Word: floto
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Died. Frank Wilson Braden. 76. cigar-puffing circus press agent, a walking, talking thesaurus of big-top ballyhoo to whom clowns were not clowns but rather "red-nosed, chalk-faced worshipers of the bluebird of happiness." who variously trumpeted the thrills of the Gentry. Sells-Floto, Ringling Brothers-Barnum & Bailey, and Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers circuses for half a century; of pneumonia; in Providence...
...scandal-a good deal of it true-that they kept a loaded shotgun in their office to discourage reader complaints. As the Post grew in power and prosperity, its proprietors branched into other fields; the Post became the first and last U.S. daily ever to own a circus (Sells-Floto), run a burlesque house and sell coal...
Between such spasms they ran the Sells-Floto Circus, beat the rival Scripps-Howard Rocky Mountain News into grogginess, forced Denver merchants to buy Bonfils' coal. They kept a shotgun in their red-carpeted office (which the underpaid staff called the "bucket of blood"), once were both wounded when an irate reader beat them to the draw. Even that affray was grist for their newsmill. Blustered Bonfils: "A dogfight in Champa Street is better than a war abroad." The maxim was drilled into George Creel, Gene Fowler, many another bright pupil in the Post's hell-for-leather...
...signed last year with the bankers with whom his ancestral tents were then in pawn. Mr. North retorted that Mr. Whitehead had stubbornly declined to face depression facts. Meantime, shrewd Mr. North was reported preparing a neat finesse. To the Ringling-owned, non-union Al G. Barnes-Sells-Floto Circus in the West would go such attractions as Gargantua the Great, the wire-walking Naittos, the Flying Concellos, perhaps Mr. Buck. With them would go the Ringling Big Top, upping the smaller show's capacity from...
...that unless help came soon the animals would be mercifully killed in lethal gas chambers. At that, money began to pour in. Actors Katharine Hepburn, Richard Dix, Stuart Erwin, oldtime silent-film Adventuress Kathlyn Williams, others donated checks from $10 to $100. Some 700 animals in the Barnes-Sells-Floto Circus were put on limited rations, the savings given Zoopark. The first of three Sunday benefit performances at the Zoo brought $1,000. Los Angeles schoolchildren scraped together $9 in pennies and dimes. At week's end a new flood-of paying visitors -brought the cheering prospect that...