Alfred Ringling

Alfred was born in McGregor, Iowa, into the family of a German immigrant harness maker. His family history opens on the Mississippi, with the arrival of a circus boat and the boys’ excitement at the prospect of a show.

Long before the Ringlings commanded railway trains and enormous tents, they had to persuade people to come and hear them.

In his 1900 Life Story of the Ringling Brothers, Alfred preserved an early concert program that gives a wonderfully practical picture of the family at work. Charles played the violin, Alfred the organ. A little later, Alfred returned as “America’s Cornet Virtuoso.” Later still, the two brothers offered a musical act on twelve instruments. Between the music came comic characters, juggling and sketches, with the brothers appearing repeatedly in different roles.

The grand announcement at the top promised a “Carnival of Fun.” The performers underneath were making that promise one act at a time.

Alfred also included Charles’s recollection of their nervous first touring performance at Mazomanie, Wisconsin. Rehearsal had gone well. Once the audience arrived, the overture fell apart: instruments squeaked and shrieked, and the players struggled to stay together. Charles remembered fifty-nine people looking more intimidating than the enormous audiences the circus later drew.

It is an appealing admission in a book otherwise full of triumph. The Ringlings had learned in front of paying customers, and their family history still made room for the embarrassment.

In May 1884, they opened their circus in Baraboo, Wisconsin, with the veteran showman Yankee Robinson. The little traveling enterprise gradually grew into a business large enough to divide among brothers with distinct responsibilities.

The circus’s 1900 route book makes Alfred’s role unusually clear. Its managerial list names him Director of Press. Charles directed advertising, John the advance operation, Otto finances, and Albert—usually billed simply as “Al.”—the exhibitions.

The distinction matters. Alfred’s work included the stories and newspaper attention that made the coming circus an event.

A March 1909 report in Variety catches him doing precisely that in New York. Preparations for the Ringling opening at Madison Square Garden had begun, and Alfred was working with press agents in a partitioned corner of Joe Mayer’s offices in the Bailey Building. For all the grandeur advertised on the posters, this glimpse of the work is agreeably ordinary: a few men in a corner of somebody else’s offices getting the publicity moving.

The same report describes a relay system for the touring press staff. An agent would go three weeks ahead, work a group of towns, and remain until the circus arrived. Once the show moved on, he would jump ahead again. Anticipation had its own itinerary.

By then, the brothers had acquired their great rival, Barnum & Bailey, which they purchased in 1907. The two circuses continued separately for years. Their eventual combination in 1919 produced the familiar Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey name.

Alfred’s family history shows how much pleasure he took in the language of the business.

In one episode, he tells how Albert and Otto bought a hyena while Alfred, Charles and John were away earning money on a concert tour. The animal was waiting when the travelers returned. In the telling, Otto revealed it by torchlight; the startled brothers were introduced to what amounted to their entire menagerie.

Then came the advertising.

The creature became the “Mammoth Midnight Marauding Man-Eating Monstrosity,” a terrifying presence whose supposed activities required a remarkable number of capital letters. A single animal had acquired a whole imaginative world around it.

Alfred presented the episode as an illustration of advice from Yankee Robinson: avoid exaggeration, but when an attraction was truly great, “bill it big.” The gap between that sensible rule and the extravagant hyena advertisement is part of the pleasure of reading him.

His book is a showman’s account of the family’s rise, complete with reconstructed conversations and polished scenes. It lets us hear how the Ringlings wanted their beginnings remembered: resourceful, funny, occasionally desperate, and always moving toward the next performance.

The surviving posters carry the same confidence. In the 1903 print above, the five brothers appear in formal portraits among animals and elaborate ornament. Alfred is at the upper left. Beneath them, the lettering announces their collective claim to the biggest show in the world. The family itself had become one of the attractions.

There is a quieter piece of Alfred’s writing that deserves a place beside all those adjectives.

In 1910, he supplied an introduction to The Autobiography of a Clown, Jules Turnour’s story as told to Isaac F. Marcosson. Alfred had known Turnour for more than twenty years. What he admired was the man’s character: behind the painted face was a “patient, serious purpose to make his life helpful.”

“The world has been made better by the presence and work of Jules,” he wrote.

The praise is direct and affectionate. After years of selling spectacles, Alfred could still write with feeling about an individual performer and the good he had done.

Music remained part of his own life, too. In March 1917, The Diapason reported that the Hutchings Organ Company was completing a large organ for his home at Oak Ridge, New Jersey. The instrument included controls for a bass drum, snare drum and cymbals, as well as an automatic player. The former band musician had found room at home for an ambitious range of sound.

The New Jersey estate did not erase Alfred’s connection to Gramercy. The wagons outside his home made the trade paper in 1918. After his death at Oak Ridge in October 1919, The Billboard reported that his son Richard would receive, among other property, the furnishings of the Ringling home on Gramercy Park.

That modest domestic detail brings him closer. Alongside the circus interests and country property were the belongings of a New York home.

At No. 36 today, the two knights still stand beside the entrance. The plaque gives Alfred a few words. Behind that brief inscription are the anxious musicians, the alarming hyena, the press agents traveling ahead, and the clown whose kindness he wanted readers to know.

And once, according to a columnist who noticed, there were circus wagons at the door.