His many stories of circus life appeared in Collier's, Holiday, Harper’s Bazaar, Saturday Evening Post, True, Saga, and Seventeen.
Mixing sawdust and grease paint with the sparkling tarnish of the music hall next door to his childhood home, Ballantine developed a lifelong hunger for show business.
After graduating from high school, Ballantine found work in a sign shop, painting posters for local movie houses, and after several years, began attending the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, beginning his long career as an artist/illustrator and later writer.
While working as a clown, he met his wife, Roberta Ballantine, a graduate of Pomona College who left California immediately after receiving her BA to go to NY where she worked as an actress and comedian before being hired by RBBB as the slender 6-foot-tall (1.8 m) “Snow Queen” who rode about the tent in the payoff float, a horse-drawn carriage with Prince Paul, the midget king.
From 1969 through 1977, Ballantine served as dean of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, a school that offered the secrets of humor and comedy, and demanded much from its students, yet gave even more.
Bill Ballantine will always be remembered by artists and circus folk alike as Murray Horwitz described him in 1999: a man who “proved that it was OK to put real ideas into your comedy” and “showed you that there were different kinds of intelligence and that acrobats and wire walkers could be just as witty in their way as poets.”[3]