Alton Barbour

THE FOUNDERS

Mabel Rilling c. 1920

To put this account in the right time frame, it is interesting to consider that the two founders for what eventually became the Denver Imperial Flyers trapeze club were both born in the 1800s. Mabel Rilling was born in 1883 and lived until 1972. Granville Johnson was born in 1897 and lived until 1956. Both were faculty members at the University of Denver in the Department of Health, Physical Education and Athletics. Mabel Rilling, a dancer, was in charge of health and physical fitness for female students at a time when women wore bloomers, long dresses and black stockings. Very few at that time imagined there would be female athletes or women doing gymnastics or acrobatics, or that they would actually sweat. That was so unfeminine. Mabel Rilling was an advocate for active, physically fit, confident young women. Granville (he was called “Granny” from a very young age) Johnson was in charge of health and fitness for the male students. Mabel Rilling received a faculty appointment from Chancellor Henry Buchtel in 1909; Granny Johnson received a faculty appointment as an instructor in 1915 when he was an undergraduate and only eighteen years of age. Both received both bachelors and masters degrees from the University of Denver. She was his senior by fourteen years. Mabel Rilling had been on the faculty for six years when Granny Johnson was appointed. They worked together in the same building, the alumni gymnasium, and the year following Granny Johnson’s appointment to the faculty the two of them co-produced the first “gym circus” in 1916. So the parent organization of Imperial Flyers can be traced to that date. It was the beginning of the circus club at the University and first of many circus performances which were presented in the March of each year. How long ago was that? It was before the United States entered WWI, before prohibition, and before women got to vote. The flying trapeze came along five years afterwards in1921. Most likely this makes it the oldest continually operating trapeze group in the world. Eventually the Imperial Flyers became the parent group for a number of other trapezes and flyers around the world.

Granville Johnson

There are some “side bars” which might explain the founders’ interest in circus skills and performances. Since Mabel Rilling was a dancer, she wanted her female students to learn to dance in a variety of styles and also to perform. She wanted them to put on shows. Why learn to dance if you can’t show an audience what you have learned to do? Her students had strength, balance, form, and agility, so they put on shows for the University community and the public. They had their own all-female dance recitals and performances. Granny Johnson was a wrestling champion both in college and in amateur competitions after college. Newspapers accounts from those times quote him as saying that in order to condition himself for his sport, he began to do gymnastics to make himself a better wrestler. Ultimately he came to believe that no matter what the sport was, an athlete would be better at that sport if he/she had gymnastic or acrobatic skills. Secondly, during the depression he supplemented his salary during non-teaching periods as a trapeze artist in now defunct circuses. So he had skill and experience as a flying trapeze performer. The Rocky Mountain News in March of 1922 has an article explaining that Granny Johnson, a physical education professor at the University of Denver fell 40 feet to the gymnasium floor when the flying trapeze rigging he was working on collapsed. One reason that story is interesting is that Granville Johnson survived the fall with no ill effects. Another reason is that it documents that there was a flying trapeze in the old alumni gymnasium as part of the circus equipment in 1922.

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