The circus is coming to town

The “Greatest Show on Earth” in Howard Tibbals’ world is also the smallest, with its diminutive circus acts, tiny spectators and a “big” top that measures just about 4 feet tall.

It is a magical world more than 50 years in the making, its seeds planted in Tibbals’ imagination as a child when he watched the circus roll in to town. He has since handcrafted nearly 1 million pieces to make up his miniature circus, which soon will have a permanent home at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in a $9-million building.

The Tibbals Learning Center -- partly built with a $6.5-million donation from Tibbals, the retired head of a successful flooring company -- is scheduled to be completed in January 2006.

Visitors will be able to see Tibbals’ 1/16th-scale circus fully assembled in an area that’s large enough to park 11 school buses. Dubbed the “Howard Brothers Circus,” it will depict a circus coming to town on rail cars, complete with its sideshows, a parade of exotic animals and a big top with 7,000 intricately carved folding chairs.

Tibbals, 68, began the painstaking installation in November.

“It’s going to take me an entire year to do what they did with 1,200 employees in just hours,” he said during a recent interview in the new 30,000-square-foot center. “How in the world did they move that stuff every day? An awful lot of muscle, both human and animal.”

The creation of Tibbals’ circus is the tale of a man fascinated and charmed by circuses and devoted to re-creating a bygone era.

Since he was a young man, Tibbals has spent two or three hours a day working with wood, plastic and cloth to construct the tiny elements that make up the traveling big top.

The circus has been on display a few times before, including at the World’s Fair in Knoxville in 1982 and at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. But for most of its existence, it has been in storage at Tibbals’ home in Oneida, Tenn.

Tibbals had been searching for a permanent home for his circus when he made the $6.5-million donation in 2000 for construction of the facility. Additional financing is coming from the Ringling endowment and the state.

The center also will become home to the massive collection of circus documents, photographs and posters Tibbals amassed in his effort to accurately re-create every detail of the circuses of the early 20th century.

The story of a culture

The display is designed to replicate the shows that toured from 1919 to 1938, although Tibbals said he did depart to include replicas of some costumes from the 1952 movie extravaganza “The Greatest Show on Earth.”

“It’s the story of American culture,” John Wetenhall, executive director of the Ringling Museum, said. “It was your television, your radio, your opera, your zoo. And all of it came to your town.”

Wetenhall said the opening of the Tibbals center would help restore the once-ailing museum complex. The museum is now operated under the auspices of Florida State University, which took over the Ringling mansion, the art museum and the circus museum four years ago. John Ringling was one of five brothers who created the famous circus in the 1880s.

The Tibbals center will be one of the highlights of a $76-million renovation of the Ringling complex, to be completed by 2007. A new home for the 18th century Venetian Asolo Theater and new art galleries are planned. The Ringling’s winter mansion, Ca d’Zan, was renovated in 2002. The 66-acre estate on Sarasota Bay was Ringling’s winter home in 1926.

The Ringling museum in the past had been so focused on its collection of Rubens paintings and other fine art that it had not fully developed its circus museum to reflect the important historical and cultural role the shows played, Wetenhall said.

A boy and his toys

Tibbals was just 3 and too young to remember the first circus his parents took him to in 1939 in Pittsburgh. But he does remember every detail of the show he saw in 1941, even that he sat on a bale of hay.

After that, he would pretend all his toys were part of the circus parade. As a child, his best days were spent watching the circus come to town. It wasn’t so much the circus acts that captured his imagination, but the amazing ability to quickly transport the huge shows with their hundreds of performers, animals and workers.

“I never watched the acts,” he said. “I watched them move things.”

The family eventually moved to Tennessee. By the 1950s, Tibbals had begun crafting the miniatures in the evenings, much to the dismay of his six children, who also loved the circus but hated how much time their father spent on his miniatures.

A winter resident of neighboring Long Boat Key, Tibbals continues to build the miniatures and the center will include a workshop where visitors will be able to see him create new pieces.

“If you go through all the effort to make it,” he said, “someone ought to see it.”