IT’S THREE O’CLOCK ON A FRIday afternoon and the boys in the back room at Merlin’s Restaurant are swapping gossip and tall tales and playing Liar’s Poker. Across Sarasota Bay out on the beaches, the ...

When John Ringling arrived in Sarasota in 1911, he was riding high. His family’s circus had survived tough competition in the 1880s. By 1907, the family was able to buy out the Barnum & Bailey Circus ...

If you haven’t visited the John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota lately, then you’re in for a surprise. And I’m not talking about the showcasing of the museum’s acclaimed Raphael tapestries ...

The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus has been entertaining audiences for a long time. Its history goes back 146 years — to about the time when professional baseball emerged and before ...

Legend has it the designs were first drawn on an old shoebox. Sitting atop a hill in northern Jefferson Township nearly a century ago, Alfred T. Ringling, one of the original Ringling brothers, ...