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Her appreciation extends to thelions she worked with also: They are so polite. They would witch their tails on the ground if ey were angry with you Theyn’t just pounce like tigers andoards do.”art of her wild animal act in lt;?d wrestling a tiger twice a vhich weighed 350 poundsnalled her ‘Kitty’ but her lame was ‘Pasha’,” Mrs. recalls. A color photo-f Pasha and her trainer 1 Mrs Weikel’s wall at Place.high leather boots andsuit,” Mrs. Weikel there wasn’t an inch t tears.”kel worked with'ementin I) Michael, the engage-hter, CarrieA. Boehle, *s Haroldiduate ofis emp-ill. Mr. ?e Highry onSfamous clown, Emmett Kelly, in the John Robinson Show, although he was a trapeze artist at the time. She remembers that his wife bore the brunt of one of the many circus superstitions“One day a newspaper reporter was there and as she left the room she whistled. That was supposed to be back luck and the one nearest the door would leave the circus,” Mrs. Weikel said. Kelly’s wife, Eva, who was standing next to the door that day, fell from her trapeze that same evening and broke her back, thus ending her circus career. “That really shook the reporter up.”Mrs. Weikel said bringing a hump back trunk on a circus train was also considered to be bad luck, but she said that was probably because those trunks were hard to load.THE BAI) reputation associated with the circus was unfounded in the twenties, according to Mrs. Weikel. She said all single girls were chaperoned and most of the performers were families who had been in the circus many years.Part of the circus excitement centered on the huge parades which preceded the show. “Some kids didn’t know there was anything after the parades,” she said.Mrs. Weikel recalls one parade in particular, during the show’s 100th anniversary tour of the South. She and two other women performers, dressed in red plush suits, marched along with the parade. “As we passed three little boys along the road, Iheard one of them say, ‘Hey look, there’s three of the original girls.”TRAGEDY STRUCK the cir cus often, Mrs. Weikel said, with performers fearing blow downs more than anything else. That was when the huge canvas tentcame loose from the tent poles, resulting in a great deal of damage and sometimes loss of both animal and human life.The performers had to count on everyone doing their job just right, Mrs Weikel said, particularly in the trapeze and high wire acts. Once when she was substituting in a trapeze act her fellow performer forgot she had to be helped down and she fell nearly 20 feet before the startled man caught her.“You can fall if your’re careless,” she said “You had to believe in people doing their jobs.”MRS. WEIKEL, who “always wanted to be a performer,” started her career in her father’s hay barn on a broomstick trapeze in Indiana. It was on that farm that she first rodehorses, something she continuedto do in the circusBefore signing up with the circus, Mrs. Weikel performed with a vaudeville show, playing at the New York Hippodrome nearly four years.One winter she left the circuses’ winter quarters in West Bend, Ind , and returned to the home of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Fred Love, at 1037 Ky. “I remember I was sewing on a coat which I was to wear when performing I sewed 22,000spangles on that coat, all by hand.”She met her husband, the late John Weikel, when he came to the circus to visit its manager during a stop in Owensboro, Ky., Weikel’s home. He brought several of his friends to the show and they were seated in the front row. “I was doing high-jumping and the horse went five feet, but I went six, landing on the ground. That was my introduction to Owensboro.”Mrs. Weikel returned to Lawrence in 1942, long after her circus career had ended, to care for her parents. “They never saw me perform,” she said. “But my mother worried about me anyway.”805Mass.
Newspaper Details
Lawrence Daily Journal World
Lawrence, Kansas, US
Tue, Oct 22, 1974
Page 7
Full Page
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USA 18 May 2020
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