Welcome all comers! Friend and enemy alike. Turn my pages all you wish, for I am and have always been an open book.
Life has treated me well — a life which I have always shared with others, and which I now share with you, bob and nabob alike.”
These words were obviously penned prior to Jonathan’s descent into the depths of gut-wrenching late-life reassessment. All tellers of the story of Jonathan Blashette are grateful that their subject postponed this intense self-examination until after his papers were donated to the Pettiville Library and Interpretive Center. Had he waited, it is entirely possible that he might have burned them all. (Final additions were made by Jonathan’s son Addicus Andrew after his father’s death.)
Incidentally, we are blessed with a nearly complete run of Jonathan’s diaries with the exception of the years 1917 and 1918, both of these volumes having been lost in France during Blashette’s tour of duty with the American Expeditionary Force. (This lacuna is bridged by correspondence and the journals of Jonathan’s contemporaries.) Seldom has a subject left such a rich reservoir of source material from which to draw.
2. “The train whistle lulled me to sleep.” Jonathan’s Diary, 6 September 1900, JBP.
3. “I have yet to make any friends.” Ibid., 8 September 1900.
4. “I am sorely homesick.” Ibid., 9 September 1900.
5. “I am alone in my trailer but tomorrow another boy will join me.” Ibid., 10 September 1900.
6. “I have met a boy who wishes to be my friend. My spirits have risen.” Ibid., 11 September 1900. Thaddeus Grund in his celebrated autobiography, Ringleader: A Life in Circus Management, with a Foreword by the Bastard Ringling Brother “Skippy” (Sarasota: Three Ring Press, 1921), notes that young Jonathan “took some time to warm to carnival life” but agrees that meeting Toby-the-Monkey-Boy Brancato was a positive development. This early difficult period of adjustment was due in no small part to the cold reception Jonathan received from the other sideshow performers who were often slow in welcoming newcomers into the fold.
So enamored was Jonathan of the jocular and gregarious Toby, Grund notes, that the circus impresario would often find Jonathan even during those first budding days of friendship with Toby, happily combing the adolescent’s furry arms and shoulders, or clandestinely munching bunches of pilfered bananas with Toby under the bleachers during big top performances. According to Grund, the two boys quickly became inseparable.
It speaks to the durability of this friendship that many years later Jonathan would bear the cost of maintaining Toby in a private room at the sanitarium where he was to spend his final declining years. Having advanced in hirsute florescence from monkey fur to a full body coat of hoary-white shag, Toby convinced himself that if he wasn’t the Abominable Snowman, he must at least be a very close relative.
7. “I think she likes me.” Young Jonathan misinterpreted the wink. Little “Annette of the Skies” was victim to periodic blepharospasm, or spasmodic winking. Jonathan later suspected his error after catching the prepubescent trapeze wonder winking at a draft horse. Joseph Alksnis-Lochrie, “Childhood Under the Big Top,” Calliope: The Magazine of the Circus 12 (fall 1957): 37–38.
8. One by one the sideshow performers came around. No one seems to agree on who next extended hand (hoof or flipper) in friendship to Jonathan. Alksnis-Lochrie insists that it was Needleman, the Human Pin Cushion, who reportedly showed up at Jonathan and Toby’s trailer door one night with a freshly baked chess pie and a set of darning needles for “postprandial amusement.” Jacques Le Pelletier in his book on the history of the side show Hawking and Gawking (Philadelphia: Moyamensing Books, 1972) believes that Penny Pullman first broke the ice, much to the displeasure of her less sociable conjoined sister Patsy who was in the midst of a sponge bath when Penny dragged her off to Jonathan’s trailer for a “hey and a howdy.” According to Le Pelletier, Patsy never forgave her sister for this indignity and extended her grudge to Jonathan, nursing it for the duration of his tenure with the circus. Intending to boycott his farewell dinner, she arrived under obvious physical duress (The sisters were united at the hip.) and protested this act of effrontery by spending the entire evening hidden from view beneath a saddle blanket, except for a brief moment when she poked her head out, turtle-like, to join in a toast to the health of President McKinley.
9. Mickey and Benny and Doob represented Grund’s very own “Lollypop Guild.” Doob Maxfield enjoyed a few moments of fame several years later when he volunteered, along with other Grund Circus dwarfs, to participate in Dr. Harvey Cushing’s ground-breaking pituitary gland research project. His poem, “To Good Doctor Cushing,” was published in Tiny Writings by Tiny People (Boston: Really Little, Brown and Company) and was well received:
Will you, doctor, make me tall?
I so tire of being small.
That is all.
10. His schedule was grueling. Jonathan’s Diary, 2 October1900, JBP.
11. “I am forever called upon to display myself.” Ibid., 4 October1900. Among the more bizarre requests Jonathan received from sideshow audiences dubious of the true corporal nature of his third leg, are the following.
“Take off that shoe. Now wriggle the toes. Take off the other shoes. Now wriggle all the toes at the same time.”
“Hop around the room like a bunny. Like a three-legged funny bunny.”
“My little Margaret wants to sit on your knee. Don’t be a wisenheimer; you know which knee.”
“That ain’t a real leg. I’m bored with this humbug. Bring out the girl who eats things on a dare.”
12. “I am demoralized.” Ibid., 7 October1900.
13. “I have decided to escape.” Ibid., 8 October1900.
14. “My escape has been foiled. I was snared and returned to my captors.” Ibid., 10 October1900.
15. Jonathan was placed under lock and key. As ghoulish as it may sound, there does seem to be substantial evidence that Jonathan was kept chained outside his trailer between performances for a period of several days following his return. This story is corroborated by a number of sources. However, one wildly erroneous contemporaneous account in the De Leaux Falls Courier would lead one to believe that Jonathan suffered a great deal more than credible sources indicate.
Escaped, Potentially Hydrophobic Circus Freak Boy
Captured, Chained, and Denied Sweets
Some Children Dream of Running Away to the Circus;
This Child Dreamed of Running Away from the Circus.
“They tossed him onto the wagon like
a sack of flour,” reports eyewitness Vitula Hart
who watched the capture from the window
of her dentist’s office.
“The boy should never have been so
roughly handled but it is always prudent to deny
children sweets,” opined the dentist.
De Leaux, Louisiana October 10, 1900 Today this
newspaper learned of the unfortunate condition of
one twelve-year-old Jonathan Blahshit [sic] who,