This poster is one of a handful that were produced in the 1920s and 30s to promote the great liberty horse trainer and performer Rudy Rudynoff (Rudy Gebhardt).
Rudy Gebhardt was the son of a German acrobat and circus wardrobe mistress who grew up on various European circuses before he changed his name to Rudynoff while performing in Switzerland during World War I. When the war ended, Rudy and his new wife Erna purchased their own horses and were featured performers on Circus Knie, coming to the United States in 1923.
According to horse trainer and performer Johnny Herriott, they arrived with Ernest Schumann who had been hired by the American Circus Corp to train horse acts while the shows were at winter quarters in Peru, Indiana during the winter of 1923-24. His apprentice was the young Rudy Rudynoff.
During the 1924 season Schumann and Rudynoff each presented a ring of liberty horses on the John Robinson Circus.
John Robinson was purchased as part of John Ringling’s acquisition of the American Circus Corporation in 1929 and Rudynoff eventually made his way to Sells-Floto and then Ringling Bros and Barnum and Bailey where he performed in the center ring in the late 1930s. With Clyde Beatty’s departure from Hagenbeck Wallace at the end of the 1934 season, several of Ringling’s acts were shift to the Hagenbeck Wallace Forepaugh-Sells Circus in 1935. Rudy Rudynoff was one of them.
After the Ringling strike in 1938 Rudynoff and his family worked in a variety of circuses, horse shows, fairs and rodeos.
Forty years after he arrived in the United States Rudy Rudynoff retired in 1963 after spending three seasons at “Frontierland” in Ocean City, Maryland. He died four years later in Baltimore at the age of 75.
-C. Berry