Monday, January 21, 2013

From Chic Silber #1

Posted by Buckles at 1/21/2013 06:06:00 AM

3 comments:

Richard Reynolds said...

This is the famous female hippo Lotus. She holds the longevity record for circus hippos. - - 51 years and some 6 months. She arrived in 1903 for Gollmar Bros and then trekked with it through 1916, then Patterson-Gollmar, a couple of Patterson’s carnivals and then in 1919 went to the Barnes show. She was with it until it pulled into Sarasota quarters at the end of 1938 marking its end.

Lotus was then an RBBB animal for the remainder of her years. She last trekked with the Big Show in 1944 and spent her retirement in Sarasota. She died there in her pool around September 1954. She was the Grande Dame of circus hippos.

21 January, 2013 14:14
Chic Silber said...


I can't recall the name of the hippo

on the Beatty Show in the 60s but I

am pretty sure it was a female even

though she was billed as "Big Otto"

(could have been Petunia)

21 January, 2013 17:35
Tony Greiner said...

I drove and watered "Fat Albert" for Johnny Frazier's "Carson & Barnes #2" in 1978. Albert was definitely male, as I once saw him in a state of arousal.

The trailer he lived in was a converted moving van, in pretty rough shape. One of the back doors had fallen off, so Albert would sometimes get up on the rear platform and look out the back while we went down the road. I could tell when he did that because there would always be a line of cars following me, people who would rather go slow and look at the hippo than get to wherever they were going.

22 January, 2013 12:06

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