Millions of Thrills at the Big Top : ‘Ladeeez and Gentlemen, the Smallest Show on Earth’

While National Geographic’s Explorers Hall awaited the arrival of a miniature circus it would put on display, officials thought that the owner, Howard Tibbals, had been kidding when he said there would be about a million pieces in it.

“As we unpacked it,” said Leonard J. Grant, a National Geographic vice president, “we began to realize it was probably 2 million pieces or more.”

And what pieces they are!

A Traveling Circus

Meticulously built to scale one-sixteenth of life size, each piece was researched and modeled after a traveling circus of the early 1900s, from the colors of the spokes on the wagon wheels to the dimensions, style and colors of the 7,000 individual folding chairs in the big tent.

Tibbals, 49, traveled from his home in Oneida, Tenn., to Pennsylvania, just to see a circus chair and take its measurements. Each of the 400 performers has a water bucket with the last name of a real circus performer on it. And the 4,000 townspeople who are attending the circus look too real to be fake, from the woman wiping her little boy’s tears, to another little boy who, as Tibbals’ assistant pointed out, is clutching his trousers below the waist because he needs to go to the bathroom.

Tibbals has worked on the project--believed to be the world’s largest private collection of circus models and memorabilia--for more than 30 years.

How many pieces are there?

“I don’t want to count them,” Tibbals said. “I’m sure there are more than a million.”

Also on display are some of Tibbals’ 4,000 circus posters and 500,000 circus photographs. He can recite the life stories of major circus figures, starting with their dates of birth, as well as circus history. He even collected things he didn’t like about the circus, like photographs of nude people who showed off their deformities. He said he keeps those pictures locked in a trunk.

Vice president of the Hartco Flooring Co., Tibbals has spent a considerable portion of his adult life--about 25 hours a week--on the circus.

Asked how he found time to raise six children, Tibbals said, “Well, the wife raised them. I didn’t raise them.” He was busy, raising the big tent.

How do his children like the little circus?

“They don’t like it,” Tibbals said. “Not enough Daddy.”

Wives Called ‘Drag Shoes’

Tibbals’ wife, Marjorie, has watched the circus expand and grow throughout their 30-year marriage.

“She doesn’t like it either,” Tibbals said. “Circus model builders call their wives ‘drag shoes’ (emergency brakes on the old circus wagons) . . . because they try to stop you.”

With little success, apparently.

Like a real circus, Tibbals’ “Howard Bros. Circus” arrived at National Geographic in 127 circus train wagons, packed in the order and manner of the real thing.

The exhibit, which will be on display until June, took 6 1/2 weeks to set up, not counting the time Tibbals spent diagraming possible layouts. Next time you think you have a trying job, remember that it took one National Geographic employee more than a week to unpack, unfold and set up the 7,000 tiny chairs.

(But that was nothing compared to what Tibbals had to do when the 7,000 custom-ordered chairs arrived from the toy company--each two-inch chair in three pieces, ready for easy home

assembly.)

His circus has been on display only one other time, at the Knoxville World’s Fair in 1982. Usually most of it just sits inside the wagons on six, 40-foot shelves in Tibbals’ basement, all packed and ready to go. Some people might find that strange but Tibbals said it is “a heckuva lot of fun.”

Tibbals’ assistant, Susan Page of Anaheim Hills, Calif., flew cross-country three times to help Tibbals set the exhibit up here. She had helped before at the World’s Fair, when she was living in Knoxville. Part of her job was to set the performers’ dining tent tables with red-checked table cloths and the doll-house sized forks, knives, spoons, dishes and separate eggs, pancakes, tomatoes, corn on the cob and more--using tweezers.

“It’s challenging,” Page said. “It’s brought things out in me I never knew I had.”

Like eye strain?

“Creative ability,” Page said.

Page set up the barber’s tent, where one man checks out his new haircut in a mirror while two others play a game of checkers, waiting their turns. At a card game nearby, one man is hiding cards under the table. Across the way there is a bird’s nest under the eaves of a bridge where no one can see it, Page said.

At night (which occurs every few minutes), tiny flames appear under the grill in a refreshment tent and lights go on inside the animal cages. There are children sneaking in under the tent (with a policeman discovering them), a pooper scooper, laundry hanging on the back lot and little fans spinning in the refrigerator cars.

Elders in the Band

Tibbals carved the 26-piece band himself, modeling the musicians after elders in his church.

“I studied them during boring sermons,” Tibbals said.

Another carver modeled the faces of several horse-riders after President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Tibbals became obsessed with the circus when he was 7. While staying with his grandparents in Fairmont, W.Va., a circus came to town, “but they wouldn’t let me go. They thought it was evil.”

Tibbals got hold of his granddaddy’s binoculars and watched in amazement as an empty field turned into a bustling center of magical activity. And then just as quickly, it was gone.

He started hanging around circuses as often as he could and of course wanted to run away with one. But the more Tibbals saw of the life style, the more he decided it was too hectic.

“I wouldn’t put up with that rat race for all the tea in China,” he said.

He decided it would be much better to just have his own circus, and he began right away with Popsicle sticks and cloth remnants. He has never stopped.

“I only know,” Tibbals said, “that I’ll be working on it as long as I live.”

Tibbals traveled around the East Coast to go to 12 circuses last year, but the modern, convention-center circuses just aren’t the same.

“The circus today is nothing but a smelly ice show. It misses the trooping. There’s no mud, no floods, no blow-downs. The excitement’s gone.”

But it lives on--at least for a few months--in Explorers Hall.