Sunday Morning with Francis Beverly Kelley

10/22/11 -- To members of the Kelley family: I am pleased that this post has brought you such pleasure, and thanks for sharing. I still feel lucky to have met Mr. Kelley, who so graciously agreed to pen a foreword to my first book, Behind the Big top.

"Spangled and big and red and gold, the circus smells of peanuts and cotton candy and pink lemonade and wild animals. It is as American as hot dogs.

It pops up some gray gray morning with is billowing tents and flags whipping in halyards on a horizon that wasn't there a few hours ago. With sights and sounds to quicken the heartbeat, it makes its visitors kin to Alice at the moment when she stepped through the looking glass into the realm of pure fantasy.

Here today and gone tomorrow, it is a state of restless American achievement, a pioneer peddler with magic in its pack and a timetable in its pocket --- a spangled, sparkling girl with a date in a town a hundred miles away tomorrow morning."

-- from his story, "The Wonder City That Moves by Night," in The National Geographic, March, 1948.

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