Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 256, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 November 1917 — CIRCUS PEOPLE FIGHT HARD [ARTICLE]

CIRCUS PEOPLE FIGHT HARD

They Stop at Nothing When Engaged in Warfire -Which Has Marked Business Since Early Day*. When circus people fight they stop short of nothing, according to one of them, Courtney Ryley Cooper, whose interesting experiences with circus wars are told in Everybody’s. Some of the most “annoying” details are given at length. “Sand finds Its way into car journals, causing hot boxes and a delay In the arrival of the show trains. Polson sometimes gets into the meat that is fed to the ‘principal’ animal act,' with the result that tigers and Hons turn their toes to the sun and the circus loses one of its best acts. Wagon wheels come off mysteriously—it is easy to loosen the nuts of a wagon in the darkness of night on a circus lot Health departments receive sud•den —announcements of epidemics' among people or stock, and hold the circus until both can be examined. Working men are bought away, and delays created by every scheme and device. Fighting circuses have even accused each other of throwing railroad switches and causing wrecks Taking it by and large, ‘dirty opposition’ is a gay and exciting existence. “And where it all began is beyond the annals of clrcusdom. It was here before we came into the game. Grizzled old men around the stake-and-chaln wagon tell stories that were history when they were children. Years of warfare, then short spasms of peace and ‘gentlemanly conduct’—such is the history of the circus from the time of Barnum. Then men called each other thieves and cutthroats and robbers and embezzlers and burglars through the newspapers, and the circus magnate who owned the most vitriolic press agent was by far the wisest showman.”-