Friday, October 19, 2007

From Bob Cline #2


Ammo cage, originally uploaded by bucklesw1.

Ammo cage

Posted by Buckles at 10/19/2007 06:06:00 AM

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

What are ammo cages and what were they used for??cc

19 October, 2007 12:44
Anonymous said...

These wagons were WW II Army surplus wagons that were constructed to transport ammunition. They were purchased by Ringling Bros and converted into animal cages. This wagon was at Circus World in Florida.

19 October, 2007 13:40
Anonymous said...

Probably the ugliest era of the great American Circus, was when they stared to utilize ammo wagen's. Just my opinion. Wade Burck

19 October, 2007 13:41
Anonymous said...

Was this the actual color of this cage wagon? Thanks for any information anyone can provide!
Neil Cockerline

19 October, 2007 14:39
Anonymous said...

Neil,
This was the color that was used for the ammo cages in 1953 & 1954. From 1949 to 1952 they were painted Ringling Red.
In 1955 they were painted cookhouse green and remained that color for as long as Ringling used them in the menegirie.
They continued using 9 of the ammo cages in Madison Sq. Garden well into the 60's.
Dom Yodice

19 October, 2007 16:01
Bob Cline said...

I've emailed back and forth with Dom Yodice a couple times today. The light blue was from the Circus World in Florida days. On the Ringling show they were famed for the sides opening up and corner panels put in place to make a wall around the cage opening. These walls were then all painted jungle green if you will, with the Palmtree / Jungle mottifs. They really looked nice all side by side but as Wade pointed out, they weren't much to talk about by themselves. Buckles has posted a couple photos before of these or I can send you a couple black & white photos.

The ammo wagons were military surplus and apparently have not been found in a photo before Ringling made them into cages. With the advent of the History channel now, a good friend, Steve Flint, caught a two second glimpse of ammo wagons on a aircraft carrier in WWII. He thinks that glimpse might be these. They had the basic floor, chassis, and tongue with a short wall on front and back ends to keep the bombs from rolling off. Ringling built them up into cages from the floor up.
Bob
fivetiger@marlboroelectric.net

19 October, 2007 17:37
Anonymous said...

The term ex-ammo wagons seems to have given these cages a bad image.
Who knows? Maybe they were purchased simply because you could get more of them in less space on a flat car? But I remember first seeing them as a kid at the Garden.
As you entered the basement, ten or twelve of them were lined up in a row with their panels open --- showing a jungle motiff. I was perhaps too young to notice the tight quarters inside the cages for the animals. But what I noticed was the jungle theme It looked to me as a kid like one very big jungle with lots of lions and tigers and leapords and hippos and rhinos in it.. The cages and their open panels seemed to "position" the animals in their natural habitat. It knocked me out as a kid. It was the inverse of another one of my favorite displays --- the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History, where the animals (stuffed) are set in their natural habitat. Back to the Ringling cages, I always thought the jungle-design panels surrounding the animals inside the cages made for a lot better presentation than the bricks and mortar we had surrounding the animals in the "lion house" at our local zoos. --- ToddP

21 October, 2007 18:51

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