"Any Luggage, Sir?"
As an undergraduate at Dartmouth, Paul Binder '63 loved European history. "It was something I couldn't get out of my blood," he recalled, sitting in the Hanover Inn coffee shop shortly before he was to join his troupe for their final day's performance on the green. "But I wanted to see it first-hand, to see those almost magical places we read about in [Prof.] John Williams' class, and have a chance to explore Rome and Paris and Trieste with my own eyes and ears. So I went overseas and traveled from London to Istanbul and back to Paris. It was there, at the Casino de Paris, a classic, small European circus, that my career began to take shape and I knew what I wanted to do with mlife." What comes across, even in casual conversation, is identical to what comes across in the Big Apple Circus ring before a rollicking audience an outpouring of enthusiasm, an almost evangelical fervor for the circus and its glories.
This is no scam, no hastily contrived apology for a way of life probably not even five Dart- mouth men or women have "bought." Au con-traire. It is more akin to conviction, to a belief that there is a profound value in the traditions of the circus, and in what it has to teach us about ourselves. According to Binder, the cir- cus evokes a special magic that transforms the world. "Our magic," he says, "is not illusion, but real. That guy out there Qn the wire is really walking just as the guy flying through the air is really flying. And whether primitive or advanced, civilization has always recognized that circus performers are real people doing extraordinary things. So you might say and I don't think you'd be off base at all that one of our purposes is to reveal that extraordinary nature of human beings."
As ringmaster, president, and artistic director of the Big Apple Circus, Paul Binder has a family of 90 to take care of, a school to operate in downtown Manhattan, and a groaning budget to balance. But he's a juggler by trade and everything seems to come naturally. After 15 minutes with him, you walk away with the feeling that if he called back one afternoon with the advice that today would be the right time to buy AT&T, you'd be on the phone to your broker as soon as he hung up asking what your margin requirement would be on 100 shares. He's a hustler no doubt about it full of himself, a street-wise New Yorker, a philosopher of sorts, a Dartmouth man who didn't come back to Hanover for 18 years. "Eighteen years???" "Yeah, that's right. I wanted to feel that when I did come back to this place, I was bringing something back with me. You know," he said as he pushed himself away from the table, "Hanover is a jewel, a cut above the rest." For a guy with a Dartmouth AB and a Columbia MBA, Paul Binder hasn't exactly followed the proverbial straight and narrow. But then again, there aren't many Big Greeners who return to the Plain with ten overstuffed vans, a tiger, and Toto the elephant for baggage.
