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Bill Ballantine, a well-respected writer and illustrator of circus subjects, was also a professional clown. A prolific writer, Ballantine contributed (circus ) and travel essays to major magazines. His many stories of circus life appeared in ''Collier's,'' ''Holiday,'' ''Harper’s Bazaar,'' ''Saturday Evening Post,'' ''True,'' ''Saga'', and ''Seventeen.'' Ballantine also authored 10 books, including (''Wild Tigers and Tame Fleas'' ), (''Horses and Their Bosses' )', and (''Clown Alley'' ), which chronicles his years as dean of the Clown College. ==Life== Born in 1910 in Millvale, Pennsylvania, Ballantine was introduced to circuses by his father, a member of the Mystic Shrine and once mayor of their home town. Mixing sawdust and grease paint with the sparkling tarnish of the music hall next door to his childhood home, Ballantine developed a lifelong hunger for show business. After graduating from high school, Ballantine found work in a sign shop, painting posters for local movie houses, and after several years, began attending the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, beginning his long career as an artist/illustrator and later writer. Through the years, he worked for a succession of employers, including the ''Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph'', Associated Press, ''PM,'' ''Punch'' and during WW II, the Office of War Information for which he designed and drew pro-democracy leaflets that the US government air-dropped over the continent. Ballantine also accepted freelance illustration and writing assignments that often provided him the opportunity to hitch rides with circus caravans. He traveled with Ringling Bros Circus during the 1946 season and then, finally, in 1947, he decided to bid a temporary farewell to the workaday world of publishing and run away to the circus. He “joined out” as a clown with the biggest of all big tops, Ringling Bros. and Barnum Bailey Circus. It was his great fortune to become a member of the Ringling clown alley with the august of the augustes—Felix Adler, Paul Jerome, Paul Jung, Emmett Kelly, and Harry Dann—as his working colleagues. While working as a clown, he met his wife, (Roberta Ballantine ), a graduate of Pomona College who left California immediately after receiving her BA to go to NY where she worked as an actress and comedienne before being hired by RBBB as the slender “Snow Queen” who rode about the tent in the payoff float, a horse-drawn carriage with Prince Paul, the midget king. In her silver spangled skin-tight costume with her ostrich plume headdress, she looked “nine feet tall” to Bill who walked behind the float dressed as a sailor carrying a buxom mermaid. From the waist up, he was mermaid, his clown face framed by long blond curls and a golden crown topped by a single pink feather. A double strand of three-inch (76 mm) fake pearls hung down over pearl studded breasts. Rings and bracelets slipped over his elbow length white cotton gloves, and in one hand, he carried a gold-filigree hand mirror. From the waist down he was sailor with white cotton duck pants reaching to red striped socks and oversized clown shoes. Strapped to his front was the false fish tail of the mermaid and strapped to his back the false upper half of the sailor. As a final touch, the false arms of the sailor’s torso draped around his own waist, and there he was, a sailor carrying a mermaid. After Bill and Roberta married in 1948, they both left the life of sawdust and spangles, but Bill soon returned, first to design a complete new midway for the show, including sideshow banners and menagerie cage designs, and then as a chronicler of the backlot and the show. Over his long career as a writer/illustrator, he published nearly 100 articles on circus and travel and illustrated regularly ''True magazine’s'' backpage feature “Strange but True” with his graceful and warmly humorous pen and ink line drawings. In 1994 sixty four of his large circus drawings were exhibited at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art Circus Gallery in Sarasota, Florida, where Bill and Roberta settled after raising a family of five children in Rockland County, NY. Then later by the City of Gainesville, Florida. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Bill Ballantine (illustrator)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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