Monday, June 04, 2007

William Woodcock Sr.'s letters #3


SAVE2924, originally uploaded by bucklesw1.

From Bill Woodcock (1941) to Col. Sturtervant

"In 1926 I was assistant to "Highpockets" on the Buchanan Show. We had thirteen elephants, three (Tommy, Ding and Boo) leased from Hall. When we closed we returned to Lancaster and were never with Buchanan again.
When we got home we found five new bulls, little ones, recently purchased from Rhue. Two of these "Sadie" and "Elsie" were bought by Criley Orton who engaged me for the following season.
I helped Al Langdon break elephants all winter and in the Spring took the two little bulls to the Orton Show.
Highpockets meanwhile took "Major", "Tommy", "Ding" and "Boo" to the ill fated Cook & Cole Circus."

Posted by Buckles at 6/04/2007 06:19:00 AM

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hope that new historians will discover what most of us old-timers have enjoyed for decades--the "Letters of Col. Woodcock" series as published in BANDWAGON. The Colonel gives wit, insight, and historical fact that only could be chronicled by a man on the lot at the time.

04 June, 2007 14:52
Anonymous said...

Richard Reynolds says - -

The late Joe Rettinger of Phoenix,AZ went to his grave trying to learn where and when Fred Buchanan died. He could never find the answer. Joe felt he wanted to drop off the radar and succeeded in doing so.

I do not know how imaginative Joe was with his research.

05 June, 2007 13:38
Dick Flint said...

Buchanan did not disappear after the infamous red-lighting episode on the 1930 Robbins show--as Joe Rettinger once implied to me--but was variously partnered with Jimmy Heron and Walter L. Main throughout the 1930s. The late Roger Boyd, Sr., recalled seeing Buchanan at this time in the vicinity of While Plains, NY, and thought he might have lived near there. It is believed that author Tom Duncan spoke with Buchanan in preparation for writing his classic 1947 circus novel, Gus the Great. Both men were from Iowa though Duncan only lived in the east after transferring to Harvard from which he graduated in 1929. He then worked as a reporter for the Des Moines Tribune in 1929-30 and published Ring Horse in 1940 by which time he had conceived the idea of his later circus novel. Duncan might have been a good source as to the showmen's whereabouts but, unfortunately, died in 1987. Buchanan's death date, however, remains elusive. Logic suggests that if he died while still active in show business, his obituary might have appeared in Billboard (which it did not), but if he had a longer life and outlived his contemporaries, he might have been forgotten by the Bible of show business.
Dick Flint
Baltimore

06 June, 2007 15:25
DanKoehl said...

Tried to figure out the names of the three other elephants, that came with "Sadie" and "Elsie" from Ruhe 1926, and the only one I would guess, is Ruth, presently at Little Rock Zoological Gardens?

30 October, 2009 15:01

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