Friday, March 10, 2017

Andrew Kassino's Giant Telephone

  Popular Electricity and the World's Advance from 1913 has a great article describing

KASSINO AND THE GIANT PHONE

     Circus people on the road - as becomes happy-go-lucky folk engaged in a most healthful occupation - have no end of fun among themselves.  This season the employees of the largest American circus have been particularly regaled by the antics, "behind the scenes," of a dwarf clown, who has adopted as the vehicle of his merrymaking a giant toy telephone instrument - one of a number of such instruments which are carried by the show for use in the latest trained elephant act.  The clown who has been tickling the risibility of his associates, and particularly the circus electricians, is Andrew Kassino, a diminutive comedian known by sight to almost every American circus goer and who has lost none of his agility, although he is no longer young.
     Kassino varies his burlesque somewhat, posing one day as a lineman and again assuming the role of an operator, although he is so short in stature that it is only with effort that he can get within hailing distance of the transmitter.


Andrew was part of the Kassino Komics aka Kassino Midgets troupe (sometimes spelled "Casino"), started as a duo by Joe Kassino as a duo in 1908, grew to three by 1910,  and had as many as eight in the mid 1920s.  The group worked for many circuses during the first half of the 20th century.

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