John Ringling Made Others Smile

Composed in Sarasota, Florida--

One of the highlights of my Sarasota vacation has been a tour of John and Mabel Ringling's beautiful estate on Sarasota Bay.

The estate features an art museum, a circus museum and my favorite building, the Ringling home.

You may remember that John and his brothers purchased the Barnum and Bailey Circus to create the "greatest show on earth."

The circus used to be a big deal whenever it came to town.  It was the first Lollapalooza and could easily be characterized as a zoo, a fashion show, a picnic, a concert (they toured with live bands) and athletic event. 

A typical Big Top in 1926 featured 2.5 hours of entertainment with no intermission.  There were as many as 800 artists, 22 displays, 1,000 workers, 10,000 attendees and 150 wagons that rolled off the train and paraded through town. 

The guy who gets most of the credit for making the circus "professional" is John Ringling.  John wasn't at the helm of the organization for very long, but he made the cover of Time magazine in 1925 and was then one of the 20 richest men in the country.

Despite his extraordinary wealth, there are very few photographs of him smiling.  The tour guide explained this by telling me, "Mr. Ringling was a very busy man."  Yeah, smiling is so darn time consuming.

Poor Mabel only lived in the Sarasota mansion for a couple years before she passed away.  John's health failed shortly after that and then the Great Depression forced him to give up nearly everything. 

Oh, well.  All my blog postings can't have a happy ending.

What was your family's favorite outing when you were a kid?  Was it the circus?