This year the Lady Vestey Victorian Festival will feature a Circus theme.
In the early days of Superior, attending a circus show was often a summer highlight. The shows traveled by rail and with five rail lines meeting here it was easy for the shows to include Superior on their routes.
A story written by Jennie Small Owen about the times in August when the Ringling Brothers Circus came to Superior was published in this newspaper about 60 years ago. With the 30th annual Memorial Weekend celebration having a Superior Strong circus theme, I think it is appropriate to reprint her story and perhaps get a feel for the excitement the circus brought to Superior every summer.
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Billboards advertising a Mammoth Herd of 40 performing elephants announced the coming visit of the Ringling Brothers three-ring circus.
“Forty Elephants!” Father would scoff in seeming doubt. But father’s making light of circus advertising did not worry us. He never missed a circus.
There was no half-way business with father on circus day either. He took the entire family, including the hired man on our Kansas farm, and we took in everything from the parade to the sideshows. In addition to his own household there was always a tearful little girl whose folks came “just for the parade.”
“Let her stay!” Father would insist when he saw her tears. He not only paid her way into the shows, but bought her peanuts, popcorn and lemonade. Not long ago, I said to my 90-year-old cousin, “You talk more about my father than you do your own.”
“Why shouldn’t I?” she retorted. “Your father took me to my first circus!”
Circus day should have been posted on the calendar in red letters, so far as my father was concerned. We would get up at 4 o’clock, milk the drowsy cows and eat breakfast by the dim light of the coal-oil lamp. Why we got up an hour earlier than usual to drive the four miles to town, I now wonder. The parade did not start until 10 o’clock. It may be we went early to avoid the dust of the other buggies and wagons.
August was usually hot and dry. Circuses were seldom rained out. Cicadas were sounding off. “Six weeks till frost,” they shrilled. The roads were shoe-mouth deep in dust. Every time a team met or passed us, a great cloud sandy loam settled on our Sunday-best clothes. A “broth of a boy” — father’s term for teenager — driving a span of ponies hitched to a red-wheeled buggy passed everybody on the road. In his wake, he not only left dust on our faces, hair, hats and dresses but on our spirits. No matter how spic and span we were when we left home, we felt “countrified” by the time we got to town. The dust did it.
But on circus day, being a country girl did not matter. The bay horses, Price and Charley, rested from the corn-plowing season, nickered and pranced like colts. They probably scented the circus animals. Father tied them to the hitching racks and we hurried over to the Hunter Brothers Store to watch the parade.
The parades were breathtaking—at least for country children. It is doubtful if there were as many as 40 elephants, but as they lumbered down Central Street with their tails and trunks entwined, we could not have been more impressed. And then there were the sleek, spirited horses, bedecked with gold and purple plumes and trappings: great gilded wagons, creaking ponderously, sturdy Shetlands looking a little sulky. Perhaps they did not like being ridden by monkeys, Glittering equestriennes smiled graciously upon two small, towhead girls. Finally there was the strident screaming calliope which we called a “call-ope.”
We had dinner at Lew Goodhue’s restaurant, always an occasion almost as exciting as the circus. Then we went to the grounds which had been vacant lots only last Saturday. Now there were men and women mingling among grazing horses,fresh painted caravans, big tents covering elephants, camels and giraffes. Other tents sheltered clowns and performers waiting for the trumpet announcing the opening of the grand spectacle. We walked around watching the animals eating their noonday meal of raw meat, shared our peanuts with the elephants; lingered long before the monkeys’ cages, fascinated by their human resemblance.
Finally we ventured into the large show tent with its three sawdust rings, its sea of waving palm leaf fans, the daring trapeze performers, the pranks of the gentle seals, the thrilling chariot races, the daring bareback riders, the ludicrous old clown who threw kisses at the pretty girls and teased the fat man and the tenderfoot who turned out to be the greatest bareback rider in the whole world.
No matter if the hot winds blew and the mortgage came due (which they did) we never missed a circus, not even in fodder years (those years, it should be explained to an urban generation, when the summer was so dry the corn produced virtually no grain but only stalks for fodder.
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As one of Marjorie Smith’s journalism students I remember Jennie Small Owen visiting Superior High School and talking to the journalism classes about her newspaper career. She was a fine writer and we are pleased to have printed a little booklet filled with her stories about growing up near Superior. Copies of the booklet are available for purchase at the newspaper office.
Her story reprinted here doesn’t include the years the circus played Superior, but she writes of it being in August. An 1897 route book maintained by the circus indicates the show played in Red Cloud on Sept. 2, Superior on Sept. 3 and Hebron on Sept. 4. Business was reported to have been good in Superior but the day was hot, windy and dusty. An 1893 route book has the circus playing in Mankato on May 11 and Fairbury on May 10.
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