Watch Yourself Go By

by Al. G. Field

"I have no contract. Here is the letter under which I joined," assured Alfred, passing the letter to the treasurer.

Glancing at it: "Yes, I wrote that letter but you'll have to see Mr. Thayer." As Alfred opened the door to depart he said, "You had best see Mr. Noyes."

"How much are you going to pay me, Mr. Thayer?"

"Well, let me see, ten dollars a week will be about right, won't it Charley?"

"Eh, no, pay him fifteen. He's worth it. He's the best boy I ever had around me," was Mr. Noyes' answer.

Charley Noyes paid Alfred the first salary he ever earned with a circus and it was so ordained that Alfred should pay the then famous circus manager the last salary he ever received, years after the day Charley Noyes declared Alfred the best boy he ever had around him. The once famous manager, broken in health and fortune, was seeking employment and it fell to Alfred's lot to secure him an engagement with a company of which Alfred was the manager. When the salary of the veteran was being discussed, Alfred's intervention secured him remuneration far in excess of that hoped for. Soon after this engagement ended, Mr. Noyes died very suddenly. The end came in a little city of Texas. It happened that the minstrel company, owned by the one time new boy of the circus, was in Waco. Letters on Mr. Noyes' person written by Alfred led the hotel people to telegraph the minstrel manager, who hastened to the city where his friend had died. Ere he arrived, the Masonic fraternity had performed the last sad rites. Mr. Noyes was the friend of Alfred when he needed friends and it was his intention to send all that was mortal of him to his old home. Telegrams were not answered and Charles Noyes sleeps in the little cemetery at Lampasas, Texas.

As the Thayer & Noyes Circus was one of the best, Alfred has always considered his engagement with that concern as the beginning of his professional career. Dr. James L. Thayer and his family were highly connected. Mr. Noyes married the sister of his partner's wife. The families did not agree and this led to a separation of the partners, disastrous to both. Chas. Noyes' Crescent City Circus, and Dr. James Thayer's Great American Circus never appealed to the people as did the old title, nor was either of the concerns as meritorious as the Thayer & Noyes concern. In the prosperous days of the show the proprietors and their wives were welcome guests in the homes of the best families in the cities visited. The writer remembers that in the city of Baltimore, the mayor, the city council and other high dignitaries attended the opening performance in a body.

The company was the cream of the circus world: S. P. Stickney, one of the most respectable and talented of old time circus men; Sam and Robert Stickney, sons; Emma Stickney, his daughter; Tom King and wife, Millie Turnour, Jimmy Reynolds, the clown whose salary of one hundred dollars a week had so excited the cupidity of Alfred; Woody Cook, who came from Cookstown, Fayette County, only a few miles from Brownsville, and who, like Alfred had left home to seek his fortune; James Kelly, champion leaper of the world; James Cook and wife, of the Cook family, were of the company.

All circus people in those days were apprenticed, all learned their business. One of the latter day hall room performers would have received short shrift in a company of those days, when every performer was an all-round athlete; in fact, in individual superiority, the circus actor of that day outclassed those of the present. The riders were very much superior as they had more competent instructors.

The only particular in which the circus performance has progressed is in the introduction of the thrillers—the big aerial acts, the mid-air feats. Combination acts are superior in the present circus and in this alone has there been improvement. The circus people of old bore the same relation to the public as does the legitimate actor today.