Man About Clown : Fixations: Tim Tegge carries on the tradition of his father’s O.C.-based mini-circus and dreams of opening a museum and research center.
Unlike so many kids growing up in this century, Tim Tegge never got to dream of running away from home and joining the circus. He was already there. That’s the problem when your dad’s a clown.
From the age of 3, Tegge, now 36, has been following in his father’s big floppy footsteps. With his family’s tiny troupe--named the TNT Circus after his initials--then on his own, and more recently with his wife of five years, Gigi, the circus has been his life. For their honeymoon, in fact, the pair went out clowning with a circus in the Midwest.
They sometimes work 100 nights in a row, living in a van and slogging through devastating weather, yet on their first night off they’ll travel out of their way to see another circus perform. In crisscrossing the nation they also have amassed a 10,000-piece collection of circus memorabilia and lore. It currently resides in several Orange County storage units, but the Tegges have a dream of making it the core of a circus museum and research center.
“People now might just go, ‘Eh, so what?’ But years ago the circus coming to town was the big thing,” Tim said. “Even in the ‘30s and ‘40s, they would close down schools and let businesses out at noon so people could go to the circus. People saved all year long to go to it. It was a big deal . . . as big as Christmas.”
It wasn’t such a big deal when Tegge was growing up in Chicago.
“While all the kids in school were out organizing their baseball games and all that, I was playing with my circus toys. That was pretty much a geek-of-the-world kind of thing at the time. They couldn’t comprehend anybody doing that,” he said.
When Tegge was a tyke, his father worked for a company that made automotive diagnostic equipment, but he loved clowning and did it on the side, calling in sick when he had a conflicting gig at a party, picnic or store grand opening.
“Finally one day when he had a booking, my mom called the office and said, ‘He’s not coming in today or tomorrow. In fact, he’s not coming in at all. He quits.’ She hung up and my dad goes, ‘Uh oh, what did you do?’ She said, ‘You wanna do this, you got three years to try to make it. If it doesn’t work, back to the office.’ He never went back.”
Tegge’s own maiden stint behind the big red nose came when his father booked a Fourth of July celebration parade in one of the Chicago suburbs. He put 3-year-old Tim in makeup too and had him pedal his trike behind the clown float. By the end of the parade, he was bushed--and hooked.
He began performing with his father whenever he could, though he said the fledgling TNT circus was a far cry from Barnum and Bailey.
“Boy, some of those early shows were pretty bad,” Tegge recalled. “(My dad would) have one or two professional acts and he’d do balloon animals and stuff. To fill time he’d get a bunch of kids from some dance school doing baton twirling or something. He’d hire an organist from church and instead of having ‘Ta-dah!’ you’d get ‘Amen.’ It was just awful.”
By the time Tegge was 14, it had become a real, albeit small, circus, touring the Midwest with some 20 members and animals. He wanted to be on the road all the time but was kept at home by his mom during the school months so he’d have some semblance of a normal childhood. Not that it worked.
“I hated school and just went along with what I had to do, waiting for summer. I was just crazy for that. I loved being out there. I wanted to always be in clown makeup.”
His father had started the circus in 1960, and moved the family to Orange County in 1976. “By 1984 he was slowing down pretty bad and was diagnosed with cancer--he smoked like a chimney. But he wanted to get in that 25th year, and he managed to, working a few dates in 1985 before it got impossible for him to travel anymore. He died in April, 1985,” Tegge said.
Tegge considered keeping the family circus going, but an insurance crunch at the time made it nearly impossible for small shows to get liability coverage. Animal-rights activists were also up in arms then over shows’ treatment of animals.
While animals aren’t necessarily asked their opinion before being drafted into performing, neither are they mistreated, Tegge maintains. When one has the better part of a house invested in an elephant, you’re inclined to treat it well, Tegge maintains. He says there is also often a close bond between human and animal, though there can be risks for both. “I knew a woman years ago who worked with the same group of elephants for 30 years and had one particular elephant where they were as close to being soul-mates as you could imagine. And one day the elephant just decided that was it and he stepped on her, put a tusk through her and killed her instantly.”
Though life on the road is always difficult (they don’t have a home here but stay in Santa Ana with Gigi’s mom when they’re in California), Tegge says circuses are in an upswing, buoyed in part by the new audience attracted by the innovative Cirque de Soleil. Along with the huge three-ring circuses, Tegge estimates, there are some 60 small outfits now working, including his own Prof. Tegge’s Circus Clown Revue.
With the new audiences, there is also a new generation of circus performer, young artists with no tradition or bloodlines in the craft. One such person is his wife--Gigi, 24, who was working in a Garden Grove comic book store when she and Tim met six years ago.
“I was always into clowns, but I never thought of them as real people,” Gigi said. “When he told me he did a circus, I thought, ‘That’s a real profession?’ Except for Ringling Bros., you don’t see circuses out here.”
They dated for a year, though he was gone on tour much of time, and then married. Meanwhile, he’d been offered a clowning gig in the Midwest, and Gigi insisted he take it, with the proviso that she be his partner. “So that was it. The day after we got married we headed in the car for Illinois, he put me in makeup, we did it, and that was our honeymoon,” she said, turning to Tim:
“Thank God you’re a clown! There’s no way you would’ve gotten me in the air on a trapeze or in a lion’s cage.” She is learning Western rope spinning from an 80-year-old Wild West show friend of Tim’s, and they’re working up an illusion where she’s in a box he sticks swords through.
Tim, for his part, is glad Gigi didn’t come from a circus background. “If they’re from a circus family, often what happens is you find you don’t marry a person; you marry a whole family, an act. So you think you’re getting a wife but you’re getting a teeter-board troupe.”
The circus world is a small one, as they found during one of their two tours in Japan. “Traveling during a night off by bullet train and cab to see a small Japanese circus, we got there just in time to see the parade of performers, and right in the middle were these German people that worked for my dad 20 years ago that I hadn’t seen since.”
The Japan trips were high points in a profession that has a lot of low ones, especially, he says, for people who go into it not knowing what to expect. The Ringling Bros. Clown College, for example, may turn out fine clowns, but they’re “Ringling-ized,” he says, expecting ideal conditions.
“So they get diplomas and are officially clowns, and wind up in (a tiny) circus, stuck in the mud having their truck pulled out by an elephant, when it’s good and ready to. It’s enough to send anybody packing home.
“Last year we were up to our knees in mud for 27 days straight. Sometimes you can’t get enough electricity, can’t get hay for the animals, and your wardrobe gets ruined in the mud. And the longer it goes on the worse it makes you feel.”
Curiously, they find, bad weather has a positive effect on attendance. “You get big audiences when it’s pouring,” Gigi said. “There’s nothing else to do outside, so they really want to see us falling down in the mud.
“Doing that and living in a van that breaks down, there’s a lot of harshness to it, but it’s romantic in a way too, a life that most people never see.”
The main payoff, both Tegges say, is the effect they can have on audiences. Especially within the intimacy of the small one-ring circus, Tim said, “there’s nothing quite like the feeling of going out in front of an audience and being able to entertain. It’s like a gift you can keep giving somebody.”
“I enjoy bringing the house down if I can,” Gigi said. “From the sentimental side, I love the little kids that make little notes or pictures of the clown and give them to me. In Japan, kids would come to the show--they must’ve seen it more than once--and would bring presents for the clowns. That drives me nuts. That’s one of the best things ever for me.”
Tim loves being a part of a living tradition that he says even is evidenced in cave drawings and certainly was in full swing by the glory days of Rome. He’s passionate about documenting circus history and devotes much of his free time to it. Because he’s been in the circus world most of his life, old-timers readily share their memories with him and often pass on treasures they could easily sell for high prices.
He has a collection of stunning stone lithographs dating back to the turn of the century, many of which would start at $5,000 at auction. He has thousands of photos and slides, letters from P.T. Barnum and other luminaries and will often detour to tiny towns to scour old newspaper microfilms for information on old traveling shows.
“People now can’t imagine a time when a circus train with 100 boxcars would pull into a city and unload 400 horses, 20 or 30 elephants, camels, zebras, lions, tigers, marching bands, 2,000 people, a tent you could barely see to the other end of,” Tim said.
Gigi continued, “Heading into WWI, the military followed the Ringling show around to find out how they could transport 2,000 people and thousands of animals and tents overnight so efficiently.”
With most of his 36 years spent in the circus, Tim sometimes gets a special thrill in his researches.
“Just a few weeks ago I went into a bookstore to look at this guy’s old circus books. I got to talking with him and asked him if he had any kind of paper ephemera or anything else circus-related that wasn’t on the shelf. He says yeah, and in his back room he pulled out some old programs and sandwiched in with all this stuff was something from the TNT Circus. As we get around the country I sometimes see scrapbooks and things that I turn up in. It’s weird to think I’ll be historical someday,” he said.
With her five years, Gigi is already thoroughly immersed in the clown’s life. “My old high school friends think it’s pretty weird, I guess. Most of my friends now are in the circus. What we do is a conversation piece for other people. They ask us, ‘What are you gonna have for babies? Kids with white faces and red noses?’ ”