Under the Small Top : The Culpepper and Merriweather ‘Mud Show’ Brings the Glitter and Thrills of the Circus to the Hamlets and Hollows of America--All in One Ring

Circus tents are held by whiskered ropes twisted in peculiar rolling hitches that loosen and tighten like ratchets when winds tousle the big top.

They have been tied that way for 200 years.

African elephants still tug tent poles and red, white, blue and patriotic panels aloft against county skies in towns we’ll never know. Pewaukee. Maquoketa. Tahoka. And traveling in short jumps, a one-ring circus will play 250 such towns along an 11,000-mile loop across 14 states in 35 weeks while suffering climates from temperate to tornado.

Their meanderings haven’t slowed for two centuries. Nor has the musk and magic of the mud shows, these smallest shows on Earth that continue to play meadows and sleepy hollows as a rural entertainment form older than baseball, certainly sturdier than MTV.

Mud shows survive, say circus folk, because the big indoor extravaganzas--the Hannefords, the Hamid-Mortons and Barnums & Baileys--cannot afford to play Smalltown U.S.A.

So in back country towns where man-made fun is month-old movies, gymkhanas and the county fair, there are huge welcomes for the glitter, cotton candy, danger, balloons, animals, coloring books, adventure, grace and comedy of the one-ring circus.

“It’s the spectacle and tradition,” says Red Johnson, owner, ringmaster and resident fire eater of the Culpepper and Merriweather Great Combined Circus. “It transports people into our nomadic lifestyle, which seems to be the problem-free world everyone wants.

“For 90 minutes they can forget that the mortgage is due and that they’ve just found out their kid smokes pot.”

Three dozen mud shows--so named for the mire in which many have wallowed--touch about 7,000 U. S. hamlets and townships each year.

Royal Sanger travels each season from Florida. Circus Vargas leaves from North Hollywood. There’s Kelly Miller, Carson and Barnes, and the Great American Circus. Culpepper and Merriweather works its transcontinental circuit from Queen Creek, Ariz.

Despite the majestic title, Culpepper and Merriweather Great Combined Circus is a 35-person mud show that last year did indeed play Pewaukee (Wisconsin). And Maquoketa (Iowa) and Tahoka (Texas). Its season begins in March in Arizona. It ends in October in El Paso.

And it performs seven days a week, two shows a day--often three on Saturdays and Sundays.

Call it circus boot camp, a farm club for young performers who hope to graduate to the three-ring leagues. But see it mostly as a haven for veterans who can and have played the big shows but prefer smaller times and towns.

Last month, the circus paused here in Northern California, 15 miles south of an earlier appearance in Greenville and one day ahead of Portola. Then the show climbed a Sierra Nevada summit into Truckee.

Nine shows in four jumps. Nine times into the ring for Heidi Wendany’s Hollywood Doggie Review and Cheeko’s breakaway bike act. Nine risks above the sod for Oran Luke, a Guamanian wire walker, and Ken Taylor, a 19-year-old trapeze artist from San Bernardino who says one day he will beat his shyness and be the world’s best.

Sometimes the juggler dropped a club. A tuxedoed magician reappeared in the bleachers wearing a Coca-Cola T-shirt and selling purple snow cones. The lovely, talented and graceful Lynn Marie tripled as aerialist, elephant rider and popcorn vendor. And fire eater Johnson singed his mustache.

But for 90 minutes, Greenville, Quincy, Portola and Truckee indeed forgot mortgage payments.

“I’ve been with the big circuses,” says Terrell (Cap) Jacobs III, the 35-year-old grandson of a big cat trainer, son of a high flier, and a circus pony rider at age 6. “But you don’t get the hometown flavor in coliseums with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey . . . you get politics, you get temperament over billing, you get lost.

“In a mud show, nothing is remote because the audience and performers are up close. Kids just don’t see ponies. They feel their wind as they ride around the ring, they smell them and hear me talking to them.”

Such closeness melds performers with their audience. It stirs a warmth unknown in the megalopolis where circus tickets are numbered for sections, rows and seats 300 feet from the sawdust.

Front and center, nose to nose at Culpepper and Merriweather, an audience sees it all. That includes a wisp of anxiety behind the aerialist’s fixed smile and eye shadow. Tootsie looks just like the dog next door--except she can ride a donkey bareback. Now you see it . . . and now you see it again, because the magician wasn’t quite quick enough closing a false bottom around a white dove.

And, see, there is a fine safety wire keeping one trapeze artiste from a splattering.

The acts are good, if basic fare. No matter. To the crowd, just the smell of warm air inside a tent on country grass and the sight of a beautiful woman kissing a horse is the perfect escape: pure circus and Americana at its roots.

Only here do mayors ride elephants. Only here can a burned-out author in hiding admit that some things still budge his cynicism. Only with the circus does entertainment intrigue adults and transfix children until the audience becomes the show.

And that’s what performers work for.

The engagement begins when kids scream and point as the clown is stalked by a giant bunny: Look out, Cheeko, behind you, he’s behind you! It is confirmed when parents yelp as a flier slips from a trapeze swinging hard over their heads. Like always, his heels catch fast and the fall is a phony.

Cheeko the clown--actually blond, gangly Brent DeWitt, 28, from Sarasota, Fla.--knows yet another circus magic: the ephemera of the mud show.

“Suppose you live in a small town and for years pass an abandoned baseball field that is all dust and ugly weeds,” he explains. “One day, a circus tent, trucks, performers and animals arrive and the field is transformed into something exciting and beautiful.”

Then the circus leaves town. It disappears overnight.

“The next morning you walk by the field and there are no tents, no animals,” says DeWitt. “Maybe there just a circle in the grass where the ring was. So you ask yourself: Was it really there? Did I imagine it?

“But you’ll never forget that moment. That’s the magic.”

Large or small, whether traveling by private railroad car or an RV in need of a valve job, the circus has been rooted in the nation’s culture since George Washington watched trick riding and a tightrope walker at Philadelphia’s Ricketts amphitheater in 1793.

But it once was presumed a fading magic.

In 1956, Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey, still the first name in American circus, went from canvas to coliseums. In a photographic look back, Life magazine said the sawdust and canvas theater of Emmett Kelly, the Flying Wallandas and Gunther Gebel-Williams was on its deathbed.

“But the circus has kept growing,” notes Johnson. “The big shows are still in business, and we’ve only had two bad days since Easter. The circus keeps coming back. You just can’t kill it.”

It would be a poor country indeed that dispatched what Huck Finn saw as “the splendidist sight that ever was.” Or extinguished the sparkle that will always send adults back to the circus to recover childhood enthusiasm.

Today’s shows are triple layered.

A “silk stocking” or “society circus” such as Ringling-Barnum needs 47 flatcars to move between city arenas and is big-profit entertainment.

Cirque du Soleil , which uses no animals, and Le Cirque Archaos , which bills itself as a post-apocalyptic circus staged against a backdrop of urban violence in a junkyard, are nouvelle experiences applauded from Washington to Tel Aviv.

And the old-time, one-ring, one-tent traveling circuses such as Culpepper and Merriweather seem to march immortal.

OK, so canvas big tops are now made from weather-tougher vinyl, and a designer tent from Italy can run $80,000. Less cumbersome Yamaha keyboards have replaced steam-whistle calliopes, and rightists have tamed wilder animal acts.

Many shows refuse to travel with carnivores or even caged animals. “Its bad public relations,” says Johnson. “Besides, bears and chimps get a little neurotic at times.”

Ugly, modern levies bloat circus overheads; health and tent permits, axle fees and liability insurance, even income taxes if the show remains in some states too long. A local authority once tried dunning Culpepper and Merriweather $700 for operating what was considered “a migrant worker camp.”

Mud show profits and losses are not huge. Johnson figures a gross of $2,000 a day to break even and pay for gas, animal feed, wages, insurance and permit fees. Two performances in Quincy came up short. But in Portola and Truckee there were audiences of more than 450 for each performance, and at $6 for adults, $4 for children the tour returned to the black.

Fifteen performers buy their own food and costumes. Culpepper and Merriweather rookies get by on $10,000 a tour, plus whatever they earn from off-season circus work. Veterans with four acts to offer will make $20,000 or more and can afford to rest, develop new acts or work winter jobs between seasons.

Twenty roustabouts, drivers, office staff and animal handlers get a free breakfast and dinner at the grub wagon. Off-season, they go back to being welders, auto mechanics, maintenance men and dry wallers.

Everybody lives, sleeps, eats, travels and often doubles up in camper shells on pickups, trailers and motor homes. The circus pays the gas bills.

Boss Johnson calls it small-scale capitalism: “Our success has been going from four people and no money to 35 people and lots of bills.”

The circus is also cleaning up its act and image. Harmen Lyzenga, a district representative with the Circus Fans Assn. of America, says animal cruelty in circuses is anathema, and that drugs and drunkenness aren’t tolerated. A more sensitive industry has condemned human freak shows into historical references.

And roustabouts who join a circus in search of a profane, tattooed, womanizing, fist-fighting and bourbon-boozing lifestyle usually are dropped off between towns.

“What is left is essential to survival,” he says, “Good, clean, healthy, family entertainment.”

Some things, though, never change: People still run away to join the circus.

Burrow into most shows and you may find a child-support deadbeat or someone ducking police troubles back East. Freedom from urban responsibilities and the independence of living from a bed in the back of a pickup remains a high. So does the nomadism that every circus, mud show or silk stocking, shares with Bedouins and Gypsies.

That’s what hooked Johnson. It happened in Pittsville, Mass., when the sandy-haired son of an insurance man cut grammar school to wander backstage at Clyde Beatty and Cole Brothers circus.

Johnson remembers entering a self-sufficient, nomadic place, filled with people he’d never seen before:

“A blacksmith making horseshoes, clowns rehearsing out of makeup and people in a cook house. I said: ‘My God, this is a town they make every day, a culture with its own language, ethics and value system.’ ”

He saw neither racism nor class biases in the circus and recognized an organization still functioning on a pioneer spirit. Johnson fell in love with a routine that he now describes with personal poetry: “You’re up with the sun. You’re down with the moon. You’re always in touch with the planet, and that puts you in touch with God.”

In the ‘60s, however, Johnson responded to grimmer stimulants.

Drugs. Alcohol. He dropped out of college after studying cultures and philosophy, groveled around San Francisco, and spent two hobo years riding the rails and hitchhiking.

Johnson hit Skid Row in Spokane, pulled himself back to manage a youth hostel, then came here, to Quincy, to work the woods for lumber companies.

And it was here, in 1977, that Big John Strong’s Circus came to town and a boy’s memories stirred. Johnson signed on as Strong’s surrogate son willing to learn every corner of the business: “Tent crew . . . bookings . . . publicity . . . advance man . . . semi driver . . . canvas boss . . . manager . . . then fire eater and the world’s worst high-wire walker.”

Strong sold out in 1983. Two years later, with a personal donation of $10,000 from an executive of the fan association, Johnson and four friends hit the road as the Culpepper and Merriweather Great Combined Circus.

It combined little but their hopes. There was nothing really great about it.

“The first name came from a 1972 movie, ‘The Culpepper Cattle Company,’ ” Johnson says. “Merriweather was the maiden name of our sponsor’s mother. It sounded like an old English tea company, but it sounded right.”

The group juggled and clowned at Florida campgrounds and RV parks, passed the hat and “sometimes made $200 on a big day.” They bought a tent and a Chevy pickup to haul it, then added a pony and players willing to work for the experience. That’s how Culpepper and Merriweather eventually moved into the big top small time.

Four founders remain: Johnson; animal trainer Cap Jacobs; his aerialist wife, Lynn Marie, and canvas boss B.J. Hebert. They have survived the broke years and reached the point where their little show sometimes ends its season $80,000 ahead--just enough to restore aging tents, replace burned-out engines or buy fancier second-hand equipment.

Johnson pays constant emotional expenses. He has never married; the show and the road are permanent partners and neither allows time for a wife. Nor does he want children traveling with the circus. It is no life for them.

Not yet.

The romance of the circus is enormous, the electricity undeniable; each performance of Culpepper and Merriweather upholds mud show tradition.

It may not offer the dazzle of a blond tamer cracking a whip in the whiskers of a dozen Bengal tigers. But when only two feet from the ring, a child will see that black-eyed Barbara the elephant, has eyelashes to die for.

There is no room beneath a mud show tent for flying young men and their triple somersaults. But Ken Taylor hangs by his neck muscles with neither net nor safety wire, knowing a bad fall from 20 feet will break his back as surely as tumbling from 100.

And there are no Culpepper and Merriweather security guards to stop the curious who slip behind the scenes to where a camel snoozes, David (Stilts) Volponi is pulling enormous striped trousers over his aluminum stilts and Barbara is sucking up most of her bathwater as she gets hosed down for the night.

There also is as much hard labor as high glamour in getting this original dog-and-pony show on and off the road. Especially when each day straddles two towns.

The last morning in Quincy began the night before. That’s when regular roustabouts and a crew of locals hired for $6 an hour started unlacing and lowering the entrance to the big top--before the first customers had left the last show.

Eight hours later, at 30 minutes of dawn, the llamas and horses are led into their trailers by performers and circus hands simultaneously working on their first coffees, the first cigarettes, the first coughs of a new day.

No matter their titles, whether performer or concession operator, everybody slogs.

Johnson--a classic of divided loyalties in a Phoenix Suns sweat shirt and a pair of Boston Celtics pants--stacks bleachers. Wendany rakes pony manure from the flattened grass where the petting zoo had been. Volponi stabs with a spiked pole to clear the pristine Plumas County Fairgrounds of the last popcorn box and shred of litter.

Advance man Dennis Egan is already ahead of the show, 50 miles down the road and on the outskirts of Portola. He staples paper arrows to phone poles that will lead the circus trucks to an abandoned baseball field, the show’s al fresco home for another 24 hours.

He squirts the dusty, scrubby five acres with spray paint, marking the precise points for the big top, its steel stakes, auxiliary tents, the office trailer and performers’ vehicles.

“Every day it moves, every day it stays the same,” says Egan.

By 10 a.m. every truck, trailer, car and motor home has made it. Barbara has helped tug the big top aloft. The ring curbs are in place. Lights, trapezes, bleachers, props and a stage for a lone keyboardist have been set and tested.

Bill Burger, beard pointed, mustache waxed, is in his red and yellow box office with early tickets to sell. He’s also checking last night’s take in an ordinary vinyl notebook. One day, owner Johnson might break down and buy a computer for the accounting.

Volponi is in costume, up on his stilts and talking down to a cluster of grade schoolers who are fascinated to silence.

“How many of you have tickets for the circus?” Volponi asks. Fifty hands are raised. Some belong to teachers. Such is the strength of anticipation.

Noon: Performers are napping or visiting antique shops in town or cooking early lunches of pork chops and gravy or making harness repairs.

3:30 p.m: The show’s portable generator clacks on. Costumes are prepared. Muscles are stretched. Makeup begins. Barbara is hosed down one more time.

5:30 p.m: Show time. Music rises and a spotlight falls.

It finds Johnson in a high silk hat, ruffled shirt and spangled morning coat. His baritone is contrived and amplified and stirs the soul of Portola.

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages . . . “