They started as performers. When he Eddie the older brother was eight years old. And as his little sister, they'd seen a circus and set up some crude rigging in the back yard. And Ben and I think it was 1903 went to the Atlanta State Fair and did kind of an act on their own. They passed the hat and the story goes, they collected $400, which they presented to their mother. And their mother said, You're not going back to school. You're making the family living because imagine to the inflation calculator in your head, right? That's a big, big sum for children to make.
A common often tongue in cheek suggestion for a career path, or a break from one would be running off to join the circus. At one point in the modest sized town of Bloomington, Illinois, that option was a viable one. And those that did started a trend that entwined Bloomington with the history of the big top. This is random acts of knowledge presented by Heartland Community College. I'm your host, Steve fast. Today's guest manages a huge collection of circus artifacts and memorabilia at Illinois State University. She explains why ISU is the home of such a large collection of circus ephemera and why the circus is tied to Central Illinois history.
I'm marine Bronstein on the Special Collections librarian at Illinois State University. And I'm coming to Heartland later in October to do a session on circus history of this community.
I think a lot of people that come to this community or maybe even grew up in this community don't realize that there is such connection to circus history. So how did it all start with Bloomington Normal and the circus
you know, it all goes back to a person I consider the most overlooked man in American history and that's Jesse fell who's Jesse fell? Do you know?
I do know who Jesse fel is. He's he Well, he is connected with Abraham Lincoln exactly as a couple of very prominent streets named after Bloomington Normal onto the University of Tennessee University. I was a mover and shaker in Illinois politics.
Where would we be without Jesse fo you know, he's the guy who convinced Lincoln to run for president rights maybe not in these United States, but he had a nephew and that nephew opened the first gymnasium in Bloomington. I can't make this up. The Matthew's name was I fall he went by his first initial. And in that first gymnasium in the mid 1870s, downtown Bloomington he installed this relatively new fangled apparatus for exhibition. It had been used as an exercise apparatus before but had never been used as something that could entertain people. And that was a trapeze invented by a guy you also know whether or not you realize it, but his name was Jules leotard, right? leotard right? So they named that after him, right? Exactly. The leotard is named after him, but he invented trapeze in Paris, France in the 1850s. And so it was really incredible, nearly 25 years later that that apparatus was installed in this new gym, downtown Bloomington, at the corner of Eastern Washington streets. And that first gymnasium was opened to all the men in the community. There was a subscription you had to pay to belong, which makes sense. And then every spring they had an exhibition of talent. Well, a couple of young men, young boys, really teenagers had belonged to that gym and did a routine on the trapeze. That the local newspaper said were every bit as good as professional troopers. Well, that's all those boys needed to hear, right? Going back to school or tripping as a circus performer, which would you choose? They chose being circus performers. So they went out and we have not found any evidence of how they did that first season, but you wouldn't expect it. But they came back to this community in the wintertime to practice their craft and then went on again successive seasons and started growing their fame.
Before this, the traveling circuses or carnivals or whatever, had no trapeze act at all correct?
Well, no, they'd had a trapeze act in the circuses. The way we think of trapeze with a flyer and a catcher and doing tricks between the two bars, if you will, was not really in evidence at that time there was single trapeze performers, but even it was in its infancy at that time.
How common was it to see any trapeze at all in a gymnasium setting or anywhere else before this?
I don't know. I've never done the research on that, that to see how prevalent trap pieces were. But I can tell you that from Jules leotard, quote unquote inventing the trapeze to it becoming a finishing act for circuses, it didn't take very long for that to happen. And I think perhaps that's because of the danger involved. Audiences kind of thrilled to see a dangerous act and what could be more dangerous than watching people over your head. Do incredible stunts, even with a net below when the net can kill you if you land wrong in it. That's a big deal.
Did word get out about this particular act? And then it became more popular did that somehow draw more people to Bloomington Normal? How did how did it continue?
Yeah, great question. So their act Like I said, we don't know how the first few seasons of their act went. But over successive seasons, they kept saying to people, you know, come back to Bloomington practice in our community because we have the space for it. We're not as expensive as Chicago or St. Louis. There's good rail service between those two towns come and practice like they did in the gymnasium that was in town and then later the YMCA that was built that had rigging permanently installed to support the Flying Trapeze and then the barn that was on East Emerson street that was also built for the specific purpose of training trapeze flyers. So we had this wonderful training ground. And I would say, because I'm a farm kid, beautifully strong farm kids to actually take up the art of flying and being fearless while doing it.
So it was something that was seasonal was is something that this is the time when people come here to train on the trapeze. And the rest of the time. They're back wherever else was that how it worked?
Well, generally, how it worked was circuses back in the day, and I'm talking the late 1800s through the 1950s. Really before circuses got into buildings, they would perform under canvas in the tent, right. And that tent, that tended season would start generally in April and end in October. So what would happen is the performers would go out and perform for those weeks. And then they come back to Bloomington. Or they'd maybe they'd go back for home wherever home was for a couple of weeks and then come to Bloomington and then practice their craft and then go out again.
So yeah, since the barn was inside, and he didn't know that they didn't need to worry about any of that. Okay, so how did this develop after that? Were there other iterations of circus performing that then followed this along?
Yeah. So the bands were the first the green brothers, they they performed professionally as the Libyans. And they did so for about 50 years, which is unheard of. It's like, Tom Cruise, right, having a 50 year, stay in the market of entertainment is phenomenal. But that was the Levant and we're just kept spreading that we had these facilities and we're willing to train people. And then if if you wanted to get finished as an artist, you knew to come to Bloomington, and it just kept snowballing, if you will, over the course of decades. Now,
did we have trapeze coaches that lived here that made their home in this area? You think of other I guess sports camps, right? You have somebody that has a job, and then they they take the summer in the case not here because it's this that's the circus season. But you know, though, they'll train people to come to baseball camp or gymnastics camp or something was similar in how these performers were trained. Yeah,
you know, there was act captains. You can think of them as that, as that or act managers that were also in the act. One of the first is one of the most well known this, and that was Eddie ward. Eddie and his sister Jenny were the ones responsible for building that barn on Emerson street. That became this training ground for so many. Eddie Ward would contract all of his acts with the American circus corporations. So for example, Miki King was an orphaned girl who grew up in Vermont and area, Canada and US in that upper northeast area of the country. And she went to see a circus and fell in love and thought that's a better job than working as a 16 year old in the Woolen Mills. And so she was hired on and ended the season back here in Bloomington and then eventually, under Eddie Ward's tutelage on her own grit and determination becomes billboards, female Performer of the Year 1936. That's pretty big deal, right? What did she claim was hometown. Was it in Vermont, or was it Bloomington it was Bloomington. That's just one example.
So how prevalent were circuses? Back then? Were there a bunch of little circuses, a couple of big circuses? How did it what was the structure of this style of entertainment back then?
Yeah, this entertainment was the number one form of entertainment. From I'm gonna say, golly, the first circus in America was 1793. You can't say it was started then. The Circus started then for sure. But was that the number one entertainment form? No. But the certainly by the 18th, the mid 1800s, up through 1950 Circus was the number one form of entertainment in this country. You didn't have to go far to see it. It came to you. And there were all sorts of sizes of circuses. There were the big shows the Ringling Brothers, the Barnum and Bailey and then when they joined in 1919, Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey, there were the smaller shows and the the main competition to Ringling was the American circus Corporation in Piru, Indiana. And those were the John Robinson Sells Floto head and back Wallace, there were five of them all told, but then there were other family circuses that would troop as well. So wonderfully rich and varied form of entertainment for your various sizes of circuses,
kind of like unlike some theater, can see your local production of something you can see a touring production of something or you're a touring productions in big cities that do runs and then they have two or three places where like Broadway or something exactly. So what what would a regular say? circus have been like around the time this was at the heyday of Bloomington ins involvement in the circus like if you were to go see one of the bigger circuses, what would you see? In terms of the variety of the trapeze acts? But what else? Oh, golly,
well, let's start with the the circus coming into town on a train, right. And children of all ages would go down to watch the unloading of the equipment. And then the setting up on the lot to see how man and beast work together to get that done. And then in the up and through, I'm going to say the 1920s when automobiles are really coming to the fore as one this kind of ended, there would be a parade through town and it would end with the KALLIOPI the cacophonous Kelly up sound. It's a client people at circus people call it Kelly open. I've been trained to say it right, from their perspective. But it would, it would have a spectacle. Every theme had a spectacle, which was a quasi entertainment quasi educational theme. So it could be something like Joan of Arc, or it could be something like Columbus discovering America for Barnum and Bailey in 1892, the anniversary of that happening so that schools, teachers could take their children to the circus, and then they could see the show and hear the music and see wonderful things they'd never seen before maybe only heard of perhaps in church, people from foreign lands, animals from foreign lands. The first zoos in the country, were actually part of the circus menageries it was just a wildly disparate, they often likened it to a dream, setting up in a lot. And then you're there all day watching the whole process watching the show. And then by the time you fall asleep, you wake up the next day, and there's nothing there. Was it a dream? You know, that's, that's kind of the romanticized version of the circus back then.
We see this connection with the trapeze and circus in Bloomington. Are there other traditions or other elements of how the circus evolved that that were tied to Bloomington Normal?
Hmm. Well, you know, Bloomington Normal also had, we had wire walkers that lived in town, and we had other managers that lived in town, advanced agents, that kind of thing. But really, the the number, the quantity of trapeze performers we had outweigh the others that we had in town related to the circus.
Well, you mentioned the one performer who came from Vermont and yeah, Mickey, Mickey King, what other famous performers came through? Tell us some of the stories of these people?
Oh, my goodness, well, it's I told you about Eddie and Jenny Ward, they started as performers. When he Eddie, the older brother was eight years old, and his little sister, they'd seen a circus and set up some crude rigging in their backyard. And then I think it was 1903 went to the Atlanta State Fair and did kind of an act on their own. They passed the hat. And the story goes, they collected $400, which they presented to their mother. And their mother said, we're not going back to school. You're making the family living because imagine do the inflation calculator in your head, right? That's a big, big sum for children to make. But they did. They continued their career. And we're very, very famous first as Double Trapeze performer So one trapeze bar over the other same set of ropes on either side, no net below. And Jenny attained such a following, if you will, an international following that there was a young British interviewer looking for a magazine that was hounding her for an interview, she finally said, Yes, I'll do this interview with you and, and sat for the interview. And he asked some wonderful questions about her upbringing. And then he said, Are you not scared of anything? I watched you do flips from a top bar to the bottom bar where you're caught by your ankles with your brother, are you never scared? She said, Well, no, he's my brother. Of course, he's going to catch me. And so the journalist thought about that for a while and he said, Well, are you scared of anything? And she said, Oh, yes. I'm scared of two things. I'm scared of fire. And I'm scared of trains. And he could understand fire, of course. But why trains? And she said, Well, if I'm crossing the street and I heal, she gets stuck in a rail and a train is coming. What's going to happen? Well, how did she die? See in a railroad accident, in a flamed in flames crazy.
Hopefully, she should have warned flats
while she wasn't run over. Okay, it was it was a railroad accident. The Hagenbeck Wallace, railroad accident of 1918 but trapped legacy story. It is a crazy story, but that's just that's just too and his most famous pupil was art conselho. A guy just wrote a book about who was a truant, who was pulled off the street by his ear by the YMCA physical director, and said, kid, you need to learn something. You're not doing anything with your life. You're skipping school, your life's gonna go down the drain. What are you going to do? And supposedly art looked up at the rigging that was permanently installed in the why and send any money in that And the physical directors response was Yeah, but you got to be good at it. And who knew that that guy aren't conselho was a natural. And then he becomes a flyer first for Eddie ward. And after Eddie Ward passes away, he he takes that model and tweaks it refines. It has, I think, at 1.8 different acts reporting to him from Russia, to England and of course, several in America, Australia as well. And then works his way up through management and in his career as executive vice president for Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey. Wow. Yeah.
You mentioned the span of when this hit his popularity, and you say that it was it's after World War Two that it kind of peaked. And so at what point did did Bloomington become less of a circus town? Was it a gradual decline? Or was it something that just as circuses became, had a lot more competition with TV and
I think circuses started to decline when those competitors really started ramping up their advertising, right. But I think what really changed for Bloomington was the centralization of all artists in places like Sarasota. But here's the thing about Sarasota when I first went to Sarasota and I met with retired circus performers there, they treated me like a rock star. I'm not a rock star. But they were like, God, you're from Bloomington, Bloomington, Illinois. Is the barn still there? Is that why still there? Tell me the rigging still there? And of course it isn't. But it's still in the minds of so many in Sarasota, at least. It's still a fun place. It's not where their art and that's how they refer to it. It's their art. It's not where their art was created. But it's where it was refined. And it's a special place for so many for that reason.
So how long did that building stay in place? When was it? Oh, the
barn? Yeah, it was built around 1915. And it came down in the late 60s. And then the why the YMCA the first YMCA in time, I think was built in 1909 ish. And then the second YMCA, which they recently moved out of to move to the third YMCA in town. I think that one was built also, I think in the 60s as well.
And did they utilize the one that's still standing for any of that? No. Yeah, so it was the one that preceded it. That was the famous one. So circuses aren't nearly as popular as they used to be. But they still do exist, and they still are solid performers. Where do people tend to learn these skills? Now? It seems like it was far more organic At its heyday. And you could have people come from anywhere. And if somebody is a circus performer now how do they learn the ropes,
I think they learn the ropes, and some of them and families they're third, fourth, fifth generation circus performers. I think Illinois State University is particularly positioned to help people learn about circus traditions through its Gamma Phi Circus, we are the largest, and the longest running I should say that way, not necessarily the largest, but the longest running collegiate circus in the world. And that we've helped train a lot of people who do eventually go on to join circuses related to that. Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey is coming up. They're having a soft opening. And then they're going to be doing another tour. They get as close as Rosemont, Illinois for us in November, I believe. So the circus the word circus has its root with the word for circle. And that makes sense. Because you think three ring, one ring, five rings, circuses, it's all that that ring. And what do we know about rings or circles is that there's no beginning, there's no end, they just keep going. They just keep morphing. And if we look back through circus history, we can see that it's really changed the format, the style, what is offered. And I think that's what we're experiencing now is another revolution, if you will, of circus and its arts and how are they're displayed and accepted.
As somebody that's a special collections librarian at Illinois State University. You know, we obviously have all this knowledge, but there's there's a lot of stuff at milnrow Library in the collections. How large is the collection of circus related memorabilia objects that are housed at Milner?
Oh, we have well over a million items in our circus and Allied Arts collection. So Allied Arts what does that mean? It's means magic. It means vaudeville, it means sideshow, the arts that are related to circus, but we have so many various types of things. We have correspondents, performers to show management, we have contracts, how much they're making back in the 30s. I can tell you art conselho, for example, was making, you know something lofty, like $250 in the height of the Depression a week which is mind blowing. It's a lot of money for back in that day, but he's also risking his life right and his wife's life as well because she was on the act as well. We have photographs 1000s of photographs in every format from heart disease to glass plate negative to Kodachrome slides and beyond. We have over 1000 pieces of wardrobe, dating from 1889 to 1980s. And we have cash books and letters. That's where the all the, the true story of circus is told. And as I like to say to people, it's a business first, yes, it's entertaining, but they're not in business, not to make money. They can't do it unless they're making money. And that is evidenced in the cash books and letters, the all the little pieces of paper that went into making a circus, a lot of money are represented in our collection. And that's also why when I hear the phrase, my life is a circus. I think it should mean that your life is a well oiled machine, and you're making a lot of money doing it, instead of what it means that kind of the chaos thing today.
Well, thank you so much for talking to us about the circus history. And thanks for coming to Heartland and telling the folks that are coming to that event about the circus and I'm sure you have some interesting things to show them as well. Very unique opportunity to see some of these things from the Special Collections at Milner library. Yeah,
thank you so much. I love talking about this. I have the best job. I don't know how I lucked into it, but I'm sure glad I did.
Maureen Bruns do manages the Special Collections at Illinois State University's Milner library. Those collections include over a million pieces of circus history. She will be speaking about that topic at Heartland Community College on Wednesday, October 18 2023. If you are interested in other interviews about history, performing arts or other topics, subscribe to random acts of knowledge on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you found this one. Thanks for listening
