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Recollections of a Circus Pastor - Part 5 by The Rev. Don Brewer 

Submitted by Editor on   6/11/2004
Last Modified

Mud shows in the east, 1963-1973

Part V- Boas Brothers Circus, 1968

By The Rev. Don Brewer (don.brewer@buckeye-express.com)

Click Here to list entire series

Dr. Charles Boas phoned me one day in 1964 to introduce himself and to ask that I meet him at a trade show near my home. His name was familiar to me as there had been a lot of publicity when he left his job teaching economic geography at a state school in Michigan to join the Penny Brothers circus as a clown. Unfortunately his fifteen minutes of fame was not enough to raise a family on. He left performing for a job as booking agent for Dory Miller, and then the corporation shows – Beatty-Cole, etc. It was in this capacity that he was attending the trade show for the purpose of booking the corporations circuses.

Charlie was a pretty good booking agent. His education in economic geography was a big plus factor in knowing when to put a show in an area whose income expanded at particular times of the year. But booking was not satisfying to Charlie. It meant he was away from his family for long periods of time, and it is a lonely life on the road. Besides, he left teaching to be in the circus, and booking isn’t exactly being in the circus. In the mid sixties he went back to teaching at York College near his home in Abbottstown, PA. And he dreamed of taking out his own circus in the summers.

He phoned me once about 5:00 in the morning to ask that I accompany him to West Virginia to look at some circus equipment that had been used by a little show called Burling Brothers Circus, run by a man named Burlingame, recently deceased. Charlie’s early morning call meant that he was heading my way and would pick me up in a couple hours. There was not a lot of usable stuff at the Burlingame farm. A couple trailers looked as though they would pull apart if someone hooked up to them. The big top canvas tore in our hands as we tried to roll the bundles. The seats were five high, and Charlie declared with experienced savvy that you can’t make any money with five high seats. We left without purchasing anything. We had several opportunities to meet after that.

In the fall of 1967 I wrote Charlie, wondering if he had gathered up enough stuff by then to start a circus. His immediate reply was something like: “Strange that you should mention it, I have indeed gathered up the appropriate appus crappus to put on a circus. My hope is to take one out for about two weeks next summer and play small towns where the dirt road meets the paved. Such stellar places as Litter Barrel, Falling Rocks, and Rest Stop. I have a 40x60 square end big top, and some seats. We can rent the trucks. I am inviting all my circus fan friends to spend their vacation with me. Already have lined up a very good band. Can you join us with your acts?”

By this time I had a four poodle act. I put together a plate spinning act for myself, and my wife and I had worked up a balloon sculpturing act in which we made large balloon animals and gave them out to the kids in the audience. I got the idea when I saw a clown made a dog during the come-in. We used this act every year. It didn’t seem like a circus act, but it went over well.

I had a pastor friend by the name of Jim Percy. He had been a magician as a youth. I asked him if he and his family would like to spend their vacation with a circus. I offered him my magic act. They thought it was a great idea.

As weeks rolled by and there was much correspondence between Charlie and myself, there were inevitable changes in plans. Charlie bought a larger top, a 60 round with two thirties, I believe, from Dave Wharton. Charlie insisted that he had cunningly bargained with Dave by saying “I won’t give you a penny more than $400 for it!” In later years I asked Dave about it, and his take on it was, “I was glad to get $400 for it. I didn’t think I would get that.”

Having a bigger tent gave Charlie bigger dreams. He set out to book somewhat larger towns than he originally intended. Some of the towns in Eastern Pennsylvania we played were East Berlin, Duncannon, Susquehanna, Mount Joy, and Lebanon, not in that order. And now he had the 40x60 to use as a side show top. This, of course, meant a banner line, stages, and side show acts. He declared that I could be the side show manager.

When we all met at winterquarters – Charlie’s family farm- he had indeed gathered up quite a crew. He had even gotten his brother to put a hundred bucks into the show so it would really be Boas Brothers. Since his world was the academic, this show had probably the highest level of graduate degrees of any show ever on the road. There were a couple PHDs, and I have lost track of how many Master’s degrees. There were only a couple people who didn’t at least have a bachelor’s.

One surprise was that he had five high seats – I think the same ones he had rejected from the Burlingame show – I never directly asked him where they came from. He touted his cook, an old railroad show cook. “We’re going to eat well, cause this guy knows what he is doing.” Well, the guy may have known what he was doing, but he was so slow he drove everybody crazy. He made coffee in the morning in a big camp coffee pot. He dumped in a pound of coffee, filled it with water, ad boiled it. Throughout the day he just added more water. It was so gritty you had to strain it through your teeth. After a couple days the crew complained so much about this guy that Charlie bought him a bus ticket and sent him home.

Now we needed a cook. The only one who could fill the bill was the guy who had signed on as boss canvasman. So another friend of Charlie’s, a high school teacher of trade vocations, took over as boss canvasman. Now you have to understand that the daily job of putting this show up and taking it down was tough. We have no elephant, no stake driver, and no canvas spool. Each day the toll on our bodies was worse. I have to admit that I was never so physically tired in my life. We were walking zombies.

The new boss canvasman gave us the only thing that passed for humor. It was his daily temper tantrums. We had a bailring top. It had to be pulled up by a line of men, some from the show and some from the town. On the last tug to get the canvas to the top of the pole, the boss would walk down the line explaining to the towners that it was very important that we coordinated dropping the rope together so that he could get the slack to wrap it around the pole pin, holding it in place. “So”, he instructed them, “When I say ‘drop it’, you let go of the rope”. On his instructions we would pull the tent up as high as it would go, then he would set himself and yell, “Okay, let her go.” The guys on the show knew that he meant let go of the rope, but he had told the towners that the signal was to be “drop it”, so they would hold onto the rope. Then the boss would get angry and start to yell “I told you when I say drop it, drop itl!!” This would go on for awhile, and happened every day. It was so ridiculous that none of us ever clued him in to the fact that he was using two different signals, and he certainly never caught on. As I said, it was our only daily amusement, to see him have a caniption fit.

After helping to get the big top in the air, it was my job to set up the tent, bannerline, and stages. When I got to winterquarters I was told that there had been no time to build proper sideshow stages. They had an eight by twelve stage top for inside but the only way to hold it up was with concrete blocks. The concrete blocks were the straw that almost broke the camel’s back. It was work enough to set up the tent and the bannerline – usually by myself. Carrying in those concrete blocks was murder.

Since I was the sideshow manager I got to wear the suit and tie and fedora and make the openings. I liked that. My wife melody was the escape artist. She would stand on the bally platform and I would choose a young man who was with several other people to step up on stage and chain her up, then accompany her into the tent where she would attempt to escape. Of course the group that the volunteer was with all bought 35 cent tickets to get in. Sometimes she didn’t get out, so I would congratulate the volunteer and unlock her with the key. We also provided three other acts in the sideshow – magic, human blockhead, and sword box.. Jim Nordmark did fire eating. One afternoon I went out on the bally platform and there was a well formed line at the marquee. I did the opening and all the usual stuff, but not one person would leave the line to buy a ticket. Some days you got it and some days you don’t.

Charlie had hired a rodeo man who had two trick horses and a brahma bull. The horses had never worked in a tent before, and he had a lot of trouble with them. He rode the brahma bull into the top, but the audience was not protected as they are in a rodeo ring. He was real nervous about the conditions, and he never showed up on the second date.

Charlie made some phone calls, and found an elephant act. It showed up on the third day in a u-haul truck accompanied by a guy who had never worked it. The elephant was a rogue, worse that the Brahma bull. We put it in the show once, and realized this wasn’t going to work. We sent it home. Apparently there was something wrong with this animal, for it died a couple weeks later.

That left the only animals on the show as my dog act. In addition there was Jim Percy’s magic act, which consisted of illusions I supplied, and featuring his wife and my wife. Their son Dave played in the band, and the other son, Rick, was a clown. Pastor Percy several years later became chaplain for Circus Kirk, and then spent some time on the Schlientz show and Hoxie. Son Rick became quite a trumpeter and was in the band for Hanneford and others, and led the band for several years at the Circus Museum in Baraboo.

Charlie started out as the big show announcer, but after a couple days there was so much work for him to do keeping the equipment rolling he asked me to take over. Joe Myers was the lead clown. He had a routine with a “rocket”, actually an old mortar shell. He would declare that he was going to light the rocket and shoot it off. The announcer would holler “You can’t do that. You might blow up the audience”. Joe would answer, “That’s ok. We’ll get a new audience tomorrow.” The announcer would then declare, “If you shoot that thing off in here you’re going to put a hole in the tent”, at which Joe would look at the top, full of holes, and then pan at the announcer and shrug his shoulders.

We had an opening walkaround, of course, designed mostly to let people know that we were a people circus, not an animal circus. Oh well, the tickets were only a dollar. I did my plate spinning act, Melody and I did the balloon act, she did the dog act and we had web and ladder . Additional acts were provided by Jim Nordmark, who did trampoline, juggling, and a gorilla suit act. Jim wasn’t a real proficient performer, so his acts were over pretty fast. We had a grand flag drop finale, with all the cast circling the arena carrying flags to the appropriate music. All in all it wasn’t too bad a show that went for a little over an hour.

After the show on the first day we put her away for the first time. When the canvas was down the poles remained standing, of course. Then Charlie informed me that he had another job for me. He explained that they had to lower the poles one at a time by letting them down with a truck. However, in the process there is a point at which the triangulation was such that the truck could no longer hold the pole, and it simply fell. If it hit the ground in could split. Therefore there had to be someone beneath it to “catch” the pole in the crotch of a six foot jack. And I had been chosen as the one dumb enough to try it. I had never seen it done before, but I learned pretty fast. With that thing coming down at you you don’t want to miss it.

Well, the Boas Brothers Circus lasted just a little over two weeks. It couldn’t have gone on any longer. I know I had never worked so hard in all my life Everyone involved was absolutely beat, and we were glad when it was all over. Charlie was going to have to find another way to play circus owner with all his appus crappus, and that’s the story for next year.

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