(continued from “A Letter to Tim Holst”)
I have always tried to avoid being snooty about my circus clown pedigree. I started with Ringling Brothers in 1971, and over the ensuing years worked with just about every other circus there was. I don’t say I was a runaway hit with any of them, but I worked ‘em nonetheless. Many great clowns did their best work away from Ringling, like Dick Monday, Barry Lubin, Bill Irwin, Steve Wolski (as Harpo the Clown), and Peter Pitofsky. Me, I just did the work.
But I never could completely shake a patrician air when I visited smaller shows -- giving the impression, I suppose, that I was slumming. But some of those mud shows . . .
The glorious North Dakota summer of 1981, when I was stuck trying to impress Becky Thingvold with plans for my make believe clown academy in Williston, comes to mind. Despite the oil boom that began gnawing at the pristine prairie, the air still sparkled with the heady tang of sage as prairie chickens strutted among the morning glory vines like returning conquerors. It was a good time to be young, in love, and without a car. I loved hiking more than driving. If you ever get to North Dakota you should definitely do some hiking. Get a good trail book like the one below.
KGCX Radio boasted both a full-time news director and a full-time sports director. I did the news in Williston, and Dewey did the sports from the home office in Sidney, Montana. He had a car, and was unusually willing to chauffeur me to distant news events to tape actualities for the station. He prided himself on being a Company Man -- always willing to drive the extra mile for the good of the station. We had both gone to Brown Institute of Broadcasting together back in Minneapolis. That is why he and I drove fifty miles one summer Saturday up to Tioga to catch a matinee of the Hooper Brothers Circus. I figured it would make a good leading story on my newscast on the coming Monday, when there was always a paucity of gripping headlines.
You may never have heard of the Hooper Brothers Circus. I know I never had. It was one of those hastily thrown together ragbags that sprouted, and then wilted, like mushrooms after a rainstorm, in the rich alluvial plains of the Upper Midwest thirty-five years ago. It was a time when everybody had a little money and everybody had work. Various circus and carnival sharpers would stitch together a few circus acts for a quick tour of the hinterlands to gouge the hayseeds for a few kopeks and then mysteriously dissolve before John Law could lay his hands on them for operating without a license (or any talent.)
And Tioga was about as out-of-the-way as you could get. It had a gas plant (courtesy of the oil boom) and a small rural hospital run by three doctors from India -- all named Patel. It’s ten miles off the main highway and at that time was surrounded by yellow bursts of rapeseed.
Dewey parked near the big top (about the size of a modest rambler) and we flashed our KGCX business cards at the ticket taker, a pimply youth who seemed more interested in picking his scabs than in our media credentials.
“Three dollars admission” he said listlessly.
“But we’re from the biggest radio station in Williams county!” I protested. “We’re here to do a story about the show.”
“Three dollars” he replied stubbornly.
I paid for myself and Dewey. The bleachers were half full of youngsters who probably wished they had gone to the Municipal Wading Pool instead. I remember little of that performance. There was a lion act, with three arthritic creatures sluggishly going through their paces, looking ready to collapse at any moment. Some horses were trotted out to do next to nothing while their trainer bellowed and cracked a whip at them. A camel was paraded around. And the candy butchers swarmed about like flies, offering popcorn, cotton candy, hot dogs, pickles on a stick, lukewarm cups of melted ice with a little Coke added as an afterthought, and circus coloring books.
Then there was the clown. I had seen him earlier in the show, dressed in a dark blue jumpsuit, shoveling up after the horses and camel. He reappeared near the end of the show in a ghastly unpowdered whiteface and dressed in what appeared to be oversized polka dot pajamas. He walked around the tent with a suitcase that was stenciled with “The Morning Paper.” He stopped occassionally to open up the suitcase to reveal a roll of toilet paper.
After the show I sought out the owners for an interview, but was shunted from surly acrobat to sullen roustabout without ever discovering the perpetrators of this tanbark travesty. It probably didn’t help that I kept introducing myself as “Tim Torkildson, formerly of Ringling Brothers.” So I settled with recording some of the departing audience.
“It’s a circus” said one young girl helpfully. “They had lions. I’m going home to wake up mom to make me dinner.”
“Can I say hello to my girlfriend Janey on air? Are we live? Hi Janey -- it’s Mitch!”
“That wasn’t much of a show” said a mother manhandling a feisty three year old while attempting to keep the howling infant in her arms from plummeting to the ground. “I wonder why the Rotary Club brought this thing here in the first place. I bet they got fleeced on it.”
Dewey and I drove back to Williston, stopping at Service Drug where I bought him a fried egg sandwich, known locally as a “gut bomb.” Dewey went to a Little League game and I went up to the studio to cobble together my leading story for Monday. I decided to use Mitch’s recording as the closer. For comedic effect (I hoped.) Then I went over to the Red Owl supermarket, where you could pick out a steak from the butcher’s counter and they would grill it for you right there in the store. Becky was in Minot covering a political rally, so I read Dickens’ “Pickwick Papers” late into the night.
Next day, Sunday, I went to the small LDS chapel for services and then took a long Sabbath nap. At four in the morning on Monday I was at the station, feeling smug about my circus ‘scoop.’ Nobody else would have it. That’s when I learned, from the AP wire, that St.Joseph’s Catholic Church in Williston had burned to the ground on Saturday night. I still used my Hooper Brothers story as the lead. I wasn’t going to let it go to waste, especially since the station would not be reimbursing me for any of my time or money.
When the station owner Oscar Halvorson came in later that day he said “Nice story on that circus up in Tioga. Start the news with something happy, is what I say.”
His wife Faye had a different opinion about my morning newscast.
“Why didn’t you have more on the fire?” she demanded. “You’ve got no sense of local community! I don’t know why Oscar ever hired you.”
I spent a good part of Monday afternoon thumbing through my paperback Thesaurus, looking up synonyms for harpy: Shrew. Hag. Termagant. Virago. Xanthippe. I’d be using them all in my next letter to Holst.
(to be continued)
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