Small Indiana town embraces its circus identity

Will Higgins | The Indianapolis Star

Show Caption Hide Caption Small Ind. town's odd circus obsession Peru, Ind., is known as the "Circus City," and with good reason. (Will Higgins / The Indianapolis Star)

Each year%2C Peru%27s 200-member youth circus practices for months to perform full three-ring shows.

This year%27s shows will be performed between July 13 and July 20.

The city%27s Big Tent identity stretches back to the 1890s.

PERU, Ind. — Megan Brehmer actually does this, has been doing it almost daily since March, and here in this town that calls itself "Circus City" it's considered normal behavior: She's 40 feet in the air, standing on the tiniest little platform. Then she jumps. "That's my favorite part," she says.

As she plummets, Jimmy Sunday, a teenager, catches her by her ankles, swings her pendulum-like, then releases her to another teen, Adam Kirk, who's hanging upside down on another swing. Adam grabs Megan by the wrists, swings her back and forth, then releases her so that she's careening freely through the air.

At this point, Megan harbors strong hope that another swing is in the proper position so that she can grab onto it. Almost always the swing is properly positioned, but when it's not, even working with a net, such a fall is painful, involving scrapes and burns. Megan's toes are still somewhat sliced up from the last miscue.

But it's not a big deal, certainly not a deal breaker, says Megan, who at 13 is Peru's youngest flying trapeze artist. Though not by much: Lexi Singletary is 14; Tiffany Rush is 17; Victoria Brooks is 18 but was just 11 when she first did the stunt.

The girls are part of a 200-member youth circus whose four months of practice culminates with full-on three-ring performances Saturday through July 20. The show - an annual rallying point for the residents - goes on despite a tornado that tore through Peru on Wednesday, ripping up trees, destroying a grocery store, tossing cars around and knocking out power to the town's west end. Clean up is underway.

Many Indiana towns have a distinguishing feature: Columbus has its architecture, Shipshewanna its Amish. But for cultural identity and tradition, Peru's long-standing embrace of the old-time Big Tent circus performance is unmatched. It goes back to the 1890s, when huge circuses lumbered across the country and needed a place to stay in the winter. The place needed to be centrally located with easy access to rail roads. A half dozen circuses chose Peru.

By the time those professional circuses cleared out, in the 1940s, they'd rubbed off on the town, had given it a worldliness. For example, in 1937 Peru's visitors included the daughter of the debauched "mad monk" Rasputin, confidante of the last Russian czar. Maria Rasputin was by then an employee of the Ringling Brothers Circus. While in Peru she was mauled by a bear, though not fatally.

Throughout the years performers married locals and established roots in Peru. Locals joined the travelling circus and later came home with stories. All these years later Peru clings to its "Circus City" designation fiercely. It has an annual youth circus, the Peru Amateur Circus, the Circus City Festival and parade, and the International Circus Hall of Fame Museum, not to mention the fantastical bits of circus memorabilia on display at the town's history museum.

There's the skull of an early 20th-century circus elephant named Charley, who during a casual outing turned on his keeper and drowned him in the Mississinewa River. Revenge was swift; Charley was shot dead — at close range, it would seem because the bullet holes in the skull, clearly marked with arrows, are tightly packed. The pachyderm's skull is exhibited a few feet away from a large Cadillac that once belonged to the songwriter Cole Porter, born Peru, in 1891.

What are the odds that a town of 14,417 would, just in the last few years, produce two people capable of making a decent living being shot out of a cannon? They're slim. But in Peru, birthplace of Brian "The Human Fuse" Miser and internationally renowned aerialist Jon Cole, such a thing, while something to be proud of, is not a huge deal.

Children in Peru learn circus skills the way other kids learn soccer. Every year some 200 of them try out for the town's youth circus. They practice in a high-ceilinged old lumber mill in the heart of downtown. They become jugglers, unicyclists, clowns, aerialists and tight-rope walkers, just as their parents did.

"Multi-generations in the youth circus are common," said Megan Montgomery, whose mother helped start the youth circus and who herself spent the spring of 1959 as a contortionist.

"It's our heritage here," said Sandy Ploss, a youth circus volunteer and former trapeze performer. Ploss is the mother of a trapeze performer and granddaughter of the famous lion tamer Clyde Beatty, believed to be the first person to put lions and tigers together in one ring.

Peru "is just a place that appreciates" the circus, said Pat Kelly, a clown since 1958 and the son of aerialist Eva Moore and the superstar clown Emmett Kelly, inventor of the sad, hobo-ish "Weary Willie" character famous for that sweeping-up-the-spotlight-with-a-broom bit.

Circus performers, in some circles, have a somewhat gamey reputation. By some counts the cliche of a person "running off and joining the circus" suggests a less-than-wholesome pursuit of adventure.

Peru, where human cannonball is a prestigious occupation, discounts this line of thinking. "Circus is all about commitment and discipline and hard work, all good qualities," said Kathi Greene, former trapeze artist and mother of aerialist Jenny Cole, who spent the last two years in China, with the Chimelong International Circus, firing her husband, Jon Cole, from a cannon. The Coles are former school teachers. They recently returned to Peru where their daughter, Olivia, 7, is in her first year in Peru's youth circus.

Parents here do not worry their children will be led astray by the circus, but they do fret over the circus' time commitment. It's as demanding as traveling soccer. Practice starts in March and goes through July, four days a week, four hours a day. In Peru, school starts in early August, so circus families must forgo summer vacations.

Jeff and Laura Rush were successful in discouraging their two older children from joining the youth circus, but their third child, Tiffany, would not be denied. Today Tiffany, 17, is one of the stars, one of just a half dozen flying trapeze performers. "It's true you give up everything," Tiffany says, "but you...fly."

You also sometimes wipe out. There are frequent injuries, mostly minor, mostly sprained ankles. The other day Hevin Smith landed wrong and sprained her ankle after doing a back flip off a teeter board. (How it works: a girl stands on one end of a teeter-totter, a guy jumps hard on the other end, and the girl launches). On Tuesday Hevin wore an air cast and walked with crutches. "It'll hurt, but I'm definitely performing Saturday," she said, Kerri Strug-ishly.

The year before last a girl was hurt badly on the flying trapeze when a strap malfunctioned and she sailed into the bleachers. She required hospitalization but recovered.

Most of Peru's youth performers are girls. It's not because the circus is considered unmanly, said Colin Quinn, a 19-year-old fly-catcher. A fly-catcher is a guy who hangs upside down from a swing and catches the female trapeze fliers.

Boys are rare in the Peru circus, Quinn said, because circus practice conflicts with summer football workouts (and football trumps circus because football players have at least a chance of getting a college scholarship. And, "In circus you have to wear tights."

Quinn plans to attend college in South Dakota on a soccer scholarship. His long-term plan is to teach physical education and become an athletic director. He joined the circus professionally only as a fly-catcher, which he concedes is a job that's nearly impossible to land.

Only a handful of Peruvians will actually "join the circus" even though such a life would be "awesome," in the opinion of Tiffany Rush, who besides being headstrong is an A student and likely college-bound.

"I will definitely miss it when it's over," which it will be in four years. The youth circus age cut-off is 21.

Which means Megan Brehmer has eight more years to fly.