Remembering Leon McBryde

Leon McBryde is a big fellow. Big in stature, big in expertise, and big in heart. When Steve Smith and I were made the advance clown team for the Ringling Blue unit back in the mid-70’s, he was also big on the image a Ringling clown should project. He did not like to see clowns as declasse citizens. A true Southern gentleman, Leon demanded dignity and respect -- and usually got it.

Smith and I were provided with a beat up old motorhome by the show, which sometimes ran -- and sometimes didn’t. Jim Howle painted the exterior in his inimitable style, putting our two clown faces prominently on each side of the balky vehicle. Leon was detailed to train us in the art and craft of advance clowning before the season got underway. Part of that crucial instruction was how to grill the perfect pork chop on a hibachi and serve it up with lots of red eye gravy and applesauce. Most of our tutoring took place around his hospitable table, with his wife Linda encouraging us to sample her homemade cornbread until we began addressing each other as “y’all” like Jed Clampett.

One day our motorhome refused to start, even when Smith crawled underneath to hotwire it. We desperately needed to do our laundry, so reverted to the old clown alley expedient of washing it by hand. We strung up the laundry to dry around the motorhome, giving it the appearance of a gypsy tent. This displeased Leon mightily.

“Y’all take that stuff down right now, hear?” he commanded. “Makes the show look like a ragbag!”

We meekly took our washing down.

As punishment for our boorish behavior he had us over for Smithfield ham and sweet potato pie. Then drove us to an auto parts store to buy a new battery for our motorhome. That took care of the starting problem -- for a while. That clunker ate more batteries during the season than you could shake a stick at. It finally developed a chassis-wide short circuit, so when we were plugged into an electric outlet and tried to fill the water tank (my responsibility) it gave me a shock that left my hands and arms tingling unpleasantly. On the brink of relaying a snarky complaint to the home office in Washington D.C., Leon counseled us on how to deal diplomatically with Irvin Feld’s bean counters.

“Y’all cain’t just insult those fellers and expect them to do anything for you. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar” he told us, then helped us draft a courteous dispatch that buttered them up and then hinted that a new vehicle might help us generate more enthusiasm for the show. It worked; within a week we got a brand spanking new motorhome and the old one, with Howle’s classic paintings, was retired to Winter Quarters -- where it sat in a sad state of disrepair for many years before vandals looted it and sprayed graffiti over our clown portraits.

As part of our training we observed Leon several times doing his celebrated grade school show, “Readers are Leaders.” Combining some hokey magic tricks with large doses of audience participation, Leon as ‘Buttons the Clown’ had them eating out of his hand. I credit Leon McBryde with first awakening the desire to be a teacher in me -- he was so obviously delighted to teach the kids about the joys of literacy. Many long years later, when I became an English teacher in Thailand, I often thought back to his methods and spirit while attempting to instruct my pupils in the mysteries of English spelling and grammar.

Smith and I made a sincere attempt to follow Leon’s example with our own school show -- to keep it focused and on track. But we both were contaminated with the invidious spirit of improvisation. We didn’t much care to stick to the same script, over and over and over again. To Leon, doing the same show the same way day after day was a sign of discipline and dedication. So he was slightly distressed at our casual and scattershot approach to entertaining and educating the elementary school kiddies. We’d always started out with our scripted show, but along about ten minutes in either Smith or I would get a wild hair up the wazoo and start throwing curve balls at each other just to see what would happen. In the middle of ‘Bigger and Bigger’, which involves blowing up a balloon, I might just release the balloon to let it fly out into the audience, and then shout “Niagara Falls! -- slowly I turned . . . “ This was Smith’s cue to yell “Yoicks and away!” before bouncing a foam rubber mallet off my head. Then we would head out into the gymnasium to begin flirting with a lady teacher until she blushed beet red and the kids were howling in delirium. At least we always ended the show the same way -- I’d play my musical saw, Smith would do a little tap dance in his clown shoes, we’d drop our pants, and then run offstage crying “May all your days be circus days -- our elephant is double parked!”

Eventually Leon became reconciled to the fact that Smith and I were intractable loons who fed off of each other’s manic attempts to derail any form of linear narrative, and gave our ‘show,’ such as it was, his blessing. The last day under his benign instruction he had us over for fried chicken smothered in milk gravy to give us these final insightful words:

“Wherever you go, there you are.”