Circus/Zoological Menagerie History 101--Get your notepad's ready kiddies.

Wade - -

Since your questions were posed so far back in the blog, I thought I would answer them with a fresh start. I will lead off with this photo of Colossus taken by Eddie Jackson at Sarasota in 1930. Jackson always wrote on the bottom of his negatives identifying the subject. Here he wrote "Colossus."

In Sarasota the sea elephants were not kept at circus winter quarters but instead lived on St. Armands Key, which was being developed by John Ringling. Stockade-like pens were built on the shore and extended out into the salt water so that the animals had both a beach to lie on and water to swim in. That is where Jackson took the above photo.

According to Lillian Burns, daughter of Owen Burns, John Ringling’s real estate partner, the sea elephant enclosure was in Panzy Cove, the dredged out, narrow canal separating St Armands from Lido Key. The enclosure wasn't ready when the show got back to Sarasota at the end of October, and Goliath had to reside in the winter quarters rail yard, inside his combination stock-tank car, until about 20 November 1928 when he was taken out to the beach. Somewhere I heard or read that real estate promotion was one of the reasons the sea elephants were installed out on St. Armands. At the time John Ringling was more interested in selling property on his islands than in running his circus. Fact is, he was desperate to sell lots because the 1926 Florida land crash had put him in a difficult position.

The colorized postcard you earlier posted shows the sea elephant and keeper in this water front stockade.

The earlier photo of the animal with his chest propped up on blocks (passenger cars in the background) shows Colossus at the old Bridgeport WQ in 1928. Though those quarters had been vacated by the show in 1927, RBBB still had some stuff there. Colossus was in Bridgeport until December 1928 when he was sent to Sarasota to join Goliath.

John Ringling bought Colossus as a back up in case the original Goliath croaked. Sea elephants have proved difficult to keep and the show had invested a ton in advertising the big seal.

The photo showing the sea elephant in the big top is of Goliath (I think). The keeper looks like Emil Warnecke who came over from Hagenbeck/Hamburg with the original Goliath. This wagon had an inclined floor so as to show off the animal. The keeper always stood in front with a bucket of fish. The beast was a huge eater and gladly showed off to get the fish as the wagon circled the hippodrome track. My Mother and Dad saw Colossus here in Atlanta in 1931. When I was a little tyke would regale me with stories about watching the sea elephant reaching up to get those fish.


The photo of Goliath on the wagon also pictures keeper Warnecke. This really shows off the animal's huge size.

You asked about the sand in the sea elephant car. That information came from John Sabo. He was Colossus’ keeper and replaced Warnecke when he went back to Hagenbeck/Hamburg. Sabo later became RBBB's menagerie superintendent.

Here is what Sabo told me in 1967 - -“They (sea elephants) traveled in a stock car with a large water tank in one end. Next to it was a bed of sand for it to lie on. The keeper and several others slept in on the other end of the stock car.”

I do not know of any filtration system in the rail car. Given those less sophisticated times, I am sure they just dumped it out, feces and all, and refilled the pool with water out of one of the circus water wagons. Same was true for the hippo cage on the lot.

Remember, toilets on rail passenger cars flushed directly onto the right of way under the cars. That did not change until about 20 years ago. On circus lots, donniker waste dropped down into holes dug into the ground underneath. “Urinals” (I use that word advisedly) for male circus patrons were nothing but shallow trenches scraped into the ground. When the show quit the grounds those holes and trenches were probably supposed to be covered over, but I suspect that was often left undone. Try any of that today!

During the winter of 1928-29, the original Goliath appears to have been attacked in his salt-water lair by a big fish of some sort. The New York Times (22 March 1929. p.21) said it was a swordfish and that it ran its blade through his shoulder. The late Mel Miller of the Sarasota Ringling Museum told me he had heard that a “shark or something” bit Goliath’s tail. Is there an odor of Dexter Fellows’ press agentry in this?

If it did happen, I doubt it was a swordfish of the Xiphidae sort (the kind we like to eat). It’s my impression that they are game fish, preferring open, deep water, and not likely to have been poking around Goliath’s shallow water pen in the Ringling Isles. A shark is a possibility, but if there were any truth to the Times story, I’d say the assailant was a sawfish (Pristidae). Some really huge examples of that dangerous looking critter have been caught right off piers in the Sarasota area.

Injury or not, Goliath toured in 1929. When he got back to his corral in the Gulf of Mexico at the end of the season, he was “loudly welcomed by his mate Colossus,” to quote BB (16 Nov, 1929), but he didn't last long, dying there later in November. At first the show denied the rumors of his demise (BB, 23 Nov. 1929), but later they ‘fessed up (BB, 4 Jan. and 8 Mar. and 5 Apr.1930 and NY Times, 28 Mar. 1930). Now, it was Colossus’ turn to impress the public, and he hit the road for RBBB’s 1930 and 1931 tours.

I hope the readers will like this.

Courtesy of Professor Richard Reynolds