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procession of elephants and wagons up North Main and across Cleveland to Barbour Street. People waved from their porches.
On the lot an even larger crowd waited, and the bosses of each department pulled stacks of passes from their pockets and hired on as many

    able bodies as they could find. The cookhouse went up first, with its long picnic tables and red-checked tablecloths, and then the horse tent. Hammer gangs drove stake lines for the big top, and for the sideshow, dressing and shop tents.
    The second section had arrived by now, and the six poles of the big top were going up, fifty-seven feet tall and capped with flags. Roughnecks rolled out the canvas sections on the ground and began lacing them together with rope from the centerpoles out to the stake lines. The sun was higher now, and the men smelled like work.

Around 11:00 A.M., city building inspector Charles Hayes arrived on the lot but saw the big top was nowhere near ready. The city didn't legally require Hayes to inspect the tent; it was a custom. He left, saying he'd return in a few hours.
The crew finished lacing and inserted sidepoles around the edge of the tent, then with the help of two elephants straining against their padded harnesses hauled the canvas to the top of the centerpoles. Inside, in the suddenly welcome shadow, teams placed two rows of shorter quarterpoles around the oval and a half-dozen elephants working solo raised them, shoring up the roof. Once done, the canvasmen came back outside and tightened or guyed out the ropes holding the sidepoles.
    The big top that was now up was new this year—the largest tent in the world, the circus claimed. It had come out of the sail loft the first week in May, and like its predecessors had been waterproofed with six thousand gallons of white gasoline and eighteen thousand pounds of paraffin. Seventy canvasmen had helped to melt the wax in cauldrons, thin it with gas, stirring it with paddles, and then sprinkle the mixture on the laid-out sections and spread it with brooms. The process was cheap and effective. The show had treated their tops like this for years.
Now that it was up, John Carson's ushers started setting out the jacks and stringers and bibles for the red grandstand chairs, the planks of the blue bleachers seats. In the grandstands they marked the row numbers on the risers with chalk, 1 through 18.
    As the circus worked, city police nosed around the lot, searching for runaways, eyeing the teenaged hands. A detective collared one boy and hauled him away. He'd just signed on in Providence; now he was going back home. The cops were also looking for a runaway from Portland with a history of mental problems. Roy Tuttle, his name was. It didn't mean anything to the men they asked; there were too many transients coming through, and some of the hands prized their anonymity. One man knew his longtime partner on the canvas crew only as Reefer and liked it that way, the fewer questions the better. The cops kept wandering, leaning in to show the picture of Tuttle.
    Even more annoying to the men were the towners who turned up to watch them sweat, getting the most out of the show without spending a penny. They saved a special name for these rubes: lot lice.

Meanwhile, out on Barbour Street, Department of Health officials were checking the hot dog and orangeade stands residents had set up on the sidewalk. The North End was solid blue-collar, Italian and Jewish families crammed into three-story tenements. People turned their yards into parking lots for a few extra bucks. It didn't look like the circus was going to make the matinee, and everyone was disappointed, not just the kids.
Downtown, the ambassadors of the circus were taking care of business. Legal adjuster Herbert DuVal called on the superintendent of buildings at city hall and paid the $500 rental fee in cash. John Brice met with Hartford police chief Charles Hallissey and arranged for both uniformed and plainclothes protection on the lot and a