Back in Time | Big Top Town | Season 11 | Episode 2

As the daring aerialists swing higher and higher above the ring, every eye is fixed on the brave man about to propel himself across the ring and into the tiny target.

The smell of popcorn and cotton candy filled the air as children of all ages pushed to the edge of their seats in wide eyed amazement.

Finally, as the swing reaches its climax.

The daredevil leaps from the perch into a death defying flight through the ring and into the net beyond landing with a flourish.

The crowd is thrilled.

It's another day at the circus.

I try to remember as some of these little kids, it's their first time seeing a circus.

Some people, their last time seeing a circus.

So that's when you kind of got to, you know, make sure that you're doing it for them.

The first circus was invited to wait out the winter in Hugo, Oklahoma, in 1941.

Since then, 22 circuses have called Hugo home.

For generations, they've been a vital part of the community.

And when the performers face that final curtain, they have a plot here to call their own.

In Oklahoma's Big Top Town.

Life in the circus is a life on the road.

And each day begins long before the first light.

The hardest job is the first.

Rain or shine crews begin driving stakes and unfolding the massive Big Top tent.

The backbone of the tented circus is the tent crew.

Without the tent, You don't have a tented circus.

So them guys work very hard.

Are the first ones up in the morning, working.

The last guys to go to bed at night, tearing it down.

In just three hours, it goes from an empty field to a bustling city within a city.

Tomorrow, it's another town, another show or two.

For people living in rural Oklahoma, the circus was about the only time that they would get to see an elephant or a camel or a tiger.

The circus brought the world to your door for just the price of admission.

The spectacle so enthralling that some people ran away with the circus.

Others started their own.

My grandfather, he got a pony and a dog, and he trained them and then he got a monkey, and he just really liked messing with animals.

And he had two sons and his wife, and they were very amenable to this lifestyle.

And they put on little shows in the community with the animals.

My grandfather, would entertain in the movie theater in between redoing the reels because they had to wind them and put the other one on.

So he would put on a little show.

And then my father, D.R.

and my uncle Kelly would sell popcorn in the audience.

And just little by little, they acquired more animals and started venturing out a little further.

And the first tent my grandfather actually made on a sewing machine.

My father and mother married very young.

My father was 16 and my mother was 15, and she was a farm girl from Kansas, and she'd never been out of the county.

She'd never seen a train, but she was very protected in her little farming community.

So they got married, and first thing they did was they ran off and joined another circus.

Mama heard her first lions growling at her, she was scared to death.

So that was her introduction to the life she would have for 65 years or longer, really.

My dad walked tight wire and my mother learned to perform a couple of little acts because she didn't grow up in the circus and it was a gradual thing through those years.

And so they started their first circus in the probably early thirties and it went broke.

In 1937, Barbara's family started the Al G. Kelly and Miller Brothers Circus.

The original name was the Miller Brothers Circus, but the Post Office kept sending their mail to the 101 Ranch in Ponca City, run by a different set of Miller Brothers.

Every spring, dozens of circuses traveled the nation, and around October they would head south to wait out the winter.

In 1941, the Al G. Kelly and Miller Brothers Circus was invited to stay in Hugo, Oklahoma.

Vernon Pratt was a circus fan.

He loved the circus.

And he became familiar with the Millers, who were in Kansas.

He persuaded my folks to move here with the enticement that the community would welcome them, which it did, and we would have free water.

So they moved from Mena, Arkansas.

Land was cheap and there was a lot of it available and a much better climate.

And they became good friends.

And so Obert Miller, who was the head of the clan, he bought property down here and moved the show down here.

And in doing so, they had a great reputation.

It was Al G. Kelly and Miller Brothers Circus at that time and a great reputation around the country with other shows and had a lot of animals.

And so they ended up attracting a lot of other show people into the Hugo community.

Since then, 22 circuses have called Hugo home.

My father, he was a dreamer.

He loved the circus and he loved the idea of lots of circuses traveling around the United States because people got such pleasure and joy out of the circus.

And so anybody that thought they wanted to take a circus out and my father thought they were capable, he'd go in with them and start a circus.

So he probably started 5, 6, 7 circuses that all came out of of Hugo.

Just in my career, I've worked with a lot of circus out of Hugo.

Kelly Miller Carson and Barnes.

I was on Circus Mondao, the National Hispanic Circus, Royal Hanneford Circus.

I've been on several circuses, you know, throughout my lifetime.

Clyde Beatty, King Brothers, Sells and Gray, Carson and Barnes, Kelly Miller.

Circus Genoa, Circus Chimera, Culpepper and Merriweather, which are still here.

Around town, exotic animals were a common sight, as well as performers practicing the high wire act in their backyard.

Hugo embraced it all.

There's a lot of paradigms about circus people even nowadays, so you can imagine in the forties if some circus folks set up on the edge of your town or bought a little piece of property, maybe their deed was no good.

Maybe the sheriff would run them down the road.

So the very fact that circus folks were able to buy property and settle in Hugo and be left alone and word got out, more shows came.

By the mid fifties, they had over 100 employees traveling on the show and they had a big tent.

And my father had.

They fell in love with elephants, of course, and they had acquired some elephants by that time.

They had their first elephant and they had a truck.

They hauled the elephant in, and when they came to Hugo, they parked out on the other side of town so they could plug in the lights and everything.

And my mom and dad lived in the front of the truck and the elephant lived at the back of the truck.

My uncle was a good builder and inventor.

So they started a welding shop and they built a lot of equipment there.

The first tent spool that they spool the tents on.

Before they'd always had to break them down, fold them in pieces and load them onto the trucks.

They built a truck and it had two of the big spools on it.

They just had to divide the tent in half, then fold it up where it would be narrow enough to fit into the spool truck.

They would tie it on and this would turn by a chain.

It just spooled on this on this apparatus and made the tear down go a lot easier and smoother.

They invented the seat wagons that we had that had a big beam on the back, and they would pick up this section of seats.

The elephants helped with that, and it'd swing around and load up stacked up on the truck and then we got to the next town, they unloaded it.

And then that truck would actually transform into seats also, so they had double seating.

With so many shows on the road, the competition was sometimes a little less than friendly.

We have someone that travels ahead of the show and they actually mark the route using paper arrows.

Not that long ago, if another show come across, someone else arrows, it was sometimes taking a moment to turn the arrows another way and send your competitor taking a left turn, but they should be taking a right turn.

The shows play in a different town every day, and it takes a lot of organization to make it work.

A lot of people that come to the circus, they see the lights, the glamor, the trapeze and you know all the front stuff, but there's so many things behind the scenes that you wouldn't even imagine.

Typically on my show, we average 48 miles a day.

So that's an hour that you move by vehicle in the morning to the new new location.

Once you get there, you start immediately unloading.

Animals get unloaded.

first, they get fed and watered and taken care of.

first, the commissary goes up at the same time, the Big Top gets laid out.

Stakes get driven in the ground.

Electricity fires up at 9:00 in the morning and everybody's got electricity.

That's all done by an electrician who's on the show and works for the circus water man's going around, watering all the trailers so you have water .

Be able to take a shower and bathe and cook and clean, whatever the case may be.

It's all departmentalized and very well organized.

There's not that big, huge circus there used to be, you know, 20 years ago there was five or six still huge circuses.

In the heyday, You're talking about several acres, five ring, two center stages and 40 elephants and giraffes, rhinos, hippos, three different sets, flying trapeze apparatus.

High wires, cannonball shots.

Some days what we call straw houses, straw houses, when you've got so many people, you can't seat them all, so you put straw on the ground and they sit on the straw.

Standing room only, that's what we called it.

I had it down to a fine T, if I could get 600 people in a day, I could make my expenses.

Break even.

Total expenses for my show at the end when I sold it was $7200 a day is what we had to generate to break even.

They say once the sawdust is in your veins, you're hooked.

Whole families perform together their entire lives.

Armando Loyal's family has been in the circus for nine generations.

My grandfather and his brothers and sisters and my great grandfather had an equestrian bareback deck where you stand up on horses and do flips and pyramids and suchwhat.

Was in Europe, John Ringling, the original one of the original Ringling Brothers, saw them in Europe and brought them to the United States.

In 1956, my grandfather was hired to come work for Al G. Kelly Miller Brothers Circus here in Hugo.

He was based out of Florida.

Moved to Hugo.

My father was a cowboy.

Back in the days when they had a Wild West show, at the end of the performance.

My mother was an aerialist, wire walker, performed in the air, did perch years ago, which is a long pole and you climb up and do tricks on the top and somebody holds it.

We came to Hugo in 1955 to go to work for Famous Cole Circus that was here.

My brother and I were trampling performers, and I did, like I say, the Wild West concert.

I did that when I was much younger.

seven, eight, nine years old.

If you want to stay later for another $0.25, you could stay and see the Wild West concert, which was all Western.

Cowboys and Indians and riders and trick riding things like that.

My family was in the circus, I was raised on the road since I was born and then went on the road right away.

So yeah, I've been on the road every single year I've been alive.

So we were just around circus growing up and our parents just, you know, always encouraged whatever type skills we wanted to do .

I just happened to want to do aerial work.

I was about three or four, and I wrote a little Shetland Pony Little Black and White Pony.

I had a cape and a little hat and boots and and well not Western boots.

I had circus performing boots, you know, and I rode in the parade, you know, around the tent.

Then when I was five, I did a little aerial thing that all the little girls start out on.

It's called swinging ladder, and it looks like a small ladder and they swing you real high.

And my mother would swing me and I do little poses.

And that was when I was five.

I had a little cocker spaniel dog named Goldie, and he would come in and sit by my mom at the bottom where she was swinging me back and forth with this rope and watch me go back and forth An the audience of course, just ate it up.

Then my next thing let's see, after that, I rode an elephant in the spec and then I started performing with the elephants when I was about eleven and oh, I forgot I did tripwire.

The cast and crew come from many countries, and a lot of languages are spoken in the camp.

But for most Hugo is their home.

If you go out throughout the country and world, I've been to other countries, and where are you from?

Hugo, Oklahoma And the first thing is, where is that?

And you know, we're just a small town.

I grew up here.

It was such a lovely little town.

Of course, children see things through children's eyes, but I just love living here.

It was a vibrant community, a successful community and there was a spirit in the town.

It permeated through every place.

You'd go into a store, and of course, everybody knew everybody.

The relationship between the town and the circuses was very good, Got along well with the schools, for school children.

Got along well with the banks for an unusual enterprise that you know, bankers not real quick to loan somebody money that you could pack up and move every day as collateral.

But that that all changed and became very, very well related association between the town and the circus people.

Of course, the circus people contributed a lot to the town, too.

In the wintertime, when you're staying here, trying to refurbish the circus and get it ready to go.

You spent a lot of money with the hardware store and with the lumber yards and the various businesses here in the community.

So it was a two way street.

The feed store is gone now.

It used to be on Fifth Street.

An old timey feed store.

My grandfather had horses, ponies and stuff for the circus in the winter.

You know, we didn't travel, we were home, so he they'd give him a line of credit through winter.

And then when the circus started up, they knew he'd be good to pay.

You can order different stuff that they didn't normally carry during the summer.

We'd order a lot for like the elephants.

It was a lot of mixture of oats and bran, and they'd order tons of bran and oats that they steam rolled oats, which they normally wouldn't carry that much of.

We went to school with non circus kids.

There was a little hesitance.

But once they got to know you and you got along well.

Definitely loved my time here in Hugo.

A lot of friends in the community, played football, you know, attracted all the extra.

I was in student council, all the regular stuff.

But then in break time, I had, you know, at the circus and did all the circus stuff and learned to perform and just every different aspect of it.

You have to continue to practice doing things, we were all performers when we first came here to Hugo.

Our family, my sisters did aerial acts.

My brother and I did trampoline, rolling globe.

We learned how to juggle.

I was enamored with the horses because of my father being a cowboy and I wanted to.

So I rode in spec and learned how to spin ropes and crack whips, things like that.

So you practiced throughout the winter just to keep sharp.

I think it's nice to live in a smaller town because then that way, visiting other places is more exciting and it makes it easier to get stuff done because there's not much to do at home.

So plenty of time for getting ready for the for the road.

Well, let me tell you, people from Hugo, the circus part doesn't faze anybody because even before my generation's kids were going to school and part of the circus, they knew circus people were here.

A lot of older circus performers are integrated into our town that, don't they?

They retired and stayed here.

Not long ago, the elephants retired, too.

Today, the veteran performers roam the 200 acre endangered Ark Foundation at Hugo.

With 25 elephants, it's the second largest herd in North America and it's opened to the public on the weekends.

The elephants were my favorite.

They have different personalities, just like people and some of them like people.

Some of them don't.

Some of them like elephants and some of them.

We have one elephant that just doesn't want anything to do with other elephants.

She's just a loner.

It gives you goose bumps because you realize I'm getting them right now.

You realize what you have exposed these children to that they probably never would have been able to.

They are children that would never see an elephant or a lion or a tiger if we didn't come to town.

I mean, zoos weren't that predominate back then?

And a little child down here in southeastern Oklahoma may never get out of the county, let alone go to Tulsa, Oklahoma City, to see these animals.

And to me, when you see them, eye to eye, That's when you fall in love with them and you care, care about them.

Out on the edge of town, there's a special place where performers go when that final curtain falls.

Showman's Rest at Mount Olivet cemetery is a peaceful place where the circus cast and crew are together forever.

Showman's Rest is an amazing thing to see in Hugo, it's the cemetery, but a whole section of the cemetery is set aside for circus performers and people.

It's quite a tour to take.

It's a treat because you have headstones that are circus tents, wagon wheels, elephants, ring masters, trapeze artist ones.

This is pretty elaborate.

We always go above and beyond for circus stuff we got, you know, we got to be noticed.

So my father, there was a man that worked for us, his name was John Carroll, Elephant John, we called him, he worked with the elephants.

And so when he passed away, he left this money, which had been earning a little bit of interest in a bank Somewhere here in Hugo and he left it to my dad.

So he came up with the idea of forming Showman's Rest.

And this would be a place that any circus person that didn't have a family, they wanted him to be buried somewhere or couldn't afford to be buried.

This fund would bury them and get him a little marker.

And so they would always be somebody coming through that would know who they were and what they did with a circus.

We put to rest a lot of my friends and family there, we that's where we go for our funeral cemetery, that's that's our place, which is really cool, I think.

A place where people of a like mind, like living, can be buried together and be together an afterlife.

My aunt Zefta who was a incredible circus performer, bareback equestrian they call her queen of the bareback riders.

She was not from Hugo, did not perform with any circuses from Hugo.

She retired from Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey, but she was in Florida.

So when she passed away, she wanted to be buried here in Hugo among her people.

It's one of the few cemeteries that I know of that has a sign up for bus parking because they bring the tour busses through and they get out and do you know and this is the honest God's truth.

I have never been there one time that there wasn't someone that has driven there and stopped to look, be looking at the grave markers and they're looking for the the circus people.

And so it's become quite an attraction.

Despite the storms, cold, heat, mud, hours on the road, wrecks, and months away from home, If you ask any lifelong showman, why do you do it?

Why not find another job?

They'll answer what and give up show business.

They do it for the love of performing the culture, the traditions and a love of life under the Big Top.

I wouldn't trade my experience in circus and my experience in the military for anything under the sun.

The enjoyment you get, the joy, pleasure you get of seeing people having a good time for something you're doing, presenting my mom's thing was always, she said, you know, it takes some people away for a couple of hours from all their problems and stuff to think about.

My parents gave me the best of both worlds.

They gave me the opportunity to grow up here in Hugo and have the same friends all through school, you know, know all the same people, the same church.

I had that stability and I also had this months of traveling and being a wanderer and circus life was the greatest place to raise a child.

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