John Phillips Thomas was a working class man from a working class family of first-generation Welsh immigrants. He started life with little wealth and few advantages of birth. With a good mind, exceptional skills and determination, he became one of the world's greatest jugglers by the age of twenty-one.On the day he was scheduled to begin spreading his fame abroad, he suffered a crippling injury that shattered his dream of circus stardom and forced him to learn to walk again on a new and different life path.For more than half a century, through two world wars and a deep depression, he mastered new careers as a salt plant machinist, a poultry breeder, and a dry farmer, all while maintaining his juggling skills and teaching them to members of his family.His accomplishments are today remembered by his descendants, who now number hundreds, and in the national Museum of Juggling History where his story and some of his equipment now reside.