Meeting John Toy

Information on John Toy is hard to come by.

Back in 1990, during a hiatus from circus clowning when my wife Amy and I bought a house on Como Avenue in Minneapolis so our six kids would not spill into the streets like a pack of stray dogs anymore, I got a phone call from an old clown -- John Toy. He said that a mutual friend of ours, Robin Shaw, told him I was a very nice guy and a former Ringling clown. I hadn’t heard from Robin in years -- not since she got mad at me for pouring ketchup on a shepherd’s pie she’d baked for me down at Winter Quarters. Toy said he’d like to get together sometime soon to talk about the ‘old days’ at Ringling. I sensed a loneliness in his voice, so although I was not partial to meeting strangers to wallow in nostalgia I agreed to meet him the next day at Aarone’s -- a bar and grill my dad managed on Hennepin Avenue. They had recently upgraded the place -- “for the damn carriage trade,” as my dad snorted -- so it was now a decent place for a meal.

But the next day there was an emergency at work and I couldn’t make it. I worked for Fingerhut Catalog Telemarketing as an assistant sales manager -- we were always chronically short of people to man the phones, relying heavily on penurious students from the University of Minnesota. The student newspaper had raked up enough muck to run an article about how underpaid and overworked Fingerhut telemarketers were -- half of them walked out after reading the story. Ted Deikel, the CEO, told our office he still expected us to meet our monthly sales quotas -- so all the management, including me, had to get on the horn to sell Corningware casserole dishes and percale pillow protectors to little old ladies in Bemidji. We worked double tides, so I barely had time to see my wife and kids, let alone visit with John Toy.

We rescheduled our tet-a-tet for the following month, November. That’s when all the carnival workers laid off for the winter and needed something to tide them over until the marks came out of hibernation in the spring. A dozen or so carnies always showed up at our office for work, They were extraordinarily good at selling (and lying) over the phone. As long as they didn’t cut the cake too wide we turned a blind eye to their slightly larcenous sales pitch. They moved a lot of product with a minimum of customer backwash. I could then go back to a more relaxed schedule, monitoring sales calls and reminding the staff to ‘stick to the script’ and ‘smile and dial.’

This time John Toy and I agreed to meet at Bridgeman’s Ice Cream in Dinkytown, by the U of M campus. But the day before our meeting my son Adam found a rusty old butcher knife in a trash can on his way to school and decided to bring it into his classroom for show and tell. He was immediately suspended until Amy and I could go in to give the principal an acceptable alibi for his ‘threatening’ behavior. It took us several days to convince the insanely cautious school authorities that Adam was just a curious little boy, not a homicidal psychopath.

I apologized profusely to Toy for this second postponement. Feeling slightly guilty and foolish, I invited him and his wife over for dinner. Come Hades or highwater, we would meet at long last.

But then his wife developed a serious illness that kept her hospitalized for weeks. He did nothing but weep during our last phone conversation. I fully intended to go over to his apartment, but a blizzard dumped a foot of snow on us and I put my back out shoveling the walk. By the time a chiropractor had me walking upright again John Toy’s phone number was disconnected. I had not taken the trouble to ask for his street address during our previous conversations.

So we never met. Years later when I finally found Robin Shaw’s email address out in Los Angeles I sent her a note asking for information about John Toy. But she never replied.  

The only information available on the internet about John Toy is a New York Times article from 1985. It reads in part:

John Toy clowned with many circuses, he was personally acquainted with many elephants, and he has stories to tell. I like his stories because they remind me of what Eudora Welty writes that she finds in the stories of Chekhov: ''What is real in life - and what a Chekhov story was made to reflect with the utmost honesty,'' she writes, ''may be at the same time what is transient, ephemeral, contradictory, even on the point of vanishing before our eyes.''

It is hard for me to conceive of anything with elephants as ephemeral, but in John Toy's memory the circus is a series of fragile, fleeting moments. They were good days, he says, but it wasn't all wonderland and spangles. He talks about clowns he worked with, marvels my somber 10-year-old self missed: Emmett Kelly, trying to sweep the spotlight from the sawdust, or holding out his pocket handkerchief to catch any Wallenda who might tumble from the high wire. He tells me about Gargantua (''the world's most terrifying living creature!'') a gorilla bought by Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey from a woman in Brooklyn who kept him as a house pet.

''I was lousy, terrible, when I first broke in,'' John Toy says, but with glitter on his nose and a heart painted on his forehead, he learned to use explosives and to fall flat on his face gracefully and competently (most of the time). Once in a clown band he was playing cymbals. ''The conductor kicked me in the rear,'' he said, ''and I fell on top of the cymbals and broke most of my ribs.'' He went on with the show.

He says he still doesn't know what is funny, but whatever it is, it should be done quickly.

At home in his apartment John Toy keeps his old trunk, full of costumes and the long, long shoes he designed for himself. Somewhere he still has a can of clown white. He hasn't clowned in almost 20 years, but practically every night he dreams about the circus. He does not dream about performing, about his time in the ring. Rather, his dream is always that he is putting on his makeup, getting ready for the show. ''After all,'' he says, ''most of the work was preparation. Two hours out of 24 are not that many.''

Robin Shaw, in the center