People Are Because They CAN Be

[mallorys_camera]

Thought the last episode of Mad Men – Wee Small Hours I believe was the subtitle – was truly remarkable and something I remember from my own brief sojourn near the top: People in power are assholes because they can be.

The rest of us can’t.

It’s as simple as that.

###

Rolled into Hugo around 1pm yesterday.

“My, this is an ugly town,” I said.

“Utilitarian,” Ben corrected.

“Ugly,” I said. “And also – utilitarian.”

###

Hugo is Fellini & Prendergass’s winter quarters. “Winter quarters” sounds grander than it really is – an acre and a half of mud and mosquitoes alongside JDK’s burned out house. Longtime readers may remember JDK’s burned out house. I asked JDK once, “Why don’t you rebuild the place?” and JDK – who was convinced the place had been torched by his enemies – snapped, “I’m leaving it the way it is. I want them to see what they’ve done to me.”

Funny. JDK’s enemies are equally convinced that he torched the place himself for the insurance money.

At the height of the Great Depression – or so the story goes – the mayor of Hugo, a circus fan, extended an invitation to D.R. Miller, owner of the Carson & Barnes Circus then headquartered in Arkansas. If you will move your headquarters to Hugo, Miller was told, the city will extend you electricity and water services in perpetuo in exchange for allowing townsfolk a chance to visit the animals every Saturday.

A deal was struck.

D.L.’s brother Kelly – owner of the (duh!) Kelly Miller¹ Circus – soon followed. When JDK left Carson & Barnes to start his own show, he used Hugo too. Then when Chance Van Zandt, a front office guy a Kelly Miller, took out an SBA around the same time to buy Fellini & Prendergass from Brownie Jackson², he moved to Hugo as well.

###

Hugo has certain advantages as a circus base. It’s centrally located which means circuses can take off from here on either the eastern or western route. It only snows maybe twice a winter. Cost of living is very cheap.

Hugo’s most popular tourist attraction is a graveyard where various circus folk are buried – like Big John Strong whose life-sized headstone is pictured above.

I’m not exactly sure why Big John Strong is buried in Hugo. To the best of my knowledge he never lived here. He grew up in Jamestown, New York, right next door to a girl who changed her name, moved to Los Angeles and eventually became a very famous actress. John Strong’s sister had been her best friend. John had done some vaudeville with his father growing up, so when Lucille Ball became a star, he figured he could do it too. He couldn’t. Snagged a few small roles, maybe one or two of them were speaking. Eventually to support himself, he talked the LA Board of Education into allowing him to sell cotton candy and peanuts – low cost of goods, high mark up – to kids at lunchtime. This endeavor proved more successful, particularly after he started hiring clowns to push the product. Eventually he decided what he really wanted was to start his own circus so that’s what he did. The Big John Strong Circus played in schools up and down California throughout the school year. In the summer they’d head back to Jamestown where they’d play for a week before heading back west again.

BJ, who got his start on the Big John Strong Circus, says one of the most memorable things about his stint there was that Big John Strong was on intimate terms with the madams of every brothel in the state Nevada, and encouraged his employees to use their services liberally.

“He was the real thing,” BJ says fondly. “The consummate showman. They threw away the mold when they made Big John.”

And if they ever decide to clone him again, they’ll have to travel all the way to Hugo to dig him up.

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1: The Kelly Miller Circus changed ownership several times over the years, in 2007 ending up in the hands of John Ringling North – yes, the great grandson of those Ringlings. In addition to cleaning up on the circus, the Norths also bought huge amounts of oil-rich Oklahoma land. Their black gold operations were consolidated under the name of Valero Oil and I believe to this day, Valero is the only gas station chain that offers a strictly American product. Anyway, Kelly Miller has deep pockets and thus is insulated a bit better than other traveling tent circuses.

2: Brownie Jackson, Fellini & Prendergass’s founder, sold the circus because he’d made a rule for himself when he’d started out never to borrow more money than he could pay back in a year. At the end of one particularly terrible season he found himself owing $40,000. Rather than leverage the loan for an additional year, he decided this was God’s way of telling him to bail.

Comments

assholes (no)

[ch.livejournal.com]

you may find this interesting:

http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/06/the_no_asshole_.html

Re: assholes (no)

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

I like that! Thanks! :-)