Twenty Clowns, Cloth Elephants, and a College Circus at the Armory
Whitman students and the Walla Walla Band plan four nights of acrobats, side shows and pink lemonade — with a hired professional troupe to keep it honest.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The Walla Walla Band-Whitman College circus is going to be a great success if the spirit shown by the boys at the meeting yesterday is any indication. Phil Winans spoke to the boys after chapel in regard to the plans which the executive committee had made. He said the friends of the school down town were standing with it and it was up to the boys to make it a great success.
The circus will be held in the Armory and will run for four nights, from November 18th to 21st inclusive. There will be acrobats and clowns galore, cloth elephants and side shows. Pink lemonade and roasted peanuts will be vended among the spectators and the Glee Club will sing popular songs each evening.
The clowns will be the principal feature of the performance. There will be twenty of them under the charge of V. O. Blalock. They will do two ten-minute acts each evening and will begin to train tomorrow evening. The following students were appointed: W. Brown, Cadwell, Bassett, Cahill, Chandler, Dodd, Helm, Keepers, Kirkman, Oldright, Palmer, E. Reser, Smalls, Woodard, Malloy, Morrow, McCaw, O'Neill, Ryan, A. Cox, Evens, Keeler, H. Paxton and Ellis.
The side shows are many and varied. All the college freaks will be on. Jim Hill will be "spieler" for this part of the show. Hez Brown, Hoover, Jamieson, Edwards, Dutcher, Walle, Merritt and Maxwell will circulate among the people and sell peanuts and pink lemonade.
The horizontal bar work will be a great feature. Dick McLean, Byron Lutcher, Joe Wray, Niles and J. Paxton are on the bill for this number. The ticket men are Baldwin, Cole, Eells, Fairlamb, Corpe, Brattain and Gillis.
A special feature of the program will be the pyramid work. Byron Lutcher, an alumnus of Whitman, has charge of this work. His assistants will be Perringer, Dutcher, Graham, Gilbreath, Niles, Joe Wray, Olds, Jim Lyman, John Lyman and Condit. The trained elephants will add to the fun of the performance; George Thompson, Thurston, Holman, Morgan, Ira Camp, Archie Camp, Rupp and G. Reser will form the interior of these huge animals.
As ring helpers the committee has appointed Joe Allen, Gross, H. Robinson and Knott. The trained horses have not been secured yet. Besides this a professional team of trained acrobats will be hired. The committee are very sanguine over the prospects; they expect to get up an attraction that will draw over a thousand people every night. Phil Winans, Louis Sutherland and V. D. Brainard have direct oversight of the arrangements on the part of the students.
At the close of the announcements the boys gave a rousing yell for the circus.
“There will be acrobats and clowns galore, cloth elephants and side shows.”
The town-and-gown instinct on show here — a college and a city band building a civic night out together — is still recognisable in Walla Walla, even if the travelling-circus idiom (cloth elephants, side shows, minstrel-era songs) has vanished. What stands out is the sheer labour of it: a hundred students turned into clowns, animals and vendors for four nights in the Armory. Community spectacle in 1903 was handmade, and everyone whose name was anyone in the class list appears in the programme.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.