This Is Not a Reading Series launches its busy fall season of non-readings tonight with an event for all you circus freaks and closet carnies. A.W. Stencell, 45-year veteran of the big top and author of Circus and Carnival Ballyhoo: Sideshow Freaks, Jaggers and BladeBox Queens, will be interviewed onstage by Toronto’s own Derek McCormack, author of The Show That Smells and Haunted Hillbilly. Stencell will be hanging vintage ballyhoo banners throughout the room, and given his long association with the thrills-and-chills business attendees can expect plenty of other surprises. (Full event details below.)
Stencell was kind enough to send Books@Torontoist a few of his memories of his early days of running away to join the circus:
I grew up in Perth, Ontario, a town near near Ottawa that was a military post in the War of 1812. Old stuffy Scotch settlement. However, it was the site of the last fatal duel in Canada and also the home of the Marx Bros Theatrical Troupe, which was famous around North America for many years. My young years seemed all in preparation of getting out of that town. I was always up at the fairgrounds waiting for a show to come in. I was fascinated by circuses, carnivals, thrill shows, etc. I started working at the fair at about age 12 or so (once I could handle making change with confidence).
Except for a brief detour into hippiedom, I was only interested in travelling shows and hanging around the barns at the fairgrounds about five blocks from my home. I made drawings of where each attraction went on the midway and kept lots of little notes. One year I got up there a few days before the show had arrived (Green Amusement Co. out of Scarborough) and the owner and this guy were having a big beef about where the guy’s joint sat the year before. I told the owner I had a map and they looked at me like I was nuts. But the owner says, “Run home and get your map.” I brought it back and he studied it for a few minutes, then he says to this concessionaire, “Here’s where your fucking joint goes, it’s right here on the map!” Then he turns to me and says: “Kid, do you want a job?”
I was hired to work in the owner’s floss joint run by his wife Heidi, a blonde Swiss lady. I worked every weekend that fall and they had me contact them as soon as I got out of school the next June. I spent the summer on the show, mostly in Quebec.
The next year I went with a circus and continued on circuses into my late teens. I was on gene Cody and Kipling Brothers (twice), Sells and Gray Circus three seasons, Hanneford Circus three seasons. I was bill-poster, 24-hour man, and then had all the novelty, program, balloon, and colouring book concessions. That is where I made enough to start my own show. Before Hanneford, I had been a few months on Ringling Barnum and Bailey Circus running the #2 floss joint.
I kept getting deported from the US and that is why I started my own circus in 1973. The frame was built from junk yards and put together on a farm that was a halfway house for ex-cons being slowly fed back into society. The first four seasons the show was called Royal Brothers Circus and I had John Frazier, an American, as a partner. In 1976 I dropped him and framed a new circus for 1977 called Martin and Downs Circus. This was named after a Torontonian, Martin J. Downs, a well-off banker here but also a powerhouse in the American circus business with several big rail circuses of note and serious competition to Ringling Brothers and others. Unfortunately he was kicked by a horse and died young. I toured that show across Canada—east one year, then west, until the fall of 1983, closing in Chapleau, Ontario. In 1982 we also had a new indoor circus built called Super Circus International. We put it out as well in 1983 for eight weeks and 54 cities and it did extremely big business. We decided to continue it and quit the tent. I toured that show until i retired in 1991. I simply got tired of it and I wanted to try and write about the business.
Besides the circus I had done various other things, including a gospel group, stage shows, hypnotic show (then illegal in Ontario), etc. Along the way, I kept everything I could find on touring shows, which is why I have such a vast collection of that side of the entertainment business.
The circus was and in some ways still is the real entertainment business—not Hollywood or the music stuff, which in many ways is not interesting. It’s just overblown by the press and centered around gossip and whose screwing who or whose getting a divorce. You didn’t need that news for excitement in my business. It was full of characters and things that happened that were unbelievable at times.
(Al Stencell will speak to Derek McCormack about these unbelievable things tonight at The Garrison, 1197 Dundas Street West. Doors open at 7 p.m., event begins at 8 p.m., admission $5 or free with book purchase.)
