• July 21, 1980
• Vol. 14
• No. 3

Lookout

Tom Gugliemo clowns around like any 16-year-old. The difference is he gets paid for it. The youngest of 26 clowns with the Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey Circus, Gugliemo spends 11 grueling months a year on the road with the Greatest Show on Earth. He was only 8 when he began teaching himself to juggle and survive pratfalls in the basement of his Northport, L.I. home. His parents, a tavern owner and a secretary, didn't take it seriously, but at 14, Tom applied to Ringling's "Clown College" in Venice, Fla. He was told to come back when he was 17. Undeterred, he showed up a year later to audition with 300 other aspiring clowns at Madison Square Garden, and he so impressed the judges that they waived the minimum-age rule. He was signed for a three-year apprenticeship at $155 a week. "We took him because he's a natural," explains Ringling Bros, president Irvin Feld. Now the 5'5", 102-pound teenager dons patchwork costume and freckles 13 times a week to become the "Naive Kid," a character he created. When the greasepaint is off, Tom, who quit North-port Junior High after the ninth grade, continues his studies by correspondence. He ultimately hopes to act in movies or on TV, which he figures would be easier than the six-day-a-week circus grind. "My biggest hobby," sighs the Naive Kid, "is sleep."

Lynne Jewell, 20, is America's top woman single-handed sailor. She achieved that title by winning five out of eight regattas last year and being the highest-ranking Yank (and No. 4 overall) at the 1979 women's world championships. En route to that finish, the plucky skipper saw her 13'11" Laser flip over seven times during the seven-day event. Born in North Hollywood, Lynne is the daughter of an industrial filmmaker and his ex-wife, Lydia, herself twice the Southern California single-handed champ. Lynne started sailing at 6 with her twin brother, Bill (now a professional motorcycle driver), and won her first race in 1975 in a Sunfish off Hyannis, Mass. She was all-scholastic in four sports in high school and was a Junior Olympic hurdler until she "got tired of running." Though nicknamed "Wild Woman" on the sailing circuit for her pranks ("I love to start food fights"), Lynne is a sober enough student to have made dean's list at Boston University this year. She will graduate in special education in 1981 and expects to go into teaching the handicapped. In the meantime she is training against men to get ready for the women's world title competition in Denmark next month. "The guys push the limits," she explains. "Even when I lose I learn something." Yet Lynne adds that "there was a time when winning really got to my head. But my mom said, 'Look, kid, why did you take up sailing? To have a good time, right?' I am."