Star Tribune from Minneapolis, Minnesota • Page 48

SaturdayJuly 161988Star Tribune 2E- "TV' A TRAIN: Old wagons are heading for Milwaukee parade 1 ife-t. Continued from page 1E more than 300,000. I I. ft I Staff Photos Richard Sennott The men and horses took a rest after loading 19 flatbed cars with circus wagons, cages, trucks and the circus calliope. unloading circus trains for more than two decades.

He is an acknowledged master. He used to spend his weekends moving not 19 flatbeds, but 90, and he did it for the Royal American Show for years at the Minnesota State Fair. The lure was "the excitement, the movement," he says. "I used to come home from work as an electronics engineer and my wife would say, "One, two or three?" and what she meant was how many years it would take for anything to happen on any decision I made that day. -Here I do something and I see the results, now.

That's why I do it. Tim Davison, a Minneapolis Second Precinct police sergeant, says working on the train is the realization of a dream his family has had -for generations. Before he became a policeman, he wanted to be an elephant trainer. At the University of Minnesota he wrote his senior paper on the influence of the circus on American life. That took him to the museutn in Baraboo, and he's been going back ever since.

Ned Kronberg, a meat cutter from White Bear Lake, goes to Baraboo every year as one of Heavy Bur-dick's whistle blowers. He went first 28 years ago on a family picnic, and he's been coming back ever since to take his two-week vacation in working clothes and a dirty felt hat and a mustache waxed up on the ends just for the occasion. Chappie Fox, 75, wears a sweaty hat and he has a big cigar in the pocket of his white shirt. He is a founder of Baraboo's Circus Museum, which was located there because it's the home of the Ringling brothers (who left around the turn of the century and never returned) and the Ringling Bros. Circus.

As a boy Fox began taking pictures of circus wagons in Milwaukee's circus parades with his Brownie camera. He has published 12 books on circus horses, circus advertising, circus trains, circus pa- rades. "Everything you see here," he said, "is a replica of the way it used to be. The bull rings on the corners of the wagons, the whistles, the Percherons, the way the men dress, the ropes and the chains and the chocks. "The system was so efficient the United States Army sent over a colonel to look at it and live with the Ringling Circus for a whole season in 191 4 to study how the circus could move so much in so short.a time, every day, loading and unloading hundreds of animals and wagons.

The colonel was amazed. He said the Army couldn't do in three days what the circus did in one. It was fascinating. That's how I got so wrapped up in it. I came here to do research on a book and I couldn't leave." ButTight now, the men are working, loading up the old circus flatcars, pulfyig the old wagons up ramps to the fcars, chocking the wheels tight.

Thee's Charley Sparbaro, 58, a retired man from Henderson, a veteran of three decades of cir- Susjnc-ving, smoking a Pall Mall on ib fcack of a Caterpillar tractor driven toy Bill McFann, a car me-chapic from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In trie circus division of labor, Spar-barg's the man who pins the designated circus wagon to the tractor to haut it to the train from the museum hart. Today, though, he and McEann can't find the wagon. ''Where the hell is it?" he yells. 'JAsjk Ed," someone else says.

Ed fc-Ed Lester, 64, an electronic, engineer from Oklahoma City, and in moving a circus he probably has few peers In the country. He's been moving this circus for years. "It's over there on the left," Ed calls put over the roaring diesels. The team finds the wagon, a big, ornate gold and red one with carvings and mirrors on the sides. Sparbaro pins its tongue to the Cat, and the machine chugs toward the ttacks outside.

Other men surround the wagon, and as Sparbaro unpins it, they take up the tongue, and hitch it to a team of three big Percherons. The big man standing off at the side is Harold (Heavy) Burdick, the wag-dn-master who works for the museum. He blows his whistle twice. The big-Percherons strain. The wagon creaks forward, up the ramps and onto the flatbed cars.

Burdick blows his whistle once, meaning sjop. The horses stop and a team of other men began securing the Wheels of the wagon with wood chocks. The men work, hour after hour, until 19 flatbeds are loaded with circus wagons and circus cages and circus trucks and the circus calliope and the Great Circus Train is ready to roll. People at the museum say it's a sbene repeated year after year in Baraboo since the Ringling Bros, came to town before the turn of the cpntury. Sparbaro and Lester and McFann are duplicating ft for $20 a day.

But that's not what counts for them. Mostly, they are taking two weeks of their vacations to be a part of the Great Circus Train. graduate of Northwestern University at 17, and a B-29 pilot over Japan before he was out of hirteens, has been loading and rv Above, a mirror on the side of circus wagon reflected the team of horses and men at work loading the Great Circus Train. At right, a crew loaded the ramps used to haul wagons on and off the rail cars. Black Maned Nubian Tigers, the Tallest Giraffe in the World.

ger cars that will take several hundred people to Milwaukee on the two-day trip. The men are out securing the chocks and the train is ready to move. The band begins to play, a little flat at first. The train moves. The cars begin passing by the intersection on parade, gleaming and glittering and glamorous as the Ringlings would say.

There's the Pawnee Bill Wild West Show wagon, weighing 6V2 tons, with carved buffalos draped in American flags on each corner, bedecked with Indians and pioneers in reliefs 8 inches deep. Not far behind is the Bostock Wombell Menagerie, built in 1859 and the oldest wagon on the train. When he opened the museum, now operated by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, it had one building and four circus wagons. Because of his books, he knew where all the old wagons were. Now, the museum has nearly 200 of them, which form the nucleus of and the Great Circus Train in Baraboo (Jointly sponsored by the museum, the railroad and Strong Funds, a Milwaukee money management firm) the Great Circus Parade in Milwaukee.

It's Tuesday, the beginning of a golden day, and already hundreds of well-wishers are coming to Baraboo to see the train off. A small band, dressed in red band suits and hats, gathers by one of the passen By the time the train is heading for the bluffs along Devils Lake and the bridge across the Wisconsin River, the band is still playing, with vigor, looking smarter than ever; And the crowd is still there, too, waving as it fades into the hills. Then there's a children's float with St. George and the Dragon, Cinderella and the Old Woman in the shoe. Along comes the Clyde Beat-ty Circus wagon, then the Ringling Bros.

Three Ring Circus with Hoot Gibson. Then the Cole Bros. Circus, the Hagenback-Wallace Circus. There are the old animal wagons (minus the animals now): Trained Polar Bears, Huge Man Eating Tiger, Dancing European Brown Bears, Royal Bengal Tigers, Holston Playful 'Gravity's Light' is very much an 'up' Continued from page 1E dancers fall. Often they stay up only precariously, which makes for deli A review yelping, "Ouch!" An old rocking chair becomes grandpa, a miniature chair the child seeking the wisdom of the ancients, much of it having to do with Gravity's Light cious movement.

The piece ends with Weller in grandfather's chair addressing the next generation, her chief advice now being, "Up, up up." Thus is the movement of history encapsulated through cumulative experi- ence with gravitational pull. Weller and her colleagues in flight waft happily upward through "Gravity's Light, provoking and challenging and imparting some wisdom along the way in the most playful, pleasantly featherlight way possible. being careful, Don tain The theme of the show is soon established in a wonderful whirlwind of wordplay. Down is bad; up is good. The dance in the show is more like natural movement extended than traditional dance, much of it stretched out and reaching, almost all of it having to do with balances.

When the balance is tipped, the Who: Created and directed by Lo-vice Weller, produced by the Southern Theatre as part of the Over-tones Series. Where: Southern Theatre, 1420 Washington Av. S. When: Tonight and July 21-23, 8 p.m. Tickets: call 340-1725.

Review: Weller and a splendid cast explore humankind's relationship to gravity, both physically and metaphysically, in an altogether happy, playful yet provocative way. It's witty, touching and smart as it shows the benefits of up over down and challenges people to soar. RiverFest On the River Downtown St. Paul Parking off Lafayette Exp. (Hwy3) Plato Exit Tickets: $1 0 at the Gate, Children 1 1 under accompanied by adult, Seniors 62 and over: FREE For Information, Call the Entertainment Line: 827-7000 dios in Los Angeles but counts KSTP-TV, Channel 5, anchor Stan Turner and medical reporter Dr.

Michael Breen among its contributors, will have its final broadcast July 23. "Great Weekend" was created to fill an apparent void on Saturday mornings, the only day of the week without a "Today or Good Morning program. At last count, the show was being carried by KSTP-TV, Channel 5, (Saturdays, 9 a.m.) and 73 other TV stations good enough to reach 70 percent of the nation's TV-equipped homes. But reaching the homes and enticing people to watch are not the same thing. The show's aim was to give adult viewers information that would help them make better use of weekend time.

Apparently, most of them had better things to do than park in front of the TV set. "Great Weekend's" audience was slow to build and its low ratings made the commercial minutes a tough sell. So ad revenues weren't sufficient to cover the production costs. USTV president Lionel Schaen told Electronic Media, a trade newspaper, that the show was going $60,000 in the hole some weeks. Audience participation Fresh Air Radio (KFAI, FM 90.3) will broadcast a live "Readathon" today, 9 a.m.

to 9 p.m., from the first floor atrium in Calhoun Square. Two dozen celebrity guests, including Joan Mondale and Star Tribune columnist Barbara Flanagan, will read from their favorite literary works. But the listener-supported station also plans frequent "open microphone" segments when anyone can read a favorite poem or prose passage. Speaking of audiences, ABC's "Home, the weekday morning series devoted to homemaking tips, needs a couple of live audiences for Twin Cities tapings Monday and Tuesday. If you'd like to sit in while hosts Rob Weller and Sandy Hill chat with local guests, call for reservations at 645-3999.

benefit from close-captioned news are older and more likely to watch the early newscast than the 10 p.m. edition. He said there are also "fome advantages to doing it closer to our working day, as far as getting people to work the But what about a ratings advan- tage? "I don't anticipate any big stying in the ratings because of this change," Franzgrote said. "In reality, the numbers aren't that big." Actually, the numbers could be significant. The Minnesota Regional Service Center for the Hearing Impaired and the nonprofit organization DEAF estimate that the seven-county Twin Cities metro area has about 20,000 deaf residents and more than 200,000 other people with some degree of hearing impairment.

-1 Wayne Moldenhauer, DEAF's executive director, said everyone he's talked to in the deaf community was "extremely positive" about KARE'S plans. He said there's little question that deaf people will gravitate to a close-captiohed local newscast. And it wouldn't be a matter of KARE's taking viewers away frefrrWCCO or KSTP, he said, be-caqe most deaf people don't walch any local newscast. Mfcdentiauer also said it's estimat-edjprery deaf person is "surround-eipyive hearing persons" fatnity, friends, social and medical weher6. He suggested that closed-caotfonjng could have a ripple ef-fettaching far beyond the basic tafcat audience.

Cfictilatodly or not, KARE really cdu) be on to something. Weekend update the Hubbard Broadcasting olJttQotit that syndicates programs naQonally, is canceling "Great Wijkend," which was launched as an adult alternative to the thftje networks' Saturday morning cartoons. The informational originates from stu By Mike SteeleStaff Writer Up Is better than down, though often more precarious and certainly difficult to achieve. Still, defy-. I ing Earth's forces has been a constant in mankind's inexorable search for the heights.

And, as Lo-vice Weller tells us in her witty new dance-theater piece, "Gravity's Light," the fitful stumbles and myriad falls along the way only make the summits more attractive and meaningful. Waller's wonderful piece, part of the Southern Theatre's Overtones series, is very much an up itself, a playfully sneaky bit of metaphysical high jinks that explores our real and metaphorical relationship to gravity. Which brings us to juggling, a near perfect symbol of her thesis: The juggler, the medieval clown of God, the fool seeking truth, the court jester, the artist, spinning three small sand bags into the air at once, controlling the arc of their flight, determining their pattern, grabbing them in mid fall and hurtling them again skyward in endless repetition. Her central image is a juggler, a cosmic comic outgrowth of Galileo, Newton and Einstein's search for knowledge, defying natural forces for art's sake, weller also is a fine dancer, a breed of artist that captivates by controlling the forces of up and down. In the cheekiest, and funniest, part of the evening, Weller the juggler sits down with her three sand bags and admonishes them, like an earnest choreographer, to greatness, urging them to "do it better than you've ever done it before." Then Weller hilariously portrays each of the three juggler's bags, each taking on a distinct personality and assuming a strong attitude toward the juggler.

Weller has great fun with this, playing on dancers' attitudes toward choreographers. "I just go up and down, she controls the patterns," mutters one. Sat, July 16 3 7:30 PM THE TEMPTATIONS THE O'JAYS Noon-Midnight DAVID LINDLEY TIM WEISBERG SPEED KINGS Blue Heat Little Women LeRoy Airmaster Mauve Decade Sun, July 17 Nootl-7PM AL STEWART TIM WEISBERG The Nerds The Boys Next Door Mauve Decade Samoa 7P.M.-Midnight (forono POESfNTS JIMMY BUFFETT "It's simple another. "I can't perform better than she who is forming the forms." Weller created the work in collaboration with her superb cast, singer-dancer Elisa Randall and singers Cynthia Lohman and Janet Gotts-chall. With the exception of some Bach for a nice yearning-toward-flight solo and an elegiac chamber work by Messaien, the four of them create their own music a capella, coming up with often beautiful, often haunting wordless tones capable of deep, earthy sounds or ethereal flights into the stratosphere.

The Southern stage is open and deep, decorated by a couple of ladders and more than 50 chairs of all kinds stacked, randomly sited or seemingly floating through space, set off by Jeff Bartlett's precise, painterly lighting. The piece opens in prehistory with the four creating a waving tree amid bird and wind sounds, blowing freely until the first human emerges, falling from the tree and LITTLE FEAT GERARD AL STEWART TIM WEISBERG BRING THE FAMILY! Enjoy the Ringling Bros, and Bamum Bailey Thrill Show, KidFest and a Carnival Midway with 40 of America's best rides and games! Thanks to our sponsors. IfTI If im. romp maxell Talent subject to clung..