Saturday, November 27, 2010

1920's Ringling-Barnum #5


Scan13259, originally uploaded by bucklesw1.

Posted by Buckles at 11/27/2010 06:22:00 AM

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Steve,
What year is this with only 2 panel wagons?
Bob Kitto

27 November, 2010 08:21
Anonymous said...

The combined RBBB shows used 2 bannerline wagons from1 1919 thru 1928 with the exception of 1921. That year they used only banners. From 1929 forward they started using 4 wagons for a total of 16 banners. According to my files the only year that this combination of acts appeared together was 1928.
Flint

27 November, 2010 12:37
Ole Whitey said...

Eko and Iko were around side shows a long time. I talked to them when they played the fair here in 1950 or 1951.

Does anyone have any biographical information on them? Or even just a list of the shows they were with in what years. I think their name was Muse but I could have that wrong.

27 November, 2010 17:31
Dick Flint said...

George and Willie Muse were albino black brothers born in 1890 and 1893. In his autobiography, Al G. Barnes discusses "buying" them from a promoter who had earlier absconded with the boys from their Virginia home and had promoted them as coming from a colony of sheep-headed people inhabiting an island in the South Seas. In 1922 they were in the Ringling-Barnum side show but for the 1923 season they were first billed as the Ambassadors from Mars, having arrived in a spaceship that crashed in the California desert. In 1927 when the Ringling show played Roanoke, their mother brought suit against the show on behalf of her sons and the next year the show settled for an undisclosed sum. The brothers considered the settlement their long unpaid wages that, likely, had been kept by the manager who had probably kidnapped them decades earlier, likely one Herman "Candy" Shelton. Having only known show business and fond of performing music, however, they returned to the show. Family members later recalled that while the South was segregated, the brothers did not find that the case in the circus though there remained a prejudice as to salaries. They were away from Ringling in the mid-30s but returned and later worked for Pete Kortes and the Clyde Beatty side show, among others, before retiring in 1961. George died in 1971 and then Willie in 2001 at the grand age of 108, having been lovingly cared for by his grandniece. Willie never consented to an interview but after his death the Roanoke Times did a wonderful story about Willie and his niece. The tale of the kidnapped brothers was legion in Roanoke and the larger black community; in the 1980s, I remember meeting Paul Henderson, a retired photographer for the Afro-American newspapers based here in Baltimore, who covered the 1927 kidnapping suit. It was my introduction to their fascinating life though I never met them.
Dick Flint
Baltimore

28 November, 2010 01:08
Ole Whitey said...

Thanks, Dick.

My dad had a good friend who had worked with them and other sideshow acts so the way I introduced myself to them was by saying I was a friend of Paul McWilliams. They remembered him at once and thus began our conversation.

This is the same way I got acquainted with the Doll family and with Betty Broadbent.

01 December, 2010 11:11

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)