Authors: Mark Dunn
The train, in fact, wasn’t late. It was on time. And no one had gathered on the platform but Addicus and his farmhand Bill Boils. Jonathan was off picking apples for a “last meal” lattice pie. To be sure, Addicus was aware that Thaddeus Grund’s Traveling Circus and Wild West Show was popular and successful, and might provide ample income for the struggling Blashettes, but Emmaline’s resistance had diminished the ebullience of the welcome. The three men rode back to the Blashette farm in a rickety buckboard, in funereal silence. Emmaline wasn’t even around when her husband and his showman guest arrived. She had ventured off to Inspiration Creek where she wept in protected solitude for the future of her special child.
1.
“Hello Mr. Diary.”
Biographers of Jonathan Blashette are indebted to their subject for a couple of reasons. From the first week of his employment with the Grund Circus, Jonathan put down his thoughts and impressions and a detailed listing of each day’s activities in a diary—a habit to which he would hold for the rest of his life. We are indebted to Jonathan, as well, for carefully maintaining this collection of diaries, and for entrusting them to the perpetual custody of the Pettiville Library and Interpretive Center to which he also bequeathed the rest of his voluminous papers and many of his personal effects. This institution offers researchers unrestricted access and extensive assistance, including, even, a daily refreshment hour of tea and “biscuits,” and the occasional neck massage.
In a bizarre sense, it is almost as if Jonathan anticipated me in particular. It was as if he knew of my special affinity for Mint Milanos and Malawi tea, and the fact that I can always do with a good neck rub.
In a codicil to his will Jonathan writes:
“I have few secrets. Most who know me know this. I should be flattered if some future researcher or biographer found this life important enough to write about. I know that it was an odd one, to be sure. But then isn’t each life unique in its own way? Delve if you wish into the eclectica of my existence on this planet and marvel at the incongruities, as I myself have marveled over them. That a country boy with three legs would grow up to hobnob with nabobs alongside “jest plain bobs” and girls who bob their hair,
and guys named Harry and hairy French guys named Guy, and I better stop here before my heirs begin to question the compos of my mentis!
Welcome all comers! Friend and enemy alike. Turn my pages all you wish, for I am and have always been an open book.
Life has treated me well—a life which I have always shared with others, and which I now share with you, bob and nabob alike.”
These words were obviously penned prior to Jonathan’s descent into the depths of gut-wrenching late-life reassessment. All tellers of the story of Jonathan Blashette are grateful that their subject postponed this intense self-examination until after his papers were donated to the Pettiville Library and Interpretive Center. Had he waited, it is entirely possible that he might have burned them all. (Final additions were made by Jonathan’s son Addicus Andrew after his father’s death.)
Incidentally, we are blessed with a nearly complete run of Jonathan’s diaries with the exception of the years 1917 and 1918, both of these volumes having been lost in France during Blashette’s tour of duty with the American Expeditionary Force. (This lacuna is bridged by correspondence and the journals of Jonathan’s contemporaries.) Seldom has a subject left such a rich reservoir of source material from which to draw.
2.
“The train whistle lulled me to sleep.”
Jonathan’s Diary, 6 September 1900, JBP.
3.
“I have yet to make any friends.”
Ibid., 8 September 1900.
4.
“I am sorely homesick.”
Ibid., 9 September 1900.
5.
“I am alone in my trailer but tomorrow another boy will join me.”
Ibid., 10 September 1900.
6.
“I have met a boy who wishes to be my friend. My spirits have risen.”
Ibid., 11 September 1900. Thaddeus Grund in his celebrated autobiography,
Ringleader: A Life in Circus Management, with a Foreword by the Bastard Ringling Brother “Skippy”
(Sarasota: Three Ring Press, 1921), notes that young Jonathan “took some time to warm to carnival life” but agrees that meeting Toby-the-Monkey-Boy Brancato was a positive development. This early difficult period of adjustment was due in no small part to the cold reception Jonathan received from the other sideshow performers who were often slow in welcoming newcomers into the fold.
So enamored was Jonathan of the jocular and gregarious Toby, Grund notes, that the circus impresario would often find Jonathan even during those first budding days of friendship with Toby, happily combing the adolescent’s furry arms and shoulders, or clandestinely munching bunches of pilfered bananas with Toby under the bleachers during big top performances. According to Grund, the two boys quickly became inseparable.
It speaks to the durability of this friendship that many years later Jonathan would bear the cost of maintaining Toby in a private room at the sanitarium where he was to spend his final declining years. Having advanced in hirsute florescence from monkey fur to a full body coat of hoary-white shag, Toby convinced himself that if he wasn’t the Abominable Snowman, he must at least be a very close relative.
7. “
I think she likes me.”
Young Jonathan misinterpreted the wink. Little “Annette of the Skies” was victim to periodic blepharospasm, or spasmodic winking. Jonathan later suspected his error after catching the prepubescent trapeze
wonder winking at a draft horse. Joseph Alksnis-Lochrie, “Childhood Under the Big Top,”
Calliope: The Magazine of the Circus
12 (fall 1957): 37-38.
8.
One by one the sideshow performers came around.
No one seems to agree on who next extended hand (hoof or flipper) in friendship to Jonathan. Alksnis-Lochrie insists that it was Needleman, the Human Pin Cushion, who reportedly showed up at Jonathan and Toby’s trailer door one night with a freshly baked chess pie and a set of darning needles for “postprandial amusement.” Jacques Le Pelletier in his book on the history of the side show
Hawking and Gawking
(Philadelphia: Moyamensing Books, 1972) believes that Penny Pullman first broke the ice, much to the displeasure of her less sociable conjoined sister Patsy who was in the midst of a sponge bath when Penny dragged her off to Jonathan’s trailer for a “hey and a howdy.” According to Le Pelletier, Patsy never forgave her sister for this indignity and extended her grudge to Jonathan, nursing it for the duration of his tenure with the circus. Intending to boycott his farewell dinner, she arrived under obvious physical duress (The sisters were united at the hip.) and protested this act of effrontery by spending the entire evening hidden from view beneath a saddle blanket, except for a brief moment when she poked her head out, turtle-like, to join in a toast to the health of President McKinley.
9.
Mickey and Benny and Doob represented Grund’s very own “Lollypop Guild.”
Doob Maxfield enjoyed a few moments of fame several years later when he volunteered, along with other Grund Circus dwarfs, to participate in Dr. Harvey Cushing’s ground-breaking pituitary gland research project. His poem, “To Good Doctor Cushing,” was published in
Tiny Writings by Tiny People
(Boston: Really Little, Brown and Company) and was well received:
Will you, doctor, make me tall?
I so tire of being small.
That is all.
10.
His schedule was grueling.
Jonathan’s Diary, 2 October1900, JBP.
11. “
I am forever called upon to display myself.”
Ibid., 4 October1900. Among the more bizarre requests Jonathan received from sideshow audiences dubious of the true corporal nature of his third leg, are the following.
“Take off that shoe. Now wriggle the toes. Take off the other shoes. Now wriggle all the toes at the same time.”
“Hop around the room like a bunny. Like a three-legged funny bunny.”
“My little Margaret wants to sit on your knee. Don’t be a wisenheimer; you know which knee.”
“That ain’t a real leg. I’m bored with this humbug. Bring out the girl who eats things on a dare.”
12. “
I am demoralized.”
Ibid., 7 October1900.
13.
“I have decided to escape.”
Ibid., 8 October1900.
14.
“My escape has been foiled. I was snared and returned to my captors.”
Ibid., 10 October1900.
15.
Jonathan was placed under lock and key.
As ghoulish as it may sound, there does seem to be substantial evidence that Jonathan was kept chained outside his trailer between performances for a period of several days following his return. This story is corroborated by a number of sources. However, one wildly erroneous contemporaneous account in the
De Leaux Falls Courier
would lead one to believe that Jonathan suffered a great deal more than credible sources
indicate.
Escaped, Potentially Hydrophobic Circus Freak Boy
Captured, Chained, and Denied Sweets
Some Children Dream of Running Away to the Circus;
This Child Dreamed of Running Away
from
the Circus.
“They tossed him onto the wagon like
a sack of flour,” reports eyewitness Vitula Hart
who watched the capture from the window
of her dentist’s office.
“The boy should never have been so
roughly handled but it is always prudent to deny
children sweets,” opined the dentist.
De Leaux, Louisiana October 10, 1900
Today this
newspaper learned of the unfortunate condition of
one twelve-year-old Jonathan Blahshit [sic] who,
following escape from the circus that had been both a
home and a prison to him for much of his young,
brutish life, was captured and rudely delivered into the
hands of his eager top-hatted wardens. As punishment
for the escape, Jonathan was tethered to an elephant
stake and left to dodge the ponderous shuffle of the
restless pachyderms that encircled him. The boy
received little sustenance during this three-day period
including few, if any, sweets. He was whipped and
denied access by local clergymen. A nearsighted
elephant, one Baraboo, mistook young Jonathan’s head
for an oversized peanut and sucked his scalp. The
young man is considering the filing of criminal
charges against the Grund Traveling Circus and Wild
West Show for reckless endangerment. He also seeks to
have his contract with his present employers fully
nullified. It is not clear if the boy has rabies. More than
likely he does not. Illustrations on page 7.
The illustrations on page 7 included one in which Baraboo was being fitted with very large glasses. The caption read, “She’s got the memory of an elephant but the eyesight of Teddy Roosevelt!”
16.
“You are compelled to appear.”
The full text of Athol Twainy Esq.’s letter of legal notification (October 17, 1900) follows.
To Mr. Thaddeus Grund
And to all other members of the Board
Of the Grund Traveling Circus and Wild West Show:
I have been retained by Jonathan Blashette to act as counsel on his behalf in the matter of Jonathan Blashette v. Thaddeus Grund et. al. in which the party of the first part hereafter prays nullification of the contract binding said youth to the aforementioned circus entity. I set forth herewith the following reasons for termination of his contract:
1. The Grund Circus has violated the aforementioned contractual agreement through base negligence, careless wardship and rampant malicious cruelty, including but not limited to the showcasing of the boy’s anatomical defects in a manner outside the boundaries of proper decorum and respect for the human condition. The boy was additionally chained among elephants, urinated upon (not by the elephants, but by a mischievous passing monkey), belittled, maligned and forced to endure an egregious assault upon his dignity by the owners and management of the Grund Circus.
2. The Grund Traveling Circus and Wild West Show, is, further, a fraud. While it resembles to some degree, a circus, its wild west show component has not been fully operational for some twelve years, and is, at present, made up of two bronzed Irishmen in frayed Indian headbonnets, a three-legged buffalo with some form of bison mange, one Annie Oakey (make note:
Oakey
, not
Oakley
) whose markswoman skills generally leave so much to be desired that audience members are forced to duck for cover when she fires at targets and skeets, one Wild Bill Hiccup (a purveyor of patent medicines), and Buffalo Bill Coby who contributes little more to the evening’s entertainment than stumbling about in a drunken stupor, wantonly spewing invective, and scratching his delicates.
The Plaintiff therefore prays release from said contract and swift return of the boy to his parents.
In their answer, Grund’s attorneys made much of the fact that Mr. Twainy was not an attorney, did not possess a law degree, and had never, in fact, even studied the law beyond a passing glance at his cousin Claude’s case books, (such contact often involving little more than the lazy tracing of his index finger around the embossed lettering on their spines), and was obviously preying on the meager financial resources of Jonathan’s mother and father. The attorneys cited the fact that Twainy had only once actually consulted with Jonathan after being retained to represent him, this conversation taking place over the telegraph wires and unfortunately truncated by a misapprehension of the word “Stop.” Furthermore, the attorneys for Grund called Twainy’s own sanity and credibility into question by reminding the court that Twainy had once vouched for the sound mental faculties of Mary Todd Lincoln even as she was discovered wading in a Washington D.C. duck pond
wearing a crown of Christmas garland and telling off-color jokes about Secretary Seward; instigated an ill-founded lawsuit against songstress Jenny Lind for shattering and collapsing the north wing of London’s Crystal Palace; and posited in a recent Chatauquan lecture that the likes of the Tilden/Hayes presidential debacle wasn’t anomalous at all, but would, no doubt, occur again, perhaps early in the twenty-first century, with the Republicans again besting the Democrats through wantonly political, extra-constitutional judicial intervention. JBP.