The Palo Alto History Project, Circus

The Palo Alto History Project

The Circus
Embarcadero Road at El Camino Real

2006

The Circus: The Greatest Show in Palo Alto

There was a time when there was no bigger day in an American small town than Circus Day. It’s a little
hard to imagine the magnitude of this yearly event nowadays, in part because we’ve forgotten the remote
isolation of small towns in the early part of the 20th Century. Before television, radio and the Hollywood
movie, small town folk did not have the digitally connected living room that they do today. The geographical
isolation was also far more dramatic in those days. Not only had cities not yet sprawled increasingly out into
the heartland, but the lack of highways and passenger planes meant that millions of Americans would never
travel more than a few hundred miles from their place of birth. So when the real circus came to town, it was
a very big deal. The circus may still call itself “The Greatest Show on Earth,” but in those days it was also
the only show in town.

Of course, Palo Alto was not exactly rural Middle America even in its earliest incarnation. From the
beginning, it was not only the home to a major university but also just a train ride away from the biggest city
on the West Coast. Still, a look back at pioneer Palo Alto finds a sleepy town that hardly resembles the
techie center that we know today. Even into the war years --- and arguably beyond--- Palo Alto was still a
quiet little hamlet with the entertainment options to match.

So on circus day, Palo Alto came to a virtual halt. A Palo Alto Times headline from the 1920s, for instance,
makes this clear with its announcement that Palo Alto schools would have a “Circus Holiday.” School
authorities, the paper reported, reasoned that “children’s minds are not receptive to ‘book learning’ when
the circus is in town.”

Of course, the circus was virtually a town of its own. Usually taking up two or three dozen railroad cars, the
circus would arrive at the University Avenue Station.   Then a frantic move would take place as hundreds of
employees would transport the enormous production to one of the circus locations --- usually an open field.
Actually, both of the main Palo Alto circus locations would become future shopping centers--- the John
Greer property where Town & Country Village now stands and the empty lot where one now finds
Edgewood Plaza. Here workers would drive huge spikes into the ground, raise the big top and set up a
small city dedicated to laughs and thrills.

And a city it was. A 1936 Palo Alto Times story told of the arrival of the “city within a city” of the 1,080
member Cole Brothers Circus: “This ‘city of white tops’ which flits around the country has its own
postmaster, garage, physician, lawyer, drug store, detectives, barber shop, wheelwright and blacksmith
shops.”

The atmosphere was often hurried and hectic on the day of the big show. Usually a circus representative
would hustle over to Police Court on Bryant Street to get a permit and invite the fire and safety inspectors
back to camp. As Building Inspector Joe Salameda told Elinor Cogswell in her “Editor at Bat” column in
1948, “Everything is hurly-burly. A public relations man takes you over and rushes you around…free
passes are being handed out. They capitalize on the confusion.” And of course, God save the inspector
who actually had to tell the public that the circus had been cancelled.

Many different circuses came through Palo Alto over the years, but they were almost all crowd-pleasers.
Existing in a day before the strange and the unbelievable was displayed nightly on the living room television,
the circus brought amazing sites to wide-eyed audiences. A look back at the acts that toured Palo Alto
through the years gives some sense of the excitement. Roy Ring’s Bicycle Riding Monkey “Tony,” Tillie the
Fan Dancing Elephant, Dardenella, the Rose of the Orient, Madame Golda and her $10,000 Dancing Horse
“White Pearl,” and even a pair of “Boxing Horses, direct from England” all delighted the crowds in Palo
Alto. And some of the posters give a pretty good sense of the action. One such notice advertised “Clyde
Beatty in person shaking dice with death in the big steel cage with 40 cruel, blood-thirsty lions and tigers of
opposite sexes.”

But it wasn’t always just lions, tigers, clowns and stunts. For instance, when the Barnes Circus arrived in
April of 1925, they accompanied the traditional acts with a “pageant enacting the adventures of Captain
John Smith and his rescue by the Indian Girl Pocahontas.” Other shows employed a Wild West theme such
as the Congress of All-Western Champion Cowboys, Ken Maynard’s Wild West, and the 101 Ranch and
Wild West Show which frantically advertised that the audience would be treated to “An Indian Massacre! A
Stage Coach Holdup! And an Outlaw attack on the Emigrant Train!”

Of course despite the breathless posters and banner headlines, not everything always went exactly as
planned. In 1946, for instance, the Clyde Beatty Circus needed the help of police escorts as a railroad
strike resulted in the slow plod of the entire circus --- pachyderms and all --- up El Camino by foot to the
next show in Redwood City.

But that was nothing compared to the fate of the Palmer Brothers Wild Animal Circus back in November
1921. The entire outfit was completely stranded in Palo Alto when Mr. Palmer himself took off with all the
door receipts as well as the “fat girl, midget maiden, African pigmy boy and Australian bushman,” according
to the Palo Alto Times. Left behind were 190 unpaid employees who took refuge waiting to be paid more
than $10,000 in past due wages.

With Mr. Palmer long gone and no money to keep the circus going, the Times reported days later that many
residents were beginning to complain of the “noise of the caged animals” and “of a sanitation problem that
has developed.” The complaints prompted city authorities to order the circus to leave, charging $100 a day
for its use of city land. Eventually, Palmer’s abandoned circus was purchased by another proprietor and the
animals were deposited at the Palo Alto Stock Farm.

But the city always did what it could to help the show go on. One September night in 1942, scores of local
boys were pressed into service when the Cole Brothers Circus arrived short of help because of the war
draft. Each received a free pass to the show in exchange for their help.   One rainy evening in 1946 several
hundred eager Palo Alto children and their parents waited more than an hour even though the Times
reported, “the tent leaked in a thousand places and the ground was ankle deep in mud and straw.” And for
many years, the city served as a kind of winter base for a number of circuses as they retooled and made
repairs before setting out for another year’s tour of the country. Howe’s Great London Circus spent four
months at the old remount station one winter and spent some $125,000 in town, while the Bernardi Circus’s
23 railroad cars housed themselves in Palo Alto during the winter of 1917-18.

Eventually, however, circus days would pass. As television, movies, sporting events and other forms of
entertainment increasingly dominated, fewer circuses were able to survive the great expense of moving from
town to town at such a pace. The rise in the costs of gasoline, big tops, and food for the animals all made
travelling circuses an increasingly unprofitable business.    In Palo Alto, the circus days essentially ended in
1953 with the construction of Town & Country Village. But by then the circus Big Top was already an
endangered species. Eventually the travelling Big Top circuses died out, leaving just the conglomerates to
play in arenas built for ice hockey and basketball. Today’s kids see their share of the wonderful and the
marvelous on screens big and small, but it’s just not the same as sitting a few rows from a dancing elephant
or a bicycle-riding monkey.


                                                                                                                      -Matt Bowling

The old University Avenue
train station where circuses
once arrived. (PAHA)

When Town & Country
Village was built, it was the
beginning of the end for
circuses in Palo Alto.

Palo Alto Home Page

Edgewood Plaza now sits on
land once used to host the
circus.

E ntertainment

The El Camin o Strip