Unicorns, giant steers and more tails

It wasn’t billed as the Greatest Show on Earth, because that phrase was already taken by a certain famous circus.

So the Giant Menagerie, which claimed to have the world’s rarest animals, came up with a slight modification on the theme. It called itself the Greatest Show of Its Kind on Earth.

The supposedly unique collection of critters arrived in Charlottesville on May 28, 1946, for a six-day stand. It set up shop on Preston Avenue near Monticello Dairy and Peyton Garage.

The show’s biggest draw was Belgian Bob, said to be the largest living horse. Bob was 19½-hands tall and weighed more than 2,750 pounds.

The proprietor of the exhibit also claimed to have the smallest horse on the planet. The tiny equine was just 28 inches tall at the shoulders.

The show also boasted of having the world’s smallest mule and the largest steer. The bovine’s measurements were taken from stem to stern and came in at more than 9 feet in length. It weighed a reported 3,005 pounds.

The venue was fronted by brightly colored signs intended to lure in customers as well as shield the attractions from the prying eyes of the nonpaying public. Some passersby might have suspected a bit of exaggerated blarney was being tossed into the mix.

One particularly bold declaration heralded the amazing opportunity for paying customers to stand eyeball to eyeball with the world’s only living unicorn. Seeing a mythical creature, alive or not, would have easily been worth the 35-cent adult ticket or the two bits that kids had to pony up.

The owner of the show must have realized that ticket sales would be more brisk if he could establish an element of credibility. He cleverly did this by citing that some of his animal oddities had been featured in Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

The extremely popular newspaper cartoon feature captured readers’ imaginations by featuring strange and bizarre items that were true, but often hard to

believe. Robert Ripley came up with the idea and started drawing the single panel cartoons in 1919.

Dramatic artistry and a reputation for being truthful resulted in Ripley creating some of his own jaw-dropping believe-it-or-not statistics. For example, during the first three weeks in May 1932 the artist received more than 2 million pieces of fan mail.

Equally impressive was the estimated 80 million daily readers who were said to have enjoyed the syndicated feature during its peak of popularity. The authenticity of the brief vignettes were ensured by a host of researchers, the most prolific being Norbert Pearlroth.

Ripley hired Pearlroth in 1923. Apparently the researcher found his calling, because for the next 52 years he worked at it six days a week.

Pearlroth would spend at least 10 hours a day in the New York Public Library searching out interesting and unusual facts for Ripley to draw. These tidbits were often about animals.

One account had to do with a deaf cat owned by the famous English novelist Charles Dickens. It said that the cat would remind Dickens that it was time for bed by snuffing out the candle on his desk.

Another cartoon panel told of a miniature horse named Twinky that served as a guide animal for the blind. Twinky wasn’t in the show that visited Charlottesville, but touting the fact that some of its unusual animals had been celebrated by the famous cartoonist certainly didn’t keep people away.

And like many successful traveling shows, this one tried to have something for just about everybody. For folks who weren’t particularly interested in oddball animals, there was Nebcurhah.

Old Neb was said to be a 3,000-year-old man from the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Although it wasn’t clarified in any of the advertisements that ran in The Daily Progress, one could reasonably suspect that the old gentleman was a mummy.

And if all else failed to bring in customers, there always were the monkeys. The price of admission included a visit to the Funny Monkey Trick House.

The star of this attraction was Bobbie the “educated monkey.” There were also a number of “bouncing baby monkeys.”

Ben the gnu also could be seen as well as Zebu the sacred ox from India. Zebu wasn’t the first holy ox to make a run at fame and fortune.

Back in the late 19th century Rajah the sacred ox was motivating people to spend a dime to see him. This famous sideshow attraction had been born in Katmandu, Nepal, in 1872.

Rajah’s claim to fame was that he was said to have been born with an arm, hand and fingers. Drawings of the creature shows the appendage being attached to its shoulder.

Apparently Zebu was simply sacred, because the advertisements didn’t mention any other noteworthy oddities about it. Still, the giant menagerie provided a pretty good value in return for some pocket change.

And the people who ran the show worked hard for the money they brought in. There were continuous performances from noon until 10 p.m., and they certainly would have been kept busy just caring for the many animals.

For people who had never seen a camel, water buffalo or llama, much less a gnu, these were worth seeing. Perhaps the show wasn’t as great as the hyperbole made it out to be, but that was part of the shtick.

And at the end of one advertisement flyer, the owner put things into what was probably a more truthful perspective. His final words on the subject were that the exhibit was “truly a good show.”