THE BALLOON MAN

Hollywood Publicist Shirley Carroll O'Connor Dies at 93

Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Longtime Hollywood publicist, Shirley Carroll O'Connor, whose colorful career included 25 years as the first female press agent under the Big Top of the Clyde Beatty, Cole Bros. and Ringling Bros. & Barnum and Bailey Circuses, has died at the age of 93, in Laguna Hills, California.
Shirley was the president of The Carrolls Agency, one of Hollywood's top and oldest entertainment-based public relations and advertising before it was closed in 1980.
She began her career in show business when she married into the circus in 1945. Her husband, Norman Carroll O'Connor, was a ringmaster and sideshow talker, and was starting another career in public relations. Shirley joined him in this endeavor and recounted stories in her memoir, "Life is a Circus," of sharing a car with an uncaged leopard on her honeymoon, losing eight elephants on Hollywood Blvd., and having as friends such circus and sideshow performers as "The Sheep-Headed Men," "Flipper Boy," "Two-Faced Man," and "Lovanda," a full-sized head on a platter.
After resigning from the circus in the 1969 season, she began handling theatre and rock accounts, earning her the title of "oldest counter-culture publicist."
Shirley and Norman established the Carrolls Agency in 1953 and handled publicity and advertising for H. Warner Buck's Sportsman Show at the Pan Pacific Auditorium, The Great Western Livestock and Dairy Show, Ringling Bros. Barnum and Bailey Circus, Clyde Beatty Cole Bros. Circus, Jungleland in Thousand Oaks and the famous Pacific Ocean Park. After Norman's death in 1967, she continued the business and moved into publicity and advertising for Broadway shows in Los Angeles.
Read more: http://losangeles.broadwayworld.com/article/Hollywood_Publicist_Shirley_Carroll_OConnor_Dies_at_93_20110125#ixzz1C8vGobFC