Comments from Richard Reynolds #3

originally uploaded by bucklesw1. Monday morning, October 17, 1938. Here's the parade coming along Peachtree St. through the famed Five Points intersection, then the heart of Atlanta's banking and business community. This was Atlanta's last rail show parade using horse drawn wagons. I should qualify that a bit - -Actually RBBB's Red unit paraded here in 2000 using historic wagons from Circus World in Baraboo pulled by teams of horses, and RBBB-Red was and is a rail show. The Robbins (actually Cole) steam calliope has just come down off the Whitehall St. viaduct (Peachtree became Whitehall there). I was standing with my family at the crest of the hill in the distance (just to the right of the smoke plume). Note the huge crowds. Atlanta proved a rare money winner for Robbins Bros. that year. Here are some more of my memories - - - The street parade Riding to town on Monday morning with my mother in a woman friend’s car and while passing over the Edgewood Ave viaduct, seeing the tops of the tents two blocks to the north. Watching the street parade with my parents and mother’s friend who had driven us to town to meet my Dad. We were on the Whitehall St. viaduct, amid a huge crowd. From the parade itself - - horse drawn wagons coming by with drivers in red uniforms with white helmets; to me they seemed to be sitting high up ♦♦♦ cowgirl/boy riders ♦♦♦ hippo in an open cage, standing up and not down in the water (Dad had said the cage would be closed, basing that on his recollections of B&B and RB parades of his youth in which the hippo and rhino cages were always closed - -but I said it would be open - -pure childish contrarian talk that tuned out to be right - -actually we really had no basis for assuming there’d be a hippo and there would not have been one if we’d seen Robbins before Cole Bros. sent over its hippo and the Beatty act) ♦♦♦ steam calliope ♦♦♦a string of boys running along behind the calliope (which Dad had said was always the case) ♦♦♦ a line of horse dung down the middle of the street when the parade had passed. Show time - - Monday, October 17th Riding to the showgrounds with my Dad on the Highland Ave. streetcar. I was so excited I was about to pop and adults were smiling at me. Seeing the hippo again standing up in her cage in the menagerie (I later learned her name was Pinky) ♦♦♦ noting the lead stock along the menagerie sidewall (I recall a zebra) ♦♦♦ all the to do about the Beatty act ♦♦♦ an elephant and a horse coming into the big cage with a lady♦♦♦ fireworks spewing columns of bright and different colored lights from canisters surrounding the big cage at the end of the act.