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The Leamy Ladies swung from a rotating contraption devised by their agent. In time, Lillian Leitzel, the youngest, would be one of the most famous women in America. When the circus season began, the two shows toured separately.

With the Barnum show setting out from New York and the Ringling show starting its season in Chicago, the two circuses traveled more than twenty-six thousand miles altogether, stopping in almost towns and cities across the nation. Now, that was circus management at its best. Narration: With profits from the two largest circuses in the nation pouring in—a reported million dollars in alone —the Ringlings began spending lavishly on their families. Michael Lancaster: Mable said it was love at first sight.

And this was a girl who had run away from home at fifteen, worked in a shoe factory. Enchanted by Sarasota, on the gulf coast of Florida, John and Charles began heading there to relax during the winter. Michael Lancaster: John and Mable studied books on etiquette, they studied books on fashion, they studied books on art and antiquities. They developed exquisite taste. And they all march for suffrage. On May 4th, , an estimated fifteen thousand people, women and their male supporters, brought New York City to a standstill.

An even larger crowd cheered them from windows and sidewalks all the way from Washington Square to Carnegie Hall. Though the campaign to give women the vote was decades old, so far only six states had enfranchised women. The dramatic rise of women in the workforce since the turn of the century, however, had swelled the ranks of the suffragists, making them more determined than ever.

Davis: The circus is a space where women did have opportunities that were unavailable in other areas of American life. Big Top headliners were paid just as well as their male counterparts. The circus offered women a life of independence and freedom from the watchful eyes of communities and family members. Narration: The female performers met with leaders of the suffrage movement before setting out on tour. They were eager to learn how best to spread their message as they traveled the country.

The Ringling brothers called her Lady Hercules. Though they boasted of her strength, the Ringling brothers were keen to present Sandwina as demure and ladylike, particularly to the men in their audiences.

Reporters were told she depended chiefly on housework to keep herself in shape. Davis: Sandwina is tall. She's statuesque. She's muscular. But she's billed as a lady dainty, whose femininity is extraordinary. The Ringling brothers loved to present this juxtaposition of seeming opposites. On the one hand with muscles coiled like pythons, but on the other gentle, dainty, and sweetly feminine.

Narration: The public was astounded to learn that Sandwina had pulled off two performances the evening before giving birth, lifting her husband over her head and bending iron bars into horseshoes. Adopted into an Australian circus family, when she was seven, Wirth had soon begun astounding audiences across Australia and New Zealand with her contortion act.

When she learned to ride, it was clear she had discovered her true talent. Dominique Jando: May Wirth was obviously extraordinary. You just look at her and knew that she was unusual. May Wirth did what we call trick somersaults, when you twist the somersault in the air so you go and you start in a direction, you arrive in another one. She did, of course, somersault from horse to horse. Only the few best men could do that, and she was a woman! Matthew Wittmann: It really, really stunned people to see women doing these things.

And so, for a certain part of the audience, it was undoubtedly empowering. As the fire raged, embers rained down on the Ringling Brothers circus, which was playing five blocks away. It took nine hours to extinguish the flames. Al, the only brother on the lot, had made sure the big top was evacuated safely. But by the time it was all over, the fire had destroyed forty-three cars of the circus train. Determined to keep to schedule, Al worked through the night persuading the railroad to loan him equipment to take him to the next stop, Marion, Ohio.

Then he directed two shows. The entire Ringling clan descended on Baraboo for the funeral, as did circus people from across the country and townspeople who admired the old man.

He loved the community and the community loved him. So, it was with great sadness the news came out that he passed. Everybody felt that the main guy had really died that day. The next year their problems only multiplied. To meet the demands of the military conflict, President Woodrow Wilson took control of the railways, prioritizing the movement of troops and materiel.

Then the Spanish flu struck. By the early fall the epidemic had spread across the country. More than ten thousand people died in September alone. Davis: Areas on the route are facing quarantine, and show dates have to be abridged.

So, the combination of the war and its shortages, its government mandates, and then the flu epidemic, present huge challenges for the Ringling Brothers as they're trying to operate two giant circuses. Narration: The brothers felt forced to make a decision, they never would have anticipated a few years earlier. After quarantines shuttered performances several days in a row, they packed up the Ringling show two weeks early.

Then for the first time since launching their circus decades before, the brothers sent the Ringling circus to winter, not in Baraboo their hometown, but in Bridgeport, Connecticut with the Barnum show. Everyone on the train knew that after decades of expansion, the unthinkable was about to happen. The brothers were consolidating. Instead of presenting two shows, they would combine them into one. Anxiety was rife in Bridgeport that fall.

Employees of both shows were unsure about their futures. And each had their own little ways about doing things. Narration: In the end, some one thousand people of a staff of twenty-eight hundred lost their jobs. It was the biggest lay-off in circus history, and an ominous sign of things to come. On March 28th, , gale forces winds buffeted New York as a late winter storm pummeled the city, leaving roads and rails coated in ice.

Despite the treacherous conditions, inside Madison Square Garden, circus staff were making final adjustments to the show. The following day, doors opened for the first performance of the Ringling Bros. Even though the city was still picking up after the storm, crowds swarmed to see the show.

It was the largest circus anyone had ever seen. Deborah Walk: I don't think there is one circus person who would say if they could walk into a time machine, that they wouldn't want to be at Madison Square Gardens when it opened in March of To see the great performers, the cavalcade of clowns, everything jam-packed into the three rings and four platforms.

It would've been the show to see. Narration: The circus kicked off with the two combined herds of elephants, followed by seven troupes of aerial performers, May Wirth with her backwards somersaults, and some six hundred other performers. When the show took to the road, audiences were staggered by its size. The circus had mushroomed into a moving town of more than eleven hundred people, horses, and nearly one thousand other animals.

The big top alone was feet long and could seat 16, people, more than twice the number that could fit into Madison Square Garden. Richard Reynolds, Circus Historian: It had a big top with eight center poles in it. The distance between most of those poles was sixty feet. That was an immensely long big top. Though elated by the success of their first combined season, the Ringlings were struggling with sad news on the home front. After a long bout of ill-health, Alf T. Ringling, creator of the great spectacles, passed away at the age of fifty-five.

The death of financial wizard Otto, a decade earlier, left just Charles and John. Five brothers had charted the evolution of a modest one-ring show into a vast circus empire.

Now responsibility for the massive organization lay with just two. Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated— in the main, abominably —because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.

Even the most hardened performers, never got used to the humiliation. Matthew Wittmann: Respectable people would skip the sideshow tent because it did have a reputation. Narration: The same traditions played out over decades. As the crowds thronged the midway past the sideshow tent towards the menagerie, they could hear the talker who ballyhooed the talent inside. To entice the crowds into the sideshow tent, the Ringling Brothers had for years featured an African-American sideshow band.

In , Charles and John hired the best jazz bandmaster in the business, P. As a young man in the s, Lowery had trained at the Boston Conservatory.

Though he was one of the best cornetists of his generation, like all black musicians of the day, Lowery was almost always confined to the sideshow. He won over fans nonetheless. Sakina Hughes, Historian: P. Lowery becomes this pillar in the African-American community. The circus is coming to town, but P. Lowery is going to be here. Narration: When Lowery had started out, black circus bands mostly played minstrel music. Lowery got rid of blackface makeup, added women to his troupe, and performed a repertoire of ragtime and the blues.

We think about the Harlem Renaissance, but the circus musicians were coming a generation before. Roger Smith, Wild Animal Trainer: A cat act, anyone can tell you they are fraught with very real danger.

The threat to life and limb, the threat of death, is a genuine constant danger that the big cat people all understand. Narration: Early one Sunday morning in July , a slip of a woman barged onto the back lot of the Ringling circus, angling for a job with the biggest show in the country. Mabel Stark was one of the most celebrated big cat trainers in America and one of the only women to wrangle tigers in the big top.

She told the astounded Ringling team that she broke in her cats herself. They offered her a job on the spot. Stark had started out as a nurse. Davis: She hated nursing. She hated the kind of confines of ordinary life. So, she too runs away and joins a circus. Running away for her was liberation. Roger Smith: This young blond comes busting through a rickety old gate, asking to be a tiger trainer and everybody was ready to throw her out. She realized very quickly, if she was going to be anything, she had to get around the genius wild animal trainer, the best that ever worked in this country, and that was Louis Roth.

Narration: And to do that, she had to marry him. She got everything that he knew and she took it from there as a tiger trainer. Then she got rid of Louis. She never loved him. Mabel Stark quickly became one of the most popular performers at the Ringling circus, yet the cat acts left some members of the audience dismayed. Davis: John Ringling had never been all that fond of cage acts involving big cats. They were cumbersome to carry. They were a logistical problem, as far as he was concerned.

He is acutely aware of this growing movement that is questioning the ethics of animal performances. As the circus roared into the mids, large profits kept rolling in and the brothers found new ways to spend their money. Charles built a house of pink marble on Sarasota Bay. John and Mable designed a fifty-six room Venetian palace next door. Wherever they were, John and Mable were surrounded by the affluent and celebrated.

Titans of industry and Broadway stars dined at their home. Presidents and First Ladies accompanied them to the circus. Americans were flush with money. Each season was more profitable than the one before. No circus could rival the Ringling show. One of the most striking was Australian wire walker Con Colleano.

He remembered practicing as many as seven hours a day, determined to perform a feat on the wire no one else had ever accomplished: a front somersault.

Narration: Colleano failed thousands of times. Sometimes the rebounding wire left him paralyzed for days. Narration: It took five years of failed attempts before Colleano successfully executed a front somersault. Dominique Jando: That was the great impossible feat of the time. It was absolutely unique. Troupe leader Karl had become a tightrope walker almost by accident. At the age of sixteen, he responded to an ad from a circus owner looking for someone to do a handstand.

Soon he was executing the stunt over rivers, between buildings. Then he brought his family in on the act. My grandfather standing on the top of a chair with his wife standing on his shoulders, while he was on a bar that was balanced between Joe Geiger and his brother Herman. Tino Wallenda: At the end of the performance, the audience were whistling and they were stomping their feet, which in Europe would be a great insult.

So my grandfather and the rest of troupe, they snuck away quickly into the dressing room. They really liked what you did. Richard Reynolds: Hands down, Lillian Leitzel. She was the greatest superstar the circus had ever seen. Narration: Leitzel came from a family of circus acrobats in Germany. She began performing with her mother and her aunts when she was just eleven. Almost immediately, she began taking attention away from her jealous mother.

The crowd would count each one. Her record was rotations. Dominique Jando: She had those shoulder dislocation, which were very well staged because there were moments when the hairpins went away and her hair get while she was doing that.

Technically it was okay. Physically it was eh. Paul Ringling: Lillian Leitzel was a tremendous actor. She was a performer from the time she took off her sandals until she came back down. Lillian Leitzel was a performer. Davis: The bandleader, Merle Evans, feared her. She would be angry about the inadequacy of the drum roll. Narration: Performers got ready in the communal dressing tents.

Leitzel had demanded her own private dressing tent, fresh flowers daily, and a maid to go with it. Ammed Tuniziani, Trapeze Artist: The power that it takes to do a triple is very hard. It takes years and years, and dedication, mentally, physically. He made it look so easy.

Dominique Jando: His triple somersault was absolutely neat. I mean there was no suspense. He just did it totally naturally. Narration: Leitzel and Codona tied the knot in Chicago between a matinee and the evening show. Dominique Jando: Their marriage was very tempestuous, as any marriage with Lillian Leitzel would be with anybody, and they both had a gigantic ego. They were both big stars and they knew it. He was beautiful. She had this wonderful charisma and charm.

So, it was the sort of Hollywood kind of marriage made in hell, actually. But for the audience it was made in heaven. Circus life was unpredictable, unconventional, magnificent and boisterous. Little girls and boys thought it the epitome of glamor.

To those in the know it was anything but. Mary Jane Miller, Aerialist: At night you pulled your curtain shut. You were in your own little cubby-hole and that was your privacy.

Jackie Leclaire, Clown, Aerialist: Everybody would wait until the train started because then it makes noise and the noise covers up everything else. Narration: There was never anything easy about life with the circus. Even the most basic commodities were in short supply.

Jackie Leclaire: Water is the most precious thing that we have because there is no water there. Each performer got two buckets, one to wash and one to rinse. Marjorie Cordell Geiger, Aerialist: I had been exposed to modest nudity in dressing rooms with ballet school, but nothing like that.

La Norma Fox, Aerialist: It was a beautiful scene. Everybody was doing something that they liked. Some like to play cards, some play dominoes, some play chess. The performers would be together, the clowns would like to be together, and the working men, they had their own groups, too.

Narration: For decades, children traveled with the show, and together the community raised them. La Norma Fox: I had more babysitters. I could never find my baby. Everybody had my boy. Marjorie Cordell Geiger: Here is this wonderful working woman. Narration: The show went on no matter the weather. The pay was meager, the work never-ending. But for workers and performers alike, circus life was simply too exhilarating to give up. Edward Hoagland: You were the celebrity, not just the performers.

The town came to see you. Even in Manhattan you could see the Empire State Building. Big deal. New York came to you. I still have my buckets.

Everybody teases me, but I do. Narration: In the fall of , sixty-two-year-old Charles Ringling suffered a stroke at his home in Sarasota. Narration: I think he was crying about two things, not only the loss of his favorite brother, but also the loss of the camaraderie that the five Ringling brothers had held together.

Family was extremely important to them. John took charge as the show set off the following spring. In March , he revealed plans to move his winter quarters from its old home in Bridgeport, Connecticut to acres outside of Sarasota. That Christmas, the circus opened its doors to Sarasotans, who, for twenty-five cents, toured the grounds for the first time. From then on, the quarters were open to the public twice-weekly as circus personnel and animals prepared for the following season.

La Norma Fox: I had never seen a winter quarters like that. In Europe they had a little place, just a small building. This was like a town.

There was all kind of big wagons with machine shops, and it was humongous. Narration: There was a tent and wardrobe building, a railroad car shop, a woodworking mill, an elephant house, a dining hall, and practice barns.

Deborah Walk: That totally transformed this area, because Sarasota, Florida, maybe fifty thousand people in the whole county, all of a sudden would see, annually, a hundred thousand people coming down to see the cocoon from which the great show emerges. But the truth was, John was facing a much more precarious business scene than he ever had with his brothers.

As the Greatest Show on Earth took to the road in the spring of , movie star Charlie Chaplin was drawing visitors by the millions to his off-kilter vision of life under the big top. A trip to see Chaplin was cheap—about a quarter. A visit to the Ringling circus cost three times as much. Jennifer Lemmer Posey: When one wants to go to the cinema, the films were there every day, every week, whereas the circus is only there once a year.

Narration: Entertainment choices only proliferated. By , eight years after the first commercial radio broadcast, a quarter of American households had radio sets. The first broadcast of the World Series in had helped launch a surging interest in sports. Star players had become national celebrities. In , ninety thousand spectators had watched Jack Dempsey knock out his opponent to retain the heavyweight title.

It was the largest audience for a sporting event ever. In , John Ringling confronted the lucrative boxing industry head on. When the time came time to sign the traditional four-week lease at Madison Square Garden, Ringling discovered the Garden insisted on reserving Friday nights for prize fighting.

When Ringling refused to sign the contract, his most formidable rival, veteran showman Jerry Mugivan, stepped in. As head of the American Circus Corporation, Mugivan took the deal. Ringling was incensed. Determined not to lose his opening venue to the competition, Ringling bought out the entire American Circus Corporation, comprised of five substantial circuses. It was a decision that would split the family apart. Davis: The date was inauspicious, September of Just six weeks later the stock market crashed.

John Ringling had made the biggest mistake of his life. Narration: After a lackluster season, Alfredo Codona and Lillian Leitzel headed to Europe to perform for the winter.

It had become an annual tradition they loved. After several weeks in Paris together, Codona headed to Berlin. Leitzel had an engagement in Copenhagen. Report a Problem Closed Captioning.

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We can remove the first show in the list to add this one. As the tent comes down for the last time, we say one final "see you down the road. Performers who grew up in the circus find it difficult to imagine another kind of life. Survival of the Fittest. Three members of the company consider leaving the circus for the "real world.

A major act is cut just before the first show; it's an inauspicious start to the season. The clock is ticking down to the dress rehearsal in Walden, but the show isn't ready. By creating an account, you acknowledge that PBS may share your information with our member stations and our respective service providers, and that you have read and understand the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. We can remove the first video in the list to add this one.

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