Charley Van Buskirk celebrates 34 years as ringmaster for the Shrine Circus in Maine

LEWISTON – Inside the ring – where he’s the master – Charley Van Buskirk’s voice stirs the circus experience for a generation.

His descriptions of the trapeze artist’s “rhapsody of flight” or the dog act’s “cavalcade of canine characters” make the performances feel more important. And there’s comfort in his sonorous sound.

“It’s him,” Frances Demers of Auburn told her husband Saturday as she heard that voice, echoing through the Colisee. “He’s the only one we know.”

Since 1973, Van Buskirk has been the ringmaster for the Maine productions of the Kora Shrine Circus.

With that voice and that mustache – spun on the tips into perfect handlebars – Van Buskirk seems like the prototype of a ringmaster.

Hours before a show, wearing jeans and smoking a pipe, the 60-something announcer explained that he avoided the job for years.

He was 3 years old when he started performing, pedaling a unicycle in the ring and on the vaudeville stage in his father’s unicycle act.

His dad avoided the customary banter between the performers and the ringmaster and often sent little Charley in his place.

It was his first taste of talking to crowds.

“I was a boy and my father didn’t like it,” he said. “So I didn’t either.”

When his dad, James, eventually stopped performing, Van Buskirk went on his own. The single act became a double when he married, but every now and then, people tried to make him the ringmaster.

About 1960, he was working in a small “shopping center circus” when its ringmaster disappeared. Folks asked him to fill in.

“I said, ‘I’m a bike act. I don’t do that,'” recalled Van Buskirk. It didn’t matter. “The red tails fit. They handed me a mic and a whistle.”

There were other overtures.

Announcing became a regular gig in 1973.

For a while, he did both, introducing himself while out of sight from audiences before pedaling into the ring.

That eventually went away, too.

“Let’s say I’m pushing 60, but I won’t say which side I’m pushing from,” Van Buskirk said.

Though he has slowed, the job keeps him on the road, traveling the way he has all his life.

“It allows me to be with show people,” he said.

And his role touches each of the others: from the Russian lady with the dogs who wear lion masks and the Argentine contortionist who can literally sit on her own head to the clowns and the fellow who trains the elephants.

He carefully crafts each introduction.

“I don’t talk down to audiences,” said Van Buskirk, who can quote William Blake at length or discuss the millennia-old origins of the word “circus.”

“I’ll use polysyllabic words at times,” he said.

It informs. It also creates an aura, he said.

It’s an aura he seems to inhabit effortlessly, from his top hat to the tall, black boots.

“I must be doing something right,” he said. “They keep asking me back.”