When did St. Louis become the juggling Mecca of the Midwest?
By Margaret Bauer
Photograph by Dilip Vishwanat
As any hip-hop aficionado could tell you, St. Louis certainly has its share of ballers—and significant showbiz cred to boot. But these days the city is gaining credence with a new brand of baller: the juggler.
So it probably stands to reason that a horde of these hot-handed ballistas is coming to town this month, when Washington University’s National Prestigious Society of Collegiate Jugglers hosts Jugglefest ’07. Performers at the festival’s public showcase on October 6 will include single-forearmed juggler Casey Boehmer, juggling contortionist Book Kennison and local phenom Cameron Ritter, who ranks among the top six underage jugglers in the world.
St. Louis, it seems, is a burgeoning Mecca for juggling. Jugglefest’s entire lineup, in fact, hails from within a 350-mile radius of the city: Kennison and Ritter grew up in St. Charles; Boehmer is the second-oldest member of Jerseyville, Ill.’s 13-member (!) Boehmer Family juggling clan; and the juggling team Passing Fancy, a.k.a. the club-tossing duo of Jim Hendricks and society president Thom Wall, has been practicing here for nearly five years. The Institute of Jugglology springs from only slightly farther afield—just below the southwestern Missouri border in Springdale, Ark.
Could the city’s rising obsession with, er, flying balls have something to do with its aerospace-industry ties, with both Boeing and SLU’s Parks College within driving distance, and the University of Missouri–Rolla (soon to be known as Missouri Science & Technology) about two hours away? Get that many flight-obsessed math geeks in one area and something is bound to get airborne, right? Wall thinks that math adds up.
“A lot of people that juggle are in IT or mathematics,” he says. “I mean, I can’t add for the life of me, but Jim [Hendricks], he’s an engineer for Boeing ... and there are like three math professors from UMSL and one of the community colleges who come to the club now and then.”
That skill-set may also explain juggling’s demographics. “I would be willing to bet that 90 percent of jugglers are single and male,” Wall says. “So you know, if you’re looking for a lonely husband ...”
