Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 2 · column 2 of 7 · from the scan, no model involved
the Hall of Fame, you have to be retired for five years or dead — and I’m neither!”)
A grandmother of 14 — “They call me Grandma clown” — she was late to answer the call of the big top.
“I started out as a concert pianist. I spent my entire childhood on the piano bench, practicing six to eight hours a day,” she recalls. Her career was launched when she was 16 and she spent the next three years touring the Midwest, playing Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Bach and Beethoven.
“Now the worst thing that could happen to a girl back then was to grow up to be an old maid. And here I was, 19 years old and single. So I did what any adolescent would do — I ran off and got married.”
She and her husband had four kids and moved from her Dayton, Ohio, home to Florida — all in rapid succession. Then he died of lung cancer. She got a job teaching and stayed in the classroom for 25 years.
During that time, she became an out-of-the-classroom expert on Punch and Judy. Word spread, and she was asked by the Circus Hall of Fame in next door Sarasota to pro
85.8%