The Life and Times of Irvin Feld

I spent the summer of 1997 doing research on the life and times of Irvin Feld. My personal interactions with the man, as well as his great influence on the entire world of clowning due to his creation of the Ringling Clown College, left me intrigued -- curious to know much more about this myopic little entrepreneur who started out with his brother Izzy selling snake oil in the Appalachians during the Great Depression and wound up as owner and operator of The Greatest Show on Earth. As my research progressed, I determined to write his biography.

At the time I had already written several novels and the first volume of my own autobiography -- called Clown Notes -- and thought, in my obliviously smug way, that capturing another man’s life would be as easy as ordering a hamburger at McDonalds. Especially a man who basked in the publicity limelight as much as Feld had. There were reams of newspaper and magazine copy about him, all easily accessible.  

I recalled vividly my first prolonged encounter with Feld. After my graduation show at Ringling Clown College in 1971 I was convinced there would be no contract offer for me, so headed back to the Venice Villas to pack, lick my wounds, and figure out how to take the bus back home to Minneapolis. It was a rainy, humid, Florida night -- the peepers were croaking dismally along the canal; fireflies described lazy zigzags in the dark foliage; and the smell of wet vegetable decay left me depressed and resentful at my failed attempt to escape my stifling Scandinavian upbringing. My life’s trajectory pulled down by the force of failure’s gravitational pull.

But then Bill Ballantine, the Dean of Clown College, interrupted my listless packing by banging on my apartment door to demand I return immediately with him to Winter Quarters -- Mr. Feld was impatiently waiting to see me. Me? Numb with disbelief at this fairy tale turn of events I was ushered into Mr. Feld’s presence in Ballantine’s office. Wreathed in cigar smoke, Feld sat behind the desk and beamed at me.

“Ah, Torkildson!” he said brightly as Ballantine literally pushed me through the office door and left. “You’re a regular screwball of a clown, aren’t you?” He was referring, I believe, to my accidentally spraying him and his entourage with a fire extinguisher during the show. “We need that kind of craziness in clown alley.” He unscrewed the cap of his gold-tipped Montblanc, then pushed a paper contract towards me. “We’d like you to start rehearsals with the Blue Unit next month. How about it?”

His thick glasses gave him an innocent, goggle-eyed appearance. I mumbled something in return, I don’t remember what, picked up the fountain pen, and signed.

“Fine, fine!” he said. “Anything you’d like to ask me about working for the show right now? I want this to be a profitable experience for both of us.”

I was still in shock at this sudden turn of events. My brain’s higher functions had shut down. I just shook my head and backed away towards the door.

“Okay, then. If you ever have any problems you can get ahold of me at any time. My door is always open to my clowns. And send Ballantine back in on your way out, will ya?”

Uncle Bill apparently had been listening at the door -- he rushed past me as I went out into the lobby and down the stairs.

And I found it to be true, at least for me, that Irvin Feld’s door was wide open. During that first season I wrote him several letters, complaining about AGVA dues and the unsanitary plumbing at Madison Square Garden. He always replied with a brief note, thanking me for my input and promising to look into the matter. His assistant, Arnie Bramow, hand-delivered his replies to me.

I took it for granted that he was like this with all the clowns on the show. But I got an inkling of his affection for me, and his possessiveness, several years later when I finally told him I was leaving the show for a two year voluntary proselyting mission for the LDS Church. That didn’t set well with him.

“I’m disappointed in you, Torkildson” he told me in his Washington DC office, after I had been startled half to death by the stuffed carcass of Gargantua, the famous killer gorilla, that he kept leering in his outer office. “I gave you your big chance and told Baumann to cut you plenty of slack. Now you go and leave me for some religious mumbo jumbo? I was grooming you for something better, y’know. Now your career will be over before it’s hardly started. Is that what you really want, kid?”

I affirmed my commitment, which only irritated him more. When I held out my hand to say goodbye he petulantly turned his back on me and let me leave in silence.

But Irvin Feld had trouble holding a grudge against his clowns. When I returned home in two year’s time, needing work, I called his office number and was immediately put through to him. He asked me how I had enjoyed myself in Taiwan, I told him it was Thailand, not Taiwan, where I had been serving, and he got right to the point by asking if I needed a job. I said I did, he told me to be in Cincinnati that weekend, and the deal was sealed.

So I had my own memories of him, as well as anecdotes from Swede Johnson and Bill Ballantine about the great man -- along with what I culled from the media. I wrote to Kenny Feld to tell him of my plans to write his father’s biography -- but never received any reply. Or help.

After three months of research and writing my money ran out and I had to go back on the road. I had no experience in finding grant money or any other way to fuel my work. I’d managed to write 170 pages and found it impossible to continue the story. The more I worked on his life, the less I felt I knew about Irvin Feld. In retrospect, I was too young and cocky to write a proper biography. So I desktop published my truncated “Life”, sold a few copies through ads in Circus Report Magazine (where I had a weekly column), donated a copy to the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, and forgot about my project in the hurly burly of keeping body and soul together while working on mud shows.

Recently I was surprised to find that Amazon.com is still offering my book, “The Life and Times of Irvin Feld” online. No copies have been sold in years, and it looks like Amazon is out of stock anyway. I may have the original manuscript tucked away somewhere in the musty old trunks I keep in my storage closet -- I recently discovered a discarded manuscript in one of them for a novel on LDS society called ‘The Further Adventures of Elder West -- but even if I did exhume my work on Irvin Feld I doubt I would have the energy and focus to expand it with further research and writing.

But I sure wish someone more competent and passionate than me would take a crack at it. It seems a shame that such a vibrant personality should be relegated to a short article on Wikipedia.

Irvin Feld. 1918 to 1984.

Thank You, Sonnie Cucinotti!

Tesekkur ederim to the many readers who liked my mini-memoir “The Clown Becomes an Entrepreneur.”   Your belief and support in my work keeps me going on rainy days:

Chris Twiford; Vivian Vance; Gabriel Romero Sr.; Elmo Gibbs; Matt Kaminsky; Thelma Todd; Mike Johnson; Mike Weakley; Rudolph Valentino; Sonnie Cucinotti; Francis X. Bushman; Scott Land; Henry Winkler; and the redoubtable Kenneth L Stallings.

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”

― Henry David Thoreau

Alex Jones Apologizes for Promoting ‘Pizzagate’ Hoax

A radio host, name of Jones,

Ate crow to the very last bones.

It seems Pizzagate

Was mere bombinate --

So now he might lose his headphones.

The Short Tempered Chef Makes Breakfast with Leftovers

A leftover by any other name is still food. Something to eat. Sustenance. Grub. And since I don’t like shopping on Sundays, I’ll just rummage through the fridge and pantry to see what I can come up with. I have no prejudices when it comes to breakfast food. Cereal, eggs, meats, fish, turnips, cheese, olives, piccalilli, curry; it’s all the same to me. To misquote Will Rogers: I never met a breakfast I didn’t like.

So lemme see . . . I put some canned tomatoes, frozen country fries, half a white onion, some leftover Thai curry paste, two eggs, a splash of soy sauce mixed with brown sugar and a splash of juice from a jar of pickled herring, some diced ham and a bit of leftover candied salmon in the wok with sesame seed oil. Blasted the whole mess on high heat for a few minutes; now It looks kinda goopy. I’ll serve it over rice with some pickled beets I’ve had in a tupperware container in the fridge for the past two weeks -- they should still be good; I don’t think pickled beets ever go bad.

My breakfast goop turned out okay. Not spectacular, but not offensive either. I think my tastebuds must be more senile than I am -- it’s getting harder to taste things that please my palate, even when I put plenty of spicy stuff in. This meal would have benefited greatly with some hot spicy pickles on the side instead of the pickled beets. Kimchi? Kimchi! That was the missing ingredient. Also, I didn’t have anything to drink in the fridge except Shasta club soda. I should have had orange juice or pineapple juice. Or even squeezed a couple of grapefruit myself for the juice.

I’ve still got a wok full of the stuff -- what to do with it? Can’t impose on the neighbors or the kids. Truth to tell, it looks disgusting. If I freeze it I’ll forget about it and throw it out the next time my daughter Sarah helps me with my housecleaning. Okay, here’s a plan: I’ll put it in tupperware and keep it in the fridge for a few days, in case I wake up real early with hunger and have time to eat before going to the Rec Center to swim.

It’s times like these when I wish I had a dog.  

The Clown Becomes an Entrepreneur

By 1999 my osteoarthritis made it hard for me to do physical comedy anymore. And I didn’t really want to go the Birthday Clown route. So I decided on a radical move -- both in career and location. I took a publicity job with Tahitian Noni Juice in Bangkok, Thailand. I also taught English on the side. Since I had spent two years in Thailand back in the 70’s as an LDS missionary, I already knew the language -- and I had many old companions who were living as expats all around the country. I soon found myself running a clown jewelry business with a Texas expat partner . . .

Alex Janney is a Texas expat who missed the kind of Tex Mex cooking he got back home, so he decided to open his own Tex Mex place on the outskirts of Bangkok, called Que Pasa. The place is still up and running, and serving huge portions of stick-to-your-ribs chili and burritos. I made Janney’s place my unofficial headquarters when I wasn’t at work, because he let me tinker in the kitchen with his Thai staff. Alex had been using canned black beans for his frijoles refritos, which didn’t taste quite right to me -- there was a certain zest lacking. So the cooks and I fiddled around with the native red beans that the Thais use for dessert -- they mix the beans with lotus buds and coconut sap sugar. I had the Thai staff cook up a mess of plain red beans, and almost had to forcibly restrain them from dumping in the sugar and lotus buds, and then had them mash the beans up with some chili powder, sesame seed oil, and green scallions. The result, while probably not to be found south of the Rio Grande, was delicious. Alex immediately put it on his menu as “Thai Refried Beans.”

When Alex married his Thai cook he became very ambitious about raising a family in good style. The local schools in Thailand, to put it charitably, are adequate. Expats normally send their children to one of the expensive International Schools that resemble a country club rather than an educational institution. But it cost an arm and a leg. Last time I checked, tuition was 70- thousand dollars (US) per year. Alex was bound and determined to put his future offspring in one of these schools, so he became an uber-entrepreneur. Since his Thai was minimal, I often went with him on shopping expeditions as interpreter to help him haggle for items he could buy cheap and sell dear.

We prowled around the Chatuchak Weekend Market looking for bargains. An amazing place straight out of the Thousand and One Arabian Nights, this bazaar offers everything from pet Madagascar hissing cockroaches to pigeon milk to shingle froes to freshly minted ‘antiques.’ We found a stall that sold samurai swords for ten dollars each. They were beautifully made, and cheap enough for Alex to buy a dozen on the spot. Alex told me that back home in Texas everyone is crazy for weaponry of any kind -- the more exotic the better. He’d sell each one for two hundred bucks. But his plans to become the Samurai Sword King of the Pecos foundered when he ran afoul of US regulations regarding the shipping of weapons from overseas. The paperwork and the fees involved left him with a piddling profit margin. You can still see some of these swords on display at Que Pasa -- and they’re still available to anyone with two hundred smackers to spare.

By now I had caught the entrepreneur fever from Janney. I, too, would invest in a sure fire product that would give me a Croesus lifestyle.

My first venture was postcards. The market had dozens of artisans who produced hand-printed one-of-a-kind picture postcards that were inlaid with gold foil and frescoed with dried tropical blossoms. I figured if I bought them for ten cents each and sold them for a dollar each I’d be well on my way to a bonanza. But I was about ten years too late -- email was by then ubiquitous and tourists were not so eager to use snail mail anymore. My inventory sat and rotted in cardboard boxes in my un-airconditioned apartment.

Nothing daunted, I continued to accompany Alex to Chatuchak on weekends with my eye peeled for the main chance.

We found it one sweltering Saturday down a dim alleyway where the goldsmiths held sway. Clown jewelry! Petite little funny men made of hammered gold and bits of rubies and emeralds that could be used as brooches or earrings or attached to necklaces and wrist bracelets. They made cloisonne Chaplins and lacquered rings featuring the likenesses of Laurel and Hardy. These humble artisans sold their wares for something like fifty baht a piece -- which translates into roughly three dollars. Since my own funds were at ebb tide at the moment, Alex put up the cash until I could pay him back and we were in the clown jewelry business!

The stuff sold well on the internet, and Alex even put up a small display case in his restaurant. But just as the money started to roll in, the Thai government sent a representative from the Tax Department to talk to us about our lack of payment of the export tax.

“Don’t worry, Tim” Alex assured me. “It’s just a shakedown. They do it all the time with the restaurant. I’ll handle it.”

He handled it alright -- and we were served with a whopping bill for eighty thousand baht. After paying it off with all our profits, and then some, I lost my taste for being an entrepreneur. I sold my half of the business to Alex for some free meals at his place. But we did continue as partners in another venture closer to my true skill set. About once a month I showed up at his restaurant to do a birthday party clown gig for some expat family. What the heck -- it helped put som tum on the table . . .   

Thank You, Conrad Thiart!

To all the gentilshommes who liked my mini-memoir ‘The Clown Fries an Egg’ I want to wish a very happy “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s First Novel Published” Day. On this date in 1920 Fitzgerald’s “This Side of Paradise” was published to wide acclaim. My readers make me feel just as famous:

Mike Weakley; Gabriel Romero Sr.; Chris Twiford; Leo Acton; Alberto Ramirez; Mike Johnson; Andrew Jackson; Ron Butler; Conrad Thiart; Bruce Rechtsteiner; Kenneth L Stallings; Bruce Veldhuisen; Alex Janney; Anna Lima; Mary Pat Cooney; Jim Aakhus; Jane Caligiuri; Linda Bamonte; Patti Jo Estes Williams; and the indispensable David Orr.

“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.”

― Hermann Hesse

The Jihadi Who Turned to Jesus

It takes a lot of courage to deny a potent creed,

One that looks on carnage as a holy blessed deed.

Had I once been jihadi, could I ever come to call

On Jesus as my Saviour and Redeemer from the Fall?

Tradition and upbringing shackle many as proud slaves

And takes them to the Promised Land by way of many graves.

So here’s to one young man at least who found a better way

And is not fearful that his colleagues might want him to slay.

It gives an old man like me, grown so cynical and wry,

The hope that exaltation still can come to those who try!

The Clown Fries an Egg

(continued from The Clown and the Weatherman)

After my TV audition debacle, and with Amy’s tacit support, I began to clown around with my newscasts. This was the heyday of the folksy broadcaster, such as Paul Harvey. So I began ending my news with nonsensical sign-offs such as “And remember, folks, you can’t make a silk purse out of a corn crib” or “Don’t forget, friends, that you can take the farmer out of the country, but you can’t make him drink.”

Oscar Halvorson, the station owner, got a chuckle out of these little jokes. His wife Faye, on the other hand, was driven into a cold fury by them. But now I was feeling my oats, and her cutting remarks to me about my ‘childish on-air tricks’ didn’t draw blood anymore. It was obvious that she had no say in how Oscar ran things, at least as far as I was concerned; so I shrugged off her hectoring with a grin.

I settled into my new career, still missing the camaraderie of clown alley, but resigned to the fact that I would have to carry on the hallowed traditions of lunacy all by myself there in northwestern North Dakota. I was buoyed up considerably by the letters and postcards I continued to receive from my old pals back at Ringling. I rejoiced when I got Tim Holst’s announcement of a baby girl born to him and his wife Linda. Chico sent me several long letters detailing the trials and tribulations of being the new boss clown -- he wrote that his ultimate goal was to displace Bill Ballantine as Dean of the Ringling Clown College. Apparently Uncle Bill was losing popularity with Irvin Feld and upper circus management due to the poor material he was sending as First of Mays. (And it wasn’t long before Chico and his wife Sandy did become the heads of Clown College; Uncle Bill was given a lukewarm send-off by the show and returned the favor by writing his autobiography, Clown Alley, in which he alternately showered affection on the circus and broiled it with acidulous comments on certain inept personalities.)

The month of May that year was a typical meteorological Jekyll and Hyde story for North Dakota. The month started with raging snirt storms -- a combination of blowing snow and dirt that froze cattle where they stood and covered everything with a gray slush. Then the temperature rocketed into heat wave mode in a matter of days. My journal shows that on May 25th it reached one-hundred degrees by two in the afternoon. There was only one thing a newsman with my background could do under those circumstances -- I would broadcast an attempt to fry an egg on the sidewalk in front of Service Drug on Main Street.

At noon I took my trusty mike out into the blazing heat, with egg in hand, and cracked it over a cement slab in front of the drug store. The crowd of perspiring citizens that gathered to watch this carnival stunt freely offered their opinions as to whether or not the egg would cook. The majority were sure that it would. I gave the egg a full two minutes to fry -- with breathless commentary. But the egg did not cook at all -- not even a little white around the edges. As the crowd melted away I was left, not with egg on my face, but egg on the sidewalk -- which I had to clean up to the satisfaction of the manager of the drug store. Do you have any idea how hard it is to wipe up egg yolk on a hot sidewalk? It was anticlimactic, to be sure, but it made the local newspaper, and even old Ben Innis, the Voice of KEYZ Radio, our main competitor, mentioned it on his evening newscast. Oscar was pleased as punch with my caper -- he gave me a ten-dollar a month raise.

It looked like I had a future in radio, after all. Channeling my goofy clown ideas into audio nonsense. My success impelled me to the next Great Leap Forward in my life’s trajectory.

I was going to ask Amy to marry me.

(to be continued)

The Short Tempered Chef Makes Lamb Curry

So I was asking around at the Provo Rec Center this morning as the water aerobics instructor vainly pleaded with us to shut up and start exercising, what’s a good dish you can make with lamb? First suggestion was lamb curry -- and by golly, that’s what I’m making today. I’ve never made it before, but I reckon if I throw the right stuff together it’ll turn out okey dokey. Isn’t that how most great cooking is done?

So I got a pound of cubed lamb, a white onion, some celery stalks, a carrot (more for the color than anything else) and I’ll swish it all together in the wok with some sesame seed oil, then add a can of Thai green curry paste and a can of coconut milk, and serve the whole shebang over angel hair pasta. Me and rice noodles just don’t get along that well.

The big question is the cubed lamb is labeled ‘lamb for stew,’ so does that mean I have to simmer it a while or can I just wok it up over high heat and it’ll be ready to eat? My feet are killing me this morning (I’m wearing a pair of Nike sneakers that are 3 years old -- the soles look like black shredded seaweed -- there’s absolutely no support left, but hey, you can still see the brand name!) I think I’ll just quick cook it and take my chances on rubbery lamb . . . .

Dammit, I just realized I didn’t buy any Major Grey’s Chutney! I doubt that Market Place has any, and besides, my feet are still killing me. Right now I wouldn’t walk a block to see the Pope ride a bicycle.

The lamb was not tough, but the next time I buy that kind at Smith’s I’ll take a minute to cut each cube in half -- they were enormous. This was a very good meal -- a little underspiced, but that was easily fixed with some hot sauce and soy sauce. Now the sad part . . . since I have no one to share it with, I’ll just pack the rest in a freezer bag and hope I remember to use it some day down the road. Ever notice how even the best tasting food isn’t really all that good when you don’t have anyone to share it with? However, since most of my homecooked stuff comes out wretched I don’t get that lonely abandoned feeling too often. Thank goodness.

We Are Cyber Insects

Round the cyber bonfire we insects blindly fly

Posting inane comments that would make a numskull cry.

Somewhere deep inside we know the time we waste online

Does not improve our intellect or make our virtues shine.

But when we try to disengage, to pull the plug, we find

We’ve nothing left that we can call our own exclusive mind.