FEARFUL FELINES

We had been in winter quarters for several weeks, Pete Cristiani, the shows owner had four or five lions in cages waiting for a lion trainer, who’s name I can’t recall now, to show up and break the lions in for an act when we were to go on the road. His wife Norma had put an ad in the local paper asking for athletic girls who would like to travel with the show to come and learn aerial ballet routines on velvet ropes and swinging ladders. About 25 girls showed up and began training. The first few days of breaking in had left them with sore muscles and they were having troubles climbing up the ropes.

Pete became impatient waiting for the lion trainer to show up so he told me and my buddy Jackie to put up the steel arena in back.

“I’ll train them myself “’ he said.

“Have you ever put up this steel arena”, Jackie asked me.” Well no, not this one, but I guess we can figure it out”, I told him. We started putting it together and everything went well until we got to the last section and there was a small gap of about eight or nine inches at the bottom. “What do you think we should do with this?”, I asked. “It’s not very big let’s just close it off with baling wire”, he said. So we wired it together.

Pete came out with a whip and a pistol loaded with blanks and entered the cage.

“Let them loose”, he said. We opened the chute cage door and the lions, who had be penned up all winter came rushing out roaring and running around Pete in a big circle as he cracked the whip and shot the pistol in the air. It was one of those times I thought years later, if only video cameras had been invented earlier, it was hilarious. But not for long, one of the lions saw that tiny gap and hit it breaking out and was now loose in winter quarters. Pete managed to roust the other lions back in their cages. “Go tell Norma to make the kids get in the house”, he told me. I ran to the front of winter quarters to Pete’s house and told Norma the lion was loose and to get the kids inside. I ran back to the steel arena on the way I noticed all 25 of those ballet girls with sore muscles had climbed up trees.

Everybody was at the far corner of winter quarters, Jackie came up with some rope, he handed one to me, “Maybe we can lasso it”, he said. Now that I think back about it, we must’ve been out of my minds.

The lion had run into a bunch of bushes, we could hear him panting, There was an old guy named Red who was painting scroll work on the trucks with us, “Is he in there?”, he asked. About that time the lion came roaring out at us and as he got to us he leaped over us, Red fell backwards and fainted, we never had time to try to lasso him.

The lion was headed towards the front, the only place where there was no gate. “We’ve got to stop him from running out the front gate”, yelled Pete.

With all the commotion, someone at the bar across the street had called the police and there were three  police officers out front with shotguns.

The lion stopped by the barn to rest and Jackie and I, ran to the front gate picking up anything we could find to try and defend ourselves we grabbed a hoe and a rake. We went to the front gate and here came the lion, it was ten feet from us and we were waving the rake and hoe and yelling, the lion stopped and went back about twenty feet and laid down panting from exhaustion of being ran around for almost an hour.

I heard one of the Police say if it got through the gate they would shoot him.

Meanwhile, Pete had called Pat Anthony, a well known lion trainer who lived a couple of miles away and Pat came walking through the gate, Pete asked him, “Do you think we can get this lion caged?”

Pat said, “get a cage and set it as close as you can to the lion”. Some bigtop hands brought out a cage and sat it about twenty feet from the lion. Pat told Jackie, me and six other working men to get some plywood that was stacked by the mechanics shop and to hold them up, four pieces each side of the cage forming a funnel shape. Pat walked around to the other side of the lion and said, “SHOO KITTY”. And the lion went right into the cage. And that ended my career as a cowboy in Africa.



WILD CARGO ON THE LOOSE



The Kelly Miller Circus had more wild animals than any other show, in fact they billed themselves as the world’s largest wild animal circus.

While in winter quarters they had a few lions in cages but no trailer to load them on so someone had the bright idea to modify an old house trailer into a cage wagon by tearing the upper portion away and just leaving the frame.

Going down the highway I would see that trailer’s back end bouncing up and down under the weight of the las cages that were loaded on and I thought to myself, “just a matter of time till a cage bounces off.”

And sure enough one day going through a town in New England it happened, spilling the cages in the center of town. Only one of the cage doors popped open and a black maned Nubian lion was walking through the streets as much in panic as the local citizenry. It ran into a local department store and caused an immediate evacuation. Luckily Captain Freddy Logan was close at hand and ran in after it with a net and a rope and was able to capture it with no problems.

It caused quite a stir in the local paper and that afternoon it seemed everyone in town had heard about the lion caught in ladies lingerie.

At the evening performance we had a standing room only crowd, I started wondering if we should let the lion escape in every town.