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Chapter 1, Part 3
One of the first performers on the bars from Eastern Michigan was George or “Bill” Hulme; his performing name was the Great Zeno. He was born in Saginaw Michigan on August 23, 1858. He died on November 22, 1933 and is buried in Saginaw. He was one of the pioneer gymnasts and was both a barist and a flyer (on the trapeze). He and all of the other earlier performers lived near sawdust, near the saw mills. Hulme, like the other gymnasts, was a great all around acrobat. He went from performing on the ground to the horizontal (parallel) bars suspended in the air.
Barists were were physically extremely strong from the waist up. Everything was in their chest and in their arms. They had did all their own projection; they had to provide their own force. They did not have a swing to move them back and forth or a wire to walk on. Hulme ran away and joined the circus at the age of 15 and traveled through Europe and South Africa working with various circuses, (Wicksom, Barnum and Phyllis); eventually he switched to work on the trapeze.
