But even with that moderate practice regimen, he was juggling five hoops at age eight. He learned many valuable lessons about juggling during those early years. He remembers practicing in a circus building in Copenhagen, where there was a very narrow and very high dressing room. He said, "For a juggler that is a very good thing because you have to put the things in exactly the same point. This is one of the most important things, juggling on the place. Otherwise, I could not juggle on one leg spinning two hoops."

 

His first performance came in May 1943, at the age of nine. The Bramsons were attending a children's performance in Goteburg, Sweden. At the end of the show, the emcee asked if anyone in the audience could perform. "And I screamed, 'Yes, I can! I can!' And this was the beginning of my juggling career," Bramson recalled.

He juggled five hoops, and didn't miss anything. "My parents were very proud," he remembered.

 

Shortly after that, he joined his parents' act, and first experienced the stress of performance. "You go on stage and it is the toughest thing in the world," he said. "I was very nervous and I always went right to the rest room while waiting to go on stage. My mother was very nervous that I might not come back in time!"

 

As a young juggler, he developed practice habits that even outdid his parents. After coming home from school, he would rehearse for eight or nine hours, sometimes wearing the skin off his palms. He said, "I was a maniac. Sometimes at 11 or midnight, my mother would come to me and say, 'Now stop, Bobby. That is enough now.' I was crazy for this."

 

Once he had mastered his parents' act, he developed a new practice philosophy. "I always rehearsed new tricks - but I never put them in my act. I always tried something new. I tried nine hoop juggling, but I never performed it because it was never 100 percent."

 

He does not mind that he was unable to perform nine hoops, even after 10 years of practice, for two reasons: It has made his seven-hoop juggling seem like nothing, but also because jugglers "are not in the Olympic games."

 

He explained, "This is what I don't like, when we say, 'Now we are juggling nine, now we are juggling 10, now we are juggling 11. Forget it! This is not the main thing of show business. I know artists who do acts juggling three balls that are fantastic. It's how they juggle and how they present three balls. That's the difference between art and the Olympic games. There you have to be the fastest, or the strongest, or whatever. But not in art. Artists entertain people. And make them happy!"

 

Bob performed with his parents across Europe, at music hall after music hall, until 1953. Then came that terrible night at the Apollo Theater in Dusseldorf, Germany. His father did the performance, did his last trick, and then had a heart attack and died on stage. "For my mother and myself it was very bad," Bob said. "But for him... he had been an artist for 53 years and was performing in front of 3,000 people, and the curtains closed, and that was the act."

 

His father's death did not stop the act. Bob and Gerti went on the next night, and eventually found that performing as a duo was not so difficult. His mother had always been the choreographer, and with her careful planning, there was never a dead moment. "When you still have a partner, she always can help you. We did double tricks. The whole act was like a picture, going one thing into another, with never a moment of emptiness," he said.

 

Bramson found that the most important thing about having a partner was having someone there to help out when he dropped a prop. But in 1964 his mother retired and he found himself alone on stage. "It started getting really hard to work all by myself, to have a driving act," he admitted.

 

He developed his signature drop line out of the blue one night on stage during a difficult moment. He explained, "For my very last trick the hoop was supposed to go around and into the little screen. But the stage was very difficult, and I missed it once. Then I missed it three times, and I didn't know what to do."

 

On his fourth attempt, sweating with anxiety, he released the hoop and watched it

slowly roll off, in the wrong direction. "Out of desperation, I said, 'Johnny, come back!'" And the hoop did!