The story is probably apocryphal. Otto wrote it down in one of my conversation notebooks in a telegraphic style, and when he handed it over to me to read it was with a wink as broad as the Mississippi at flood tide. But it's been told dozens of times since it first appeared in print in 1951 in the New York Daily Mirror:
In his early days with the circus in America, Otto was apprenticed to the Hodgini riding act. Old man Hodgini taught Griebling how to ride bareback while juggling, and how to take a fall off a galloping horse, and other needful things a bareback comedy rider should know.
But Otto grew tired of the peripatetic existence of a circus performer. One day in Rochester, Minnesota, old man Hodgini gave Otto 5 dollars, telling him to go into town to get some bread and milk.
Otto took the money, hopped a train, and went to Wisconsin to work as a logger and farmhand. He stuck it out for two years before realizing that circus performing was a better career than pulling splinters out of your hind end every night or trying to wash the smell of manure out of your clothes. So when he read in the local paper that the Hodgini troupe would be playing with a circus in a nearby town, he gathered up his meager belongings, bought a loaf of bread and a quart of milk, and quietly walked onto the circus lot to hand the long-delayed comestibles to old man Hodgini -- who, it is claimed, did not blink an eye but simply told Griebling to "get back to work."
Otto never left the tanbark circuit again . . .
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