"Black Diamond" #1

My father's early years in show business were pretty exciting having run away to join the Rhoda Royal Circus in 1920 at age sixteen and two years later fled Military School in Bellbuckle, Tenn. to serve as a camel groom on the Ringling Show and remarkably is listed in the 1922 Hagenbeck-Wallace Route Book as presenting an end ring elephant act for Bert Noyes. However 1923 on the Barnes Show was the year he he talked and wrote mostly about, having then gone to work for his life long hero, Cheerful Gardner. I never heard him say how he managed to get this job on the Atterbury Show but at age 20 had his own herd.