Perry

                       

I had just returned home after undergoing four interviews with members of the law department of a financial services corporation in Minneapolis, when the phone rang and they asked me if I would be willing to come back for another interview the next day.  I was wondering what more there was to say, but I needed a job, so I agreed to come at 10:00am the next morning to interview with a Vice President and Assistant General Counsel.

It was early 1984 and I was trying to break into the white-collar world.  I had determined that my future as a railroad trackman was limited and in the summer of 1983 I had completed a paralegal certificate program at Roosevelt University in Chicago.  Since then, I had been working temporary jobs and trying to land my first real job in the legal field.

So the next day, I put on the second of the two suits I owned, the second of the three ties in my collection, and my last clean dress shirt and headed back downtown.  When I arrived, the HR manager I had been dealing with asked me if anyone had talked to me about Perry.  I said no and was told he could be a bit gruff.  Being duly warned, I joined the manager as we rode the elevator to the law department.  We were met there by the Deputy General Counsel of the company, who took me aside and asked me if anyone had talked to me about Perry.  I remember thinking that after working on the railroad, “gruff” was not going to be a problem.

When I entered Perry’s office he was sitting with his back to me with his legs propped up on the credenza behind his desk.  I noticed about six inches of very white, hairless leg was showing and he was reading something while smoking a cigarette.  Another cigarette was burning in the ashtray on his desk.  As he slowly turned around I saw a large bald head that vaguely looked like a bald eagle peering at me over a pair of glasses propped on the end of his nose.  His shirtsleeves were rolled up and each forearm was decorated with sailing ship tattoos (this was long before every teenage girl got tattoos).

After looking me up and down, he said, “I like your shirt.”  I wasn’t sure how to interpret that opening, so I just thanked him.  As he looked over my resume, he started asking me about the railroad.  Where had I worked?  What were my duties?  Had I ever worked as a brakeman?  Did I operate any heavy machinery?  Had I worked on rail gangs?  This went on for about twenty-five minutes and then the interview was over.  As I left his office, I thought, “Damn, he doesn’t think I can handle this job.”  I had wondered how my last three jobs, window washer, truck driver, and trackman were going to play in the white-collar world and now I thought I had my answer.

I went home thinking my job search would continue.  Early that afternoon, a law firm I had interviewed with called and offered me a job.  I asked for a day to consider the offer.  Around 3:00 the financial services company called and offered me a job that I immediately accepted.  The financial services job paid two thousand dollars a year more ($14,000 to $12,000) and I had a feeling that the corporate job was a better fit for me. I was probably right, as I would spend the next 25 years with the company.

So I went to work for Perry.  One of the first things I noticed was the fierce pride he took in his work and the work of his subordinates.  He helped me define professionalism.  He was interested in excellence and when you fell short of his expectations you heard about it.  He did not suffer fools gladly and patience was not his long suit.

His reputation around the company was one part awe and two parts trepidation.  I quickly learned that being perceived as his lieutenant could be used to my advantage as people often preferred to deal with me and would meet me more than half way rather than tangle with Perry.

There are many, many stories about Perry. One of the many I witnessed and/or participated in illustrates the fear he could engender.  John was a second year law student who was working as a summer law clerk.  He worked directly with Perry and had, what I perceived to be, a good relationship with him.  One day Shelly, Perry’s long time secretary, told me that John was going to be married in a week and he had not told Perry that he needed a week off for his honeymoon.  Shelly had been telling John for more than a month he needed to talk with Perry and let him know he would be gone the week following his wedding.  Shelly offered to tell Perry for John but he kept saying he would do it but never did.  On the Wednesday before the wedding Shelly finally walked into Perry’s office and told him John was getting married on Saturday but was apparently to frightened to tell him he would be gone the next week on his honeymoon.  Perry looked at me and grinned and told Shelly to go get John and bring him to his office.  When John walked in Perry told him that the company had just been served with a large class action lawsuit and it was going to require us all to work Saturday and Sunday.  John got a little pale, hesitated for a moment, and said “OK,” and walked out of the office.  I stood there with my mouth open, unable to believe what I had just witnessed.  I was already envisioning the conversation John was probably formulating in his mind in which he tells his bride he has to work on his wedding day.  Perry told Shelly to go get John and then congratulated him and told him he understood he would be out the following week.

After I had worked for Perry for a couple of years, budgets were tight and we were short a worker or two and the workload required we work on Saturdays.  Perry would pick me up Saturday mornings around 7:30 in a great big green 1977 Cadillac.  The thing was a mile long and had the famous Cadillac fins. Everything in it was immaculate except the ashtray. We would first meet to discuss what he wanted me to spend my time on and then we would each work separately.  At 11:30 we would go to lunch and I would go to school.  I was allowed to ask any questions I had and he took the time to not only give me the answer but to explain the whys and wherefores.  He would share insights and viewpoints that I as a lowly paralegal would have had no way of knowing about and taught me how to think through issues.  He took the time to educate me far beyond what was necessary for my immediate job and I consider what he did to be a gift I could never begin to reciprocate.

Sometimes at lunch, he would tell me about his life.   He had been orphaned and was living on the streets of Minneapolis with his 13-year-old cousin.  They made their money selling newspapers and he started smoking when he was about five or six years old.  Eventually his uncle, who was a railroad engineer (the type that drive the trains) came down to the Twin Cities from Thief River Falls Minnesota and took both of them in and raised them in northern Minnesota.  Quite a few of his uncles worked on the railroad.  That is when I learned that what I had perceived as a negative in my job interview, had been, in fact, a huge advantage.

When World War ll broke out he ran away at age 16 and tried to join the marines.  He was in boot camp in California before his uncle was able to track him down and return him to Minnesota to finish high school.  He graduated at 17 and with his uncle’s permission, enlisted in the navy.

If you have seen WW ll movies of fighter planes with the glass bubble on the bottom with the machine guns, then you know where Perry spent approximately two years during the war.  He told me he had seen and participated in some horrible things but he never went into much detail.  He knew I was interested in history and I think that led him to open up a little bit about his war time experiences.  Like most veterans who were actually involved in heavy combat operations, he didn’t talk about it much.  He once told me, he had talked to me more about his experiences in the war than anyone else, including his family.  One time he looked up and said, “It’s strange to think that the most important thing you did in your lifetime was done when you were 19 years old.”

I doubt Perry could survive in today’s corporate culture, let alone flourish.  He had no trouble speaking truth to power and considered it an essential part of his job.  That is an attribute that became increasingly rare over my 25-year career.  One time a young attorney was having trouble scheduling dates for the deposition of a couple members of the executive team including the CEO.  They kept blowing her off and treating her requests for dates as a nuisance.  When she told Perry the problems she was having, Perry told her to follow him as they went up to the CEO’s office.  When they got there Perry asked if the CEO was in and his secretary told him he was in but he was meeting with the other member of the executive team that was going to be deposed and they couldn’t be interrupted.  Perry walked into the CEO’s office and told him to get out his book (calendar, in those days people kept paper calendars).  Looking over the CEO’s shoulder, he quizzed him on the importance of certain meetings and events listed on the calendar, getting the CEO to admit he could miss several of the up coming events if necessary.  He told the young attorney that all of these dates were open for the deposition.  He then turned to the other executive in the office and told him to get out his book and repeated the exercise.

  It is almost unimaginable that such a scenario could play out today. Such a stunt would almost certainly spell career suicide.  After Perry retired, I felt the company missed his willingness to tell the business side the harsh truths they sometimes did not want to hear.

Perry was a man of high integrity and often told me, “They don’t pay me to cheat, lie, or steal.”  He would usually follow that up with, “If anyone is going to prison, it is our job to make sure it’s not you or me.”  He told me of a couple of times, in his career, when he had made it known that if certain decisions were made he would resign.  Luckily for him and the company he never had to take that step.

There was another side of Perry that surfaced at unexpected times.  One time a financial planner in Indiana got in trouble and was summoned by Perry to come to the home office in Minneapolis.  Before he got to town Perry did some research into this individual and found out the man had a very sad childhood and had been troubled all of his life.  When he entered the conference room where Perry, an outside counsel, and myself were waiting for him, Perry treated this man gently and elicited the necessary information while all the time being kind and considerate.  After the interview I was walking the planner to where he could get a cab to the airport when he told me that Perry wasn’t a bad guy and when he had talked with him on the phone a few days before he thought he was 7 feet tall and 700 hundred pounds.  Perry had demonstrated that there was no need to intimidate, brow beat, or judge this poor guy who was going to lose his job and quite possibly end up in prison.

Years later, I found myself in a similar situation.  A financial planner who had been fired for a combination of poor performance and alcohol use on the job had filed a wrongful termination suit against the company.  A Kansas judge had ordered the parties to get together and see if they couldn’t settle the case.  I was sent to Wichita to represent the company.  The meeting was to take place at 10:00am and at about 10:20 a woman walked into the conference room and identified herself as the wife of the planner.  She told me that she had been driving her husband to the meeting when he became so agitated and nervous that he had thrown open the car door at a red light and ran away.  She was late because she had been out looking for him.  I sat down with this poor woman and explained why the company had terminated her husband.  I could tell she had never heard any of this stuff before but her experience with her seriously alcoholic husband lead her to believe what I was telling her.  She agreed to go look for her husband and called about an hour later and we set up an afternoon meeting.  This time he came and one look at him told me this was an individual who was going to hit rock bottom soon and get help or he wouldn’t live to be a middle-aged man.  Remembering Perry’s demeanor years before, I tried to make the man feel at ease and eventually offered him $500 to make his suit go away. The $500 let him feel he had, in someway, won something and had been treated with respect.  It was a tiny fraction of what it would have cost to defend the lawsuit.

Whenever people who worked with Perry get together and his name comes up the stories start to flow.  He was a unique character and one of the most intelligent men I have encountered in my lifetime.  He had argued and won a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, taught at Marquette University Law School and was friends with the likes of Walter Mondale.  When he retired, the company hired two attorneys to replace him.

I worked with Perry for the last six years of his career.  During the course of those six years I learned many invaluable lessons that helped me one day rise to the level of vice president.  Our personalities were very different ( believe it or not, I was known as a nice guy), but lessons on integrity, professionalism and empathy transcend style.  I will always be grateful to him, not just for the knowledge he imparted, but also for his willingness to invest the time and effort to help a trackman find his way in an alien culture.  The day he retired, I said to Shelly, “ I don’t know what the future will bring, but I very much doubt it will ever be this much fun again.”  I was right.

All The Live Long Day

                       

Often, as I am walking down the street, people will stop me and ask, “ Grouch, what was it like working on the railroad in the late seventies.”  I usually answer with something brief and move on.  But now, I want to reward my four and half regular readers and provide a more detailed account of the life of a “gandy dancer” some thirty-six years ago.

Actually, my first recollection of being hired is sitting in a room with about twenty-five other job applicants taking an intelligence test designed to determine if we had the candlepower necessary to work like a government mule.  The last part of the test was one of those deals where they give you a set of four pictures, three of which were related, and you were asked to pick out the outlier.  After we had finished the test, my neighbor asked me what I had put for the last question.  The four pictures were of a pig, a cow, a sheep, and a tiger.  I told him the tiger and he said he put the pig because he really liked pork.  A few minutes later, the guy who was conducting the test, came back in with the corrected exams and read one name and asked that individual to leave. My neighbor got up and trudged out of the room, presumably to go have a pork chop for lunch.

That was how I found out I was smart enough to be a trackman.  What I later learned was intelligence comes in many guises and forms.  I worked with some very intelligent people who had eighth grade educations and were functionally illiterate.  Then again, there were some college graduates who didn’t have the sense God gave a flea.  It was one of the first lessons I learned working on the railroad and one that stuck with me throughout my working life.

After I was hired, I was required to attend a series of safety meetings where I found out the many ways I could get mangled or killed on the job.  They even had short films, similar to the driver’s education classics, that featured actors being dismembered, run over by box cars, or in some graphic way being sent to that big railroad in the sky.

My first actual day on the job, I went with five other newbies, to a rail yard to replace some ties.  We all suffered that first day, because we weren’t used to heavy physical labor on this scale.  Working on a section crew in those days was similar to working on a section crew 75 years in the past.  Virtually nothing was automated and everything you dealt with was heavy.  Going to work was like lifting weights for eight or ten hours a day.

Section crews were still using this method to line track in the 70s

 

For the first couple weeks, I would wake up in the middle of the night with my hands cramped into tight fists.  I began to wonder if I was going to be able to cut it.  Our foreman, who was a barrel chested Irishman, complete with red beard and hair, had come right out of high school to work on the railroad.  At the time I met him, he was a ten-year veteran who was incredibly brash and an instinctively good railroader and leader.  One day he told me not to worry because in a month I was going to feel better than I ever had before and would be roaring like a lion.  He was right, and soon, the work we did that first day seemed like a piece of cake that we could now accomplish in half the time.

Try swinging this 11 pound spike maul all day

To sum it up, the work was physically demanding, often dangerous, filthy, and sometimes downright disgusting, and I liked doing it a lot.  There was something about the romance of the railroad that seemed to make up for a lot of the downside.  I usually am very skeptical of “the romance” factor but it was definitely there on the railroad.  There were people who would come to the edge of the rail yard and set up folding chairs, pop a few beers and watch us work for an afternoon.  Sometimes they would travel considerable distances to do it.  I never did understand that hobby, but there was something about the railroad that connected with people in different ways.

Additionally, there were some good things about the work.  The job would often take you to places, even in the center of a city, where you felt you were way out in the country.  Because little machinery was used, the worksite was quiet and working in close quarters with your crew encouraged conversation.  Unlike many factory jobs where the noise is a danger to your hearing and your sanity, working out on the right of way was peaceful and you really got to know the people you worked with after talking with them for eight hours every day.

The people I worked with on the railroad were almost universally really good people.  I would say about 30 percent of them were crazy, but crazy in a good way (although there were a few who were just plain crazy).  Sure, there were a few jerks and slackers but they weren’t tolerated for very long and usually moved on to larger rail or tie gangs where they could hide their laziness or incompetence. I worked in Wisconsin, Iowa, South Dakota and Minnesota and found the people to be remarkably consistent in their make-up and I really enjoyed working with them.

So to give you a little flavor of what it was like I thought I would try to describe a few of my experiences as a trackman on the Chicago Northwestern Railroad.

It was about 11:00am on a steamy summer morning when the crew truck pulled up next to a rendering plant about 10 miles outside of Milwaukee.  We were there to retire an old spur line that had been used by the plant in past years.  In other words we were there to take apart the spur, salvage the plates, spikes, rails, switches, and the frog (a frog is a section of track that allows train cars to switch from one track to another).  Most, if not all, of the ties had sunk down into the ground and were in various stages of rot.

Our first task was to cut down the eye level grass that had grown in order to get to the job and find the old line.  Another truck pulled up with a bunch of scythes; you know, the kind used by the Grim Reaper.  So we plunged into the tall grass, swinging the scythes and waking up the billions of mosquitoes and other flying insects that liked to hang around tall marshy grass next to a rendering plant.  We quickly retreated and the call went out for repellant.  Not too much later, the assistant foreman came back with several cans of Raid.  We were all doused and headed back to the tall grass.  By now the temperature was pushing ninety and the repellant quickly was washed off as we sweat through our clothes.  We would work for ten minutes and retreat for another dousing with the bug spray.  This went on for the better part of two hours until we had cleared the grass enough to start taking apart the track.

The work itself was not particularly difficult, but digging next to the rendering plant was a repulsive and stinky task.  Every other shovelful brought up bones or pieces of rotting hides.  Our assistant foreman started talking about going into the plant and finding the “kill room.”  I wasn’t particularly interested in this field trip and eventually the assistant foreman went off by himself to see what he could find out.  Before too long he came back to the crew and told us he had found a foreman in the plant who had agreed to give us a tour culminating at the “kill room.”  I didn’t want to go but the other crewmembers agreed to go and I didn’t want to miss what undoubtedly was going to be a topic of conversation for the next couple of days, so I agreed to go along.

I will spare you the details, but just say the ‘kill room” was an appalling thing to witness.  One of the things that struck me was the eyes of the workers.  They went about their business covered in gore with a far away stare.  They did not acknowledge us as we crowed into their nightmarish workspace.  In one corner of the room there was a small table with their lunch pails and thermoses.  Apparently they ate their lunch right there.  I wondered how these guys dealt with the psychological aspects of their job.  Killing all day, every day, had to leave its mark. We left the “kill room” and quietly finished our work.  Not much was said about our little side trip.

Now that I have you thinking about your lunch, let me say a few words about the trackman’s eating habits.  I was not the shortest guy on my crew but at 145 pounds I was by far the lightest.  There were some work sites where it was necessary to pack a lunch.  I knew one guy who would pack nine sandwiches along with a piece of fruit or two and a slice of cake or pie.  He was a great customer of the Tupperware Company and had plastic containers for pie, cake, sandwiches and anything else that was eatable.  He would eat the first three sandwiches at our 10:00am break and take care of the last six at lunch.  Many of the crewmembers packed their lunches in those large Play Skool coolers.  These guys worked hard and ate like turn of the century farmers.

One time I accompanied three of these hungry men to a little pizza parlor not far from our work site.  The four of us ordered an extra large 16-inch pizza with everything on it.  When the pizza was set in front of us, my companions rolled up the slices like a tortilla and took two bites to consume an entire slice.  As I watched amazed, they ate the whole pizza like they were contestants in a hot dog eating contest.  I took my initial slice and was eating it in the conventional manner when I realized it was going to be the only slice I was going to get if I didn’t hurry.  So I grabbed another slice with my left hand and was just starting to eat it when the last slice went down.  I was grateful I got through that lunch without losing a finger or two.

Working on the railroad was a dangerous job.  Besides the obvious hazards related to working around moving trains, there were many other ways you could get hurt.  One of the most common ways to hurt yourself was to injure your back.  You were always lifting heavy objects and early on in my tenure I vowed I would not leave the job with a screwed up back.  There were innumerable ways to squash fingers or toes, hurt knees, or lose eyes if you were not careful.  Sometimes danger showed up in the most unexpected ways.

One day we were working replacing ties up on a crest.  The crest dropped off dramatically just a couple of feet from the right of way.  In order to remove a tie, you have to pull out the spikes, jack up the track, remove the plates, dig out the tie if necessary, so it could be slid under the jacked up rail.  The roadbed we were working on was extremely hard and it was necessary to use a pick ax to loosen the earth around the ties so they could be slid under the rail.

In order to slide the old tie out, you use a tool called a tie tong.  The tie tong looked like what you see people using when they are moving big blocks of ice around.  The trick was to jam the sharpened points of the tongs into both sides of the ties, then pull back and slide the tie between your legs and out under the rail.  The points of the tie tongs would become dull and as a result people would grind them down to create sharper points.  The problem was that each time the points were ground they became thinner and weaker and more likely to break when the trackman put all of his strength into pulling a reluctant tie under the rail.

So on that particular day, I was using a too often sharpened tie tong to pull out ties when the points broke off and I flew backward and over the side of the crest.  Later, my crewmates told me they heard a noise and looked up and all they saw was my hardhat twenty feet in the air and me gone.  When I flew backward my feet had come up and kicked my helmet straight up in the air as I began my plunge to the bottom of the crest.  You probably have seen videos of skiers who lose control and do endless somersaults, ass over teakettle, down the slope.  That was what I was doing to the bottom of the crest.  When I got to the bottom, I was able to get up and after a bit, determine I was bruised and cut up, but had not suffered any serious injuries.  As I looked around, I saw numerous large rocks and places where I could have dashed my brains out.  By sheer luck, I am still able to feed myself and you get to read these wonderful stories.

And sometimes, the work was worthy of the theatre of the absurd.  One dark and cloudy Friday afternoon it began to rain about 15 minutes before quitting time.  We piled into the truck and slowly rode back to our locker room where we changed out of our work clothes and headed home.  Because it was Friday and most everybody had plans, the locker room emptied quickly and I found myself the last one leaving.  As I was walking across the gravel parking lot to my luxury AMC Gremlin, I was stopped by a railroad official, who told me I couldn’t leave because there had been a derailment at the far eastern part of the yard.  I was caught and couldn’t figure any way out of it, so I went back in the locker room and put my work clothes back on.

 While I was dressing, I heard the official making calls to the homes of various workers trying to get them back to the yard.  Mysteriously, nobody’s wife had any idea where her husband was at the moment and the official had no idea what bars he could have called to collect most of them.  So I was the lone grunt heading out to work until it was determined there was nothing more that could be done that night.

The official drove me out to the site of the derailment and I went to work, as the rain became a downpour.  It was just a foreman, who practically lived at the yard, and me working to repair a sidetrack so the burro crane could come in and lift the trucks (train wheels are called trucks) onto the sidetrack and then put the derailed cars on the trucks so they could be moved out of the way.  We first had to clear a lot of broken rail and splintered ties that required getting down in the muck.  It continued to rain until about an hour before we were told to go home about eight hours after I had been shanghaied.

The official apparently forgot about me and got in his car and left.  So I began the walk back to the locker room as the mud and dirt began to dry somewhat. When I got back to the locker room there was no one around and everything was locked up tight.  So I walked over to my car, wondering if I had anything I could throw down to protect my upholstery, and seeing I didn’t, jumped in the car and turned the key.  You know the sound a car makes when a battery is dead?  That was what I heard.  This was before the days of cell phones and all the mom and pop places I knew around the yard were closed, so I began a half a mile walk to the nearest bus stop.

As I was making my way, it began to rain again.  Soon the bus came and when the doors opened the driver looked at me like he was picking up the creature from the black lagoon.  As I walked down the aisle looking to sit down, veteran urban bus riders began taking all kind of actions designed to discourage me from sitting next to them. Finally, I found a seat and collapsed into it.  The other bus riders kept throwing me glances like they were worried that at any moment I would let out a roar and began to eat anyone foolish enough to sit within six seats of me.

Finally I made it to the door of the one bedroom apartment Pat and I shared on Milwaukee’s east side.  As I unlocked the door and stood in the doorframe, Pat looked up from the book she was reading, and burst into a loud and prolonged laugh.  To this day, I think, in this instance, she lacked a certain level of empathy.

Despite all of what I have related here, and I have just scratched the surface, I really did enjoy my time on the railroad.  It taught me that you could do more than you think yourself capable of.  I also enjoyed the people.  They were a rough and tumble bunch, almost always profane and politically incorrect, but below the gruff exterior, they would give you the shirt off their back if you needed it.  They worked and lived hard and were an incredible amount of fun to be around.

But, the handwriting was on the wall.  The work I was doing was a young man’s job and people who held on too long either got injured or exposed themselves to ridicule when they could no longer keep up with the young bucks.  A 50-year-old trackman looked 70 and probably felt like a 110.  So it was with mixed feelings as I came to realize it was time for me to move on and took the steps that would lead to me entering the corporate world.  My railroad background would play a surprising role in my first corporate job, but that is a story for another time.

A baseball Story?

                       

Another baseball season is upon us, so I thought I would tell you a sort of baseball story.  It goes back to when I was seventeen and if the first part of the story seems a little heavy on the braggadocio, don’t worry, debauchery, degradation and humiliation are soon to follow.

When I was seventeen, I was pitching for Green Bay West, one of two American Legion teams in the city.  American Legion baseball was for 16 through 18 year olds.  As the season wore on, I began a series of games where I would give up two to three hits while striking out 15-16-17 batters over 9 innings.  During these games I was able to throw all of my pitches for strikes, something I struggledwith at times, and felt as strong in the 9th inning as I did in the 1^st.  Later I would hear athletes, who were performing at peak levels, talk about being in the “zone.”  It is a somewhat mysterious state of being that will show up for a period of time and then, just as inexplicably, disappear.  While you are in the “zone” everything is easier and you get teased with a small dose of your full potential.  Looking back at it now, I think I was in the “zone” for the last weeks of that season and our post-season tournament run.

Our tournament almost ended in our first game.  I had pitched another “in the zone” type game, striking out 16 and giving up 3 hits over nine innings.  Unfortunately, the other team bunched two of the hits, along with a walk and an error to score 2 runs in the third inning and went into the bottom of the ninth leading 2 to 0.  The opposing pitcher had thrown a no hitter at us through 8 innings, when I lead off the bottom of the ninth.

The first pitch was low and outside for a ball.  The next pitch was on the inside corner and I lined it over second base for our first hit of the game and a breath of hope.  Our shortstop smashed the first pitch he saw over the left field wall and the game was tied at 2.  Our first baseman drove the next pitch over the right field wall and we won the game and advanced to the next round of the tournament.  I remember empathizing with the other pitcher who had gone into the ninth with a no hitter and four pitches later had lost his no hitter, his team had lost the game, and they had been eliminated from the tournament.  What a difference four pitches can make.  We won our next two games and earned a spot in the eight-team state tournament.

The tournament was held in Wausau, Wisconsin.  Wausau is a town of about 30 thousand located on the Wisconsin River in north central Wisconsin.  We were scheduled to play the opening game of the tournament.  The game was to start at noon so the plan was to travel to Wausau the night before the game and stay at a motel.  All went well the first night and we woke up the next morning ready to go.  Unfortunately, it began to rain at 10:00am and eventually all the opening day games were postponed till the following day.  Suddenly, we had time to kill and kill it we did.

Not long after the game was officially postponed, decks of cards, cigars and beer magically appeared in several of the player’s motel rooms.  Our coach was a very nice guy who devoted a whole lot of time to the team but was either incredibly naïve or chose to turn a blind eye to how his group of stellar young men was spending their downtime.  Although the night’s activities were probably not what the various advocates of youth sports had in mind, the night was relatively quiet, nobody got hurt and the motel rooms went undamaged.

Actual team photo.  I'm the one with the ace under the table.

The next day the rain continued and all the games were called off by 1:00pm. Once again we found ourselves looking at several hours of down time.  Once again, our coach decided to pursue his own course and left us to find our own way to pass the time.  Hindsight is 20/20, but this was probably a mistake.

By mid afternoon the card games were reconstituted and my teammates fake ID’s did their magic.  The older brother of one of our players bought his way into one of the card games with a bottle of Wild Turkey.

As early evening approached things got a little out of control.  Our center fielder, one of the nicest people you would ever want to meet, and under usual circumstances, pretty much a teetotaler, pranced out of a bathroom with shaving cream piled on the top of his head about 15 inches high.  He was singing a then popular commercial jingle the chorus of which went, “smells so good you won’t want to shave it off.”  At some point in his dance he lowered his head and plowed right into our second baseman’s belly resulting in a shaving cream explosion that covered card players, spectators and the room.  This stunt was met with widespread approval and a couple of more shaving cream experiments were attempted.  In another room someone threw a baseball through a mirror.

Around 9:00pm the rain stopped.  A couple of our advance scouts discovered that the Marathon County Fair was in town and all the pent up energy and consumed alcohol demanded we check it out.

Once we got to the fair, we split up and wandered the fair grounds in groups of two and three.  As time went on, I began to get bored and began to think about arranging a ride back to the motel.  At this point in time, if you put aside the drinking, gambling, smoking, and cussing, I was an innocent as the driven snow.  I was unaware that just a few minutes before one of our outfielders had gotten into a fight and knocked a local guy to the ground with a well-placed uppercut.  More importantly, a rumor had gone through the carnival workers that two guys had either assaulted or tried to assault a co-worker’s daughter, sister, or wife.  So it was in this heated atmosphere I found myself talking with our right fielder about calling it a night.

Suddenly, I heard a commotion around us and I saw what I believed to be other fair goers pointing at the two of us.  Just as I began to become aware that we had become people of interest, I looked down the midway to see about a half of dozen carnies running full steam toward us with blood in their eyes.  Somehow, the rumored assault was communicated and with the posse about 25 yards away our minds chose the flee option, and we took off down the midway.  Was I scared?  Let’s put it this way.  The situation I found myself in scared the beer out of me, both figuratively and literally (oof, that was a hard line to write).

Soon we ran out of midway and headed into the woods at the end of the fairgrounds.  The combination of fear and the fact we were 17 years old, kept us in front of our pursuers.  Once we were in the woods, we soon came to a fork in the path we were on, and our right fielder went to the left and I went to the right.  By then some of our pursuers were running out of gas.  Of the three that were keeping up with us, two went to the left and the other one came after me.

As I was running deeper into the woods, it occurred to me that I might escape but then find myself hopelessly lost in the pitch-black woods.  I noticed that only one carnie was coming after me, and I made the decision to engage this fine fellow in a reasonable discussion of the situation.  As he ran up to me, he initially showed little interest in discussing the matter.  He wound up and took a roundhouse punch aimed at my head.  I jumped back just in time and threw out a half-hearted punch that grazed his forehead.  This slowed him down for an instant, and I held up my hands, palms up and told the guy, that I didn’t do anything and I didn’t want to fight.  When he hesitated a bit more, I told him that I would let him take me back to the fair where he could turn me into cops, who maintained a presence on the fairgrounds.  As I was talking with him, I noticed he wasn’t much older than I was, and I thought he wasn’t all that interested in an all out fistfight.  So he agreed to my suggestion and we started back the way we had come.

When we reached the spot where I had split up with our right fielder, we heard a commotion off in the direction he had gone and my carnie insisted we go find out what was happening.  I later found out, that when we split up, the path my friend took lead right into the area where the fair workers had set up their camp for the duration of the fair.  Finding himself in the middle of the enemy camp, he had run into the first open tent he found and in the darkness of the tent found a cot and sat down.  Unfortunately, the cot he sat down on was occupied by a fellow that didn’t take kindly to being sat upon.  They had piled outside and were in the middle of a ring of spectators, squaring off getting ready to come to blows, as we approached the scene.  Just then a burly cop burst through the ring of spectators and threw himself on my teammate's back and they went down in the dust.  Once the cop had nabbed my friend, my carnie brought me to the cop and he took custody of the two of us.

As we walked back to the fairgrounds cop shop, we took the opportunity to profess our innocence, or at least our innocence with respect to any assault that may have taken place.  The police were using a trailer as a temporary headquarters and we were taken inside the trailer and told to sit down as they arranged for us to get a ride down to the real headquarters in downtown Wausau.  In addition to my relief from escaping any vigilante justice, I somehow was able to somehow surmise the police didn’t believe anything had really happened or at the very least, if something had happened, we were not the guilty parties.  So my concern went to the things we were guilty of and how to explain being in the police station at two in the morning the day before the opening game of the State Tournament.

Once we got to the station, we were brought before the desk sergeant, who was looking over our driver’s licenses, which had been confiscated by the cop at the fairgrounds.  The sergeant looked at the two of us, and noting we were from Green Bay, growled, “What the hell are you doing here?”  My friend, who was tougher than me and taking this situation a little more in stride, pointed at me and said, “He’s pitching the opening game of the State Tournament tomorrow.”  The sergeant shook his head and asked if our parents were in town.  We told him they wouldn’t be in Wausau until shortly before game time and humbly suggested he call our coach.  Seeing little alternative, he agreed and called the motel and summoned our coach to the station to pick up a couple of his players.

When the coach arrived and saw us sitting there, he gave us a disgusted look and went into a room to talk with an officer about our fate.  After a while, he emerged and signaled for us to follow him out to his car.  Nobody said anything the first few minutes of the ride back to the motel when the coach turned to us and said, “I won’t tell anybody about this if you don’t.”  A great wave of relief rolled over me as we readily agreed to the terms of the deal.  The coach had wisely decided that nobody was going to come out of this smelling like a rose and choose the route of least pain.

The next day we finally played the opening game at noon.   I pitched poorly; the “zone” had moved on to someone who wasn’t taking it for granted, and we lost.

What did I learn from the experience, beside the obvious fact that drinking and carousing for two days before the big game probably isn’t such a hot idea?  I did get a little dose of what terror feels like when I looked up and saw those carnies coming full speed, looking to put a big hurt on us.  Over the years I have told this story a few times almost always for its comic effect, and it does have some funny twists.  But when I sat down to write it, I found there was just a tinge of regret that has always been there, I guess, that I hadn’t been smart enough to just go to bed and get a good night’s rest the night before the big game.

A Stroll Around Zihuatanejo

I have often been asked what I do when I am in Mexico and what is it like.  Well, I have been asked that at least once, anyway.  So I thought I would take my seven regular readers on a stroll through this beautiful town and try and capture a little of its soul.

Let’s start our journey in bed where we are peacefully sleeping until a man yells “bolillos” outside the window at 7:15am.  Bolillos are a type of roll you can eat with your first cup of coffee in the morning.  This vendor walks through your neighborhood calling out his wares and you just need to stick your head out your door for home delivery.  Random home delivery still exists in Zihuatanejo.  Later in the afternoon a man will call out “agua” and once again you need only stick your head out and indicate how much you want.  He will carry  5 gallon jugs of bottled water up your stairs and to your door.  The garbage men ring a bell and yell “basura” when they are nearby so you remember to take your garbage out.  A man plays a few notes on a wooden pan flute to indicate he is around if you need anything sharpened.  Then there is the tamale lady and finally the gas company that plays a recording that sounds like the seventh cavalry coming to the rescue followed by an elongated “gaaaaassss.”  I have taken to announcing gas this way, but Pat feels it is inappropriate.  I say forearmed is forewarned.

After breakfast we head out into the bright sunlight and crisp, clean air.  We walk past the man who sells fresh juice in a vacant lot on the corner.  Here, we cross the street and head down Calle Los Cocos.

I think I need to pause here and talk a little bit about the art of walking around Zihuatanejo.  There are a few rules and precautions the smart pedestrian should heed to prevent injury and/or embarrassment.  If you are walking in the part of town that caters to tourists, you can disregard most, but not all of these rules.  For the last several years the town has done a good job of repaving both streets and sidewalks with red bricks in these areas and have just began to start doing the same in the neighborhoods.

We will be walking in the less tourist-travelled areas and you have to pay close attention to where you are going.  The sidewalks will dip unexpectedly, or a curb will show up between two lots, or the sidewalk will end and you will be on dirt or gravel, or there will be a hole in the center of the sidewalk, or the sidewalk will narrow to a single human lane, or a tree will be growing in the middle of the narrow sidewalk or rebar (the metal bars that hold concrete together in a building) will be sticking up through the sidewalk.  You get the picture.  So, the first rule is if you are going to gawk at something, stop and gawk.  And you will see thinks that make you take a second look.  A couple of days ago, I saw a motorbike go by with a driver and three passengers.  It was a wonder they could all get on it, let alone ride around in traffic like that.  On that same day, I saw a motorist, who apparently missed his turn in a busy traffic circle, throw it in reverse and back up into oncoming traffic to where he could make his turn.  Of course, he could have gone around the circle one more time to where he could have made the turn without backing up, but that must have seemed like a waste of gas or something to him. Which brings me to the other bit of cautionary advice I have for you.

Pedestrians should assume they never have the right of way.  There are crosswalks where I’ve been told, if they run you over, they are in the wrong.  Of course you will be run over, so I suggest avoiding testing that out.  The rules of the road are different here and they seem to work for the local drivers.  Mexicans have to be the greatest defensive drivers on the planet.  I have seen some pretty outrageous moves and the other drivers make room, change lanes, break just in time and everything seems to work out fine.  I’ve never witnessed any road rage, even when the maneuver in question was incredibly dumb.  So, as a pedestrian, you need to become a defensive walker.

Another factor playing a part in walking around is how the streets are laid out.  Minnesota’s famous wrassling governor once observed that drunken Irishmen must have designed the streets of Saint Paul.  Well, it appears the city engineers of Zihuatanejo brought these very same Irishmen to town and got them lit up on tequila to help plan the streets of the city.  It is hard to get from point A to point B.  What concerns us most, as pedestrians, is making the mistake of assuming a street is one way just because it looks like it should be.  Look both ways, children, and you will live to go on another field trip.

There, now that is out of the way, we are ready to make our way down Calle Los Cocos.  Los Cocos is a street full of vegetable and fruit markets.  There are also places that sell tortillas, chicken, eggs and fresh fish.  If we go in the morning, when the fresh stuff is delivered, we will find a narrow street packed with delivery trucks, buses, taxis, delivery bicycles, pick-up trucks, cars and tons of shoppers looking to buy the food they will cook that day.  There are little carts parked on the sidewalk selling strawberries, blackberries, peanuts, pistachios and things I haven’t been able to identify.  Walking the sidewalk requires constant adjustments, going from the sidewalk to the road and back again.  The scene looks like the movies you’ve seen where they show a New York City street circa 1915.  It is very colorful, vibrant and alive.  If you are out shopping, you can fill bags with bananas, melons, strawberries, onions, potatoes, mushrooms, green peppers, avocados, and any number of other foodstuffs till your arms are breaking and only spend somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 to $15 bucks.

Having navigated Calle Los Cocos, let’s head over to Calle Jose Morales for a glance at a slice of the local business community.  Here, in the U.S., we like to pay homage to small business and the entrepreneurial spirit. But in reality, the ascendance of corporate America has made those two ideals seem like anachronisms.  Not so in Mexico.  The large box stores are just beginning to show up in Zihuatanejo and there remains a tremendous variety of small-scale business activity.

Jose Morales is a commercial street about a half mile from the tourist area.  As we walk down the street we will pass a store that sells paper, a store that makes keys, a flower shop, a store that sells bootleg movies, a pharmacy, a unisex beauty parlor, a hardware store, a store that sells plastic pails, plates, cups etc., a store that sells stuffed animals, a car wash, a shop specializing in repairing car air conditioning systems, a men’s clothing store, a woman’s clothing store, a pet shop, a motorcycle repair yard, a shoe store, several small grocery stores, a bakery, several street vendors, several small restaurants, a furniture store, a paint store, and an Internet café.  And this is on one side of the street in a little less than a mile.  In addition, Jose Morales is just one of several of these commercial streets in town.  You also find a variety of small businesses sprinkled throughout the neighborhoods.

This stunning array of small businesses makes you wonder, how do they survive?  Everybody seems to be in the process of opening a small specialty business.  I think their survival is probably linked to several factors.  One is the purpose of  many of these businesses is to put food on the table of the owner and his family.  There are chains in Mexico but far fewer than you will find here in the U.S..  The owners of these small businesses are not looking to keep a bevy of shareholders and stakeholders well fed, but rather looking to provide for their families.  The local economy has not been consolidated into Best Buy’s, Home Depots, McDonalds’, and other mega businesses that undercut the profit margins of the smaller guys and eventually drive them out of business.  What you see in Zihuatanejo is similar to what you saw in the U.S. in thousands of small towns across the country 50 years ago.

Pako practicing with "Las Gringas"

Now that we have been walking for a while we should stop at El Pueblito for lunch.  As we are walking down the street we see a small sign that says, “El Pueblito and a single door is open to the street.  As you go through the door you will find an open courtyard with several tables arranged under an open-air tile roof designed to provide shade.  There are interesting antique ranch tools, guns, saddles, children’s toys and even a hangman’s noose decorating the place.  There are a variety of cacti growing along one wall.  Another wall, that abuts a church bell tower, is where you often see iguanas scurry across the tile roof and sometimes settle down for a sunbath.  It is Thursday, so one of Zihuatanejo’s best guitar players will be playing while you eat.  The food is Mexican and good.  One note.  If you see a man come in and lay a three-foot machete, also known as a gringa, across his table, don’t get worried.  He is not some madman who is about to start chopping his way through the patrons of the restaurant.  He’s just someone stopping for lunch that was working a job clearing brush or he took a walk up into the mountains perhaps to chop some ginger root and used the machete to clear the way and chop the root.

After we leave the restaurant, we pass the hall where the Teacher’s wedding reception was held and eventually come to a large open field where a kiddy carnival has been set up.  The carnival will stick around for a couple of weeks and will then be replaced by a circus or a concert.  The kiddy carnival is remarkable for the rides that are set up.  There is every ride, those of you over 50 will remember, from the church picnics and county fairs of your youth.  Some Mexican carnival owner must have traveled the U.S. and bought up every one of these ancient rides he or she could find.  People who are fans of these amusement park relics (I’m pretty sure there is a subculture dedicated to these things) would think they died and went to heaven.

Continuing on past the kiddy carnival and past a large home goods tent sale we eventually come to a soccer field.  If we are lucky, a game will be in progress.  Among the first things you will notice, if a game is being played, is that there is a layer of dust that hovers about a foot and half above the field.  There are hints of where grass might live during the rainy season but those areas have long ago been churned to dust.  You will also probably notice the skill of the players.  Soccer, or Fútbol, is Mexico’s favorite sport and you can see that its best athletes gravitate toward ‘the beautiful game.’

As we move along, we will come to a shady grove of trees where the fisherman hang out before and after they go out to sea.  They will be lounging in hammocks, eating meals that are sometimes cooked over an open fire, or mending their nets.  Almost always there will be an active conversation going on.  As we walk past the fisherman, we cross a bridge across a channel and find ourselves in the tourist area.

But we aren’t interested in the tourist area of El Centro today and it feels like it is time to walk to the nicest beach within walking distance of the central part of town.  We are off to La Ropa.

Descent to La Ropa

The trip from El Centro to La Ropa is an exercise of going from sea level up a series of hills and then a steep descent back to sea level and the beach.  Don’t worry, once you have walked up these hills four or five times a week for a couple of months, the huffing and puffing becomes much less noticeable.  The pay off for this walk is the several places you can stop and look out at the beautiful vistas from high above the bay.  Bursts of cascading bougainvillea decorate our route and if we are really lucky, we might look out and see whales playing in the bay.  We might also come upon a three foot black iguana, sunning himself on the sidewalk (I have been told the black ones make for the best eating).  If you are a bit squeamish about three foot lizards, the lizards are more squeamish about you and will skitter away, amazingly fast, when you get anywhere close.

Once we make the descent to the sea, you will find a wide sand beach scattered with restaurants, hotels, and public areas.  The heat of the day will be relieved as the ocean breezes cool everything down.   As we walk the beach, we will see an amazing array of human forms, some alluring and some not.  Now it is getting to be late afternoon and we deserve to treat ourselves to drinks and a bit to eat while we watch the sun go down.  So we will walk the length of the beach to a restaurant named Rossi’s and go upstairs and claim a roof top table overlooking the bay where we can watch the sun sink into the ocean and light up the sky.  For very little dinero, we can drink beer, margaritas, pina coladas, or just about anything else while munching on fresh guacamole or shrimp tacos.  The sun will eventually go down, the sky will turn pink and we will need to think about heading home.

There are two options for getting back to town.  We can walk the way we came, but if you been on the roof for a while, and enjoyed a beverage or two, it will be getting dark, making the walk back more difficult.  Another factor we might want to consider before walking back is that, occasionally, a big old crocodile decides to visit the beach and take an evening stroll.  This doesn’t happen often, but it does happen and the local firemen come out and wrangle the monster and send him back to a swamp far removed from tourists and casual strollers.   The other alternative is to walk thirty yards to where a bus will pick us up and take us to town for 85 cents.  If we linger too long and the last bus leaves, we can take a taxi for around $3.

Try not to take a walk with this guy

After you get back to the apartment and clean up and rest, you might want to walk into town for an ice cream cone or just to see what is happening.  There are always basketball or volleyball games to watch and, often, public entertainment to take in.  When you have had your fill, it is time to walk home and go to bed.

You might think this is the end of your experience, but you might be wrong.  As you lay dreaming of beautiful vistas around 3:00 in the morning, a car alarm will go off.  This will key the 15 neighborhood dogs to start snarling, barking and howling.  Not to be out done, the roosters begin crowing (yes, you live with roosters in town and no, they don’t just crow at dawn).  Finally, to top off the symphony, your neighbor, who figures he would rather listen to his music, turns his sound system to 11 and the strains of a Mexican polka join the cacophony.  This, too, is Mexico.  Luckily, it all will usually die down in 10 or 15 minutes and you can just sleep a little later in the morning or at least till you hear the bolillo man calling.

The Greatest Shows on Earth

I was never much of a circus fan when I was a kid.  The Ringling Bros., Barnum and Bailey three-ring circus would come to the Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena in Green Bay and my parents or one of the other neighborhood parents would take a group of kids to see it.

I think, part of the reason, I never really connected with the circus was because I never aspired to become a circus performer.  I read Claude Bottom’s fabulous autobiography, “Life of a Lion Tamer” but I never considered taking up the profession.  It wasn’t like when I walked into County Stadium in Milwaukee to see the Braves play and pictured myself on the mound in the seventh game of the World Series.  I just never saw myself as circus material.

Another reason I wasn’t a big fan was, at a relatively young age, I was offended by the hype and over the top exploitation of kids the circus people employed to separate parents from their money.  They would turn off the lights in the arena and walk down the aisles with all kinds of junk that lit up and sparkled driving the little consumers wild with desire for this over priced crap.  They didn’t just do this once, but over and over until the kids were crazy and the parents gave up. The stuff almost always broke on the way home in the car and ended up thrown in a toy box where it was eventually thrown out years later.  After all, Barnum was right in the circus’s title.

So it came as a surprise to me that when I was in my early 20’s and traveling around Latin America that I would become a big fan of the little circuses that would travel from small town to small town and entertain the local populace.

I think there were two reasons these circuses appealed to me.  First, and this remains true to this day, this is purely local entertainment.  It is seldom you run into tourists at these venues.  They are all single ring, small tent affairs and I find it interesting to see what the people enjoy on their nights out.

The second reason I became a fan was that you never knew what you were going to see and sometimes the acts were truly whacked-out crazy.  The larger first world circuses were pretty predictable stuff but these small budget Latin American circuses had to get creative in the entertainment they presented and it was practically guaranteed that you would see something unexpected before the night was over.

In the early and mid seventies the circuses didn’t travel with much in the way of animals.  There may be a dog act that consisted of a couple of dogs doing the same tricks your cousin taught his dog to do when you were a kid.  There might be a pony thrown in once in a while but animals were expensive and these were shoestring operations.  So they had to rely on humans to carry the show.  The tents were small and the bleachers were often skinny boards lashed together with rope.  If there was a trapeze artist, his back would literally hit the top of the tent on the backswing and his feet would hit it as he swung forward.  Every seat was right on top of the action.

To give you a flavor of what these shows were like let me (try to stop me) describe a circus I saw in Ecuador in the mid seventies.  The first act was perhaps my favorite.  A middle-aged woman came out and paraded around the ring wearing what can best be described as a drum majorette’s costume from the 50”s.  It had been washed so often that the colors were just a hint of what they had once been.  She was also wearing a pair of tattered fishnet stockings.

While she walked around the ring throwing here arms in the air, an assistant brought out a wooden table and placed it in the center of the ring.  While the assistant waited, the woman finished her circuit and laid belly down on the table.  The artist brought her legs up like a teenage girl lying on her bed, and the assistant lit a cigarette and placed it between the artist’s big and second toes.  She then proceeded to arch her leg in such a way that she was able to smoke the cigarette with her foot.  She calmly smoked the heater and when she was done, so was her act.  Spectacular!

For years now, I have speculated about her act.  How was it developed?  Was she from a branch of the famous Wallenda family that disputed what specialty the family should pursue resulting in one branch flying and the other foot smoking?  Or, was this woman identified at an early age as someone, who had the God given talent to some day, if she worked hard, become a foot smoker?  Unfortunately, these questions will never be answered and I am left to wonder.

The next performer, admittedly, had a tough act to follow.  As he entered the ring wearing what can only described as an old pair of Festus Hagen’s long handles, the assistant brought two wooden straight back chairs into the ring.  Furniture played a big part in this circus.  The artist then placed his heels on the edge of one chair and the back of his head on the other chair.  The assistant placed a big rock on the performer’s stomach and brought out a sledgehammer.  He proceeded to whack the rock with the hammer until it finally broke.  Ta Da!  It was a noble effort, but I still had to give the nod to the foot smoker for pure entertainment.

The final act was an acrobat who used all of the furniture that had been used in the previous two acts.  I bet they ate their post show meal on that very same furniture.  This guy’s specialty was balancing on top of a combination of beer bottles and furniture.  At that time in Ecuador, they sold beer in 22 oz. bottles.  The deposit on the bottles was actually worth more than the beer in the bottles.  It was these 22 ouncers he was using in his act.  As it turned out, it was a pretty amazing act as he balanced one leg of a chair on one beer bottle and then balanced himself on the back of the chair.  In this way he built a pyramid of sorts consisting of chairs and beer bottles, and eventually the foot smoker’s table, all the while balancing on the top of the pile.  This guy had talent and deserved a lot of credit for putting together an act out of next to nothing.  His act was the finale and fitting finish to a great show.

All of this cost about 30 cents.  Where else could you get that type of entertainment value?  The crowd had cheered throughout and left happy.  I was hooked.

Through the years, we have seldom passed up the opportunity to see one of these circuses.  And so it was, Pat and I found ourselves in line to get into “The Circus of Peking China” the other night in Zihuatanejo.  These guys must have been on the road so long that they were unaware that Peking was now called Beijing.  Once again, we were the sole gringos in attendance.  But the entertainment bar has been raised in Mexico.

Through the years the circus has slowly but surely followed the same path as TV and become more sophisticated.  I remember watching a game show in a small tienda in Mexico nearly 40 years ago.  At the end of the telecast, the winner was established and her prize was a metal cooking pot -- just a pot.  The winner hugged that pot like Honey Boo Boo’s mother hugs a pork chop.  She was genuinely excited to have won a cooking pot.  Those days are long gone.  Watching Mexican TV isn’t all that much different now than watching U.S. TV.  The soaps are more dramatic and romantic but the production values have pretty much caught up with the U.S.  And the most important part of TV, the advertising, is as slick as the stuff that bombards us every hour of every day.  Also, those Mexicans who have cable get a lot of programming from the U.S.  As a result, people’s tastes and expectations have changed.

The Circus of Peking China reflected these changes.  There was still one ring but the tent was larger and the seats were molded plastic with backs.  The show featured a troop of actual Chinese acrobats who were very talented and professional.  There was a Mexican juggler who was also very good.  He finished his act by getting on his back and having a metal cylinder placed on his feet.  His young son and daughter attached them selves to either end of the cylinder and he proceeded to spin them around at crazy speeds.  His kids are either going to be the first Mexican astronauts or have their brains turned to jelly by the time they reach the age of twelve.

The biggest change was probably the animals.  This circus was travelling around with ten Bengal tigers, camels (one and two humpers), zebras, horses, a Clydesdale, a miniature horse, and giraffes.  Putting aside the whole issue of animals in the circus, I have to say that these animals looked as if they were well taken care of and those that performed were lively and well trained.

One of the best moments of the circus was when three young women led three giraffes into the ring.  Kids were recruited from the audience and were formed into three lines, one in front of each giraffe.  The kids had a rectangular cracker of some sort put into their mouths and then one by one were brought forth to stand in front of the huge beasts.  The giraffe would bend its long graceful neck down to the kid’s face and snatch the cracker.  Sometimes the kid got his face washed and their reactions ranged from excited to appalled. In case you were wondering, giraffes eating crackers generate a lot of saliva. During the intermission, families, for a price, could come down and have their pictures taken with a giraffe.  I guess the cracker trick was about the only thing you could train a giraffe to do in a circus but that seemed to be enough for the crowd.

All in all, it was a very different circus from the ones we used to see years ago.  The talent was better and the show was grander.  The price was also higher ($7.75) to support the larger tent, the more expensive human talent and the travelling menagerie.  It was a fun night, but I can’t tell you I enjoyed it quite as much as I did years ago when anything could be and was marched out into the ring for our amazement and entertainment.  I am holding out hope that foot smoking will once again become in vogue, but I guess I’m just being nostalgic.