Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Route Cards #2


Scan11691, originally uploaded by bucklesw1.

Posted by Buckles at 5/20/2009 06:47:00 AM

1 comments:

Richard Reynolds said...

Though the route card says “Robbins Bros,” all of the newspaper ads in Atlanta called it “Famous Robbins.”

I saw the show here in Atlanta. It had a long, 240 mile haul here from Valdosta and the trains pulled up to the Highland Ave. showgrounds lot at 2:30 on Sunday (16th).

I went with my folks to see the set up. I remember being there with activity all around but only three things specifically stand out from that day - -

(1) walking from our house to the lot (about a mile) and seeing balloon stands near the entrance to the lot; (2) the big top being raised; and (3) being down at the baggage stock tent on the lot’s lower level.

I recall that a horse guy picked up a kid by his ankles and stuck his head in a feed bucket. I think he was a driver because he had on a red jacket, likely the one he’d wear in the parade the next morning. I think the kid had been “bad” and had pestered the driver until he’d had enough. Folks all around smiled as in “good, he deserved it.” Back then no one thought a thing about smacking a misbehaving child.

The next day, Monday was a red letter day for me, namely, the only time I ever saw an old fashioned railroad circus street parade with horse drawn wagons. I recall wagons coming by with drivers in red uniforms with white helmets; to me they seemed to be sitting high up - -also

♦♦♦ 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 even 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.

I just got in under the wire on a classical, daily circus street parade staged by a rail show, for its like could be seen for only one more year (Cole Bros, in 1939). Parker and Watts paraded for a few more weeks after Cole closed in 1939, but it was a motorized show.

After the parade, we had lunch at the S&W Cafeteria downtown. Dad took me to the Robbins Monday matinee (17th).

We rode to the show grounds on the Highland Ave streetcar. I loved Atlanta’s old streetcars, but like the street parade they too are now long gone (the last one rolled here in Atlanta in April 1949). En route to the lot I was so excited I could hardly breathe.

In the menagerie the camels and a zebra were lined up along the sidewall and not out in the middle of the tent.

I also recall seeing the hippo in the menagerie. It was standing up on the dry deck of its wagon.

I would later learn that she was hippo Pinky (or Pinkey), a female born to Alice on Hagenbeck Wallace in 1928. RBBB sold her to Cole Bros. in 1936 for $2,000. In 1939 Adkins and Terrell sent her to National Zoo in trade for a pygmy hippo.

This was the first time I saw the great Clyde Beatty, though I wish I could recall him from that day with more than just a haze. I do a remember a lady (Harriett Beatty?) bringing an elephant into the arena, and I think there was also a horse.

At the end of the act fireworks were set off all around the perimeter of the cage. They spewed a fountain of bright lights, sort of reminiscent of roman candles. [I’ll have to admit that the fireworks may have been after the big cage acts of Barnes-Sells Floto/RBBB the next month, but I think it was Robbins]

The weather was wonderful and the take here in Atlanta was the best Robbins enjoyed all year. Alas, that was not enough and it soon folded and retreated to its Rochester barns. They needed a bailout!

21 May, 2009 15:26

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