This morning I thought I'd go back to a little circus history. Beers & Barnes was a small show out of Miami that used to tour in the east. These pictures were taken in 1957. It was a long time fixture in small and medium size towns up and down the East Coast. I'm not sure if the played in the mid-west or not. It was owned by Charles Beers and Harold Barnes. Mr Barnes was the father of Dave Hoover's wife Lois.
I remember a funny story told to us by our ex-partner Dave Wharton. And I belive it took place just about in this time frame that these pictures were taken.
Dave was just a kid from Centerville, MD and was spending his summer clowning on the show.
So he asked Mr Beers and Mr Barnes if he could sell coloring books on the show to earn a few extra dollars. Well at first they had never heard of such a thing but decided to let Dave sell them. After the first week and they saw young Dave was doing pretty well with the books they called him aside one day. They told him and they had a board of directors meeting and the board had decided that from now on the show would sell the coloring books and Dave could have a small percentage! Well of course the Board consisted of Mr Beers and Mr Barnes!
One last tid-bit-Dave Hoover presented his Lions on the show. One year they were playing in Berlin, MD and Dave had an incident with one of the cats and had to be brought to Salisbury to the emergency room.
Here's an interesting find. I just found these circus stamps. I guess Bill bought these when they first came out. I see they are 29 cent stamps. So they had to have been issued some years ago!
