Monday, June 26, 2017

#4 The Big Cage


3 comments:

Tony Greiner said...

Seems like that elephant needs a lot of leather armor. How trained was this tiger?

Wade G. Burck said...

Bill Golden, the year before I took over the Hawthorn tiger and elephant act's, wearing one of the Nudie's of Hollywood costumes. The tiger Bill is using was named Sultan,later we used Rajah and the elephant is Joyce(who notoriously killed groom David Farr at the Mediana Temple in 1977. There was also a beautiful male lion named Soloman used with the tiger's in the act. If you think that's a lot of leather armor to look at, you should have had to load and unload it out of the truck. A massive piece of work complete with coco mat pad and head cover dotted with nails every two inches. When Herta Cuneo did the riding act with the white tiger Bagheera the leather sides of the "howda" were eliminated and velvet side's she(and I think Wanda Ward) made were used over the coco mat pad. I later used the velvet outfit for the white and gold tiger riding act. Two years ago, when I was in Illinois visiting my son, I saw the leather "howda" laying on the floor in one of the barn's, wet and covered with mold. I was aghast at seeing a piece of equipment that held so many memories for me being treated this way and asked my son why someone didn't cover it and put it up on a higher shelf. He replied, "if you want it up high, you put it up. It is so heavy nobody want's to touch it." Me telling him I used to load and unload it and move it into the building a dozen times a week, would have had the effect of my father telling me he used to walk miles to school in bad weather. The younger generation doesn't want to hear such nonsense......... :)

Wade Burck

Roger Smith said...

WADE: My old man did that, too. With every telling, the school got further away, the hills were higher, the snow was deeper, and there was less in the lunch pail. And no, I didn't want to hear it.