| Early in the 20th century in America's Southwest Robert Hall, a part-Cherokee trick rider with Tiger Bill's Wild West Show, sold needles, tools and sundries from his wagon and ran silent movies, performing between reels.
His son Melvin, a wire-walking, hand-balancing, unicycle-riding vaudevillian, married Aurelia Zavata, a somersaulting equestrienne who came to America with her family of riders to perform with the Cole Brothers Circus.
Melvin taught their sons and daughters to ride the single-wheeled cycles. "The Whiz Kids," they did schoolwork in the mornings, "played" on their cycles in the afternoons and performed in the evenings.
Son Jimmy, much to his father's dismay, preferred bears to cycles. Bear man Bucky Steele encouraged and trained the 11-year-old, and when Jimmy was 14, Ursa, the waltzing, scooter-riding, soda-pop guzzling bear, became his.
Today on their Texas ranch, Jimmy and his aerialist wife, Tepa, breed and raise bears who balance on rolling globes, ride motorcycles and, like Jimmy's father Melvin do handstands in the ring.
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