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THE ACADEMIC JUGGLER

Clubs Have Come A Long Way

by Arthur Lewbel

Last Summer I visited one of the last strongholds of old vaudeville - the Catskills.

Near the lobby of the "Raleigh" resort were photos of performers that have worked there. Some were famous (Milton Berle), most were not. The one juggler depicted was Jay Green, a person to whom many jugglers have reason to be grateful, though most don't know it.

Thin clubs are called "European" style, descended from straight sticks, like those juggled by Rastelli and other Europeans. Fat "American" style clubs are modeled after gymnastic swinging clubs, which were very popular in the U.S. around the turn of the century, during this country's previous fitness craze. The early juggling club makers Van Wyck and Harry Lind made clubs out of a variety of woods, including maple, covered with canvas. Stu Raynolds, a chemical engineer, designed the first high-tech juggling club, molded of fiberglass.

What about the clubs that most jugglers use today? The standard molded-plastic-outside / wood-dowelinside / plastic-fiIm-finished / tapedhandle / rubber-tipped club was invented by Jerry Greenberg, a.k.a. Jay Green. My first set of purchased clubs were Jay Green Europeans around 1974. They're short, fat, and heavy by modern standards, but a non-juggler wouldn't notice any difference between them and today's top products.

In the late 1970's Dave Finnegan's new Juggle-Bug company produced what was essentially an elongated plastic bottle, complete with a screw on plastic cap. Though relatively hard to juggle, at three for ten dollars JuggleBug's first clubs were like the model T Ford - so inexpensive that anyone could afford them.

When the popularity of juggling exploded in the eighties, the demand for high quality clubs encouraged new manufacturers - Brian Dube, then Todd Smith, then Renegade. The competition has increased quality and brought down prices. In 1975, a single Jay Green club cost $17. Adjusting for inflation, that is equivalent to about $40 today. In contrast, Todd Smith's top of line "satellite" club (my personal favorite) goes for around $25. Continued improvements in club technology will no doubt lead to still better and less expensive props for the next generation of jugglers.

Speaking of history, the computer museum in downtown Boston shows a movie about the history of computers. Included is a clip of 1950's scientists demonstrating one of the first uses of computers - a simulation of the path of an object thrown in the air. Computerizing the basic physics of thrown objects under gravity is so straightforward that almost any juggler who learns to program computers is tempted to write a juggling program.

Fifteen years ago, when students weren't given access to computer screens (we all used punch cards and teletype machines then) Dave Ledoux at MIT wrote a clever computer program, the output of which was a deck of punched cards. When you flipped through the deck of cards, the holes moved in a three or five ball cascade!

Of course, juggling programs today trace out patterns directly on the computer screen. The main drawback of the few juggling programs I've seen or heard about is that they require the user to completely describe a pattern (in computer language) before they can show it. As a result, they can't really be used to invent new patterns. What I would like is a program that starts with a simple pattern like a cascade, and lets the user freely distort it (perhaps with commands like "move where the right hand catches three inches higher left) to create something new.

James Frank (Silver Spring, Md,) wrote to me, proposing that people interested in juggling software should get together, perhaps via CompuServe or some other network. Anyone who's interested please contact James. Also, I can be reached by electronic mail on Bitnet:

The Academic Juggler is an occasional feature of Jugglers World, and is devoted to formal analyses of juggling. Anybody who has suggestions is encouraged to write to me (Arthur Lewbel, Lexington, MA).