Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Clyde Beatty Circus Elephants 1946 #1 (From Buckles)


SAVE2866, originally uploaded by bucklesw1.

The Beatty Show carried eight elephants in 1946 "Mary", "Sidney", "Anna May", "Babe", "Marian", "Addie", "Cora" and "Inez".
Claude "Slivers" Madison was in charge.

Posted by Buckles at 5/23/2007 06:30:00 AM

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

For younger readers, we probably need to mention that the 1946 Beatty railroad show was actually the former Russell Bros trucker, which Art Concello had bought and later put on the former Beckman & Gerety (Carnival) train.

Some of the wagons were converted trailers from Russell and others were classic carnival wagons from B&G. The cage wagons for Beatty's cats were newly built for this tour as he had been carrying the cats in converted Coca-Cola trucks for several years.

Beginning in 1949 the wagons were mainly from the Sparks Circus fielded by James Edgar, were of steel construction and top-notch in every way.

Tom Parkinson had some ideas about the legal structure of the 1946 outfit, with Concello and Beatty each having corporations involved.

Everything was run by professionals and the performance was first class. The show's business in five Canadian provinces was phenomenal and has been cited ever since as an example of how good a tour of the Dominion could be.

Beatty used his share of the 1946 money as a down payment and was listed as owner the following year. Alas the 1946 success was not repeated but the show did manage to stay afloat through 1956 (although Beatty was not the final owner) and the show was the last American tent show to travel by rail.

23 May, 2007 12:51

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