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Six Degrees of Separation


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I never knew something could die twice, but two weeks ago, my childhood wrote its second obituary.

Smells of popcorn, sounds of roaring crowds and images of animal acts, jugglers and clowns rolled through me conjuring up joyful times.

Like many institutions, the inevitable happened Jan. 14 when the Feld Organization announced it would close its Ringling Brothers Circus and cease performing. Citing shrinking ticket sales and a dwindling audience, as well as stepped up scrutiny from animal rights activists, the circus is soon to be no more.

The circus was one of the few places one could be thrilled by such things as high-wire artists, made to laugh by such acts as clowns and amazed by daring animal acts. And the clowns. Like many people, I’ve never had a problem with clowns, which seem to come in all shapes and iterations – goofy, scary, outlandish and sad.

I remember wondrous times as a child going to the circus. When I was six, a circus came to my hometown of Milan, Georgia accidentally. We later learned, after it had already set up on the town’s only baseball field, that it was supposed to go to Millen, Georgia, a much larger town closer to Augusta. My sister Carol took me and my brother Frank to see the show “under the big top.”

My next encounter with a clown would be 1975 when Clem Clown came to the Mack’s store in the nearby town of McRae to meet fans of his afternoon show on WALB-TV 10 in Albany, Georgia. But my favorite clown was one known the world over.

I also grew up watching inimitable Emmett Kelly on television. Having created Weary Willie on his drawing board in the late 1930s, Kelly portrayed, the sad hobo clown from the late 1930s on up until the 1980s. And it would be the late-80s when the unbelievable happened – I met his daughter. Suddenly, I was playing the game of “Six Degrees of Separation.”

“Is it true that your father is the most famous clown in the world,” I asked.

“Yes,” said Stasia Kelly.

We were attending a convention sponsored by the now-defunct organization once known as the Georgia Association of Newscasters. It was thrilling to meet Stasia as I had only previously known her as a voice on Fox 97, a now bygone FM radio station in Atlanta.

While she did not go into detail about her father, I recall taking up most of the conversation telling her how he made me laugh as a child watching him perform on TV variety shows, which are, well, now a thing of the past.

I remember pondering aloud with Stasia whether she thought the day will come when no one will know who her father was. She firmly answered that that day was inevitable.

By the 1940s, Weary Willie was a hit and Kelly signed on with Ringling Brothers where he would go on to make thousands of adults and children laugh for decades.

Just in that brief moment, I could tell she loved her father, and, consequently, she could tell that her father’s work had brought me joy as an unwitting child.

In an article she wrote for Guideposts magazine in October 2006, Stasia said people cared about Willie and his struggles.

“They saw that no matter how hard he took it on the chin, Willie never gave up. He became the world’s most famous clown, probably the most recognizable clown ever. Maybe the reason Willie was so easy for people to love was that Dad brought a bit of himself to the character. Not that Dad was a sad sack, but he understood struggle,” she wrote in Guideposts.

Stasia was inspired to write the Guideposts story after her father died. In the article, she describes how she felt boarding a plane in Atlanta to head to her childhood home in Sarasota, Florida the day her father died. She sat there clutching a newspaper article that included a photo of her father talking on the phone smiling after hearing news of her birth.

“Now, staring out the plane window, I tried to be grateful for that happiness Dad had found, and for the life he had led making others happy. How much more blessed could a daughter be than to have Emmett Kelly as her father?” she writes.

And just as organizations fold and radio stations change names and formats, the inevitable happens. And like Stasia, we can strive to be grateful for the happiness those things brought us along the way.