If ever there was a guardian angel for the Ringling clowns it was George Schellenberger. A retired mail carrier with a bungalow in Venice Florida, George put his considerable carpentering and handyman skills to work to help construct sturdy clown props for both the Blue Unit and the Red Unit back in the 1970’s. He did it on the cuff; he just enjoyed the company of professional funsters.
He brought meatloaf sandwiches, hard boiled eggs, and bags of oranges to the arena during rehearsals to feed impecunious clowns, such as myself. And each season he bailed a few of the more roistering jesters out of jail, at his own expense.
He was a good egg.
Of course he built his clown props out of quality wood and thick metal. His prop blunderbusses, which used only blanks, were made with high grade bronze and lead. His slapsticks, hinged paddles that fired a black powder squib when making contact with clown derrieres, were constructed of scrap mahogany. They all weighed a ton and if one fell on you during a clown gag a broken leg was the least of your worries. Lugging them in and out of the prop box insured a hernia. While fulsome in our appreciation to him at the start of each season, we couldn’t wait until his cumbersome props started to fall apart. Then we would shed crocodile tears while shoving them into a corner and go back to the flimsy balsa wood and cardboard props we’d surreptitiously packed alongside George’s behemoth contraptions.
Another of George’s stellar qualities was his love of sharing old movies with the clowns during rehearsals. In the evening he’d set up his projector with a screen in the weedy arena parking lot to give us the hearty slapstick goulash of Mack Sennett’s ‘Tillie’s Punctured Romance’ or the rowdy Marx Brothers in ‘At the Circus’. And he saved the best for last; the night before the show left on tour he would exhibit Cecil B. DeMille’s deathless classic, ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’.
The first time I viewed this epic paean to ‘Big Bertha’ (as Ringling was affectionately called by veteran performers) way back in 1971 I choked up several times as the valiant circus crew battled blow downs and train wrecks and cornball acting to keep the show on the road. This was my life now, I thought to myself -- all the stoic heroism of Charlton Heston; the wide-eyed bravura of Betty Hutton; and the surong sexuality of Dorothy Lamour. I would become part of the myth, part of the very fabric of American life. To a green kid, who’d never been farther from home than Duluth before, this epiphany reduced me to a gurgling emotional pulp there amidst the creeping Charlie and beggarweed of the parking lot. But I was not alone; I noticed several of the other First of Mays also grizzling silently as well.
The next day the train pulled out for our first stop in Tampa; while I was using the bathroom at the end of the car someone broke into my roomette and stole my cassette player and the Timex self-winding watch my parents had given me. And so my first season under the Big Top began . . .
Forty-six years later, retired in Provo Utah to be near most of my kids, I bought ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ DVD on Amazon to show to my grandkids on a sleety winter’s evening. To set the proper mood I purchased a big bag of orange colored banana flavored marshmallow circus peanuts and individual boxes of Barnum’s Animals for each of the little ones. Pink lemonade was on tap, along with all the microwave popcorn they could handle (which turned out to be just over a short ton).
I had filled their affectionate and porous heads with a wealth of detail and jargon about my tanbark adventures in the past; now I wanted to show them the real deal -- the real Ringling Brothers, not the campy Broadway fluff the show had degenerated into when it played the Salt Palace in recent years.
Sadly, my build up of the movie could not be sustained in their young and insubstantial minds. Ten minutes into the film, just about the time Charlton Heston is telling the circus management that the show will play every city, large and small, for a full season, instead of the half season suggested by those mealy-mouthed pen pushers, the grand kids’ attention began to waver until they soon drifted away. They would come back briefly whenever I screamed “Hey, I worked with that guy!”, and they indulgently watched the famous circus train wreck that was the highlight of the film -- saying afterwards it was okay, but kinda phony-looking (it was all done with miniatures; there was no such thing as computer imaging and blue screens back in 1952).
But I’m not sorry I made the attempt. Unless you’re the Apostle Paul it’s hard to share an epiphany with others; all you can really say is “This means a great deal to me”, and leave it at that.
Cecil B. DeMille’s movie is something everyone should watch at least once, fortified with lots of popcorn and pink lemonade. Because it shows not what the circus used to really be like, but because it shows what people used to think the circus was really like -- a bombastic amalgamation of glamor and grit that brought out the sugar-crazed child in everyone. No one, except DeMille, ever took the circus very seriously; but back in those Kodachrome days it was considered part of the American landscape like the Grand Canyon or Mount Rushmore. Not to see it, or smell it, or taste the cotton candy, was to miss out on a basic, if slightly trivial, right inherent to every citizen in their pursuit of happiness.
And life becomes a little more second-class when we decide to stop believing in that particular kind of hoopla today.
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