Yup - I Saved the Circus

YUP, I SAVED THE CIRCUS


I bought Susan Gruen’s New York Times bestseller, “Water for Elephants”, as a beach book and it took me couple of years to get to it. I knew absolutely nothing about the book other than the review quotes on the back cover (“Compelling….Riveting…. Sheer Fun…. Engrossing”) so it took a back seat to other titles until last week when I needed a book for a perfect day at the Jersey shore.

I enjoyed the book, even if it’s not great literature. The narrator-hero was a student at my alma mater, Cornell, so that piqued my interest, but the real virtue of the book is its depiction of life on a traveling circus during the Depression. The author deeply researched the circus world of the twenties and thirties and artfully recreated the complex and strange social environment of traveling circuses.

But the book reminded me of one of the more unique cases of my legal career: The Day I Saved the Circus. It’s a good story. On an early summer Saturday morning in the early 80’s my friend Yves Veenstra, the celebrated trial lawyer at the Parker McCay firm, called me and said he had just been hired to represent the Cole Brothers-Clyde Beatty Circus which was in town and they had a huge problem. The SPCA had seized the circus lions and tigers and there was a risk that the 3 p.m. matinee would be cancelled unless the big cats were returned. He admitted that he didn’t have a clue on how to do this and thought that I, as a former assistant county prosecutor, might be able help.

The simple truth is that I was also clueless but as a sole practitioner I needed the gig and had the confidence of a young trial lawyer that we would think of some way to solve this unique problem. So I shaved, put on a pair of khakis and a clean shirt and met the wily and witty Mr. Veenstra at his Mt. Holly office at 9 a.m. We made a few telephone calls to find out where the cats were being housed and then we researched the sparse law on the powers of the SPCA, which said that the SPCA could confiscate animals, but not how to get them back. So we would be writing on a truly blank legal slate. That did not deter us.

We came up with the bright idea that we should file something like a writ for habeas corpus, which in Latin means “produce the body”. The only problem is that neither us had ever done a habeas writ. So we found a copy of motion to reduce bail in a criminal case and followed that format and typed a short memo that wildly threw out concepts like “procedural due process”, “maintaining the status quo”, “the public welfare” in seeing the circus and other legal bromides and mumbo jumbo.

Our next problem is that it was a Saturday and the courts were closed. But Yves knew that Judge Dominick Ferrelli lived in town, so we called his listed telephone number and explained our predicament. He told us to come to his house in fifteen minutes and we walked the few blocks to his home where we found him in his kitchen drinking coffee and doing a crossword puzzle. He took us to his den, read our papers, gave us this “Are you kidding me?” smile, but agreed to order the temporary release of the cats conditioned upon the posting of security on Monday morning. But there was a problem: We hadn’t prepared an order. Yves and I looked at each other blankly and told the judge we would be back in a half hour with an order, but he said “Don’t bother, I’ll do it.” And he did. He was an old newspaper reporter and he went to his manual typewriter and typed a perfect order which he signed and sent us on our way.

Now we were faced with the problem of how to execute the order. How do you get twenty lions and tigers from the SPCA and return them to the circus grounds? We called the circus manager and he put together a crew of animal handlers and a couple tractor-animal trailers which followed us to the animal preserve in Ocean County where the cats were being held. We drove in convoy like fashion to the preserve and quickly located the cats. They weren’t hard to find. They were growling and mewing like crazy in the summer heat and the smell of rotting meat, cat urine and feces was overwhelming. The ruckus that we made woke up the animal handler’s who had gone with the cats. A group of incredibly dirty, smelly men, some virtually toothless, climbed out of the storage boxes beneath the tractor’s cab which they used for sleeping quarters. I hadn’t expected this at all, and I immediately felt a pang of conscious since it appeared that the cats lived a truly hard-scrabble existence. But Yves and I had signed up for the duration and we found the SPCA’s head guy and served the order on him. He looked at us like we were aliens, which is pretty close to how we felt, and it was clear that no one had ever pulled this stunt before. He and his cohorts took the order, spoke among themselves and told us they were calling the cops.

So we stood in the heat for fifteen minutes until two patrol cards arrive with officers wearing those macho sunglasses with the reflective lenses. They first went to the SPCA crowd, take the order and approach us and ask, in essence, “what’s this c**p?” We tell him it’s exactly what it says, an order from a Superior Court Judge telling the SPCA to release the cats, and if you don’t want to enforce the order, please let us talk to your supervisor. They go back to the SPCA crew, engage in a bit of animated discussion, and return to us, saying, “Hook up the rigs and get those cats out of here.” The truckers and handles get to work and in short order the cats, still growling and mewing, head back to Burlington County with plenty of time to make the Saturday matinee.

I had largely forgotten about this escapade, so I have to thank “Water for Elephants” for rekindling it. I made about $500.00 for my time and troubles, but what I really wanted was a big circus poster. I never learned how the SPCA complaint was handled, but candidly, I was glad to be done since I felt sorry for those big beasts. They deserved better.

Now that I have told you how I saved the circus, in a bit I’ll tell you how I saved the farm.
Tom Barron

***The information included in this newsletter is not, nor is it intended to be, legal advice. You should consult an attorney for advice regarding your individual situation. We invite you to contact us and welcome your calls, letters and electronic mail. Contacting us does not create an attorney-client relationship. Please do not send any confidential information to us until such time as an attorney-client relationship has been established.