Oakley, the Tree Man
2022 marked the 50th year that Cliff Spenger has been performing annually at Renaissance festivals. His journey has taken him through several transformations and has resulted in a character that is not only entertaining, but one he uses for societal change.
Cliff was born in Oakland, California and in High school a Reader’s Digest article on Outward Bound caught his attention. He saved up the money from his job mopping floors before school to attend the mountaineering school in Colorado which initiated his appreciation of the outdoors.
Spenger’s interest in rope walking stemmed from a television show – T.H.E. Cat, which featured a cat burglar who would walk a rope between buildings. He worked on this skill for four years until he heard that rope walkers were performing at the Northern CA Renaissance Pleasure Faire. A friend was doing Indian dance on a low rope and he joined the act on a higher rope with a sword on his head. He continued working both of the CA Pleasure Faires through most of the 1970’s.
Cliff mentioned the Faire Entertainers bus that was provided for participants from the Northern Faire to ride to the Southern show. He said the long hours became “like a dream” leaving Oakland Friday evening at 7:30, performing all weekend and then arriving home in the wee hours Monday morning.
One day at the Southern Faire, Mary Evanoff, a patron photographer, gave him some “beautiful photographs” she had taken of him. She later sold him a portrait that she painted from one of them. They started dating and since she was a gymnast already, she worked on her juggling and rope walking to join him in his show. They married and had a daughter, Mary, who they added to the act at the age of 8 days old.
Spenger had auditioned for the Ringling Bros. Barnum and Bailey Clown College in 1975 but was turned down because he was “overqualified” due to the juggling and ropewalking abilities he had already developed. They did, however, hire him to teach those skills. He took advantage of his position to attend the history of clowning classes.
He heard about King Richard’s Faire in Wisconsin from crafters who sold there. And in 1981, Cliff and Mary were hired by John Mills to work the show. Jeff Siegal saw them there and hired them for Minnesota. They soon added Texas, Largo and Sarasota to their schedule. Eventually they appeared at Arizona, Maryland, Georgia and Carolina until 1992 when they split up and Mary started booking herself as a solo act.
Four years later, Cliff decided that he wanted to come up with another character to appear at the end of the day. He thought using the stilts would be a good idea and had leather armor made for a ten-foot-tall knight but never used it. He was intrigued by a picture of the Green Man in a book owned by a stone carver he knew and decided to be a walking tree version of the Green Man.
The Green Man made his first Renaissance appearance at TRF in 1996. Jeff Baldwin, the entertainment director, liked it so much that he wanted to drop the ropewalking act and have the tree man appear all day. Not quite ready to retire his rope walking stage show, Cliff declined. The following year, in Arizona, Jeff Siegal wanted a full-time tree man as well and Spenger made peace with his new identity at Renaissance festivals.
While surfing the internet he came across Wangari Maathai, an environmental advocate who had created jobs planting trees for women in Africa. He contacted her Green Belt Movement, sent his tree man video and pledged to help them. They posted it on their media page. After seeing the video, Paul Coleman contacted Cliff about a walk he and his Wife, Konomi Kikuchi, were on. They were walking from Hong Kong to Beijing promoting the greening of the 2008 Olympics. Paul invited Cliff to join them on their walk and to a project in Mongolia reclaiming forest from the Gobi Desert by annually planting hundreds of thousands trees on its perimeter.
Tree Man, Inner Mongolia
The following year Spenger’s tree man also joined them to promote the first International Day of Peace in Okinawa.
Since then Cliff has taken on his own projects. He performed at an elementary school and convinced the students to plant 200 trees. He is working on an online course hosted by the tree man to encourage kids to connect with nature more and spend less time on their electronic devices. During the pandemic he took courses so he could start marketing for renewable energy companies.
He still enjoys performing at Renaissance festivals as a “Joyous time in an outdoor setting” and believes that they provide a “relief” and “a safe place to escape” for patrons. An interaction with Oakley in the lanes will also provide them with a lasting memory of their day at the festival..
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