Ancient Hixtory

Ms Monroe at Madison Square Garden c.1950 in the Ringling
Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.The elephant and its
harness were dyed pink to match her costume.
NewYorkSocialDiary.com

RBB&B included Hicksville in its 1951 tour.To put this in context, and to appreciate the magnitude of the 1951 version of this circus, let's consider some statistics.That year, the circus performed at 121 locations, gave 333 performances under canvas, and traveled more than 17,000 miles, from Boston to Seattle to Baton Rouge, and then across the south to its Florida home.At each stop, it needed 15 empty acres on which to erect its 41 tents.There were more than 1,200 employees in the tour, and almost 1,100 animals.

The circus train's 70 cars (together, more than 1.1 miles long) were of course parked in the rail yard south of Barclay Street ; the performance was held in an open field further west, on John Street .

As the caption above indicates, the three-day stop in Hicksville was one of RBB&B's numerous charitable performances, in this case coordinated with Long Island 's American Legion posts.The conveniently nearby site used for the circus grounds was not going to be available for long.In fact, it should not have been available at all. Hicksville developer Jerry Spiegel had intended to build new homes on it, but there had been a recent government change in funding GI mortgages, and he had stopped building homes in protest.Thus, he was able to "donate" the use of land (which he was not using anyway) to the fund-raising effort.

At this point, the reader probably does not need a description of more circus acts.I shall instead note that the 1952 film The Greatest Show on Earth was shot during the early part of this circus's 1951 tour; thus, the non-actor performers who appear in the film are the actual workers and performers whom people saw on the 1951 tour.Incidentally, Greatest was the top-grossing Paramount film of all time, as well as the top-grossing film of the year, and it won 1952's Best Picture Oscar for Cecil B. deMille.

Five years later, the 1956 version of the same circus performed in Hicksville .Externally, things may have looked much the same, but they were very different. Hicksville had changed; choice temporary circus grounds were scarce.RBB&B performed for two days on a field at Old Country and South Oyster Bay Roads.More important, the circus was wrestling with serious labor disruptions, and it was in the process of laying off a number of "offstage" workers.  Whether or not the layoffs were to blame is debatable, but something went wrong.

The Times reported that all the injuries were minor contusions, and that the cause of the accident was the young elephant's tripping over some hard-to-see safety netting that lay in its path.As with other such incidents, people later tended to recall this mishap in somewhat inflated terms, especially if they were children at the time.

The labor issues were the result of the circus owners' intentions to cut costs long-term.Among their options, they considered switching the circus from its train to highway travel, a change which would have affected literally everyone in the circus.Ultimately, that idea was dropped, because it would not have been cost-effective.