Shocked and Amazed - On and Off the Midway

The last time I talked to Mae Noell - just a few months before I was told she'd died - she was giving me bad news. Well, news that was bad for Dolphin-Moon Press anyway. She and I had been in negotiations to republish her book THE HISTORY OF NOELL'S ARK GORILLA SHOW. It really shouldn't have been a surprise that the bad news was her bowing out of the negotiations; many book plans don't result in publication. But that, of course, was okay in the broadest sense: as I told her by phone and then by letter, I'd have been proud to have Dolphin-Moon Press re-issue the book, but the most important thing was that somebody re-issue it. GORILLA SHOW, you see, is probably one of the ten best books on sideshow ever written.

I don't say that lightly. Not to Mae and not to you. GORILLA SHOW is fun (and funny) and it's chock full of details about the day-to-day business of keeping a show going on the road. It's got diagrams of the show and how she and her husband, Bob, handled it. It tells how young bucks were contracted to go glove-to-glove with the world's only athletic apes - you know, the monkeys who'd whale the hell out of you for the amusement of maybe a couple hundred of your friends, relatives and neighbors. I suppose it beat getting the crap kicked out of you by one of those boxing kangaroos.

Well, not unlike the surprise that those young men got when a chimp - hardly the size of an eight year old boy - shook the tar out of them, I got a surprise of my own when I went south the following season to the Extravaganza (the annual carny trade fair held in Gibsonton, FL). Remember now: I was told some months back that Mae Noell had passed away. I knew she'd been in bad health; it was common knowledge that she'd been bad off for some time. As she herself put it to me once, she felt like one of those people you'd see in the middle of the summer dressed in half a dozen coats. "I just can't get warm," she'd told me. Honestly, I couldn't face calling the Chimp Farm in Tarpon Springs from Baltimore to confirm what several people had told me independently about her demise. But I couldn't not call once I got within easy driving range, and Tarpon Springs is just a holler from the Extravaganza.

So I call up the Chimp Farm, home still to the chimpanzees, orangs and gorillas that Mae and Bob Noell bred or bought or, often enough, were given when their owners couldn't handle them. And when I make that call, a woman's voice comes on the phone - Mae's daughter - who proceeds to tell me Mae's fine, she's right there under some blankets, and she's doing better than the doctors had hoped. True to form, when I visited with Mae the next day, and told her I'd heard she'd died, Mae assured me that she had. And of course she'd been brought back from the beyond, but not before the nursing home (where she'd been at the time of her near-fatal coronary arrest) had told her family she'd passed away. Leave it to Mae Noell to come back from the dead and be able to joke about it.

Maybe that ability to laugh has pulled Mae through more than most of us townees will ever know. Perhaps, too, her strength has come from her sense of history, an all-pervading subject with her. Oh, it's not that other show folk don't have their own jackpots to cut up, but Mae not only has her share of show tales spanning vaudeville (as a kid), the medicine shows (through her adolescence), carnivals (after her marriage to Bob) and the road-side zoo of the Noell's Ark Chimp Farm itself. She also has a family history that she'll gladly trace back for you the couple hundred years she's pieced together (this care of her connections to the Germana Society). I'll never forget the time she told me to do whatever I could to find and buy old bibles. When I asked her why, she told me so I could send the family tree pages to the Mormons (renowned for their obsession with family history - all families) that they could enter all the names in their vast genealogical data bank, the better to help others in their search for their pasts. She told me she'd bartered with antique dealers just to xerox the pages when they wouldn't drop the price low enough to justify her buying another old bible. That's what you call dedication. And dedication is what Mae Noell is really all about.

S&A: 1914 you were born. Your brother was born 1917. Your parents were vaudeville people, a show business family. You were probably on stage very early.

MN: First my dad and mother had the vaudeville and I helped them with that. Then they went barnstorming with it in the '20s during the Depression. When we went barnstorming, we would play in the little schools and the little theatres. I was about 6 years old when I took part in the acts, but my brother was too young. After the barnstorming my dad and mother just started to have a medicine show. The barnstorming was stopped somewhere when I was around the age of twelve. The medicine show came along somewhere when I was around the age of twelve and right on into 17 when I eloped with my husband who was also running another medicine show. I got married in 1931. We were married for 60 years. Sixty continuous years. Bob was born on the farm, one of seven living children - one of nine that had been born. He was next to the youngest. His mother and father were in the same generation as my grandparents. His mother and father remembered the Civil War. My grandparents remembered the civil war. It's kinda funny to think that they were in the same generation.

MN: A man came through Beford County, VA, with a medicine show. His name was Doc Etling. Bob was 12 years old and he went to the show every night. He had to walk three miles to get to the show and I guess, in fact, he tried to stay there in the daytime. He begged Etling, "Please let me join your show. I want to be part of the show." "Well," he said, "I can't do that. I'll have to talk to your parents." And Bob said, "Well, please do that. Please do." Well by that time Bob's mother had died and the old man was having a lot of difficulty raising these last two or three kids. So Etling said to Bob's father, "I'll be good to him, and I'll teach him a trade. He'll be a showman when he gets done." So the old man said, "Good. Take him. Fine. He'll be better off with you than he is here." There were bootleggers in those days, you know, and he was afraid that Bob was going to get involved in that. Now Doc Etling had two brothers. Doc was the magician and one of the brothers was a lightweight balancer who did a beautiful act. The other brother did a juggling act, so each one of the three taught their skills to Bob. Then the blackface comedian quit, and even though Bob was only 12 years old he took up his job and learned these other three things. So I was married to one of the most talented men, I think, I have ever known. He could put the whole show on by himself. The only thing I did was the ukulele and I just chorded and sang with it which went over good because I was a teenaged girl and at the time I was probably fairly good looking because teenagers usually are. The other thing was my drawing act which I am proud of because I am still doing it at my age and still wowing them when I do it.

MN: It's not my original act. I bought it. There was a man called Balda up in Oshkosh, WI. From the earliest time I can remember the ad was in the Billboard: "Balda Artworks." My dad came to me when I was 12 years old and he said, "Mae, you like to draw. This ad says that they will send me for $1 a book, and if you study this book and learn how to do these drawings, you can do an act. Would you do an act on the stage for me?" I said, "Oh boy, yeah!" So I went to work and I worked hard at it and I did the act. There was Bob doing his juggling, balancing, blackface, magic and me doing the ukulele and the drawing act. I can do them small or big. I'd hold a board and draw comic pictures that you can hold upside down. A little couplet went with each picture. A little couplet like, "This is Sye Mercus reviewing the circus. And here is one of the clowns who, at present, is one of the funniest men in town." That's all I said and it was just a little couplet like that on every one. I'd draw not as fast as some people but fast enough for a 12 year old kid. The audience would be entranced. When I do it now, even though I'm slower now because I'm older, it's still the same.