The Ringling Press Kit

The Ringling press kit was a thing of beauty. It was created to bewitch hard boiled newspaper reporters and editors into granting the show reams of free publicity. It was the keystone of the circus marketing strategy. 

When I joined the Greatest Show on Earth back in 1971, newspapers still ruled the earth. If you wanted to know the weather forecast you read the newspaper -- TV and radio 'meteorologists' were considered strictly fly-by-night parvenus. If the newspaper said it was gonna rain, it was gonna rain -- and if it didn't rain that only meant the weather was wrong, not the newspaper. The sports scores were lined up in proper accurate order to settle many a bet. The shenanigans in Washington were faithfully analyzed and skewered by a legion of reporters who were respectful of the Presidency and Congress and yet faithfully critical of them at the same time. The comics section was generously splashed across several pages, and printed in a bold, large font, very easy for Grandma to read even without her bifocals -- on Sundays it was always in color.

 Newspaper journalists were the louche guardians of public morals and trusted chroniclers of everything from an obscure military junta in French Guiana to depressed pork belly futures in Des Moines.

Back then hard-living reporters were killed by damaged livers and tobacco-induced lung cancer, not by assassination.

 Every morning, without fail, when I was on the road back in those halcyon days, I never went to work in clown alley without first buying a pack of Juicy Fruit gum, a bottle of Yoo-hoo , and a newspaper. A day without reading the newspaper was a day steeped in ignorance.

And the Ringling press kit reflected that long-ago peculiarly American desire to kowtow to the Fourth Estate. It was a massive affair, and must have weighed at least five pounds. Inside a red vinyl case, that closed with an ornate gilt clasp, were over seventy 8x10 black and white glossies of every performer on the show. Even MY photo was in there. There was a six-page precis of the history of the original Ringling Brothers -- all five of them. It was printed on elegant cream colored card stock, suitable for framing. On the side of the case was a pouch that held a tin medallion, like something out of a cereal box, that gave the bearer the right to enter the Big Top on the cuff at any time during the current season. It could be attached to the lapel of a suit coat or pinned to a blouse, and usually started to corrode after a few weeks.

And the press releases . . . 
There were over a hundred of 'em. There were biographies of all the tanbark stars -- Gunther Gebel-Williams; The Flying Gaonas; Ursula Bottcher and her trained polar bears; and Peggy Williams, the first female clown (although she really wasn't -- but she was the first female clown with a college degree.)     

There were stories on what elephants ate (which was anything they could get their trunks around -- especially cigar and cigarette butts); articles purporting to describe the strange superstitions of clown alley, such as the belief that it was bad luck to lay a hat on your clown trunk and that each clown painted their own clown face on a Titleist golf ball, which was then sent to the John Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, to be trademark registered (all a bunch of hooey, but good publicity for Titleist.) There were press releases on how many miles of electrical cable the show carried and the secret recipe for pink cotton candy. Why the number 99 is considered unlucky for circus performers (aerialist Lillian Leitzel fell to her death after 99 turns on the Spanish web when the swivel snapped.) And why John Philip Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever is never played by the circus band, except to clear the tent or arena during an emergency. 

The Ringling press agents were prodigal with those wonderful press kits -- it didn't matter if you worked for the New York Times or the Podunk Weekly Gazette; when the show hit town you automatically were handed one in person by a Ringling press agent. 

Reporters took a more relaxed view of their duties back then -- those news releases were printed, verbatim, in dozens of papers across the land, with the reporter's byline smugly attached. I know, because I would cut them out to paste in my scrapbook. 

At the end of the season the leftover press kits were sent down to winter quarters in Venice, Florida, where they were stored in a damp backroom of the rehearsal arena -- there to rot away. When the arena was abandoned by Ringling because of a property tax dispute with the city years later, there wasn't a single decent press kit left. But by then the internet was taking over and newspapers were receding in relevance. The Ringling press kit had become about as pertinent as the rotary dial phone.

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