit Beatty at an early preseason practice in 1932 and put him in the hospital for a number of weeks with what the press department called "Jungle Fever." The lion died under mysterious circumstances on the train back from New York to join Hagenbeck-Wallace at the Chicago Coliseum the following spring. |
Sunday, November 12, 2006
Clyde Beatty #3
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2 comments:
I think the one thing that makes this all that more impressive is that all these cats were jungle born and adults or young adults when captured in the wild. At first there was no such thing as bottle fed babies. They arrived and broke them into the act and went on the road, now! I had all captive born animals and none were mother raised and a couple gave me pure fits. I can't even begin to imagine the stress these trainers were under breaking the acts from back then.
Bob
They were Old School masters. Those surviving into my time, Beatty, Bert Nelson, and Mabel Stark, told me of training new jungle-bred cats in the given spanse of four months per season in those Winterquarters barns. It almost killed me to hear what I'd missed. From the way they talked, it wasn't stress. One by one, they fully sensed they were extraordinary people doing work only select persons could do, and they couldn't get enough of it.
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