This is a little known story.   It happened not so long ago… July 23, 1957…. as a matter of fact.

The place was Plineyville, West Virginia…. and a circus came to town.  It was a big dang deal for Plineyville.  Not a great deal happened in those parts.  I’ll tell you that much right now.

Most of the shops locked their doors at 5 p.m. sharp.  The only thing to do in the evenings was to stroll down to Paget’s Ice Cream Parlor… and have a double-dip of Millie’s Fudge Ripple.

So when the Mantegna Brothers’ Traveling Circus and Grand Menagerie came to town… it was one big whack-a-doodle-do.

They had everything… elephants, jugglers, knife throwers, trapeze artists, magicians, lions, and tigers, and bears… oh my.

Everyone in Plineyville was elated.  I mean.  They were going to shoot a guy out of a cannon!

Well….

The night before the circus was to open, the lock on the lion’s cage door was unlatched.  To this day… no one is quite sure how it happened.  A mystery.

But the lions escaped.  And… they were angry lions.  The kind that had spent too much time in cages… and the kind that didn’t like standing on pylons and getting hit with whips.

So when they got loose, it spelled trouble.  They went on a rampage at the circus.  They ate the lion tamers, the mind-readers, the trapeze artists… just about everybody.  They even ate the guy that worked at the corn dog stand.

The only ones the lions spared were the circus clowns.  Yep.  As it turns out…. the lions said they tasted funny.

“Meddle not in the affairs of the dragon; for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.” – E.P. Lenwood