By Marilyn May
Milford History
The Ringling Bros. Circus visited Fowler Field in 1955. The partially enclosed main tent covering the three performance rings can be seen on the upper left. Photo courtesy of the Daniel E. Moger Photo Collection.
A call would go out across the neighborhood faster than a trapeze artist flying through the air: The circus is in town! It was 1955, and the arrival of a three-ring circus was pretty big news.
Kids headed for the top of the bank along Wilcox Park to look down on Fowler Field to see the sights. The trucks of the Ringling Bros. Circus and the camper vechicles of the entertainers and roustabouts had rolled into Milford in the dead of night. (At that time, the field was called the dike.)
As the morning went on, just the sight of the “big top” going up with the elephants pulling the ropes to raise the heavy canvas tent seemed like “the greatest show on Earth.” All morning long, all kinds of boxes and equipment seemed to come tumbling out of the big trucks.
If you had remembered that the circus was due that day, you could get up at dawn and watch the horses being unloaded. The horses, happy to be out of their trailers, would stretch and prance and munch on tufts of dewy grass.
It was known that the circus folks always liked coming to Milford. They parked their campers in the shade of Wilcox Park along grassy areas, and on hot days the cooling winds off the harbor refreshed the night. They also liked walking to downtown Milford to shop at the original Milford Pharmacy, W.T. Grants, grocery stores and other small shops.
Even if you didn’t have a ticket to see the circus performance, the lights on the field were glorious to see. Along the midway, there were games of chance and circus barkers calling out to folks to buy tickets for the sideshows. The crowd, the circus music, the smell of popcorn and the sight of cottom candy being swirled into sugary clouds atop a paper cone made it a summer night you would never forget.
A few days later, everything disappeared overnight, but the magic was still in the air. Next summer, the circus would come again.
Marilyn May is a lifelong resident of Milford and on the board of the Milford Historical Society.