How he ran away to join the circus

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus is going dark, and Conrad Hartz of Beaufort is blue.

As a child in Ridgeland whose daddy ran the Coastal Theatre, he got to see “The Greatest Show on Earth” over and over again until it burned a spotlight-sized hole inside him.

He got to see the real show in Savannah in 1955, its last year under the big top.

Then as a Vietnam veteran whose mother wanted him in college, he chucked good sense to actually join the “greatest show on earth.”

Hartz became a sad-faced clown with Ringling Bros. He said he left the show in about a year because his mother was sick with cancer. It was at the Carolina Coliseum in Columbia. He said the circus understood, but it’s not something you can just walk away from.

Even through a college degree, marriage, two children, jobs with TCL, USCB and Sears Roebuck, a divorce, retirement and a granddaughter — the fire of the bright lights never dimmed.

Today, at 71, the show goes on in a cluttered workshop behind his brick ranch house. That’s where he hand-carves puppets from chunks of basswood for ventriloquists.

And he created a 12-puppet circus of marionettes — a show he puts on at festivals around the state. His little circus on strings has a juggler and a skeleton that plays boogie woogie on the piano so hard that his bones fly apart. And a clown that looks like he did when he wore giant green shoes and paired with Buttons the clown to make people laugh at the real circus.

In 1996, Hartz brought an aging Buffalo Bob Smith and his famous puppet Howdy Doody to Beaufort for a show at USCB.

“It was for old children like me,” he said.

Clown College

Hartz didn’t set out to be a clown.

He started badgering Ringling Bros. for a job in business management. Finally, a secretary said he might want to try out for Ringling’s new Clown College.

He already knew how to juggle and ride a unicycle, so he did it. Forty students were chosen from 400 applicants. Ten of them made the show. That was in 1969, four years after he graduated from Ridgeland High School, served in the Marine Corps and dabbled with college.

“It was very intense,” Hartz said. “There was no goofing around, nothing silly. It was a serious school teaching us to make people laugh.”

His roommate, who became Buttons, was a large man. Hartz was smaller. Buttons was the happy clown with a big smile and big eyes. Hartz was the tramp clown with basset hound eyelids and a turned-down mouth. “I was the butt end of all the tricks and that paid off,” Hartz said. “We worked well together.”

Buttons (Leon McBryde) stayed with the show for years, and is now “the best looking Santa Claus you have ever seen,” Hartz said. He also has a business that makes clown noses and other accessories for entertainers.

Hartz said his mother was OK with him chasing the circus.

He comes from German immigrants to the Ehrhardt area of the Lowcountry. He said he was an accident who came along after his parents, Herman and Zenith Hartz, had adopted a daughter.

His mother was a daughter of country doctor John Francis Coleman, and head of nurses at the Ridgeland hospital when they dealt with a lot of grisly wrecks on two-lane U.S. 17. His father ran the movie theater for about 20 years, until it burned in 1954.

That’s where his son learned there’s something else out there besides Ridgeland.

“I had a real pragmatic mother and a father who was a dreamer of dreams,” Hartz said. “He liked the circus. He liked carnivals. He would slam on the brakes if he saw any sign of a carnival. I got about half and half between the two of them.”

Puppets

Blame another movie for the puppets.

It was “Lili” — with the song, “Hi Lili, Hi Lo.”

“I mean it burned down to the core in me and I couldn’t shake it off,” Hartz said. “It got me crazy about puppets.”

He taught himself to do it, giving them each a personality and hand-made, moving eyes.

Hartz said it takes about 80 hours to make one. He said he sells them at a convention of ventriloquists in Cincinnati.

He said he was pragmatic enough to keep jobs, “but all the time I was interested in puppets.”

“This is what I was destined to do, rather than be a Sears man helping customers return stuff,” Hartz said.

Now he worries about the dreams of children who stare at cell phones all day.

“I could see the circus trying to keep up with young kids with smartphones, making the show more cool, making it shorter,” he said. “When they went down from three rings to one, they lost all the razzle-dazzle going on all at the same time, and I could see that the end was coming. Losing the elephants killed it.

“I hate to see all that history go down the drain.”

This story was originally published January 22, 2017 at 3:40 PM with the headline "How he ran away to join the circus."