Tuesday, June 04, 2019

CLOWNS #11


6 comments:

Mr.Lee said...

Klause . Ada's husband and Brunon's dad..

Chic Silber said...


Klaudiusz Blaszak & his wife

Adela Smeija framed a beautiful

1 ring European style circus

that I designed & built all the

technical elements for back in

the late 70s "Stardust Cirkus"

Sorrowfully it didn't last long

Roger Smith said...

This is the lion we took in at Jungleland, in July of 1967. Klaudiusz was defecting from the Polish contingent of the Ringling show, and his lion, Oss, was under threat of death. The show, the Polish Director, or both, claimed Oss had "cage paralysis" and was to be euthanized. Blaszak loaded him into a car and drove him up from the LA Sports Arena to us. We shifted him into our arena, and proved he was in prime condition. Klaus, as we called him, then vanished for some 3 weeks, and we figured the Communist agents had deep-6'd him in the Pacific. He later materialized with Ada and 3-year-old Brunon, and as I described above in #8, their attitude to all of us, including Mabel Stark, was that we were beneath their knowing us.


Chic Silber said...


I thought he was called "Ace"

Maybe Oss is Polish for Ace

I had a very good relationship

with both Ada & Klaus Roger

under very different conditions

Kenny mentioned that Ada died

recently while I was away

Roger Smith said...

He told me the name for his comedy lion could sound like Ace over here, but was more like Oss in Poland. It translated roughly to "ass" or "buffoon", he said.

Klaus often began a conversation by getting our attention with a word sounding like "Koor-vah." I asked what "koor-vah" meant in English, and he said it's like prostitute, or whore. I asked if he meant to call us whores, and he said, so what if he did. Big mistake, corrected more than once, and eventually dissolved.

Chic Silber said...


Ada as a widdow spent many of her

last years with Janek Perz who is

the widdower of Bunny Bartok