The Greatest Job on Earth : From the age of 3, Tim Tegge has been following in the big floppy footsteps of his father, a circus performer. Now he clowns around with wife Gigi as they travel the world in the one-ring Prof. Tegge’s Circus Clown Revue.

Unlike many kids growing up in this century, Tim Tegge never dreamed 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, 36, has been following in his father’s big, floppy footsteps. With his family’s tiny troupe, then on his own, and most recently with his wife, the circus has been his life. On their honeymoon, he and Gigi 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 a night off, they will travel miles to see another circus. In crisscrossing the nation they have amassed a 10,000-piece collection of circus memorabilia and lore. It resides in several Orange County storage units, but the Tegges dream of making it the core of a museum and research center.

“People now might just go, ‘Eh, so what?’ But years ago the circus coming to town was the big thing,” Tegge 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.”

But 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.

Tegge’s father worked for a company that made automotive diagnostic equipment, but he loved to clown on the side, calling in sick when he had a conflicting gig at a party, picnic or store 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 want to do this, you’ve got three years to try to make it. If it doesn’t work, back to the office.’ He never went back.”

Tegge’s maiden stint behind the big red nose came when his father put him in makeup and had him pedal his trike behind a clown float. By the end of that Fourth of July parade, the 3-year-old was bushed--and hooked.

He performed whenever he could with his father, whose 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, TNT had become a real, albeit small, circus, touring the Midwest with about 20 members and animals. He was kept at home by his mom during the school months in the hope he’d have 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 moved the family to Orange County in 1976, and TNT continued to perform into its 25th year. “By 1984, (my father) was slowing down pretty bad and was diagnosed with cancer--he smoked like a chimney. . . . He died in April, 1985,” Tegge said.

Tegge wanted to keep the family circus going, but an insurance crunch made it nearly impossible for small shows to get liability coverage. And animal rights activists were protesting the treatment of circus animals.

Now, circuses are in an upswing, Tegge said, buoyed in part by the innovative Cirque du Soleil, which features only human acts. Along with the huge three-ring circuses, 60 or so small outfits work the circuit, including the one-ring Prof. Tegge’s Circus Clown Revue. Entertaining the new audience is a new generation of performer--young artists with no tradition or bloodlines in the craft, such as Gigi, 24, who met Tim six years ago in the Garden Grove comic book store where she worked.

“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.”

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The couple dated for a year. When Tim was offered a clowning gig in the Midwest, Gigi insisted that 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. The couple lives with Gigi’s mother in Santa Ana between gigs.

Gigi is learning Western rope-spinning from an 80-year-old veteran of a Wild West show, and the couple is working on an illusion act involving swords. But that’s as risky as it gets. “Thank God you’re a clown,” Gigi has said to Tim. “There’s no way you would’ve gotten me in the air on a trapeze or in a lion’s cage.”

The circus world is a small one. On one of their two tours in Japan, the Tegges traveled by bullet train and cab on their night off 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,” Tim said.

The Japan trips were high points in a profession that has a lot of low ones.

“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,” Gigi said. “And the longer it goes on, the worse it makes you feel.”

The payoff, of course, is the audience reaction. “I enjoy bringing the house down if I can,” Gigi said. “In Japan, kids would come to the show and would bring presents for the clowns. That drives me nuts. That’s one of the best things ever for me.”

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Tim loves being part of a living tradition and devotes much of his free time to documenting circus history. He takes detours to tiny towns to scour newspaper microfilm for stories on old traveling shows. And he seeks out circus old-timers, who share memories and often pass on treasures they could easily sell at high prices. The Tegge collection includes stunning stone lithographs dating to the turn of the century, thousands of photos and slides, and letters from P.T. Barnum and other luminaries.

“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.

With most of his 36 years spent in the circus, Tim sometimes gets a special thrill from his research, such as the trip to a bookstore that turned up more than old circus books.

“(The shop owner) 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.”