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The Juggling Arts

The mother and daughter team of Mary Ann Schabinger and Dorothy Hardwicke established their San Jose company in 1979 out of affection for fellow jugglers. They offer a wide variety of props, including hard to find mouth sticks, ball and stick clubs for beginners, torches with fiberglass wicks, rolling globes, juggling tricks and an assortment of spinning plates, clubs, rings, balls and publications.

They were inspired and encouraged by Homer Stack, the 96-year-old veteran vaudevillian. Characteristically for this juggling-before-business team, they devoted most of their questionnaire to Stack.

Renegade Juggling Equipment

With shades of black light posters, patched jeans, beads and Grateful Dead music, this fluorescent, effervescent band of anachronistic anarchists was founded at the 1982 Santa Barbara convention and have been a welcomed force in juggling ever since.

Renegade Juggling Equipment was established the next year with the guidance of members conversant in mathematics and plastics technology. Their ability to manufacture all components in-house has enabled them to maintain a stringent watch over their products, which include 25 standard clubs in a dazzling array of decorations - nuclear missles, L.E.D. lit, spectrum rings, numbers clubs, swinging torches and a variety of less esoteric props.

Like Jugglebug and Jenack Circus Renegade combines product sales with service to the community molded from their own anti-establishment credo.

They have been involved in numerous incidents, and have lately enjoyed immense success at conventions with their Beggar's Banquet and Club Renegade.

Todd Smith

As a student at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, Todd Smith got tremendously excited about juggling in 1979. He ordered a set of clubs, but had to wait nine months for them to arrive. "I put two and . two together and realized there was a demand for equipment that I could meet," he said.

Raised in a family of engineers and woodworking tinkerers, he began building clubs while still in college. When he graduated in 1981 he returned to his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, and set up shop. Business sputtered along for about three years, but he says "it's gone haywire" since 1984, growing at a much faster rate than he imagined possible.

That's largely because of a wholesale program of sales to a couple of hundred

stores and export of equipment to Europe, which now accounts for 20 percent of sales. He moved to a bigger shop in August 1985 and has just bought a 6,000-squarefoot building to expand again.

His biggest sellers are European clubs, but he also markets everything from rubber chickens to silicone balls to cigar boxes. Other big sellers are his one-piece molded Elan line of clubs and a new molded ring.

Of his three employees, the latest hired is an experienced cabinet maker who is helping develop a new emphasis on specialty items such as prop cases and custom-made props. Prop making is everything for Smith, who spends countless hours in the shop. It's not an easy business, but he says he can't imagine a better time than working on the cutting edge of juggling technology.

Zen Products

Speaking of yin and yang, Ann Worth founded her Zen Products in 1977 while living across from the Flying Karamazov Brothers in San Francisco. Their routine about imaginary zen products like Milk of Amnesia, Consciousness Raisin' Bran, and Blank of America inspired her name. Their need for good balls inspired her product.

Worth likes the fact that the word zen can mean anything from meditation to a moustache to a moray eel, leaving a nicely open-ended name for her enterprise. She works in her Victorian flat with bolts of fabric hanging from the walls and a back room crammed with balls, sticks and birdseed. Worth also serves the community through juggling schools at the Marin Renaissance Faire and teaches at other street festivals and parks.

These and many others represent the people who support "Juggler's World" and serve the juggler with their products and philosophies ranging from the high tech to the low tech. Thanks to them all!