Williams & Cole Circus

One of the jobs I did with Harvey Copeland involved a drive to Groveland, FL, where Bill Ballantine and Roberta lived in a little house by a lake.  Bill's daughter, Bridget, had contracted to do her single trapeze act on Circus Vargas and Bill asked Harvey to build a rigging box that would contain her chandelier (under which the trapeze was suspended) and double as a bed for her daughter Zita when the box was loaded into her van.  So off we went to Groveland. 

Seems like it took two trips, a bunch of plywood, and some blue paint.  On that trip was the first time I heard of the Williams & Cole Circus.  Something new, started by Oklahoma City attorney Jerry D. Sokolosky and former Ringling comptroller, Billy Williams.  It was supposed to start onApril 30, 1977, and tour the mid-west for 17 weeks.  Bridget had been contacted by them, but couldn't go, since she was going to Vargas.  But I could!  And I did. 

I was thrilled!  I was going places!  I was gonna be in the circus again!  At the end of March, I got this letter . . .

In the time I had left before I left for Oklahoma, I painted everything I owned, including my truck (see the newspaper article below).  I made new wardrobe, I spiffed up everything I owned.  I even bought a rabbit to produce out of the square/circle illusion Harvey built for me as a going away present.  (I named the rabbit "Oliver," after Bill Ballantine .  It was his middle name.  Bill's middle name, not the rabbit's.  The rabbit didn't have a middle name.)  I bought magnetic signs to put on my van, and Harvey painted the Williams & Cole logo on them.

And he knew that I had walked stilts at Clown College, but I didn't have any.  So he made me a pair of five foot stilts.  But not just regular stilts-- no, not Harvey.  He told me about old time clowns that walked stilts dressed in kilts, with the stilts carved into knobby knees and bony ankles.  And he made me a pair like that-- he carved them out of 4x4 cyprus fence posts, with a chain saw!  Then he built me a tripod stilt-ladder that would work anywhere, even in the middle of a field, which is where I spent a lot of my career . . .

The drag came from my clown college classmate and friend, Richard Fick-- don't know why he didnt need it anymore, but I was grateful for the gift.  To the right is Bruce the Clown on stilts.>

<To the left is Bruce the Clown Magician.  I had magic, I had stilts, I had Hugo, the Performing Rock.  I could juggle, and ride a unicycle (sort of, unless I had to turn a corner), and I had a seventeen week agreement for the princely sum of $150.00 per week.  I was ready!  So, off I went to Oklahoma City.  When I got there, I found chaos, but I've always liked chaos, so I felt right at home.  In the next two and a half weeks, I built and painted two sets of 36 foot diameter ring-curb and two knock down concession stands.  Also did any number of pre-opening publicity gigs, including one at the Rattlesnake Festival in Enid.  (I think it was Enid- it may have been somewhere else.  I remember the rattlesnakes more than the location . . .) Ever since, I've felt that chicken tastes like rattlesnake . . .

Here's two newspaper photos from the time . . .

P.S.  Just discovered that if you click on any of the photos, you get enlarged versions, and you can read the fine print . . .

Sarasota Art . . .

Not a person, but a concept . . . Harvey was a sign-writer.  Most of being his apprentice was going on jobs with him and proof reading whatever he was painting.  Sometimes, if a word had a repeating letter, or combination of letters, it was easy to just go on to the end of the word, and leave out the repeat.  And, having spent my formative years in Catholic school, I had me some kind of vocabulary and I could spell up a storm.

And he could paint!  It was amazing.  Harvey once painted a sink on the side of a clown prop that looked so real that a drunk guy walked up and tried to pee in it . . . He could paint letters in styles that only after computers and MicroSoft WORD did I realize were "fonts."  He worked in fiberglass, plywood, sheetmetal, glass, foam rubber, whatever was at hand.  He could make anything out of anything . . .

This is the Old Heidelburg Castle, a German restaurant in Sarasota . . .

It already looked like this the first time I saw it.  Harvey and a guy named Dave Radtke, I think, had built the turrets out of sheet-metal, and painted the towers and windows.  As the bricks got further from the ground, they also got thinner, adding to the illusion of height when you looked up at the turrets.  When I worked there with Harvey, we were re-painting the people on the front wall.  It was where I learned about scaffolding, and German food . . .

I remember Harvey painted an airplane, the Dog Track building,  any number of signs and vehicles.  He worked for a number of years in the Clown College Prop Shop with George Shellenberger, Wilson Dahne and Ivan Saxby, and at Hagenbeck/Walllace as shop foreman.  There may have been stuff he didn't do in his life, but it was never because he believed he couldn't . . . if Harvey didn't do it, it was only because he didn't want to.

I heard one story wherein a friend of his was opening a welding shop, and a group got together and bought him an anvil- it took four guys to carry it in, and they presented him with a hammer to strike the first blow.  When he did, the anvil shattered, because Harvey had made a mold, cast a plaster anvil, and then painted it to look like the real thing.

I remember another time, working in some capacity for RBB&B at WQ, entertaining a film crew that had no clue what they wanted.  Frosty Little was there, and Eddie DelMoral, and Harvey and me.  Frosty was getting more and more frustrated because the crew had no idea what to film, and he was improvising a script for them as the day wore on.  And on, and on . . .

Harvey and Eddie went out and got lunch, and came back 45 minutes later with Eddie carrying about 12 styrofoam boxes, stacked atop one another, staggering under the load.  Frosty saw him, just as he reached the ring curb, and tripped.  Frosty about lost it, between being hungry and frustrated, and let out a few choice clown expletives before he realized that all 12 boxes were just floating to the ground, since they were empty.  About then, Harvey came around the corner carrying the real lunch, laughing quietly to himself.

"You can do it," he'd say to discouraged clowns, so often that Chuck Sidlow got years of mileage from imitating Harvey's encouraging speech.  Harvey was the guy who taught me that just because you'd never done something didn't mean you couldn't charge top dollar for doing it.  In fact, he'd say, sometimes, you have to charge more if you've never done it before, because you have to allow time for making mistakes and learning from them.

The last time I saw Harvey was at the Sarasota Circus Parade staging ground the only year I was in it.  Tony Dow was the guest grand marshall.  Harvey had a roll of white shelf paper and a can of red paint, and he was painting names on banners for the dignataries' convertibles , even as the cars were lining up and entering the parade. 

He taught me how to paint, how to maintain a brush, how to use a brush to pick up paint that you spilled.  He taught me how to use tools for what they were for, and how to have confidence in my ability.  The skills I learned working with him fed me during the winter months when no one wanted clowns, and enabled me to survive, even to this day, in lean times.  He was my mentor, and he was my friend.