The Greatest Show on Earth.
With his booming voice
and gentle manner,
Trevor Bale, Master of the Ring,
commands the mighty tigers to
leap through flaming rings of fire.

Trevor Bale was a Dane by birth and a circus performer by ancestry – born in 1913, while his parents were performing with Cirkus Schumann. When he was 3, he rode a unicycle and at 10 entered a ring with a lion in South Africa.

During his lifetime, he was ringmaster, animal master, acrobat, aerialist and clown. He was fearless in the ring. Big cats and little dogs and all species of four-legged creatures listened, obeyed and performed. John Ringling North brought him to America to train the first riding tiger from the wild. He appeared with big cats until he was 78 and with Liberty horses until just days before he died at 81.

His children combine the grace and theatricality of their dancer-mother with the skill and daring of their risk-taking father. Gloria and Dawnita create equestrian acts of lyrical grace. Bonnie, the youngest, is a singing ringmistress. Elvin, at 11, practiced to be an aerialist, alone in a darkened tent before dawn. At 16, he performed his electrifying heel-catching trapeze act. Intrigued by the mechanics of wheels and motion, Elvin devised ever-increasing feats of daring.

Known as the Phantom of Balance, he rode his motorcycle on a cable stretched between tall buildings and balanced, blindfolded, on a spinning Wheel of Doom. As the Human Space Shuttle, he was shot from a cannon, until an accident of timing turned the daredevil into an agent and teacher of other performers.