Under the little big top: Circus Daze at the Uniontown Mall
UNIONTOWN -- Today is the last day that the little big top will be at Uniontown Mall for Circus Daze as the Circus Model Builders are in town for their national convention.
The builders gather every year, with local clubs sponsoring regional gatherings where people with a love of models and the circus come to meet, display their handiwork, their passion, share ideas or sell items they collected, according to Ron Hurst, of Peoria, Ill., who has a table set up of photos from the early '30s, popcorn bags and boxes, model trains from the 1940s days of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus, that are one-eighth representatives, which means that an eighth of an inch represents a foot in actuality.
A kit model builder, Hurst says he always had an interest in model building and the circus, both of which he calls clean hobbies, adding that before television or radio the circus was the only form of entertainment, and it has never been censored.
What Hurst's hobby does for others is educate people somewhat about the circus and bring back memories to the older generation that remembered those golden circus days.
Fred Hoffman, of Pottstown, remembers being a child, getting on his bike, riding to a location where a circus was once set up, and picking up all the discarded posters and circus programs, because he was -- and he still is -- a circus fan like many are football or baseball fans.
Fifty years later, the stuff that Hoffman got for free started to increase in value, and he sold whatever he really didn't want in his collection for some pretty good money.
For example, Hoffman sold a 101 Ranch Wild West Show poster from 1928 for $1,500.
Displaying model trains from the circus days is not the only enjoyable activity for Jack Salisbury, of East Syracuse, N.Y.
He's currently trying to get lines of trains back in working condition to run along an electric track.
Salisbury spent 18 months working on the trains and expects to work for another year on some problems that can't be seen with the naked eye.
What can be seen at Salisbury's display is the "pride and joy" of his collection -- a bear inside a scaled-down model train car where the wheels move and the axel pivots.
Motion, or animation, is one of the four things that Ted Bennett, of Philadelphia, learned to lure people to his display. The other three are lights, music and the smell of the circus.
"Not of the animals, of course," says Bennett, who adds that popcorn is the circus smell that attracts people, especially children, to the display.
At his Uniontown Mall display, Bennett has three out of four with animated carnival rides -- because it was not uncommon to see a carnival set up next to a circus-- lamps spotlighting his hand-sewn tents and carnival music playing in the middle of it all.
With eight tables set up, Bennett has 475 handmade tents, 1,500 hand-painted people and 350 trucks with circus stickers attached.
Bennett's display is also a history lesson of how circuses operated back then and what somebody attending a circus went through.
Another historic lesson at the Circus Daze was Rob Houston's history and memorabilia of the three elephants at Ringling and Barnum and Bailey Circus' existence.
Animated models of actual animals like Jumbo, who died 100 years ago; King Tusk, who died sometime in the past year; and Anna May, who is the current elephant for the circus and is currently scaled down and on display all day today at the mall.
