Tuesday, November 02, 2010

Circus Trains #9


Circus Trains-9, originally uploaded by bucklesw1.

Posted by Buckles at 11/02/2010 05:53:00 AM

6 comments:

Bob Cline said...

The interesting wagon in front appears to be part Alfred Court cage and arena sections stacked up on the back end.

How did they transfer animals out of this cage to the arena? Was a chute being used?
Bob

02 November, 2010 06:27
Harry Kingston said...

Bob,
Yes chut's were used and remember they were up when the fire started in 1944 and that was where many bodies were found stacked on top on each other.
The towners paniced and could not get over the chut's.
They were the ones with curved tops not flat top ones like Beatty used.
Harry

02 November, 2010 10:19
Buckles said...

From this angle it's easy to see why Circus Fans of the day so disliked the transfer to pneumatic tires.
An aesthetic caravan now looked more like farm wagons on the way to the grain elevator.

02 November, 2010 11:11
Anonymous said...

Bob,
This photo is from 1945. Ringling only carried one cage act that year, that being the "Ladies & the Leopards".
The act was presented by Wilson Storey and consisted of 12 leopards (spotted & black),panthers and pumas. In addition there were 6 girls that appeared in the arena with the cats.
The small wagons that you see on the first flat bed wagon and the third flat bed were the cages that were used to carry the animals. There were actually four small cages. By yesterday's standards, there would have been plenty of room for the 12 cats.
Two of the cages were pushed into the Big Top for the act. No chutes were used. This way there was nothing blocking any track, etc.
Joe Bradbury's 1945 Ringling article in White Tops (N/D'81 & J/F '82) describes the act, etc.
Dom

02 November, 2010 13:43
Richard Reynolds said...

This is 1945. Nearly all of these photos were taken by Chappie Fox in either 1945 or 1946 with some from 1938.

Here we see two stringer wagons carrying the small Alfred Court European cages that housed the leopard act.

That was the only “big cage” number in 1945. It featured show girls in the cage with the leopards. It was the last act Court produced for RBBB before he went back to France and into retirement.

There were 4 of these small cage wagons, characterized by the clerestory roofs with ventilation slits. The look was akin to the raised roofs of railroad passenger cars. [See photo 6 for comparison.] The show bought them on March 31, 1945, presumably from Court.

Court had sold all his remaining performing animals to the show on November 17, 1944.

For the act, all the animals were put into two of these small cages and a crawler tractor brought them into the tent where they were spotted up against the arena cage. I well recall going by them here in Atlanta as we walked the hippodrome track to get to our seats.

When the act was done a crawler tractor (painted orange mind you) came in and hauled them along the track and out the back door. I can close my eyes and still that action.

After the 1944 big top fire, the show took some time to settle on how best to get the wild animals into the steel arena(s). The tunnels or chutes were out for safety reasons because they stretched across the hippodrome track from cage wagons outside. They had caused a pile-up of panicked patrons in the Hartford fire. So what to do?

For 1945 they used the system described above. There was no wild animal act at all in 1946. For 1947they used newly built tall cage wagons, one for each arena. But that blocked the view from some of the seats and was unsatisfactory.

Then in 1948 they settled on the long low silhouette wagons so often photographed. They were not ideal but were better than anything tried up until then. They were employed until the big top came down forever in 1956.

02 November, 2010 14:07
Ole Whitey said...

We should mention that Joe Walsh' wife Charlotte AKA "Zeke" was the lady who draped the leopard around her neck in this act to great applause. She told me about this years later when she was with Robert Baudy's act.

Zeke was all woman but she was as tough as nails.

02 November, 2010 22:57

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