Queen of the Air: A True Story of Love and Tragedy at the Circus by Dean N. Jensen

Author:Dean N. Jensen [Jensen, Dean N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Non-Fiction, Biography & Autobiography, Biography, History, Retail, Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307986580
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2013-06-10T23:00:00+00:00

ALFREDO CODONA AND LEITZEL, FOLLOWING THEIR MARRIAGE CEREMONY ON JULY 20, 1928, ON CHICAGO’S LAKEFRONT WHERE THE RINGLING BROS. AND BARNUM & BAILEY CIRCUS WAS PERFORMING. THE OPEN TOP LANDAULET IN WHICH THE NEWLYWEDS TRAVELED HAD BEEN MODIFIED BY CLOWN MYRON “BUTCH” BAKER SO IT COULD REAR UP ON ITS BACK WHEELS LIKE A RODEO HORSE. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)

CHAPTER 15

For the residents of Wichita Falls, Texas, who left their houses the morning of April 17, 1919, it all must have looked like something that had slipped off a star, something magical and sparkly that dropped from the sky and landed on, of all places, their town. On a dusty scrap of land near the railroad tracks that the day before was a patch of barrenness with only some rusted cans, tumbleweeds, and prairie dogs, tents were rising. Scattered here and there around the canvas stables, sideshow, and big top were a couple dozen gilded and rainbow-splashed parade wagons and floats that took the morning light and flung it back at the sun.

Sometime after midnight, when all of Wichita Falls was sleeping, the Sells-Floto Circus train had stolen into town. It arrived in style, on a forty-car train, all white with blue lettering, “the prettiest thing that ever moved over the rails,” Billboard declared.

The town’s forty thousand citizens should have felt well favored. The Sells-Floto Circus’s Wichita Falls matinee and evening performances would be the first of its planned 165-town 1919 tour. Immediately upon their arrival, the roustabouts, working by torchlight, started unloading the train of its caged wild animals, elephants, horses, tents, parade wagons, and other cargo. By the time the first light of the new day appeared, the show’s here-today, gone-tomorrow encampment was largely established.

The invading gypsies must have struck the townspeople as members of some lost and ancient tribe. They were black and white, and red skinned, coffee colored, and faintly yellow. They appeared to have come from everywhere, and quite possibly they did.

Strolling the circus grounds were five or six dozen showgirls, many of them appearing bored at having been deposited in a place of such dusty forlornness. Even in their everyday housedresses, even with curlers in their hair, they were striking, all of them gorgeous enough to be contestants in a beauty contest.

Greatest in number in the circus tribe were the whiskered, gray-faced, and sweat-soaked men who threw slabs of meat to the lions and tigers, pitched hay at the horses and zebras, and rhythmically swung sledgehammers at the tent stakes.

There was another distinctive subculture with the traveling show that was not yet seeable to the Wichita Falls townsfolk making early morning explorations of the new show ground. Its members included Carlos Traveno, “The Two-Headed Mexican”; the “Honduras Siamese Twins”; and Kyko and Sulu, a brother and sister from Zanzibar whose heads looked like they had been shaped by a giant pencil sharpener. These “Marvelous Human Prodigies,” along with a dozen and a half others just as remarkable, were hidden behind the canvas flaps of Professor W. F.

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