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Thursday, April 13, 2006

Ed Lentz

The daffodils are out, the birds have begun to return and the ice, snow and chill of the winter are behind us. At least most of the time it seems that way until a late winter storm puts a half inch of snow on top of the daffodils.

This has been known to happen more than a few times. For the most part, one of the ways central Ohio knows that winter is finally over is when we worry less about ice on the roads and more about the wind and rain that comes with warmer weather.

Over the course of the past century, we have come to identify certain customs with the coming of spring. It is the season of Easter in the Christian tradition, and the arrival of the Easter Bunny is awaited with some anticipation.

Even this tradition has evolved in the past few years. Forty or fifty years ago, if one was young and so inclined, a visit to see the Easter Bunny at a local department store was second only to a trip to see Santa Claus at Christmas time. I noted with interest recently that the Easter Bunny is now doing guest appearances at local fast-service restaurants as well. Whether one can see the Easter Bunny when using the drive-through was not made clear by the sign announcing his arrival.

If one travels back to the Columbus of a century ago, the coming of Easter would at once be rather familiar and yet somewhat different as well.

For most of the past two millennia, Easter was and still is a religious holiday. And it was and still is a time for family gatherings as well. In the Columbus of 1906, Easter was celebrated largely in that context.

The primary news of the day concerned the special programming and decoration of local churches and a general cessation of work and business for the day. But even one hundred years ago, some of the traditions more cultural than religious were already becoming popular. Most local newspapers ran articles on how to dye Easter eggs and the fundamentals of how to conduct an Easter egg hunt.

Easter was a day to be remembered with joy and with reverence. In that sense, the day has not changed much at all.

The other big event in central Ohio in mid-April of 1906 has no current counterpart. Early April was when the circus left Columbus.

In the years after the American Civil War, there were a number of traveling circuses criss-crossing America with the widest variety of performers, both human and animal. It was a tradition that can be found in most cultures and on most continents and America was no exception. One of the most successful of these traveling shows was assembled by four brothers named Sells from what is now Dublin.

It is difficult to imagine today not only how entertaining the circus was but how important it was as well to early America. This was a world without radio or television, much less the Internet. It was a world with few automobiles and an easy means to go wherever we pleased whenever we pleased to find the entertainment we wished.

In this America of one hundred years ago, entertainment came to us and it came to specific times and places. Larger towns like Columbus had theatres which held forth with traveling troupes of singers, dancers and professional thespians.

But much of America was still a very rural place and for the small towns and villages where most of America lived, the biggest single event of the year was the day the circus came to town.

Of all of these circuses, most did not do all that well. The hours were long and the rewards, monetary and otherwise, were meager. But the Sells Brothers prospered.

They did it by understanding both the circus and America better than many of their competitors.

They learned that the railroad was changing America. They replaced the horse-drawn circus wagons of early America with a circus on rails.

They also understood that anybody in the business of entertaining people had to offer something the other circuses did not offer. The Sells Brothers Circus made a habit out of outdoing the competition. Most importantly, it did this with elephants.

To people living in America a hundred years ago, an elephant was the essence of elegant, exotic wonder. People had read about elephants as they had read about dinosaurs. If one was eight or 88 in 1906, an elephant was a wonder to behold. Most big circuses had at least one or two elephants. The Sells Brothers had a lot of them. It was this sort of thing that made the Sells Brothers Circus worth seeing, over and over again. And people did just that.

Each year, the Sells Brothers Circus and later the Adam Forepaugh-Sells Brothers Circus went on the road for most of the warmer months. But as winter approached, the circus came home to Columbus. Across the Olentangy River from the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College -- now The Ohio State University -- the circus went into winter quarters at a place that soon came to be called Sellsville. Baby animals born in the winter were kept in the basement of one of the Sells Brothers' homes at the corner of Buttles and Dennison Avenue near Goodale Park.

For several generations of local residents, the day the circus left town for its annual tour in early April was one way Columbus knew that spring had really arrived.

The other way most of us know that spring has arrived is with the coming of April 15 and the due date of a variety of taxes -- federal, state and local. It is with some feeling of both envy and wonder that we should note that people in central Ohio in 1906 did not share in this reminder. There was no income tax.

The government of the United States had imposed an income tax from time to time in its early history. But in 1895, The United States Supreme Court had declared that an income tax then in practice was unconstitutional. It would not be until 1913 that a Constitutional Amendment would make a federal income tax possible once again.

So for this one brief moment in time, central Ohio paid many other kinds of taxes. But our forebears did not have to line up before midnight at the Post Office munching Easter candy with their horses and buggies and tax returns in hand. Some traditions belong exclusively to our own time.

Ed Lentz writes a history column for ThisWeek.