The Circus Comes to Tioga

(continued from “A Letter to Tim Holst”)

I have always tried to avoid being snooty about my circus clown pedigree. I started with Ringling Brothers in 1971, and over the ensuing years worked with just about every other circus there was. I don’t say I was a runaway hit with any of them, but I worked ‘em nonetheless. Many great clowns did their best work away from Ringling, like Dick Monday, Barry Lubin, Bill Irwin, Steve Wolski (as Harpo the Clown), and Peter Pitofsky. Me, I just did the work.  

But I never could completely shake a patrician air when I visited smaller shows -- giving the impression, I suppose, that I was slumming. But some of those mud shows . . .

The glorious North Dakota summer of 1981, when I was stuck trying to impress Becky Thingvold with plans for my make believe clown academy in Williston, comes to mind. Despite the oil boom that began gnawing at the pristine prairie, the air still sparkled with the heady tang of sage as prairie chickens strutted among the morning glory vines like returning conquerors. It was a good time to be young, in love, and without a car. I loved hiking more than driving. If you ever get to North Dakota you should definitely do some hiking. Get a good trail book like the one below.

KGCX Radio boasted both a full-time news director and a full-time sports director. I did the news in Williston, and Dewey did the sports from the home office in Sidney, Montana. He had a car, and was unusually willing to chauffeur me to distant news events to tape actualities for the station. He prided himself on being a Company Man -- always willing to drive the extra mile for the good of the station. We had both gone to Brown Institute of Broadcasting together back in Minneapolis. That is why he and I drove fifty miles one summer Saturday up to Tioga to catch a matinee of the Hooper Brothers Circus. I figured it would make a good leading story on my newscast on the coming Monday, when there was always a paucity of gripping headlines.

You may never have heard of the Hooper Brothers Circus. I know I never had. It was one of those hastily thrown together ragbags that sprouted, and then wilted, like mushrooms after a rainstorm, in the rich alluvial plains of the Upper Midwest thirty-five years ago. It was a time when everybody had a little money and everybody had work. Various circus and carnival sharpers would stitch together a few circus acts for a quick tour of the hinterlands to gouge the hayseeds for a few kopeks and then mysteriously dissolve before John Law could lay his hands on them for operating without a license (or any talent.)

And Tioga was about as out-of-the-way as you could get. It had a gas plant (courtesy of the oil boom) and a small rural hospital run by three doctors from India -- all named Patel. It’s ten miles off the main highway and at that time was surrounded by yellow bursts of rapeseed.

Dewey parked near the big top (about the size of a modest rambler) and we flashed our KGCX business cards at the ticket taker, a pimply youth who seemed more interested in picking his scabs than in our media credentials.

“Three dollars admission” he said listlessly.

“But we’re from the biggest radio station in Williams county!” I protested. “We’re here to do a story about the show.”

“Three dollars” he replied stubbornly.

I paid for myself and Dewey. The bleachers were half full of youngsters who probably wished they had gone to the Municipal Wading Pool instead. I remember little of that performance. There was a lion act, with three arthritic creatures sluggishly going through their paces, looking ready to collapse at any moment. Some horses were trotted out to do next to nothing while their trainer bellowed and cracked a whip at them. A camel was paraded around. And the candy butchers swarmed about like flies, offering popcorn, cotton candy, hot dogs, pickles on a stick, lukewarm cups of melted ice with a little Coke added as an afterthought, and circus coloring books.

Then there was the clown. I had seen him earlier in the show, dressed in a dark blue jumpsuit, shoveling up after the horses and camel. He reappeared near the end of the show in a ghastly unpowdered whiteface and dressed in what appeared to be oversized polka dot pajamas. He walked around the tent with a suitcase that was stenciled with “The Morning Paper.” He stopped occassionally to open up the suitcase to reveal a roll of toilet paper.

After the show I sought out the owners for an interview, but was shunted from surly acrobat to sullen roustabout without ever discovering the perpetrators of this tanbark travesty. It probably didn’t help that I kept introducing myself as “Tim Torkildson, formerly of Ringling Brothers.” So I settled with recording some of the departing audience.

“It’s a circus” said one young girl helpfully. “They had lions. I’m going home to wake up mom to make me dinner.”

“Can I say hello to my girlfriend Janey on air? Are we live? Hi Janey -- it’s Mitch!”

“That wasn’t much of a show” said a mother manhandling a feisty three year old while attempting to keep the howling infant in her arms from plummeting to the ground. “I wonder why the Rotary Club brought this thing here in the first place. I bet they got fleeced on it.”

Dewey and I drove back to Williston, stopping at Service Drug where I bought him a fried egg sandwich, known locally as a “gut bomb.” Dewey went to a Little League game and I went up to the studio to cobble together my leading story for Monday. I decided to use Mitch’s recording as the closer. For comedic effect (I hoped.) Then I went over to the Red Owl supermarket, where you could pick out a steak from the butcher’s counter and they would grill it for you right there in the store. Becky was in Minot covering a political rally, so I read Dickens’ “Pickwick Papers” late into the night.

Next day, Sunday, I went to the small LDS chapel for services and then took a long Sabbath nap. At four in the morning on Monday I was at the station, feeling smug about my circus ‘scoop.’ Nobody else would have it. That’s when I learned, from the AP wire, that St.Joseph’s Catholic Church in Williston had burned to the ground on Saturday night. I still used my Hooper Brothers story as the lead. I wasn’t going to let it go to waste, especially since the station would not be reimbursing me for any of my time or money.

When the station owner Oscar Halvorson came in later that day he said “Nice story on that circus up in Tioga. Start the news with something happy, is what I say.”

His wife Faye had a different opinion about my morning newscast.

“Why didn’t you have more on the fire?” she demanded. “You’ve got no sense of local community! I don’t know why Oscar ever hired you.”

I spent a good part of Monday afternoon thumbing through my paperback Thesaurus, looking up synonyms for harpy: Shrew. Hag. Termagant. Virago. Xanthippe. I’d be using them all in my next letter to Holst.  

(to be continued)

Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

The person that is right for me in marriage don’t exist;

Tall or short or thin or fat, of all the gals I’ve kissed

The only one that stands a chance of matrimony strong

Is the one who never tells me that I may be wrong.

Agreeable and pliant and attuned to all my moods,

She will never harbor any grudges, slants, or feuds.

And if there’s such a woman, and I don’t say that there is,

They’ll put her in an archive as a tantalizing whiz.

Thank You, Jeffrey Loseff!

Discerning readers deserve dedicated writers -- so for all those who liked my mini memoir “A Letter to Tim Holst” I wish to say “May the golden years be reflected in your bank account!”

Jeffrey Loseff; John Jay; Billy Jim Baker; John Rutledge; Mike Weakley; William Cushing; Matt Kaminsky; James Wilson; John Blair; Sue Ellen Yung; James Iredell; and the effervescent Bushrod Washington.

“You can make anything by writing.” C.S. Lewis

No Magic in How G.O.P. Plan Lowers Premiums: It Pushes Out Older People

There was an old man from Secaucus

Who said bitterly “So they block us

From medical care

Because of white hair;

Congress is out to just fock us!”

Jessica Farrar of Texas

Down in Texas legislators don’t have much to do,

And so they mess around with bills that really are cuckoo.

Farrar has got a doozy that she thinks is pretty sweet;

Onanism is the subject that she wants to treat.

She thinks that single-handed she’ll upset the applecart.

How much is she making to be flippant and so tart?

Texans, put your lawmakers on chain gangs for a change

Instead of paying them to make up laws so weird and strange!

A Letter to Tim Holst

(continued from A Clown in Williston ND)

I have always loved writing letters. I still write them today, in the Age of Email -- mostly to grand kids, who think that mail carriers are my personal assistants. In the Ringling clown alley of 45 years ago I nearly bankrupted myself, buying stamps and stationery. My portable Underwood clacked merrily away day and night.

My news director job at KGCX turned out to be less of a sinecure than I thought it would be. And I wrote reams of letters to friends back in clown alley about it. I had to jump out of bed at 4am to walk down to the station and turn it on. The station’s broadcasting equipment was elderly, bought piecemeal from Army surplus entrepots and assembled by Oscar Halvorson, the owner. He was actually a wheat farmer who had taught himself electronics over the years, first as a hobby and then as a business investment. My job was to get Oscar’s vacuum tubes warmed up properly before turning on the main switch to flood the whole shebang with current. A cold vacuum tube is finicky and liable to blow up if not handled with kid gloves. This required an exact sequence of events; turning on switch A before switch B, and waiting ten minutes before turning on switch C, and so on. My skills in this department were puny. I’d forget the order or wait too long or do something else that left the broadcast assembly unfriendly and uncooperative. Then I’d have to call Oscar to guide me. Although he was a farmer, he was not an early riser. And he didn’t care to be roused from slumber while it was still pitch black outside. He soon gave me a nickname: Dum Gutt. That’s Norwegian for stupid boy.

Once I had the whole thing up and humming, I played a scratchy recording of the Star Spangled Banner and then announced that KGCX was now on the air. This was followed by the latest weather forecast off the AP machine and then a selection from an old Jim Neighbors record called “Hymns and Country Favorites.” At this point I turned everything over to the announcer at the home office over in Montana and busied myself getting my first local newscast ready.    

I rarely got out of the office before 4pm. And then there were city council meetings, county commissioner meetings, and school board meetings to attend at night. And whenever there was a lull in the action at the office I wrote letters. Lots of letters. On thick and grainy yellow paper provided for the AP machine in large rolls. This gave me the appearance of being very busy all the time, which impressed Oscar, but not his wife Faye, who did a ten minute Farm Cooking show each morning.

“You’re always writing away but you don’t produce much news” she liked to tell me. I would just smile and nod my head in reply. Then I would mention her in my next letter to Tim Holst as “that horse-faced harpy with a beehive hairdo.” For of all the people I wrote to during my tenure at KGCX about half of the letters went to Holst. Because he always wrote back -- not much, maybe just a postcard, but it was comforting to get a reply with the Ringling letterhead on it. I always made carbon copies of my letters, and I still have a goodly number of them today, salted away in an old footlocker. One of my first letters to him from Williston concerned l’affaire Becky Thingvold. With a few edits for clarity and continuity, here’s what I wrote him:

My Dear Holsty Tolsty;

These early North Dakota mornings are only made bearable by the song of the birds. I take a ten block walk from my basement apartment to the station, along streets that have houses on one side and wheatfields on the other side.The stoplights flash green until 6am, then automatically begin their duty of harassing what little traffic there is. Downtown consists of a sleepy Main Street that dips down to the Amtrak station. On the other side of that is a slough that drains into the Missouri River. Meadowlarks and magpies and jays banter with me as I stroll, as if merrily mocking my decision to abandon the big top. I may take up birdwatching, as opposed to girl watching -- less stress.

I’m involved with a girl named Becky, a reporter on the local rag. Well, not ‘involved’ involved -- more like I have fed her a string of fibs about starting my own Clown College here in town. She wasn’t impressed with my clowning background until I mentioned that I would start up a clown school. She wants to attend it, to write about it for the paper, and if I could make her my only student . . . . (insert your own dirty clown joke here.)

So it seems I’m committed to training the rubes around here in the fine art of pie throwing and pants dropping. Good thing I’ve got my clown trunk stored in my mom’s basement. I wonder how much it costs to have it shipped out here on the train?

Boy, I miss living on the train! A different view from my window each week and those familiar sounds and reeks -- Roofus snoring like a buzz saw and raw sewage dripping on the tracks. Here I rent a basement apartment for one-hundred dollars a month. It has a small furnished living room and kitchen and a huge bedroom with a king size bed that’s the size of my roomette back on the circus train. I wonder who has my roomette this season? Bet it’s a First of May. Please tell me what they are like this season -- they can’t be as good as we were that first season.

Well, that’s all for now -- I’ve got to go down to the Cop Shop to see what Chief Atol has been up to. He’s a roly-poly chain smoker who starts every morning by replacing his Winstons with celery and carrot sticks, but by late afternoon he’s alway back on the nicotine -- like a dog back to its vomit. He’s from a tribe of Lebanese that settled in these parts sixty years ago as shopkeepers and cafe owners. Now they own most of the construction and paving companies in the county -- remember I told you there’s an oil boom going on here? The Chief was one of the main hellraisers in Williston when he was a kid, until, the way he tells it, he was brought before a judge who gave him a choice -- either ninety days in jail or he could join the police force. He chose the flatfoot option and worked his way up to Chief. That’s the way things work around here, I’ve noticed. If you’re a native you always move to the top of the greasy pole, and if you’re an outsider (like me) you stay where you are.

Be good, amigo -- and if you can’t be good at least be Republican.  Tork.

A week later I got Holst’s reply on a postcard:

Dear Tork; the new clowns are a sorry bunch. All college grads. They overthink the clown gags until Swede and Prince Paul start foaming at the mouth. Linda is pregnant. How does Barnum Bailey Holst sound for a name?

Yours until the popcorn runs out, Tim Holst.

(to be continued)

Restaurant Review: The Worst Restaurant in Provo.

There is a certain simple elegance to a hamburger with fries. No one is looking for a revelation between the bun or Balm of Gilead in the greasy french fry bag. Just have ketchup, mustard, salt, and napkins available, and I can enjoy myself on a basic, earthy level. But somehow the Rocky Mountain Drive Inn in Provo has managed to bollox up that simple equation terribly.

Their booths are designed for midgets. I couldn’t slide into any of them. The don’t even bring you your tray; you have to go up and get it yourself. A small thing, surely; but it’s the little details that add the right soupcon to a meal eaten out. Their decor is a puzzling, not to say disconcerting, blend of picture window and photos of Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, and Ella Fitzgerald. What those three have to do with burgers and fries I cannot figure out. Unless it’s the fact that I’m pretty sure none of the three ever set foot in this forsaken burgery.

As for the food. Suffice it to say that the ketchup was the only part I found palatable. The french fries were wishy-washy; some were hard and stiff as an ironing board while other slices were spongy and starchy. My quarter cheese burger . . . well, it there was a quarter pound of meat in there, I’m a Baptist! And it leaked a goopy orange sauce with every bite until my table swam in it like kindergarten finger paint. It came lukewarm and by the time I was halfway done it had started to congeal into a cold and heartless piece of wreckage that Caligula would not feed to his prisoners. For the first, and I fervently hope the last, time in my adult life I couldn't finish either the burger or the fries. And I hadn't had any breakfast. Even my fountain drink tasted off, and there was no ice in their ice machine.

On the off chance I might be mistaken in my opinion, I asked the guy sitting in the next booth how he liked his corn dog and fries. He was wearing a black hoodie with Provo Law stenciled on the front.

"It was okay" he said grudgingly, as if aware if he perjured himself too badly he might be out of a job.

If you’re into culinary self-flagellation, by all means stop by the Rocky Mountain Drive Inn. Otherwise, fuhgeddaboudit.

A Clown in Williston ND

(continued from A Clown at Brown)

One of the first people I met at my new gig in Williston was Becky Thingvold, who worked as a general assignment reporter for the Williston Daily Herald. She had just graduated from Minot State College and the Herald was her first professional job. She was short and pert with brunette hair and an upturned nose, so I decided to fall in love with her and sweep her off her feet with my media savvy -- learned over the years at Ringling as a publicity-happy clown.

“I’m the news director at KGCX you’ve been hearing so much about” I began modestly.

“I thought you were hired by KEYZ Radio; they’re the only radio station in town as far as I know” she replied sweetly.

“Technically, KGCX is located across the state line in Sidney, Montana -- but we have a news and sales office here in town” I replied through gritted teeth. This was a sore spot with me -- I worked at a satellite office for the station, not even the home office. I thought I would be a big fish in a small pond, but it looked instead like I was a tadpole in a puddle.

“Well, what’s so special about you?” she asked impertinently. Now I was getting to like her.

“Oh, nothing much -- it’s just that my last job was as a clown with Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus. You might have heard of them . . . “ I waited for her double-take, but instead she did one of those funny girl moves when their bra or corset or whatever the hell it is they use to keep themselves vertical starts to pinch. Then she smoothed the front of her blouse and said “So you have no previous broadcast or journalism experience? Interesting. How do you think you’ll do with such a demanding job?”

“Why, um,I think it’s just . . . “ I began to splutter with indignation, sounding like a toy motorboat. I needed to make a bombshell announcement to recover my equilibrium, which this snip of a girl had sadly discombobulated.

“Actually, my job at the station will take second place to my main goal here in Williston” I said, wondering what in the Sam Hill my brain was going to tell my mouth to say next. The two were definitely not in sync at this moment.

“And what’s that?” she asked, looking more interested.

“I’m opening a clown academy here in town, to train young people in the ancient slapstick art of circus buffoonery!” I practically crowed.   

“Wow, that’s great!” she said enthusiastically. Now I had her. “I’d love to be one of your first students and write about it for the paper.”

“Well,” I temporized, rubbing my chin, “we’ll have to see about that. To be fair I’ll have to hold auditions to see who might have the raw talent necessary to successfully complete the course -- but I’ll certainly keep you mind, Becky. Mind if I call you Becky?”

“Not at all -- and I can call you Tim?”

“Of course. Why don’t we go down to Service Drug on Main for some fried egg sandwiches and talk it over some more? My treat.”

“Sure, Tim!”

And so we did. Using my turbo-imagination, which scaled breathtaking heights of folly and bombast under the impetus of her coruscating blue eyes, I briefly sketched out my plans to open the Academy as soon as possible, with the ultimate goal of putting Williston on the map as home to a renaissance of earthy big top comedy. After all, I boasted, I had worked directly under the greats like Emmett Kelly, Lou Jacobs, and Otto Griebling; the Dean of the Clown College himself, Bill Ballantine, a famous author and illustrator, had hand drawn my diploma for me (he did that for every graduate that year.)  I could hand pick my instructors from my close personal friends in the Ringling clown alley. Becky ate it up like laudanum-laced licorice.  

“I gotta go write this up and have my editor approve it” she apologized as she got up from her counter stool. “It should be in tomorrow’s paper” she said. “Meet you here tomorrow for lunch, then?” she asked.

Thrilled at my unexpected and total triumph, I merely nodded pleasantly in the affirmative, maintaining a complete sangfroid. After she was gone I strolled over to the candy counter and ordered several Russell Stover Maple Cream Easter Eggs as a sort of non-alcoholic digestif. They were on sale, two for a quarter. Then I went next door to walk up the dusty wooden stairs to the second storey office of KGCX.

As I sat down to my desk to peruse the latest pickings from the AP wire, the enormous scope of my gasconade hit me like the Tunguska Event. I could never pull off such a stunt by myself, and even if I could get a school of sorts up and running I had no idea if anyone in this hayseed community of 14-thousand would be the least bit interested in learning to clown.

“Uh, Arvella,” I said, turning to the office receptionist. She was a local farm girl with a face that would stop a sundial. “Do you think anyone would be very interested in learning how to become a circus clown around here?”

She put down her crochet needle and yarn to squint at me through her glasses.

“What? No! Who cares for that kind of thing” she replied decidedly. “Don’t forget you have to do the cattle prices from Fargo at 3!”

“No, I won’t forget” I said glumly. This was a fine kettle of fish I’d just pickled myself in. What was I going to do?  

(to be continued)

Thank You, Matt Kaminsky!

For all the many readers who liked my mini-memoir “Yellowed Journalism,” I just want to say May It Rain Gummi Bears On Your Parade!

Mike Weakley; Charles W. Fairbanks; Chris Twiford; Thomas R. Marshall; Matt Kaminsky; Charles G. Dawes; Gabriel Romero Sr.; Charles Curtis; John Nance Garner; Zasu Pitts; Henry A. Wallace; Alben W. Barkley; Nelson Rockefeller; and the magical Walter Mondale.

“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”

Steve King from Iowa

Out there in the cornfields stands a man so white and true

He throws out all the babies that do not share his own hue.

Not a racist, mind you; but a xenophobic dude

Whose policy is radical, and also very shrewd.

For on the fringe Steve King has found constituent support

For his idea America must be a kangaroo court.

God bless this man of tunnel vision, squinting at tomorrow --

Making sure that infants will grow up in ethnic sorrow.