Peak Sneaking

Roaring, grunting, shouting, squeaking, last week Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows opened its 1930 season in New York's Bronx Coliseum. Like the perennial sea serpent story and the yarn of the rat that nibbled the baby, Manhattan pressmen took their cue, played up Circus because Circus is always news.

Largely responsible for Circus ballyhoo is grizzled, bushy-browed Dexter Fellowes, Ringling pressagent. For 37 years Dexter Fellowes has been getting publicity for tent shows--a U. S. pressagent record. Business associates claim that he has the widest U. S. acquaintance. Even before the Circus got to town, his arrival was the signal for his friends of the press to wax waggish. He did not mind, for his policy is: let the newsmen write anything they like about him.

For example, newsgatherer Alva Johnston reported in the Herald Tribune that Dexter Fellowes had spent the winter buying mountains "to be sawed up into precipices for the new granite billboards, ranging in size from 140 acres to a square mile."

Credulous laymen gasped when Dexter Fellowes was quoted as having said: "I snapped up 67 of the choicest Alps in the country, scattered from the coast range to the White Mountains. ... I started in California and intended to sneak all the best peaks before the trade got wind of my intentions, but before I had cleaned up the coast range the news was out. In the Sierra Nevadas the prices jumped from $50 a peak to $1,000 and I had to play one mountain against another to get them for anything like a reasonable figure."

From another angle, Edwin C. Hill of the Sun concocted an imaginary conversation with "Dr. Dexter Fellowes" anent sea elephant Goliath II, successor to Goliath --who was reported dead twice last year (TIME, Oct. 7, Oct. 28), the last time officially.

"How are you characterizing Goliath II, Doctor?"

"Very simply for. such an astounding creature. I shall state in my billing: 'Biggest born beast of the briny. Bearded. Booms like a bittern. Brutal beak. Bulkiest behemoth believable--' "

"Yes, yes, Doctor, but time presses. Are the clowns up to the mark this year-- funny, full of pranks?"

"Battalions of buffoons, boy. Broadcasting button-bursting brusqueries. Bliths boobies. Bubbling with blarney. Banish bile. Beggar bulletins; Bandy badinage--" Newsmen knew that although Dexter Fellowes had been engaged in neither peak sneaking nor animated alliteration, indeed had not even been interviewed, he was grateful for notices given his Circus in the Herald Tribune and the Sun.

So widely has the name and fame of Fellowes been broadcast that few realize he is but the senior third of John Ringling's publicity team. The other two, Floyd Bell and Thomas Killilea. frequently have a hard time getting audience as Ringling representatives. Yet between this triumvirate, all America is divided into three parts,, each has his particular sphere of influence. In Washington, Detroit and Cleveland, Pressagent Bell, who left a good job with the St. Louis & San Francisco ("Frisco") R. R. five years, ago, handles all circus "public relations." Newark and Cincinnati are the peculiar province of Pressagent Killilea, who abandons his Boston advertising business each March to follow the white tops. Dexter Fellowes is supreme in Brooklyn, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee.

But it is about Fellowes that the tallest tales are told. Of all the fictions his journalistic cronies have written about him, those which amuse him most are the fables connecting him with people he could never have known. He is credited with having been a bosom friend of Phineas Taylor Barnum, whom he, as an infant, vaguely remembers having once seen saluting patrons at his show. Legend also has it that he frequently played at dice with Showman Adam Forepaugh. Mr. Fellowes does recall having once seen Showman Forepaugh in his father's Hartford, Conn., drug store.

In these debunked times editors are chary of exaggerated Circus yarns. And "Mr. John" Ringling proscribes all conventional "build-ups." No freak, equestrienne, or wire artist is permitted to endorse cigarets, motor cars or trick neckwear. In the past decade the Big Show has grown extremely respectable. To advertise 26 zebras, the publicity men must be able to point to 26--count them--26.

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