| Eva Iola Merriman was no Indian princess, but she was a good talker. A piano-playing child prodigy for silent movies, she found her true calling as a "talker" with her parents' medicine show. By 16, she was a wife and mother, and when her husband died, the widow became a traveling "Princess."
Farmboy Ben Davenport learned about horse-trading from his uncle and about the traveling life from gypsies who passed by the family farm. After a year of college, he took to the roads, riding the rails across country. While making tires for Goodyear, he and a buddy got a dog and Ben taught the pooch to climb and jump from a ladder. With some canvas, sidepoles and banners, they had themselves a circus. Their sign read ADMISSION 15¢, but they only charged a dime to see the "high-diving dog" and an aging mare they called a "miniature horse." In time, Ben and his dog were in the Seils Sterling Circus and when he joined the medicine show, he married the "Princess."
Starting a circus of their own, they called their new enterprise Davenport's Society Circus, to give it a little class.
Ben and the "Princess" had a daughter, Norma Pearl the Silver Whirl, who napped behind the calliope when she was a baby, made her debut as an aerialist at the age of 8 and became an equestrienne when she married into the Cristiani family of riders.
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