Sunday, September 10, 2006

Bertram W. Mills' Circus 1927-28 Progrtam #2


"Mabel Stark, who appears with her parachute horse, is also the World's Greatest Tiger Trainer. Above she is seen with the famous Wrestling Tiger, Rajah."

With the Ringling-Barnum Circus, Miss Stark performed with 14 large tigers in the ring at once but has abandoned that act to handle a group of mettlesome horses. But horses mean little to a lady who has spent a great part of her life among tigers and she hopes to persuade her employers to revive her tiger act next year with 16 or 18 beasts.
This in spite of the fact that she ascends 70 ft. in the air on the back of "Jupiter the Parachute Horse", a stunt thrilling enough for most people!"

Posted by Buckles at 9/10/2006 05:41:00 AM

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

We know John Ringling canned cage acts in 1925. Mabel figured simply to move on, but he had at least two more years on her contract, with an option for a third. Buckles ran a photo of her doing the rearing lay-back on a horse during that era. She kept many such photos in her personal scrapbooks. She was rather good at it, and honored her Ringling obligations, but snarled the rest of her life about those "three wasted years without my stripes." She was back in the arena full-time by 1928, when she was on John Robinson, and suffered that rough mauling by the tigers Zoo and Shiek. It was Terrell Jacobs who went in for Mabel.

10 September, 2006 16:52

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