Star Tribune from Minneapolis, Minnesota • Page 47

Our TirebirdV3E Playful 'Gravity's Light' very much an 'up'2E Pesky, biting flies are no real danger3E Children need to see creative expression3E Comlcs6-7E Crossword9E TV, Radlo8E I 3 History comes alive at Baraboo museum By George MonaghanStaff Writer Baraboo, Wis. most summer days there not much action in Baraboo, a quaint, quiet town of 8,000 35 miles north of Madison surrounded oy green hills and rocky bluffs. VI son Now and then a freight train highballs through on the Chicago and North Western Railroad tracks. Tourists, many visiting from the nearby Wisconsin Dells, come by to see the Circus World Museum and its animal shows and its collection of old circus wagons. But something happens this time of year in Baraboo.

It comes alive. Men start coming in from Milwaukee, Chicago, the Twin Cities, Detroit, Oklahoma City, Buffalo, from towns in Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Nevada, New York. Some wear overalls and old felt hats with sweat-stained bands and old leather work gloves with worn fingers. Diesel locomotives rumble along the tracks. Long flatcars fill the rail yard.

Tractors chug around. Chains clank. Hammers and mallets pound on steel and wood. Men yell and you can hear horses at work. People from town begin to show up, just to watch.

They're joined by out-of-towners. And for the first time in a year, 75 old circus wagons the biggest and most resplendent from the museum's collection of 200 move out of their barn across the street from the tracks. It is the Greatest Show in town, as the men put together the Great Circus Train. In a day, when they are done, the train will head out through dozens of small towns and crossroads for 222 miles, past thousands of waving people. At its destination, Milwaukee, it will roll out in this Sunday's Great Circus Parade before a cheering crowd of TRAIN Continued on page 2E -v At s.

i' I V. i )i 1 1 Staff Photos Richard Sennott Wagonmaster Harold (Heavy) Bur-dick, top left, secured a wagon on, a flatbed rail car. When the circus train made stop in Madison, was met by about 5,000 people, including Karen Field, 5, perched on the shoulders of her mother, Paula, and several who found front-row seats on a side track. Above, Ned Kronberg, meat cutter from White Bear Lake, supervised the loading and un-' loading of the wagons in Baraboo and Milwaukee, Wis. He takes a two-week vacation every year to Join the circus crew as an atsls-T tant wagon master.

If V.J I 4d A review KARE's 6 p.m. newscast will become close captioned for deaf in October Hints of a better story make 'Bellman' intriguing Noel Holston It will have to be done in real time," Franzgrote said. "So, somebody actually has to sit there during the telecast with a keyboard and put the material on the screen." Franzgrote declined to say how much the equipment would cost, but he said that personnel was the major expense. He said the operators must have skills comparable to those of a court reporter and presumably would be paid commensurately. Because KARE plans to close-caption its 6 p.m.

news a distant third in the ratings instead of its top-rated 1 0 p.m. newscast, one well might wonder if there is also considerable strategic value in this good-neighborly endeavor. Whether it's buying official sponsorship of the Aquatennial Torchlight Parade or videotaping waving schoolchildren for the closing credits of its newscasts, finding fresh ways to ingratiate its newscasts and newscasters to viewers is a KARE trademark. Franzgrote, however, said that the decision to close-caption the 6 p.m. doesn't mean KARE is targeting WCCO-Channel 4's top-ranked "Moore Report" at 6 p.m.

He said that many of the people who could HOLSTON Continued on page 2E ri ARE-Channel 1 1 's 6 p.m. newscast will be- come the Twin Cities' first locally produced I Pr9ram closed captioned for the deaf JL and hearing impaired Oct. 3. Depending on how quickly the station can install the necessary equipment and train someone to operate it, KARE could begin closed-captioned telecasts even sooner. KARE also plans to contribute $10,000 to a fund to subsidize purchases of closed-caption decoders by people who can't afford the devices that enable them to see otherwise invisible subtitles at the bottom of their TV screens.

The decoders, priced in the $150 to $200 range, can be purchased at Sears department stores and the DEAF store in St Paul. Manufactured by the National Captioning Institute, the same organization that captions most network shows, the decoders can be connected to any TV set. The three networks' nightly newscasts already are closed captioned, as are most network prime time shows and a number of public-TV programs. But no Twin Cities programs are captioned. KARE president Joe Franzgrote said that putting captions on the newscast will require equipment similar to that used by a court reporter.

"In some cases, the information can be input in advance, but some of Television "bellman" apparently also is slang among bank robbers for the guy who deactivates the alarm while his accomplices are cracking the vault. The bellman here (Bernard Hill) ls4 reluctant one, an alcoholic computer specialist named Hitler who has just lost his job and his wife. leaves him with "the Boy," a chikl from an earlier marriage who un derstands only unconsciously that; his mother never loved him. Hiller and the Boy (Kieran O'Brien)' are taken hostage by a bank-rob- bing syndicate after he unwisely agrees to steal some crucial data" for them from his former company. He compounds his misery by ao-cepting the role of bellman on their next caper an assault on an electronically fortified bank that common opinion holds to be unreachable.

FILM Continued on page 9E By Jeremiah Creadon "Bellman and True" is a British bank-heist thriller with enough of the usual suspense to make it rec-ommendable. But the film's real strength is the interplay between its main character and his young stepson, an affecting love story that gives this mechanistic genre film a soul. Other extraordinary glimmers come and go, suggesting that perhaps Desmond Lowden original novel has more depth than director Richard Loncraine was able to convey in the film, despite some atmospheric camera work and good character acting. Those qualities can't equal the novelist's ability to portray the human heart in conflict with "Bellman and True," the title of the novel and the film, refers to a pair of hunting dogs celebrated in a tra-' ditional Scottish hunting song. A .4.