Howard Tibbals’ World's Smallest Circus Finds

Sarasota, FL, December 6--The "Greatest Show on Earth" in Howard Tibbals' world is also the smallest, with its diminutive circus acts, tiny spectators and a "big" top that measures just about 4 feet tall, according to the Lakeland, Florida Ledger. It is a magical world more than 50 years in the making, its seeds planted in Tibbals' imagination as a child when he watched the circus roll into town. He has since handcrafted nearly 1 million pieces to make up his miniature circus, which will soon have a permanent home at the John and Mable Ringing Museum of Art in a grand $9 million building. The Tibbals Learning Center -built with a $6.5 million donation from Tibbals, the retired head of a Hartco-Tibbals Flooring Co., a successful flooring company and now a unit of Armstrong world Industries -is scheduled to be completed in January 2006. When it's done, the display also will be another milestone in the renaissance of the Ringling estate. Museum officials said the tiny circus is central to the effort to create a collection of artifacts that will be a tribute to the American circus. Visitors will be able to see Tibbals' 1/16th-scale miniature circus fully assembled in an area that's large enough to park 11 school buses. Dubbed the "Howard Brothers Circus," it will depict a circus coming to town on rail cars, complete with its sideshows, a parade of exotic animals and a big top with 7,000 intricately carved folding chairs. Tibbals, 68, began the painstaking installation in November. "It's going to take me an entire year to do what they did with 1,200 employees in just hours," he said during a recent interview in the new 30,000-square-foot center. "How in the world did they move that stuff every day? An awful lot of muscle, both human and animal." The miniature circus has been on display a few times before, including at the World's Fair in Knoxville in 1982 and at the National Geographic Society in Washington. But for most of its existence, it has been in storage at Tibbals' home in Oneida, Tenn.