Photograph by Dick Weddle
This is Mrs. Ethel Romelfanger (née Judevine; later Luckey). She was the official organist at the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wis. Here, she plays air calliope, flanked by shaker chimes and a Unafone, at the “Beautiful American Festival” at the downtown St. Louis Famous-Barr. It’s mid-October, yet she wears a sleeveless shift (look closely, and you’ll see it’s shot through with metallic threads) and wooden high-heeled sandals. If her 1961 album “American” Steam Calliope Concert II offers any clue, she’s playing a classic like “Camptown Races,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” or “Happy Birthday.” In 1968, Billboard was stuffed with lists of groovy singles like “Love Child” and “Magic Carpet Ride,” but just six years earlier, it reviewed Ethel Romelfanger’s album—and gave it four stars. That was when Billboard did a column called “Circus Trouping,” which ran next to ads for actual carnival work. Clyde Beattie of Cole Bros. sought a winter-season fat lady; Buckeye Circus was in need of a “menagerie man” to “drive Hitch with White Mules”; and shockingly, Rudy Bros. announced: “Want Second Elephant Man.” (Read further, and you realize it’s just an ad for a day laborer, preferably one “sober, reliable, able to drive a truck.”) In 1961, you could run away with the circus, but there are clues on the next page that you’d have to try much, much harder in ’68. “The Final Curtain”—that’s the obits—is filled with death notices for circus and carnival people, including Tito Flint, the clown; George Lake of Lake Bros. Penny Arcades; and Kelly the Candy Man, “veteran concessionaire.” In a way, Romelfanger’s got a funeral-hymn posture here—of course, that’d be a circus funeral for the circus itself, with a brass band, and clowns without makeup, and for the music, a secret showperson’s version of “Abide With Me,” with lyrics about stomped-on cotton candy under the bleachers after the lights go down, and trains rolling on to the next town forevermore, and some wistful bearded lady playing the harmonica, watching a cold rain falling outside the tent flaps.
Photograph by Dick Weddle, Globe-Democrat Collection, courtesy of the St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.
