SOMETIMES THE CIRCUS COMES TO YOU.

Baraboo's Circus World Museum use the former Ringling Brothers winter quarters.  When he model show takes place at the museum, it is often set among the restored wagons, a number of which have appeared in movies or been paraded through Milwaukee streets.

Those wagons often come to the museum in rough shape, and somebody has to do the restoration.

Imagine what it must have been like. “I love thinking about that kind of stuff,” Harold “Heavy” Burdick said. “Can you imagine being a kid in Baraboo when the circus was right here?” Heavy is 66. For the past 48 years he’s been working at Circus World in some capacity or other: working the grounds, fixing up the circus wagons. He takes pride in his work, in Circus World, in the magic of it all.

“It must have been something. You’re in school and you look up and see an elephant walking down the street.” Heavy smiles. Heavy kicks at his work boots and adjusts his yardstick-themed suspenders. “That’s what gets me,” he said, “being a part of something like that.”

His enthusiasm for the circus and his lifetime of work preserving it, is infectious.

Preservation is preservation, whether it's an electric railway or a circus parade.

Here is the C.P. Fox Wagon Restoration Center on the Circus World campus. It’s got all manner of things: paints, sheets of wood, scaffolding, ladders, hammers, pliers, chisels, nails, screws, drills, saws, sanders. All that, and more, like merry-go-round horses; ticket booths; illustrations of fearsome lions; and, of course, circus wagons.

Yes, and that's what's in the restoration center, which is where the final work goes on. The inventory is in a few places the press and the public generally do not go.

When Circus World opened to the public in 1959 it was home to six circus wagons. It now is home to 265 of them. It is the largest collection of authentic circus wagons on earth.

“I’ve had my hands on every one of them,” he said. “My hands on every last one of them.”

He was a farmhand, decades back. He grew up on a farm. He didn’t want to work on a farm much. So, at the age of 19, he came upon Circus World.

“It just hit me,” he said. “It still does.” He’s worked the grounds ever since.

“If you get yourself in the right place,” he said, “you’re sunk.” He laughed. “That’s a good kind of sunk.”

He’s since sunk deep roots into circus and the Baraboo community.

“This is a ‘we’ shop, not an ‘I’ shop,” he said. “I’m just carrying on what others did before me,” he said. “Some of the best people in the world I’ve met here.”

The circus people, and the circus modellers, tend to be more neighborly than the model railroaders, although there is a lot of cross-participation in those hobbies.

“All the guys who do the circus, I can’t say enough about them,” he said. Guys like Wilbur, Tim, Bill, Marv, Leonard. “I’ve learned something from everyone I’ve worked with.”

He’s currently learning something about his latest project – a wagon called #44 Gollman Brothers Lion and Tiger Tableau. “The Gollmar Girls – they’ll get a kick out of me calling them that – gave us the money to fund the restoration,” Burdick said.

The “Gollmar Girls” are Sandy and Gail. They’re in the winter of their lives. “We are probably the only third generation family members of the original Gollmar Brothers Circus that we know of,” Sandy said.

The Gollmar Brothers Circus operated out of winter quarters on Baraboo’s Second Avenue from 1891 to 1916.

The wagon Burdick and his team are restoring, doesn’t look much like a wagon at present. It looks like it’s barely been touched, except by decay, since 1916 when the circus ended. It’s disassembled, dingy, dinged up, stripped of paint and anything like the magic of a circus.

Circus wagons were often cast off, or perhaps wound up in some farmer's shed. At least many of the interurban cars that have been brought back to preservation service might have been used as summer cabins.

“One season could do a wagon in,” he said.

Being a wagon in circus’s heyday was no easy day. Nor is it easy to restore something that comes in shambles. But, from ashes arise Phoenixes.

“It takes time,” he said. “It takes dedication. This place is personal for me. I take this place personal.”

There are still itinerant circuses showing, although they travel in trucks and motor homes, not on trains with parade wagons. Find yourself a circus and go to it.