Greatest Show

An entertainment troupe which eats 10,000 pancakes for breakfast, carries its own post office and uses more than half the elephants in America opened its 1931 season in Manhattan last week--Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey's Combined Shows, in every sense the Greatest Show on Earth. This year's premiere was a little saddened by the absence of Lillian Leitzel, the small, muscular lady who used to do more than 200 one-handed giant turns on a rope high up under the Big Top. She fell and was killed when a trapeze ring broke with her in Copenhagen last February (TIME, Feb. 23). Last week her husband, Trapezist Alfredo Codona, "The Wizard of Flight," brought back her ashes in a golden urn. Airplanes dropped wreaths on his ship as it came up New York Harbor. There are still 800 other performers in the Circus, however--whip-crackers who knock the caps off bottles 50 ft. away; whooping cowboys; clowns who operate explosive Fords; agile gymnasts; "strange people from the far corners of the world." And there are birds & beasts without end --sprightly little dogs; pigeons colored like caster eggs; zebras that never quite learn their tricks; a sea lion that balances itself on one flipper; another that plays the "Star Spangled Banner"; the sea elephant Goliath who snorts like thunder and gulps adult fish on his motor truck; horses that wheel through handsome convolutions. As always, the Circus has something to please everybody. Boys who have grown too old to want to run away from home and carry water for the elephants may be inclined to do the same sort of thing for the equestriennes, who are particularly beauteous this year.

Chief new attraction is Clyde Beatty, 26, of Chillicothe, Ohio, "the world's youngest and most fearless wild animal trainer." Mr. Beatty is left alone in a great cage in which there are some 40 hissing, snarling, rumbling lions and tigers. These he persuades to form various artistic groupings by means of a whip, chair and frequently used revolver. Mr. Beatty's most showmanlike beast is Kazan, a large old lion who quails and cowers very perceptibly when the trainer stares him into submission. But occasionally Kazan is unable to stifle a yawn.

The performance is still concluded by Hugo Zacchini, who permits himself to be shot out of a cannon. Spectators shudder when they remember that an imitator, Harry Powers, died at Atlantic City when attempting the feat from an airplane.

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