How I Got Blacklisted from Ringling Brothers Circus

That's me, Michu, and Dougie Ashton. 1977.

When I returned to the Ringling Brothers Circus Blue Unit in 1977, after a two year hiatus in Thailand as a volunteer missionary for the LDS Church, the first thing that my old pal Tim Holst, the man who had initially gotten me interested in the LDS Church and then baptized me five years earlier, had said to me was: “It’s kinda like being in Hell, isn’t it?”

He was referring, I think, to the initial shock I was experiencing from the earthy and crapulous shenanigans of clown alley to which I was a daily and unwilling witness. The talk was of nothing but drinking and copulation. A blue haze of cigarette smoke hung over the alley like a London pea-souper. The slightly eccentric characters I fondly remembered from my earlier days in clown alley had somehow transmogrified into mangy ogres who delighted to spout blasphemies at the drop of a rubber chicken.

It was a far cry from the mission field, where my whole being was consecrated to gathering souls for Christ.

A few of the old stalwarts remained, like Swede Johnson, Prince Paul, and Mark Anthony -- veteran merrymakers that did not concern themselves with carnal matters but instead dedicated all their waking hours to exciting the audience’s funny bone.They were zircons in the rough. But their social lives were very private and very quiet -- they respected me as one of their own, a true zany, but they were set in their ways and didn’t need much of my company.  

I felt lonely and isolated. Gone were my boon companions of earlier days, who accompanied me to used bookstores hunting for a rare copy of Gene Fowler’s ‘Mother Goose,’ the biography of Mack Sennett, or rejoiced with me when we found a Woolworth’s that still served a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup for one dollar. These new clowns just wanted to prowl the local gin mills looking to pick up floozies. I made no secret of my disdain for their tawdry activities.

Even worse, since I was still pals with Tim Holst, who had gone from clown to ring master to the current assistant Performance Director, rumors began to circulate that I was a snitch -- that I ran to Holst with details of every misdeed perpetrated in clown alley. Such was not the case; I held  the code of clown alley as sacred -- Never Rat Out a Fellow Joey. Holst and I went jogging every day between the matinee and evening show, usually around the outside of the arena. That is when I supposedly spilled the beans to him.

So my isolation grew more pronounced as the season progressed, with hard looks and muttered curses directed my way. Until one Sabbath day, in St. Louis, Missouri, Michu, the World’s Smallest Man, pushed me over the edge . . .

I went to church that morning, as always, and had become more desconsolate than usual as I compared the stable, happy, Mormon families around me to my own bleak existence among a covey of depraved sex fiends. It wasn’t fair -- in fact, it was downright nauseating! As I seated myself at my clown trunk, I decided to read a few verses from my brand new leatherbound Book of Mormon to sooth my anguished soul.

And that’s when Michu, who was embedded in clown alley as a star comic attraction, weaved his way over to me with a large bottle of Miller’s High Life in hand and slowly poured its contents all over my scriptures.

I interrupted his high-pitched snicker by lifting him up and depositing him inside his own wardrobe trunk -- which I then closed and locked. It took the boss clown ten minutes to jimmy the lock and let him out. And by then my fate was sealed.

For it is an unalterable decree in the circus that regular people cannot physically manhandle a Little Person in any way, shape, or form. To do so means instant dismissal. I was summoned before the Performance Director, Charlie Baumann, and the assistant Performance Director, Tim Holst (my good old pal), and judgement was summarily passed. I was guilty, but would be allowed to finish out the season, since, Baumann growled at me, they couldn’t spare such an energetic fool as me in the middle of a rough tour. But I would be blacklisted; never allowed back into the Ringling clown alley. And word of my disgrace would be communicated to all other major circuses.

As the days went by I could see that Holst was agonizing about my fate. As a true blue pal he wanted to help, and finally he asked me if I wanted him to go see old man Feld, the owner of the circus, to plead my case and seek a reversal of judgement. He said he’d be glad to do it. Maybe he could do it-- but he now had a wife to support, with a kid on the way, and I didn’t like the idea of him jeopardizing his own career just to go to bat for me, a bigtop pariah. So I gave him the old John Wayne baloney: “Don’t worry about me, pilgrim” I told him. “I always land on my feet. I’ll just mosey on back to Minnesota to see what else I might can do. You just keep that wife and kid of yourn in spangles and cotton candy, ya hear me?” I gave him a friendly jab on the chin and then sauntered off into the sunset, with the brim of my ten gallon clown hat tipped up at a raffish angle.