It could have been the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression of the ’30s, maybe the war years in the ’40s.
It could have been earlier, near the turn of the century, or even earlier than that, with the taste of the Civil War still fresh, still in the rearview mirror. It could have been later, through the Cold War or the Counterculture, disco or Reagan.
But it wasn’t. The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus train rolled slowly in earlier this week, appearing from behind a railroad car with giant logs, announced by its blaring horn, its endless line of identical cars nearing the end of the line.
This weekend, the end of the line means Manchester and Southern New Hampshire University Arena. Three shows Saturday, two more Sunday, then ride the rail to the next stop, closer to the end of that line.
The Greatest Show on Earth is nearly done, folding its tents for good next month after 146 years. Sadly, smart phones and video games and pay-per-view movies and year-round youth sports leagues and rising costs and pressure from animal rights groups have taken a bite out of ticket sales.
“We have people in our show who have been here for generations,” Kristen Michelle Wilson, the first female ringmaster in the circus’s history, would tell me later at the SNHU Arena. “We feel for the next generation of kids who won’t get to know the magic of the circus train rolling into their town, going to see the shows. It’s the end of an era.”
So I made sure to watch the train from a small hill, watch a piece of history. I’m old enough to remember seeing the circus, this circus, at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
That means I’m old enough to feel like a kid.
I was on federal land, off limits I’d been told, which mixed nicely with the feel of the circus, with its daring acts, off-the-beaten-path lifestyle and free-spirited reputation.
The Pan Am Railway workers, wearing yellow vests and hard hats, some smoking cigarettes, barely gave me a second look.
Later, a few hundred yards away, about 20 people gathered, waiting for that famous train, with the circus name on each car in white letters over a red background, to pass the railroad crossing on Chase Street. Cameras clicked when the red lights flashed and the crossing gate lowered, stopping traffic.
No one was there to keep you away, which meant you could touch the train as it crept past. You could touch the past along with it. The crossing signal warning, the squeaky grinding metal, the hum of the engine all mixed into sounds of nostalgia.
“Quite a shame, because it’s a national treasure to me, the last traveling circus on rails,” said Cullen Maher, an employee at Conway Scenic Railroad in North Conway. “It’s been going on for more than 140 years now, so out of all the circuses, this is the last one to go all around the country.”
Maher is a self-described train nerd who loves the circus and knows all about it. He’s 21, in an age group that lost interest in old-school entertainment long ago. He remembered going to the circus as a kid, seeing the elephants and buying souvenirs.
“It was just such a great time,” Maher said. “It’s amazing to see all the circus train cars.”
He knew that the cars were disconnected at the Nashua pit stop. He knew Wilson and the clowns and the aerialists would sleep there, in those rail cars, bussed back and forth to the arena this weekend.
That’s the way it’s always been, for decades. For more than a century, in fact. Circus kids travel with their parents, learning on the road. I saw a box of diapers in a train window.
“They have a daycare center for the little ones, because the families grew up on this train,” Maher said. “It was the primary way of life for them.”
Rob Potter, a 56-year-old construction worker and painter, was at the railroad crossing, too. He pointed to his house, about 100 yards away, and said he watches the train go by each year. He loved going to the show with his parents at the Boston Garden in the 1960s. I asked him about the end of this institution.
“I think it’s a damn shame,” Potter told me. “History is taken away from the kids.”
I saw Esther Daack, a former production manager for the circus, on the train, standing in front of an open, square window.
“We’re just visiting, doing one last train ride,” she told me from up above. “Our first engagement was at the Boston Garden, and then Madison Square Garden. That was big. The circus never left us.”
As the sun set, I drove to the Canal Street railroad crossing in Manchester, a block away from the SNHU Arena, expecting the remaining cars, the ones with the circus equipment, to pass. An SUV pulled in just before 11 p.m., joining me in the lonely parking lot.
A father, Frank Donovan of Manchester, had heard recently that the circus was on its last legs. He brought his 9-year-old son, William Donovan, downtown, on a school night, way past his bed time.
“This is history,” Frank told me. “This is the last hurrah, and I couldn’t imagine my son not seeing this. It’s important, a piece of history. We’re losing the circus forever.”
William took video of the train, stopped a half-mile away, behind the outfield wall where the Fisher Cats baseball team plays its home games. I drove there and found another lonely parking lot, this one with one car, belonging to Mike Walker of Merrimack, whose engine was idling to fight the night chill.
For Walker, it had been a long day, starting at 6 that morning. He followed the circus train, from Ayer, Mass., to Westford, to Chelmsford, to Nashua, to Manchester. He hoped to see workers unload the cars near the arena, but all was still at 11:30 p.m., with a yellow school bus and an SUV and the back of a hauler lying quietly on flatbeds.
“Very sad to think the circus is gone,” said Walker, a local project manager. “There are carnivals, but it’s not Ringling Brothers. I don’t think there is a replacement.”
That’s fine with animal activists, of course. Ringling Bros. is folding, thanks in part to groups like the New Hampshire Animal Rights League. About 25 people from the organization will stage protests throughout the weekend, coordinator Kristina Snyder of Chester told me.
This feud has been simmering for years. The circus has never lost in court, however, and in fact has been awarded $25 million in two settlements.
This was all-out, dirty warfare, with a paid plaintiff, a former circus barn worker, once accepting $190,000 from animal-rights groups to back their charges of animal mistreatment. But the pressure continued, and the elephants left the show last year. More than 100 other animals will join them soon in retirement.
Yet Snyder still won’t back down, saying caging animals and transporting them across the country will stand as a battle cry through next month, as will the future of the animals once the lights grow dark.
“We are happy that Ringling is going away,” Snyder told me by phone, adding, “But there are other circuses.”
None like this one, which in the 19th century featured a parade of elephants walking across the Brooklyn Bridge to promote upcoming shows. I was lucky enough to spend time with a Ringling clown, Truett Adams of Dallas.
She met me in the arena lobby. She had banana-yellow hair, a tomato-red nose, chalk-white makeup on her face and a story that broke her heart.
At least at first. In the middle of a weekend of shows last January in Orlando, Fla., about 300 members of this family were called together in a giant meeting room.
Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus would close for good after its show May 21 in Uniondale, NY.
“I got up from my chair and left the room and as I was walking away from the room, it kind of came over me what it meant,” Adams said. “There were definitely tears.”
Adams continued: “But then as the days passed and the weeks passed, I realized I have this amazing opportunity to be on the final tour. I get to celebrate the people who have influenced my life, the clowns who have come before me. I get to celebrate what they did in the biggest bow that I’m ever going to get.”
I also spoke to Kristen Michelle Wilson, a former rock band and dinner theater singer. She beat out hundreds of candidates last fall, becoming the first female ringmaster in Ringling Bros. history.
Trying to remain calm after getting the job, before the start of negotiations for her contract, Wilson excused herself, went to the bathroom and took a selfie.
“I was so exuberant, I think you see light exploding out of my eyeballs,” she told me.
That’s not surprising. Her giant, expressive dark eyes were lively, as joyful as the circus itself. Her uniform, which she wore, included boots with three-inch heels, putting her at six feet tall, a commanding yet approachable presence of black-haired, enthusiastic dynamite. Her top hat and coat sparkled. She’ll reach out and touch you if you attend this weekend.
She joked that former ringmasters had typically been “barrel-chested men. Well, now they have a 6-foot barrel-chested woman.”
Wilson never ran out of thoughts, never grew tired of talking, despite a mountain of publicity the past few months. She got rid of her car and apartment to take the job. At the time, she no longer needed them.
“We get to interact with grandparents who bring their children,” Wilson told me. “They’re remembering back to their childhood when they came. It’s special to see so many generations sharing this magic.”
Wilson was at the same meeting as Adams, the one in Orlando, the one that changed the lives of the more than 500 soon-to-be-unemployed showbiz people. She had started three days before the news broke.
“You could hear a pin drop, because 300 people were just caught off guard,” Wilson said. “We were shocked. We were sad.”
I asked her why The Greatest Show on Earth could no longer sustain itself. She schooled me in sociology, saying, “We have trained our children to stare at these little screens so they’re quiet, and that is the antithesis of what the circus is. The circus is no screen. The circus is live in front of you.”
She adopted a similar mindset as Adams, explaining that every moment from now through the end will be magnified, more appreciated, more significant.
“Three weeks of fun,” Wilson called it. “No complaints, no sadness. All of us are realizing our time is finite. It makes it that much more precious.”
Next month, Wilson will introduce various acts. She views herself as a glittering arrow pointing toward a brand of entertainment that somehow got lost in a world of circuits and distractions. The entertainment that for more than 100 years has rolled into cities, on those trains that stretch forever, is nearing its final stop.
I asked Wilson what she might say on her last night.
“At the very end I get to say a couple of extra things to acknowledge the people who make the greatest show on earth,” she told me. “I’ve been trying to come up with it in my mind. The better rehearsed I am, the better the likelihood I can make it through without crying.”