By Carl Kozlowski
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Hansen, who’s 89, sports an upturned mustache and meets me wearing a tie patterned with extravagantly colorful birds, one of his workers perched on his head. He received his first bird after performing a wedding in Minneapolis in 1946. The bride’s mother gave Hansen’s first wife a canary from the brood she was raising, and soon the Hansens were training it to climb a ladder (dubbed “Jacob’s ladder” in the shows) and ride a bicycle to the joyous strains of church hymns.
“My wife would start playing songs and the canary would burst out singing. We got more canaries and trained them to sing along, and soon we started getting calls from other churches asking to see the canary choir,” recalls Hansen. “Newspapers started coming, and then a Minneapolis radio station offered us a free weekly show if we used our canary choir.”
At the shows Eunice kicks things off by introducing the birds. One of them singsongs, “And now, presenting…Dr. Hansen!” Hansen’s sermon of God’s love plays off the birds’ antics. When one knocks on a tiny door, he asks, “Is that Jesus?” A parrot wolf whistles, and he responds in mock horror, “Hey, hey, none of that!” During an informal performance in his garage, Hansen asked me to light a prop house on fire. The roof aflame, a macaw hopped onto a tiny fire truck and started pushing, banging its beak into a button that set off a siren. Arriving at the house, the macaw tore open the front door and another parrot jumped out, squawking. The message, Hansen says, is to have faith. To further illustrate his point, he pulls out his trick Bible, which shoots out flames to show the fire of faith instilled by the Holy Spirit.
That was nothing compared to the tragedy that struck as Hansen drove to a gig in 1951. The birds’ trailer caught fire on the highway and all 27 of his birds died in the flames. Hansen suffered burns to his scalp trying to rescue them. He methodically acquired and trained new birds until the show was back on the road.
