Stilts and Zeke are a couple of guys who love the circus. Both were at the Bendix Elementary School grounds Sunday, Aug. 3, when the Culpepper & Merriweather Circus rolled into town for two performances. Stilts, whose real name is David Volponi, arrived with the show. He’s the circus’s stiltwalker-promoter, standing on 21/2-feet extensions of his 5-foot, 8-inch frame. He’s been in the circus 16 years, so long he claims to have sawdust – used to cover the ground under the big top in the old days – in his veins. Charles “Zeke” Koehler, a retired real estate man who lives on Clearwater Lake, came to enjoy the show with his wife, son and four grandchildren – Annalisa, Layla, Autumn and Livia. He has a blood connection with the circus too: His second cousin was none other than Clyde Beatty, the late, great lion tamer and circus performer. The C&W circus, sponsored by the Annandale Area Chamber of Commerce, entertained more than 500 people at the first show and about 300 at the second before dismantling everything and heading out Monday morning to its next stop. Show a success Chamber president Marlene Young said it was a financial and entertainment success. Stilts, towering over a group of more than 50 people, described the action as Barbara, one of the circus’s African elephants, helped a crew of men raise the 6,000-pound, 10,000-square-foot tent Sunday morning. “We do this 229 days this year in a new town every day,” he said. But it was the first time the C&W circus has been to Annandale. “Fifty or so of us make up the circus,” he said, with people from South America, Mexico, Europe and across the United States. “It is like a big family.” Later Stilts, 41, explained he was helping a friend who was sponsoring the circus in his hometown of Groveland, Calif., when he met the owner, who invited him to join the show. He left Groveland the next day, Stilts said. But when he’s not stiltwalking, working the concession stand, taking tickets and making announcements with the circus, he returns to Groveland where he runs a roof and gutter cleaning business. He sometimes actually uses stilts to reach the high spots in that job, he said. Bringing happiness “I think it’s just like the Lord wanted me to bring this happiness … to millions over the years,” he said of his circus work. “I love it. You see a lot, entertain a lot, put a lot of smiles on people’s faces, that’s for sure.” Zeke, 78, said he was close to Beatty, his mother’s cousin, from about age 6 to 35. “He was there every year with the Shrine Circus in Minneapolis,” where Zeke lived. “He had his own circus, the Clyde Beatty Circus,” Zeke said, and he made movies too. Zeke spun a few Beatty stories. “He said he’d name a lion after me if I stopped chewing my fingernails,” said Zeke, who figured he was about 12 to 14 at the time. “And he did. He named the lion Zeke. It was the laziest lion he had.” Every time Beatty came to town with the circus, he come over to Zeke’s house for dinner, all dressed up in his circus outfit. All the kids in the neighborhood would come in to take a look. “They’d just stand there in awe. “I was the hero of the neighborhood.” Lions and tigers don’t like each other, Zeke said, and that was fortunate for his famous cousin. A tiger once attacked Beatty and had him down on the ground. A lion, seeing the tiger in a vulnerable position, attacked it, but not before the tiger took a big chunk out of Beatty’s leg. At the hospital, the lion tamer refused to let doctors amputate the leg. Beatty survived and believed the lion had saved his life, though not intentionally, Zeke said.
