Williamsville, 1956

At the end of the spring and just before I turned five, the twins were born. No one expected there to be two babies and because they were premature, they had to stay extra time in the hospital. Joanne was particularly small – when she came home, she was about the size of Tippo and too small to be held, at least by me. In retrospect, they were very lucky.   I had three good friends in college who were blind and all of them had gotten that way because they had been premature and had been given pure oxygen in their incubators in the early 50's.

We only had the one crib – it was the one my parents had made initially for me. It was green and had three drawers underneath with handles in the shape of elephants -- Hannibal, Annabelle and James. But although there were three elephants, there were two babies and was only one crib, so we had to get another. Papa built a wall in that divided the larger front bedroom into two smaller rooms – one for Roy and the other for the twins, but suddenly our little house seemed very crowded.

Grandma and Grandpa Hendrick came to visit and help out because having two babies was a lot of work! One of the big jobs was sterilizing the glass baby bottles and making baby formula – a concoction of dilute evaporated milk and corn syrup. We did not have a dishwasher, so after washing, all the bottles had to be boiled in a special pan on top of the stove to make sure they were sterile. Then, the formula was made, strained into the bottles, which were capped by putting the sterilized nipple upside down on time and then stored in the fridge. When it was time to feed the babies, you take the bottle from the fridge, uncap it, put it in a pan of water and heat it on the stove until it is war.  When it is, you put the rubber nipple on top, screw the top on and, as a final check, squirt a little bit on your wrist to make sure the temperature is just right.  The entire process takes about 20 minutes and all the time, the baby is howling because it is hungry.  Honestly, breast feeding is MUCH easier!

Diapers were also very time-consuming. They were made of cloth and held in place with huge fancy safety pins. When the baby was changed, the diaper had to be rinsed out in the toilet and put into a diaper pail. When twins came home, Roy apparently decided he was not a baby any more and stopped using them, so there were only two babys' worth of the things, but that was more than enough.   After a couple of days, ewwwwwwww, the STINK!!!  Washing the diapers for two babies could have been overwhelming, but we had a diaper service that came to the house, removed the pails of dirty ones and left stacks of fresh clean ones.

During the summer of 1956, the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey circus performed in Northern New York state. The circus arrived on the train and performed in a huge canvas tent. Although I wasn’t supposed to overhear my parents talking about it, something horrible had happened with the tent before the circus arrived.  I was afraid to ask about it because I thought I’d be punished for listening when I was not supposed to.  The night before we went, I could hardly sleep because I was excited about the circus and worried about the tent. 

When we got to the circus, the tent wasn’t fearsome at all: it was magnificent! Inside, it was wide enough to hold three circus rings and tall enough for fearsomely high wire. We saw people who rode beautiful horses standing up and the Flying Wallendas who did acrobatics on the wire. They were famous for doing a balancing act without a safety net and when they made a pyramid of people high above the crowd, I so was afraid that they would fall off and be smashed to bits that I could hardly look.  I was very happy when they got off the wire and came safely down to the ground.

There was fresh sawdust underfoot and the smell of the popcorn and the roasting peanuts mixed with the smell of the animals and tent in a foreign and exciting way.

There was a sideshow that had beasts I'd only seen in books. Elephants. Giraffes. Even a zebra! The tigers that were plenty scary on the pages of “Little Black Sambo” were really terrifying up close.  Their teeth were huge and sharp, there was a wild smell about them and they made of savage coughing noise that I KNEW meant "Hellooooooo tasty morsel!" in Tigerish.

When we got home, I drew pictures of all the animals – a zebra, a monkey, a giraffe, a horse and a stalking tiger with a mouthful of sharp teeth.

The Fierce Tiger says GRRRRRRRR!!!!!!

Mom used a special kind of paint to copy the drawings onto fabric and made it into curtains for my room. The curtains were very well-made because even today, they are hanging in Robby's room – toothy tigers and all!

This piece and those that accompany it were written in 2008 at the behest of my mother who, as a gift for her eightieth birthday, requested that each of her four children write "a memoir to explain to future generations what your childhood was like."  She plans to serve as chief editor and publish these pieces as a conjoint family history of some sort.

Memory is personal: some recollections remain quietly in the back of the mind, obediently available on request, some twist and turn their way through dreams and hindsight, transmuting themselves over time while yet others lose themselves for years, only to reappear in a flash when triggered by a word, a taste or a scent. 

My recollections of the circus more than 50 years ago are based on the pictures preserved in those curtains plus those few elements sufficiently striking to impress a four-year-old: staying awake worrying about the tent, the tigers, the horseback riders, the Flying Wallendas and that unique circus smell.  These elements are barely enough to create the haiku I wrote in third grade:

Hot day, scary tent.
Popcorn, peanuts, tiger coughs.
Hearts fly in summer!

The Internet makes mnemonists of us all, but can prove as false as any personal memory.  While exploring background material for this article, I researched historical tent problems with the Ringling Brothers and came to the conclusion that the issue my parents were discussing was probably the terrible Hartford circus fire.  The Editor in Chief tells me that this is wrong; that problem was that the tent was destroyed by a storm shortly before we were to see it.  She notes the circus was able to continue because they paid for their back-up tent to be brought from storage via air freight, something that was very expensive and remarkable.

This correction illustrates several points: that it is possible to find almost anything on the Internet, that eavesdropping easily results in more confusion than illumination and that moms never lose the habit of telling their kids what is what!