Sunday Morning with Francis Beverly Kelley: A Fleeting Brilliance Almost Gone the Moment it Arrives ...

There are only two days in the circus business: today and tomorrow. Always the course of the show's bloodstream lies a hundred or so miles ahead where cheerfully and competently it will repeat today's routine. Only the name of the town, the weather, and the spectators will alter the mammoth animated mural which is circus day in America.

Bright ribbons in the coiffure of springtime are the brilliant pictures of snarling wild animals, tumbling acrobats, pretty circus girls, and laughing clowns that quicken the pulse of kids from eight to eighty. These are the trumpet notes of spring expressed in color; and yet the men who bring about this magic on barns and fences and in store windows act so inconspicuously that their "art work" seems to have been executed by sheer magic.

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