Out in the countryside, with a menagerie of dogs, cats, and horses, lives the last scion of a circus empire.
I took the train to Ballinasloe, watching as an early sunset lit the horizon gold at the edge of the overcast clouds, to meet John Ringling North II. Born in Sarasota, Florida in 1940, John is an elderly gentleman with blue jeans, endless anecdotes, and an all-American accent.
Circus has run through the lines of his life from the start: “In the wintertime, I lived near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, went to school. And in the summertime, I’d go on the road with my dad with the circus.”
That would be the Ringling Brothers circus, where John’s father was vice president and his uncle was president. John wasn’t involved with management of the show, though he did perform when he was a kid – “you know, as a clown, but I had all the best clowns in the world around me, so it wasn’t very difficult.”
“In those days, especially when we were still under canvas, the Fourth of July is probably the biggest day of the year, and then the day the circus came to town, it’s the next biggest. I mean, the whole town. Seated 10,000 and mostly they had 10,000 people come to it,” he said, recalling the atmosphere. “We’d play all over. People don’t realize that we did play a lot of one-day stands, even in that great big tent.”
Back then, the circus got around via train: “When I was with them, and it might have been bigger before that, we had 80 railroad cars.” And John usually got to stay in his uncle’s private car. “Oh, it was unbelievable. It had a slot machine in the living room. It took a lot of quarters away from me, but I loved that.” His uncle also employed a French chef.
The origins of Ringling, however, were more humble. “They didn’t have any money, but the five brothers, when they were grown up, they saw a circus called Dan Rice’s Circus. It came on a boat, but they’d unload off the boat and it was a circus. And they decided that’s what they wanted to do.
“In the summers, they would all go work for somebody else. They were all musicians and dancers. And finally, they saved all that money. And then in 1884, they started their own circus, Ringling Brothers. But it was very small, one ring. And I think the only animal they had was a hyena.
“They were dead honest. At that time, all circuses relied a lot on pickpockets and shortchange. They wouldn’t allow that. Other circus people laughed at them and called them the Sunday School Circus. The public kind of caught on, so they got bigger and bigger.
“Finally, when Barnum and Bailey went to Europe for three years, and that’s when they kind of took over. So when Barnum and Bailey came back, they were the biggest circus in the East, but Ringling Brothers was the biggest in the West.”
Ringling Bros. eventually bought Barnum and Bailey. The circus stayed in the Ringling family until 1967, when it was sold to the Felds.
The Norths had left Ireland during the famine, but John came here for the first time when he was 22, sent to set up a cattle farm on land his father had bought back.
“Once the circus moved into buildings, the show was the same, still a great show. But it was a different kind of life, you know. It was like being in Tesco all day, locked in a building. So I didn’t like that. I’d go see the circus. I got to know all the circus people over here. But I wasn’t working for them.”
Wherever he was, John said there’s always a kinship with other circus people. “Well, you just feel at home, because they’d understand what the life was like. When I first came, I met the Fawcetts, and they said, ‘oh, yeah, don’t ever pay for a ticket’, and all of them did, that was great.”
The Ringling Circus stopped touring after retiring their iconic elephants, citing steep declines in ticket sales. In 2023, “they’ve come back out with the new Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey, which I haven’t seen. My friend went to see it, and he said, ‘it’s a very good show, but it’s really not like circus, because a lot of it’s screens.’
“There’s no ring, and I guess some were live acts, but a lot of them were just on a great big screen. But they still call it the greatest show on earth.”
In 2006, John bought Kelly Miller Circus. He ran it for a decade and has ten years’ worth of tales – like that one time in upstate New York when the tigers got out, just before dawn – but that’s another story. And in circus, there’s always more to tell.
That’s all we have, really – once the show is over, the tent is packed up, and the last caravan is pulled off the lot.
An empty space, and a story.
Gráinne Greene came from the US to study journalism, politics, and sociology. She has a wide range of experience from the performing arts to public advocacy and is committed to working toward a better world. She is particularly interested in education, politics, gender, and providing historical context and analysis to current events. Gráinne is also a professional illustrator and writes poetry.