Monday, April 18, 2011

RBBB Rolling Stock #1 (From Jim Elliott)


04-17-2011 12;28;01PM, originally uploaded by bucklesw1.

Last Saturday on the drive up to Orlando, Jim loaned me several folders of circus and zoo pictures to run on the Blog.
Plenty unidentified elephant pix I have been going over but I thought I'd start out with the subject I know the least about.
Buckles

Posted by Buckles at 4/18/2011 06:44:00 AM

5 comments:

Buckles said...

Seventy six years as man and boy and I never trouped on a show with side poles as wiggley as these.

18 April, 2011 10:54
Ole Whitey said...

John Frasier had a story about some show he was on as a kid (possibly Rogers Bros?) and the night before the show was to pull out of WQ, they were out in the woods chopping down sidepoles.

18 April, 2011 11:34
Anonymous said...

#66 belonged to the wardrobe dept.

18 April, 2011 11:52
Roger Smith said...

On my first tour with Miller-Johnson, Charlie Germain was incensed that Jungleland sent me out without net poles. Our net was pulled tight horizontally, but it had no spider and didn't provide for a light tub, which Germain wanted. At one woodside lot, he had the boys cut two spindly 20-foot spars and fit them with rigging that hauled up a single big lightbulb. It was as mudshow as it sounds, and one dark night the rough-hewn poles lay red-lighted in yesterday's town.

18 April, 2011 15:56
Anonymous said...

From 1825 onward, when the tent was first introduced, until the literal invention of the pole wagon, circus companies would always chop down and prepare a local tree to serve as the center pole of the pavilion. The change in practice likely came about when shows covered territory where there weren't suitable trees, or when more than one large pole was necessary, as with the implementation of quarter poles in 1847.

The young Ringlings, or their men, went out and cut stakes or poles in a tamarack swamp outside of Baraboo for their show.

Al Stencell can also tell you a wonderful jackpot about cutting poles and an automobile. It may be in one of his memoirs. Some things never changed.

19 April, 2011 11:08

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