West Bend, WI – For over 15 years, Dave Bohn wrote down memories of his childhood, growing up on the family farm just south of West Bend on Hwy P. He hopes his writings will preserve the often-overlooked stories of ordinary farmers and everyday farm life in rural Washington County, WI, during the Great Depression through the eyes of a local farm boy.
When we were young, almost every year, two or three big cars would park on the corner of Rusco Drive and Hwy 45 (now Hwy P) for one night during the summer. This was during the mid 1930’s.
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We would wait for them to arrive every year. They would come in the late afternoon or early evening and spend the night there in some tents on the side of the road. They were circus gypsies on the move, moving from one town to another. They worked for the circus and were traveling from Milwaukee to the next town where the circus was scheduled.
For some reason, they stopped near our farm every year when I was a kid. They stayed on the roadside in the area of the electrical company substation, which was our farmland.
It was a grassy roadside area back then with nothing planted and there is a creek running through that area, so they probably knew they had a source for water there. I suppose they got to know where it was and just stopped every year. This was just down the road from our house.
They would always play loud music. I don’t know if it was on the radio or on records. Most likely, they had a record player with them, so it was probably on that. The music was always really loud, and we could easily hear at our house. It was a different type of music. I don’t know exactly how to describe it. We called it gypsy music.
The music was the first thing they would put on, so we always knew when they arrived, and they played the music well into the night. Most of the time, they just spent one night.
In the morning, when we woke up, they were gone, presumably on to the next town for the next show. At that time, there were one night circus shows in the smaller towns throughout all of Wisconsin and probably the entire country. They would just move on to the next town on their route, traveling through the region.
I don’t know exactly where these people were from, but we called them Gypsies. From what we knew, they came to the US in the early 1900’s from eastern Europe. Without a home to call their own, they just traveled around the country, here and in Europe.
They would travel around in groups with about eight people in each car; mom, dad, a few kids, and grandma and grandpa all in one car. The monkeys would travel with them in the cars, so I imagine those cars were pretty chaotic.
Everyone had a job in the circus, even the kids and the grandparents. They had a variety of jobs with the circus; some were animal trainers, some were acrobats, and other fortune tellers. The people that were animal trainers would work with different animals to teach them tricks for the performance. This was just how we knew their lifewas
In the 1930’s when the circus was big and it was traveling through, we would also see the big animals go past on trucks because we lived on a main highway from Milwaukee. The animals were in the traditional painted circus cages.
I’m guessing they traveled up to Fond du Lac for the next performance, but I don’t really know. It was always a sight to see. We’d all just sit on the front lawn and watch them go past. They always traveled in a group, so we got to see all the animals.
Living just up the hill from where these circus gypsies camped each year, Mom and Dad would worry. Most people in the area were just a little on edge when they were around because they were strangers, and we didn’t know anything about them.
They were nomads and people at that time thought that they kind of lived off what was easily available for their lifestyle.
The gypsies were always gone by morning, but Dad never did find anything missing and we never heard of any problems from neighbors either.
If they did take anything, they never took much and certainly not more than they needed. Even though their lifestyle was completely different than ours, they were just trying to survive, and I can’t find fault with that.
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I don’t know what ever happened to these people or what they did after the big time of circuses ended. But when I was a kid, we knew they were coming, and we’d wait for them every year. I only remember the circus gypsies coming through when I was a boy.
By the time I was a teenager, the circus gypsies didn’t stop near our farm anymore, so we didn’t really see them. That was about the time the traveling circuses faded away.
The Great Depression and the onset of World War II most likely caused the decline of the traveling circuses.
