According to family oral history, my great grandfather, Theodore Wells Dooley, who was born in Virginia in 1847 (this area became West Virginia during the Civil War), joined a circus as a clown, probably sometime after 1867. He also may have worked as a blacksmith and carpenter in the circus. The story is that the circus went broke somewhere in the area of Jasper County, GA and he stayed there, married in 1876 and raised a family there. Are there any records of clowns or circuses that went out of business in the early days? Jim Fazekas jnjfuzzy@mindspring.com