A Farewell to Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus

1885  St.Thomas, Ontario enroute to Chicago

A map of Margaret and James Franklin’s passage through the Great Lakes on The Grand Trunk Railroad’s (1887 map) with connections from Burlington, Vermont to Chicago, Illinois.  JUMBO, Barnum and Bailey’s 13 foot tall elephant was hit by a Grand Trunk Train while trying to help dwarf Asian elephant Tom Thumb in St. Thomas, Ontario classification yard.

Prolonged screeching brakes woke them. Their train car shuttered to a lurching start, then stop. 

Watch out! Margaret shouted as she and James were knocked into the wall of the boxcar, buffeted by their over-the-shoulder bags, but the suitcases slid and tumbled to jab their ribs and legs.

Let’s get out of here! Before the train takes off! They gathered their belongings and rushed to the partially opened door.  The train jerks forward then a high-pitched, bellowing animal scream, like a fluted pipe, fills the air.  Then silence. Men were yelling and calling. They hear, He's' over. Back 'er up” “Get off 'im! amidst a hollow, rounded sounding wail.  Neither James nor Maggie had ever heard pain expressed so woefully and mournfully.

What's that sound James?  Margaret looks frightened of what she cannot see, only hear.

It's some kind of animal, I think. It’s louder than an ox, and higher pitched.  What is that? James wonders out loud.   A clear ear splitting trumpeting tapers to a purring, sputtering sound that churns like an ailing engine.  Then a loud trumpeting again.   An early morning light is coming through the partially opened door.  The workers have left this box car.  James and Margaret desperately want to leave it without goodbyes.

            Reverberations between metal train cars calmed and they stood to feel for bodily injury. The locomotive then revs up and reverses backwards!  Margaret and James were jolted to the metal floor. The train tipped.   Then, the train car crashed onto it's right side.  The rolled canvasses and crates were tossed about tumbling into the shifting walls.  The sound of crates of china and glass shuffled, slid, then shattered against the sides of the car along with Margaret and James.  The train car strained its connections, derailed and suddenly, fell sideways. A flash of sunlight flooded through the car's sliding door, now on the top giving a view of wispy clouds swiping a blue sky. In the distance, a symphony of trumpeting, overlapped with echoing trumpeting. The distant trumpeting, seemed to be calling, asking for a response, from what might be...?  

Climb along the sides Margaret. We can get out on top, maybe unseen James hoarsely called from the bottom of the sideways train car.

I don't know if I can move, Margaret groaned.  I hit the side hard and my hip is locked.

Joe, hey Joe!  Romeo and Juliet…  they're here in the bottom of the train car! 

Better stay there for a minute, Rory called into the car.   We were headed to the chow tent, until we saw the accident. The train's derailed and rolled on top of Jumbo, Bailey's Prize elephant.

Circus? James looks to Margaret. 

James climbs the pile of crates, grabs hold of the door edge, and pulls himself up and out.  He and the men go to look for a rope to help Margaret.  In the meantime, Margaret felt an excruciating pain. The human shouts after the silenced animal fills her with a sorrow for having left home.  The aloneness blended with the fear of how will she start over in a large city?  Then she saw a Baleek cup intact.  In front of her a crate of Baleek china cups and saucers has cracked open in the fall.  In her want to hold onto their dream of a new life with a family, Margaret searched through the chipped ivory colored shards to find three sets in mint condition.  They were carefully wrapped in clothing and tucked into her bag.  It was her way to begin a legacy for her and James’ children.  Their family will happen, she consoled herself.

            A rope was dropped down and James dropped back into the car to tie it under Margaret's arms.  The three men above hoisted her, while James cradled a foothold for her.   Maggie grabbed the metal opened door and pulled herself out to the morning sunlight. James climbed on top of the crates and canvas rolls with the suitcases and shoulder bags tied over his shoulders.   He used the last of his rested strength to pull himself up out of the train car.  Margaret sat on top of the car, mesmerized by the scene in front of her.

            Along miles of train track were brightly painted P.T. Barnum and J.A. Bailey’s Circus, Greatest Show on Earth.  Flourishing gold framed and crowned train cars were decorative in gold –leafed patterns along the top.  Margaret gazed wondrously at what seemed to be a mile of red and gold trains on each of three tracks.  Beyond the ticket gate were llamas, polar bears and cages of cats, lions, spider monkeys and zebras.  She saw black and white horses, mounds of hay, and two giraffes.  A hill-sized elephant was on it's side under the train car just before theirs.  It is the most enormous beast she has ever seen, maybe 13 feet in from head to foot and textured like dried mud in an empty creek bed.

            Maybe twenty other elephants' ears were caught and prodded with bull hooks to move crates and boxes.  Their trainers called and shouted Hey! Derri!   Heye! Steh, Ragu, Steh!  Their steps were like a dance, choreographed between the trainer and wrinkled wise-eyed beasts.  The elephants massive mounded frames heaved like mountains and moved on short tree trunk legs.  An elephant's trunk seemed to be an animal all its own.  The trunk moved like a giant snake that hooked around handles or poles and lifted people and bales of hay.  Its tip was more of a dexterous appendage with a graceful thumb- that opened, grasped small objects with minute skills several feet from it's eyes.  Margaret McKillip Franklin had stopped breathing in her amazement.

A Circus, James said again quietly, staring in disbelief.

Margaret recognized the words and wanted them to bring meaning.  She could only stare at the menagerie in front of her.  The color, the gold lettering, the shouts and most of all the loud, agonizing, sputter the enormous elephant of releasing its life completely captured her focus.   Jumbo was not in her ability to comprehend.  Margaret had never seen so much un-harnessed chaos and sporadic motion. James joined her to revel in the red and gold train cars and collaboration of man and animal working together.

 An elephant is dying? James attempted to understand by saying the words.  This relocation was his idea, the marriage, saving of money, staying in the train car had all come from him.  What nightmare had he brought to the blossom of their marriage?  Was he really able to fulfill the vow he’d made to his father-in-law to keep Margaret safe. 

Come on Maggie, we've got to get out of here before they see us!  James held her elbow to redirect her attention to climbing off the top of the toppled train.

The young couple arrived in Chicago, the rail hub of the country, and were greeted by tugboats and rail yards belching smoke. The stockyard stank pervasively in the air and privy vaults infected water wells in many backyards.  Sanitary discipline was mandatory for survival while Margaret and James became part of Chicago doubling its population.  Daniel, her younger brother offered her his home as they got settled.  James stayed with some friends of his wagon drivers from back home.

P. T. Barnum says that the younger elephant, Tom Thumb, was on the railroad tracks. Jumbo was walking up to lead him to safety, but an unexpected locomotive hit Tom Thumb, killing him instantly. Because of this, the locomotive derailed and hit Jumbo, killing him too.

Today, I'll present "1955 The Artist Reporter" at "That Should be in a Museum" at 60 inches from Center in the Chicago Cultural Center:


1955 The Artist Reporter

    The oppressive, heavy air woke Dad before dawn. Not even the starlings had begun their early gurgling, disjointed harsh chatter.  The sullen air over-rode the cheap and sputtering window air-conditioner that strained to lift the humidity while barely puffing cooler air in lazy circles through the thick and slow aura.  There it was. The first bird’s shrill sliding whistle of the day, rhythmic, echoing and distant. Ahh, That’s the one that will get the worm. In the dark, his bare feet stepped onto the worn carpet and opened the wide mouth of his leather aviator’s bag.  In boxers and a v-necked t-shirt, Dad carried his toiletry bag to the sparse, plastic-tiled bathroom. After a steamy shower, he wiped dripping condensation from the tin-framed medicine cabinet mirror.  It’s just another job, he told himself as he lathered the bar of shaving soap, leaned into the cracked mirror to cover his jaws, chin and under his nose with white foam. He lifted his chin and daubbed the foam above the jugular and back to the base of his ears. His silver two sided and dulled razor scraped a red path through the stubble.  The other side was not much sharper.  Dad recalled from last night that sideways look of the poker-faced night clerk as he peered at Dad’s brown paper package under his right arm. “Wellllcum to Summmner,” He’d been friendly enough, though his southern accent, with elongated syllables, took a little concentrating to discern. His package had slumped into the front desk when Dad set it on the toes of his oxfords to sign in at the motel. “Ouch!”, a spot of red dripped through the foam as the razor nicked the edge of his jaw. He dabbed the spot with some toilet paper, leaving it sticking out on his face while the razor continued to graze through sequential paths.        

“What brings you to Mississippi?” the cab driver from the airport had tried to carry Dad’s 2 by 3 foot flat, but bulging, brown package, into the lobby.  “It’s a bit heavy,” Dad had coveted his package of drawing pads, pencils and ink pens while keeping up a friendly banter about the heaviness of the night air.  The cold splash of water stung his freshly shaved face.  Maybe, I’ll take the smallest drawing pad and blend in with all the reporters. He sat by the waste basket pushing the one-sided razor through the soon faceted wood and graphite of his veri-black pencil, then lightly shaved a sharper point.  Another pencil and another were sharpened by hand until he filled the breast pocket of his white dress shirt.  These would hide beneath his suitcoat.  The inside suitcoat breast pocket held his press credentials from Life Magazine.

It's too early to call Irene.  Maybe after breakfast and before the kids are awake.  He pulled the rubber eraser apart, squished it together and pulled it apart to clean it from yesterday’s erasure.  As dawn lightened the sky through the narrow blinds, Dad slipped on his suit, tightened his knit tie and went downstairs for his continental breakfast of coffee, toast and orange marmalade. 

 “It’s a bit sticky,” Dad summed up his impressions of Mississippi to Mom over the lobby telephone.  She was too distracted by her oldest, elementary-aged son who had just spilled his cereal bowl to interpret what this might mean.  The twins were stiff-leggedly climbing up, then jumping down the two living room steps.  The middle boy had slid in his stocking feet down the concrete ramp into the kitchen, climbed onto the chair rungs and was staring straight into her face. By the windows, a pre-school daughter was quietly weaving nylon loops on a small red frame-probably making a potholder. Nearby a toddler was taking cautious steps from the coffee table to the couch, then to the cyprus window frame.  He slipped down and began to cry looking at the splinter in his finger.   Most had eaten breakfast already. 

“You’re up bright and early!  What time does the trial begin?”  she asked.  Mom didn’t know yet that she would miss this closeness, knowing where all her children were at a glance.

“I’m headed over to size up the place and see if I can get a start on drawing the courtroom,” he replied hearing the baby’s sobs in the background. The phone line started to crackled.

 “Keep in touch,” she replied as the milk flowed off the edge of the table and across the concrete floor. 

         

 

She had barely finished sanding the cyprus beams of their newly built home when Dad landed in Sumner County Mississippi for Life Magazine to cover, with drawings, the Emmett Till Trial.  These Southerners are still peeved about last year’s Brown vs. the Board of Education decision he thought as he stepped out into the dusty dawn. He was only a few blocks from the red-brick county courthouse with a clock tower that was sounding 6:30. A few police were chatting by the front door but were not letting reporters in until seven.  Across the street, Dad drew, from a coffee shop, the arched windows and doors of the courthouse on a small sketch pad that fit in his suitcoat pocket.  As soon as the doors opened, he flashed his credentials and found a seat in the middle of the still empty, white press section.  With his sharpest pencil, he drew the juror’s seats, the witnesses stand, the door to the chambers and judge’s seat with American and Mississippi flags on either side.  He was drawing the stage set for the what would become five days of court theatrics and sixty-seven minutes to a jury decision.

         He was jostled as the press section began to fill and the spectators shuffled into the courtroom and gallery seats.  From a lone crow to a sparrow amongst a flock of birds, he mused. Dad erased a stray line caused by a reporter who bumped his elbow.  We’re perched here like a flock of sparrows on a wire.  “Eh Mac, sorry”, the reporter said in a distinctly Chicago accent.  The less said, the better with us sounding like that. He redrew his line, then glanced around to see several reporter friends from Chicago settle into seats. 

         Ok, relax. Let it flow, stay alert. Where’s the story?  Nah, the segregation in the courtroom or the press sections is not news.  His pencil captured the body language of a coifed and elegantly dressed, Mrs. Bryant in his hand-sized spiral notebook.  The heavy heat in the crowded room evaporated. He focused. Fourteen non-sympathetic and arrogant white male jurors set the tone with a wash of ink.  Their likeness and lackadaisical body language slumped in wooden chairs. Leave out the juror’s beer, it’s judgmental.  He didn’t feel the heat though he’d already soaked his t-shirt and dress shirt as the hopeless fans noisily churned above. Accused of flirting with a young, white female grocer, Emmett was abducted from Mose Wright, his uncle’s home, and cousin’s bed, a few nights later.  Sighs were breathed in the upper balcony seats. Chairs moved on wood. The nephew, son, still-a-boy, Emmett was beaten in Leslie Milam’s shed, shot and mutilated, then found in the Tallahatchie River. Pencils slowed in the negro press section. Rustling of fabric from the gallery was almost a squirming silence. Not a breath was drawn from those in the rear seats.

                               

 Then it happened!  “Can you identify the men who came to your door?’ Graphite that scratched the texture of paper interrupted the vacuum of breathing as Mose Wright stood up. With a shaking arm he pointed to a the white men , Roy Bryant and J.W. Milan, “There’s he.”  Dad’s pencil flew to capture the tension in the air. He just shucked 300 years of United States history. Dad’s lines captured the electricity in the room in the form of the shaky, outstretched and elongated arm, the force of gesture in the stance, the suspenders on the pants. Then, a loud lurching thud.  Mose Wright sat.  That told what strength it took him to stand, point his finger and state two words. The Judge’s gavel echoed in the thick air as he called a recess.  After coming out of his drawing, Dad folded up his pad, tucked his pencils in his breast pocket. He and another reporter silently walked across the street for a cup of coffee.  At the coffee shop door they were surrounded, closely, by a few white male citizens, “You Northerners go back home and leave us Sumner folks alone.” Shirking off the comment, he decided to get coffee at his hotel. 

         In his hotel room, Dad redrew the sketches on larger sheets of Arches paper. Got to get the quiver from the rear gallery in his spine.  His hand shook.  Life had a tight and strict Saturday night deadline.  Getting the art finished on time took long nights and early mornings, then days for the mail. Dad mailed the notebooks and drawings in the brown, flat package from the hotel desk directly to a New York City address. He sees from the corner of his eye the Times on the desk with the headline, “The First Time in Mississippi History a Negro testified against a Sumner County citizen.” Ahh, They beat me to it.  The cab picked him up at the motel door for the airport with only his aviator’s bag in hand, not knowing if his drawings would be published.

Franklin McMahon realized then that art could effectuate social change. The Life Magazine Emmett Till Trial article also changed a cartoonist father into an Artist Reporter, a chronicler of his time.  A few months later, when Rosa Parks built up the courage to  remain seated in the back of the bus, she thought of Emmett Till.  Her one phone call from jail was to Reverend Ralph Abernathy.  He called Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.   The Civil Rights Movement peacefully began with the month long bus boycott when Blacks walked to work interrupting the bus system's income.

        

18 W Tooker Place_1919

Last night Dan and I were back in our first Newberry Library neighborhood and found the bricked up entrance to the Dill Pickle.  When my grandparents walked through this gray stone door it said

" Step High, Stoop low, Leave your Dignity Outside"

1919 Chicago

Meeting after work in the loop Grandpa and Gram walked along Dearborn with their picnic basket of sausage and cheese, apples and a bottle of wine.

“ fellow came to the board this morning on his best game, “ Grandpa was telling her as they strolled along.  “By three o’clock he’s turnin’ purple and left.  I don’t know if he made it home.“ Silence followed as they settled on a bench in Bughouse Square with tens of other couples, she lifted her veil and they removed their gloves to nibble slowly and enjoy the fresh air. “Eva received a letter from Alderbrook.  The family is looking forward to our arrival in August and has the church reserved.  We’ll have our reception at the McKillips across the street.”  Gram changed the subject.

“Sure will be nice to get out of the city.” He replied.

“Are we coming back to it?” she asked.  “ I’m considering Oak Park these days.” Dusk turned to dark as they stretched their legs and sipped their wine. The gas lamps were turned on.  Grandpa snoozed a bit. Gram wrote her response in a letter to Eva that plans for their wedding were set.  A slight chill settled in the air as the benches filled with night sleepers.

 “ Let’s go to the Dill Pickle tonight,” Gram suggested. “Carl Sandburg is playing his banjo.”

“You’re call,” Grandpa added, “what about a visit to Adolph’s for an unwind after? Renucci is always an inspiration on a bleak day.” 

“So what is he? The honorary mayor, chief of police or dog catcher on Rush Street” Gram laughed.  

“He’s the pulsing artery of the north side!” Grandpa put on his hat and they strolled along the diagonal path. “ as long as whoever knows the right rhythm of door knocks.”   The couple, separated only by ten years of age, walked arm in arm down Tooker Place and stepped up, ducked way down and left their ails behind.