On Hanneford's Circus
by Al Stencell
Hanneford Poster artwork.
The second circus that I worked for while I was still in high school was titled Sells and Gray Circus. It was part of the Acme Circus Corp that owned the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus (the longest tent circus in the U.S.) plus two smaller shows of equal size, King Bros Circus and Sells and Gray Circus. By this time, all three shows had managers and the owners were seldom around them. Bill English was the manager of Sells and Gray Circus and also a third partner in it only along with Walter Kernan and Frank McCloskey who owned all three shows.
Bill was a real showman of the old school and a mentor to me. He grew up in Boston and had graduated from Harvard with a law degree. During his schooling years he had worked as a candy butcher at the famous Howard Burlesque theatre in Boston and was thoroughly bitten with the show biz bug. I don't think he ever used his law experience other than settling beefs on shows. He had concessions of both circuses and carnivals and also girl shows on carnivals and then for years managed side shows on circuses.
Sells and Gray was started in the winter of 1962 and had a dry run of a few weeks in Florida where it did enough business to warrant it going out the next year for a long 40 plus week season. Previously, Bill had been the side show manager on the Beatty-Cole Circus and also the national advertising manager/salesman. He had also steered the Beatty-Cole show through a very successful Canadian tour in 1958. He liked Canada and he spoke French well enough to handle the booking and to also make the side show openings in French.
When he bought into the Sells and Gray Circus he routed it into Canada each season for 8-12 weeks. I first joined as a candy butcher in 1964 and spent the summer tour in Canada on the show. Bill hired me back the next season but I got deported from the U.S. when the show was up in Michigan. I ended up back in Canada on another show for that summer. The next summer I worked on Sells and Gray Circus where I had the candy apple and snow cone stand.
I ended up away from Bill for a few seasons and in the meantime he sold his interest in Sells and Gray and started a producing company out of Sarasota, Florida where he was phone promoting magic show tours using magic productions produced by Phillip Morris. Bill also started a circus company which he called Circus Classics and he hired Tommy Hanneford to produce the circus. Bill called it the Hanneford Circus. Since Bill knew the Canadian territory well, that's where he first toured it and he contacted me to be the bill poster. I worked on this show from 1970 through 1972.
Bill was old school and wanted to use a lot of paper (posters) daily. He had a lady doing the press for him by the name of Jackie Wilcox -a very southern gal who chain smoked and swore like a trouper but who with her husband had been one of the best billposter teams in the 1950's. Her husband had died and Jackie had taken Bill's offer to be the press agent. I was sent over to Jackie to learn to be a lithographer - that is one that puts circus posters into store windows as opposed to a bill poster that pasted them on the outside of buildings, fences, etc. With a few exceptions most circuses had done away with outside posting.
Hanneford Poster artwork.
The first thing Jackie did was take me to a lumber store where we bought two small pieces of wood - a 1/2 by 3/4 and about seven feet long, a roll of electrical tape, plus a few pieces of sand paper. Then off to a garage where she got the service station owner to give us some pieces of old inner tubes from car tires. Back at the motel she took out her pocket knife and shaved the wood at an angle on two opposite sides of one of the stick ends so it was almost a point but not quite. The end of the other end she slightly rounded with sand paper. She then cut a hunk of inner tube into a piece that was 3/4" inches wide by 10 inches long. This piece of rubber was placed over the rounded end of the stick and wrapped with tape lower down to keep it on the stick. I now had what lithographers called "LITHO STICKS"
When you see posters hung at the top of very high store windows - that's how the lithographer got them up there. Also the sticks were how you moved posters into hard to reach areas behind window displays, mannequins, and tight corners. You did have to be careful with them in China shops!!! The posters were attached to the window surface with small gummy stickers about 2 x 3 inches in size. They came in packs of 50 or so. In the old days circuses actually had their titles printed on these stickers. You licked them and attached three of them to the top of the poster and two of them, one in each corner at the bottom of the poster. You folded the poster back over itself in the middle over the rubber end stick and hoisted that stick and poster onto the window. The rubber end allowed you to hold the poster in the place against the glass and to also slide along the glass to any place in the window that you wanted to be in. Once you had it where you wanted it - you took the pointed stick and ran it over the top small gummy stickers securing it to the window. Then you dropped your arms down and as you lowered the two sticks - one on each side of the poster you crossed over the two bottom stickers, sealing the poster in place. You kept the posters to the very top of the store window if you could so if the merchant changed his mind and wanted it down he had to get a ladder to do so. With the sticks you could also put it into corners behind window displays where the shop keeper would have had to remove the whole display to get at the poster.
When someone removed these posters there would be tell-tale pieces of these stickers left behind. When you lithographed in cities which were visited annually by tent circuses using billing crews you would see the old sticker pieces in the windows. You knew someone had posted paper in that place and where they had put the posters in the window. If the merchant said he never allowed posters in his window you would point out that someone had recently put circus posters there. He wondered how you knew.
The standard poster size was called a one sheet. It came in two styles - flat or horizontal. Next were 1/2 sheets- half the size of a one sheet and in two types - flat and horizontal. The best piece however was a long skinny piece called a "panel". All of these poster sizes were used for both pictorial and date posters. Date posters were white stock with red or blue lettering on them - the show name, city, date, show times, location and sponsor information.
The pictorial paper only had the show title on the poster. The name of the city, lot, date, show times and if there was a sponsor were printed on what we called a "tail". It was about 8" deep and as long as a one sheet. However the wording was laid out on it in a way that buy cutting the paper the tail fit onto all the poster sizes.
The standard time that owners liked to keep the advance people - press and bill posters out front of a one day tent circus once two weeks. Before you could show on Sundays it was easy but once shows also showed on Sunday it became harder as you had to place bills for two days as shops were closed on Sunday and you couldn't work. In the old days, when shows put up thousands of posters a day, the big railroad circuses here had one or two railroad advance cars fitted with berths for the billers plus storage for the posters, long tables to lay out the posters and paste up the tails, etc. plus a big boiler for hot water for making up the paste. Truck circuses made do with one or two trucks for the same purpose except that many preferred to hotel the billers. By my time they were few bill crews or bill trucks. Me and my own station wagon made up the billing crew on the Hanneford Circus. I carried a couple of weeks paper in the station wagon and had to make up my daily supply of 300 or so tailed up posters in my motel room or on a park table.
To make you your posters for a day's billing you took the various piles of posters (different sizes) that you had and you "circused" them. That is you placed them in piles according to the pictorial on them. All the ones with clown faces in one pile, the elephant one in one pile, the one with horses on it in one pile, etc. You then went along and took a poster from each pile and went along doing this until you had all the posters in on pile. You did this so that when you took what posters you needed for the day and tailed them up -as you went along the street putting them up, the same image didn't appear next to each other otherwise you had one store with a clown poster, another had a pictorial of elephants, another performing dogs, another of horses, etc. It made it more interesting and easier to catch the eye of people on the street.
Hanneford Poster artwork.
You usually tailed up your posters the night before using them or you took all of Sunday evening and tailed up a week's worth of posters. You let them dry overnight. In doing this, you counted out how many pictorial posters you wanted. You did them in groups of twenty or so. You took about twenty of them and laid them down with the pictorial side up. Then you proceeded to fold over the bottom of each poster about 2" inches. You then placed the pile of posters face down on a table. You took a pile of tails cut to the poster size and laid them next to the posters face down. You then ran a coin down them to fan them out leaving an inch or so of each tail exposed. You then took your paste brush and ran white paste over the exposed surfaces using a two inch wide paste brush. You then picked up a tail and fixed it onto the 2" strip on the poster and ran your hand over it, usually the outside of your palm to smooth it down and seal the paste to each surface. You did each poster that way until all the tails were pasted on the posters. You had to wait an hour or so for the posters to dry before you could fold them up and make up your bundle to carry down the street with you. The bundle of posters you carried was called -a "HOD".
Besides the paper posters of various sizes you also had window cards which were made of stiff cardboard. Old timers bent them along the sides - about a 1/2 inch-meaning the poster when sitting on a window ledge now had a bit of support at each end. This was helpful if the store owner wouldn't let you fix any tape or stickers to his window otherwise I just put a few stickers or tape on them and fastened them to the glass.
You didn't take the window cards with you unless you were hurried for time. You didn't want the store owner to see that you had a smaller poster. You did the lithographing first then went back and carded the stores that wouldn't let you put a big poster up. If it was a drug store or variety store with a soft drink machine up front by the window you just simply placed a card behind it, often without asking the owner's permission as he never looked there anyway. Your trump card in 'strong arming' places (putting posters up without permission) was the fact that most store workers and the owner never came into the store by the main front door anyway.
What billers liked were empties, that is vacant stores. If you could get the phone number for the real estate agent and have him come down and let you in, you could fill the windows with posters. Called a "hit", it really stood out. Sometimes you could go around back and force the door open and get in. Old time billers carried lock picks. This was the forerunner to today's "street art". There was nothing most biller wouldn't do to get their posters into windows of shops and businesses.
Besides the pictorial pieces there were also posters of various sizes with just the name of the city, date, location, show times. These were usually printed on white paper in big blue or red letters. These were called date sheets. You would often put a date sheet in a window and then combine it with an un-tailed pictorial piece to make an eye catching display. When you put up a big display of paper you used the date sheets and un-tailed pictorial and saved the tailed pictorial for single hits in stores.
On Hanneford, Bill English would sometimes buy outdoor advertising in large cities - these were Billboard size hits. Posters for them were four sheets high and maybe four sheets or more wide. Bill would send up a number of these for each town for me to try and get up in stores. You needed empties for them or big places like an auto body shop, places with lots of glass that didn't need the windows for display purposes. Just getting half of the number in the date took up four feet of window glass. By the time you got July 12 in the window the poster could cover a surface of eight by fifteen feet. ('Sir, I would like to give you some passes and put up a poster in one of your side windows...would that be O.K.') Many store owners were surprised to see the entire window filled in.
Hanneford Poster artwork.
By the time I started billposting there were only a half dozen or so poster companies left. The main poster company that most of the shows were using was one of the oldest firms going -Enquirer printing Co. in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was a huge five-six story building downtown about 6 blocks up from the Mississippi River. The firm had printed for every circus going plus carnivals, fairs, rodeos, etc. The firm when I was around it was owned by the Anderson brothers (John and Harry). I dealt with Harry. Harry looked like a mad gangster and when he talked he spit his words out - "O"'s came out like ooooh. Harry was a terrible speller and could screw up the spelling of any town with more than a half dozen letters in its name. You were constantly repeating the information to him when you ordered posters making him spell it back to you.
The main thing was that Harry loved shows, and especially circuses. It was in his blood too. At one time he had lost a lot of money running show boat on the Mississippi. You couldn't keep track of the number of times that he had been stuck by showmen not paying their printing bills. However, if someone he trusted vouched for you, you got all the credit in the world from him. He knew me from working for Bill and when I started my circus Harry printed all my posters and colouring books on the "if come" - that is he waited until the show closed at the end of the season for the bulk of his money.
By this time, few shows were using specially designed posters. The Enquirer line of circus posters had artwork going back to the 1950's even back to the 1930's. If there was a cut that had a crowd scene in it - all the males and most of the females were wearing hats. Even the clowns looked old. A tiger or leaping lion or a group of trained horses or a herd of elephants didn't change. They were O.K. However, Harry may tell you he had a nice poster with an elephant on it and if you had a show with one elephant - you ordered it. When they came you found out the artwork sometimes portrayed a dozen elephants.
Bill English used about 8 different pictorial pieces from Enquirer for Hanneford. The window card artwork was a real old dated piece. We used posters of leaping tigers and lions despite the fact that the cage art for the first couple of years was Capt. Frank Simpson and his very small troupe of leopards. The show only had a baby elephant named INA. The show had lots of horses - ponies, dogs all courtesy of the Hanneford acts. The big act was the Hanneford Riding act which featured Tommy doing the comedy riding. He would come out of the audience when his mother asked for a volunteer. He wore these nerdy glasses. She would tell him to take them off and he would turn around and stick his face in the horse's ass and wave his arms around in panic. She would pull his head out from between the horse's ass cheeks and he would then proceed with both hands to slick his hair back. This was all before he even got on the horse and proceeded to fall half, follow the horse around the ring holding onto its tail, etc. Nobody and I mean nobody was funnier in a circus act than Tommy Hanneford.
Ricky Suarez, a Mexican did all the hard tricks such as the horse to horse somersault. In the act were Tommy's wife Struppi, a cousin, Ricky's wife and another show girl plus Tommy's old man and his mother. They more or less stood in the centre of the ring and directed the pace of the horses. Tommy's father was a very small man with almost midget size feet. He wore custom made shoes that looked like a small piece of leather folded four ways around the foot. He had been a great rider in his day but now suffered a lot of pain from it. However, twice or three times a day he limped into the ring. Mrs Hanneford -Katherine was a taller lady and usually wore a big fathered hat in the ring. She looked like Royalty.
Tommy's wife Struppi was German and had come over here with another girl doing a double trapeze act. The third year of the Hanneford Circus, Frank Simpson sold the Hanneford's leopard act and Struppi worked it. They also bought two more elephants which I believed had been on the Hunt Bros. Circus. Roy Bush came over and worked them. He had Tourrett's syndrome' and was pretty colourful -at least language wise!
Struppi dropped the leopards and added tigers and the act became a very good tiger act. All the Hanneford acts were first class. However, Tommy liked to keep as much money as he could -so the family and a few cousins did as much of the show as possible. This became a problem for Bill English as it hurt the business. After going into a city two or three years in a row and the crowd seeing almost the same show each time - business dropped. I can remember folks getting up and leaving when the big riding act came on. They'd seen it several times.
Bill English dropped the Hanneford show but Tommy kept on with it and it is still going today. Once Bill was gone there were no more billers or pro press agents on it. The Hanneford show now existed by selling out their show to others promoters and Shrine clubs could rent for their dates. Tommy died a few seasons back but Struppi still takes the show out each year.
Enquirer Printing Company still exists but they had cut back on their show printing. The old building was sold and a new building bought a few blocks further north. For a few decades, the company did all the printing for Proctor and Gamble. The company is now outside the city and no longer does printing for P&G but continues to print paper and coupons, etc. for several of the larger touring circuses including Cole Bros. -the former Clyde Beatty -Cole Bros. Circus owned by Johnny Pugh -son of England's illustrious "Digger Pugh".
Hanneford Poster artwork.
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