Sunday, July 28, 2019

RAIL #7


Posted by Chic Silber at 7/28/2019 10:08:00 PM

6 comments:

Chic Silber said...


That's a whole mess of punks

28 July, 2019 22:32
Paul Gutheil said...

Perhaps they were in "Punksatawney"?

29 July, 2019 12:17
Richard Reynolds said...

This is 1955 when the show carried 52 elephants, many of them punks as you see.

29 July, 2019 17:25
Richard Reynolds said...

I believe that is Smokey Jones (red shirt) on the elephant horse whose name I think was Harold.

29 July, 2019 17:49
Roger Smith said...

RICHARD nails it. That's Smokey, and his mount is the same Harold that Arky Scott rode just prior to Smokey's era. I'm not finding Benny White in this shot.

At the time, word went around that Arky had taken a step down. Not exactly. He came straight from RB to Thousand Oaks, when the Old Place was still called World Jungle Compound. He worked 2 elephants, Bimbo and Taffy, on 47 of 49 episodes of CIRCUS BOY, and commanded the Compound herd of 7. He had the ideal job for this time of his life, and was our Elephant Superintendent until his death in 1968, 10 days before Mabel Stark died.

@L, the guy atop the stock car had the best vantage point of all, and I wonder what the undergarment factory people were thinking.

29 July, 2019 18:50
Wade G. Burck said...

Folk's may recall in 1974-75 when Carson and Barnes had 50 elephants on the show, commemorating Dorie's 50 years in show business. An amazing, incredible sight to be be sure. One adult Asian(maybe Barbara), one adolescent African named Paula, and 48 babies all under the age of 3-4 with their names stenciled on their forehead's to facilitate in identifying them. They all wore 8 foot drag chains on one front leg each time they were taken off the picket line, thrown over their neck's. They had made god awful, ugly head pieces for each of them made out of washers connected together by a chain link. The performance tub's were man hole debris traps that weighed about a ton. It was not an ideal situation by any stretch of the imagination, but that's how it was "back in the day." Fortunately, we will not see a return to that time, and you understand the need for regulation of some kind when someone can amass those numbers of a species of animal, to celebrate their "Happy Birthday." Due respect......

Wade Burck

31 July, 2019 10:20

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