Lucky find: I was going to say, this is the closest image I could find of a circus off a country road, and then, I discovered - look closely - "Carson & Barnes on a truck! Not sure the year.
Some of my most pleasant circus-going memories are of select past editions I have seen over the years of the Carson & Barnes Circus, when it spread its magical, if sometimes modest, assets across three to five rings.
For years, I have thought back on a day, up near Calistoga in Sonoma County, when I and either Hugo Marquardt or Don Marcks went to the show. A nice grassy lot on the side of a country road. Plenty of people in the seats. It's a standout day. Sometimes, C&B would breeze across the sawdust in a kind of rough yet straight-ahead manner, no intermission to stop the flow, a live band adding gusto to the merry mix.
So I was delighted, by serendipity, to find this entry in a 1965 diary, which I'd been going through, researching another subject altogether:
The date is September 11. It's a Saturday:
"I went this morning on the L bus to El Cerrito, where I met Don Marcks, who took me with him to see the Carson & Barnes show in Vallejo [so that's where it was! Not too far from Vallejo.} It was a pleasant day. The performance was 'good' - well paced and noticeably free of commercials (there were no signs in the big top). Sky King was there to entertain the kids, and he sang a song about the circus which he had written for the finale. It was nice -- Then I came home with a Mr. Bert Hanson, an elderly man who works magic for a hobby."
From nit-picky me, the above sounds like a near-rave. Some circus shows remain a flowing stream through our honoring memories. That was surely one of them.
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