Timothy J. Holst
Timothy J. Holst enjoyed a long career in the circus. He graduated from the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College in 1971. He toured as a Keystone Kops clown before becoming the singing ringmaster in 1973. He later became general manager of the Red Show, performance director, production coordinator, and special consultant to Kenneth Feld. In 1984 he became vice president of Talent and Production.
He spent the last two decades of his career traveling through over 160 countries as a talent scout and making deals with then-Communist countries to hire performers and enter into cultural exchanges. An article in The New Yorker written by Fred C. Shapiro quoted a Western diplomat who recalled being “welcomed in a gher near the Gobi Desert.” The diplomat added that “we were far away from any road, and I asked the shepherd if we were the first foreigners he had ever received. ‘The second,’ he said, and he showed me a card left by the first, a scout from Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey, who had been there a few months before.” It was Tim Holst.[1]
Holst died on April 16, 2009, while on a recruiting trip in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Holst was born on October 9, 1947, in Illinois. He studied drama at Ricks College and Utah State University. While performing summer theater in Yellowstone, he was discovered by a traveling promoter for Ringling Brothers who offered him a place at the Clown College in Florida.
He had served as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to Sweden, and was consequently fluent in Swedish as well as Spanish. He could converse “passably” in Russian, Mandarin, French, and Portuguese. Feld said that Holst introduced performers to American society and “became involved in these families’ lives at every step of the way.”[2]
Holst married Linda Wilson and she often traveled with him. They made their home in Sarasota County, Florida, and had three children. He was posthumously inducted into the Ring of Fame in 2013.
