tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73315996322975997132024-02-06T21:24:32.557-08:00Bloodletters and Bad ActorsA look at the violent, vice-ridden, and nefarious world of early Omaha performing arts.maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comBlogger25125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-2592378923690124652014-07-31T10:10:00.003-07:002014-07-31T10:24:31.114-07:00The Wrestlers<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://farmerburnslifework.com/hangman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://farmerburnslifework.com/hangman.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Farmer Burns</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I have mentioned the Burwood Theater before, but it was
short-lived. It opened in 1906, had a local group of players that included
Harold Lloyd, and then closed in 1908. Then it reopened as something else: The
Gayety.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Gayety’s producer's tastes tended toward lower-brow
entertainment – the theater eventually became a burlesque house. But in their first
years, they offered an entertainment that, while flamboyantly theatrical, is
not something we tend to associate with the stage.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
They offered wrestling.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Let me backtrack just a bit. I can’t provide the entire
history of modern wrestling as entertainment, but I think I can give a sense of
just how wild its early years were. It is important to note that there are two styles
of wrestling in this country: Greco-Roman, which you’ll see in college
athletics and in the Olympics, and a style suitably called Catch As Catch Can,
which developed at fairs in Britain during the Victorian era.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The style was loose and florid, perfectly suited to
performance, and quickly jumped the pond. Carnival wrestlers in the United States
would challenge locals – a risky endeavor, as locals could sometimes be quite
skilled in their own form of folk wrestling, especially recent immigrants. You
didn’t want to spar with a fellow who just got off the boat from Ireland,
as they had the Collar and Elbow style of grappling, which included a lot of kicking and
tripping. You especially didn’t want to go face-to-face with a man versed in Lancashire wrestling, as they had no compunctions about
dislocating your finger. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>OMAHA WRESTLERS </b></div>
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<br /></div>
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Omaha has its own history of
wrestling, which is probably worth its own blog, as we were the home of Farmer Burns
Wrestling School,
which was one of America’s
first training grounds for Catch wrestlers, and were also the homes to such
legendary professional wrestlers as Baron Von Raschke and Lance Cade. People
have been wrestling in Omaha since at least
February 13, 1879, when the Academy
of Music set up a purse
of $1,000 for a match between local boy Clarence Whistler and professional
athlete Andre Christol. Whistler was a powerhouse <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>employee of the smelting works. Christol, in
the meanwhile, had been a gymnast since he was 5 years old, was from France,
and had a father who died in a wrestling match.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Whistler beat Christol, including completely flinging
Christol over his head on two occasions. Christol was relying on the purse,
and, finding himself broke, proposed a rematch, or that he box whoever was
handy. He and Whistler grappled again that month, each winning a round and then
becoming deadlocked for the third round, which lasted a whopping 58 minutes
before the referee declared it a draw, with the whole match lasting one hour
and forty-five minutes.</div>
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<br /></div>
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By the time the Gayety opened, wrestling had developed a bit
of a circuit, with some recognizable names, and even public grudges. No longer
were individual wrestlers pitted against burly locals; instead, wrestlers
grappled with each other. The sport was still new enough that setting up these
matches could be tricky, though, as the World-Herald reported on December 14,
1909. The new manager of the Gayety, E.L. Johnson, had wanted to start with a
real splash: Stanislaus Zbyszko, the Polish strongman who was one of wrestling’s
first superstars, a 5’8” and 260 pound mass of muscle who won the World
Heavyweight championship two times. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Zbyszko was not available, though, so Johnson matched an
enormous Dane from Iowa
named Jess Westergaard against Charles August Fenby, a titanic German. In
writing that echoes later wrestling rivalries, the World-Herald wrote that “Owing
to the bickering that has been going on between Westergaard and the German
behemoth, much professional jealousy has been engendered, and a hard-fought,
vicious battle is bound to eventuate.”</div>
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<br /></div>
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How did it go? About as well as one would hope, as the World-Herald
declared it “One of the hardest fought and most interesting mat battles ever
pulled off in Omaha,”
which is a pull quote I would love to see on a theater poster. I’ll let the
newspaper tell of the fight:</div>
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<br /></div>
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“As was generally anticipated, the Iowan won in two straight
falls, but at that it is doubtful if he ever had a tougher or busier session in
his whole career. Fenby is a big, powerful fellow, and well versed in the
science of the pad, and while he had Westergaard in a score of tight places, he
was unable to pin his shoulder to the mat. One advantage enjoyed by the Dane
was that he had the house with him, while the German had to content himself
with the cheers of a limited bunch of followers. But his showing was remarkable
and he never gave Westergaard a second’s rest – it was hammer and tongs from
the moment they stepped on the pad until the referee slapped the victor on the
back.”</div>
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<br /></div>
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This was just the first of many matches at the theater, as
manager Johnson told the paper. “The next attraction … will be between two of
the most refulgent stars in the grappling firmament,” Johnson said, and, again,
what I would give to see these words as part of a theater’s self-promotion. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Zbyszko did make it to Omaha
in early 1910, but he was too big a star for the Gayety, instead appearing<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>at a series of matches in Omaha’s auditorium, battling, in one
instance, “The Monstrous Frenchman” De Rou’en, with an introductory match
featuring Jensen and M’Cabe, “the heavy weight policemen.” Zbyszko made
repeated trips to Omaha, and just following him
back and forth to Omaha
gives a sense of just how frequently wrestlers appeared in local theaters, as
additional matches are often mentioned. A March 14, 1911 article mentions a
wrestling match at Krug Theater between champion Frank Gotch and another fighter. Like the
Gayety, the Krug was a frequent location for matches. In 1912, another story
discusses a match at Boyd’s theater. For a short time, there didn’t seem to be
a local theater that wouldn’t turn its stage over to occasional mortal combat.</div>
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<br /></div>
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(As an aside, I just want to mention the amazing name of a wrestler
who appeared at Krug in 1913. The World-Herald describes him as a “mat terror”
from Chicago,
and he seems to have been an early example of a masked wrestler. His name?
Mysterious Waffles.)</div>
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<br /></div>
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<b>ONSTAGE AT THE GAYETY </b></div>
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<br /></div>
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Back to the Gayety in1909, the year of its opening, -- well, onward it
went, wrestling on a Saturday, a Christmas show the following Friday (the
William Grew company from St. Joseph, MO,
presenting “The New Magdalene.”) On December 27 the theater brought to town
Rice & Barton, two blackface comedians who eventually founded a burlesque
troupe, and the following day they announced Iowa
wrestler James Corbin had accepted the theater’s challenge to grapple with Iowa wrestler Bill
Hokuff. On New Year's Day, the theater turned over the space to a local reverend, C.
W. Savidge, for a public meeting. Savidge invited Omaha’s perpetual mayor, “Cowboy” Jim
Dahlman, sending him a note reading “We want the sinners there, you know,” to
which the mayor responded he would be there as long as Savidge was as well,
writing “We want all the sinners there.”</div>
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<br /></div>
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In January, the Gayety began running ads in the World-Herald
trumpeting their schedule, claiming “If it’s at the Gayety, it’s good!”
“Devoted to Strictly High-Grade Extravaganza and Vaudeville,” the ad continued,
which, even now, is the sort of claim that would make someone read the ad to
see what qualifies. There was:</div>
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<br /></div>
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CLARK’S </div>
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RUNWAY GIRLS</div>
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Headed by</div>
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JACK REID</div>
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IN THE MAN FROM MAYO</div>
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With An All-Star Cast, Including</div>
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MISS ESTELLE ROSE</div>
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Just from Europe</div>
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FRANK L. WAKEFIELD</div>
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(Famous Dope Comedian)</div>
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<br /></div>
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And that’s a lot to unpack. “The Man from Mayo” was a
burlesque of the style I have mentioned earlier in this blog, consisting of a
comic play filled with comely women. Jack Reid, the lead, was an Irish dialect
comic, while Estelle Rose was a multitalented vaudeville performer from England who did
impressions and sang. Wakefield,
in the meanwhile, made a career out of playing a dope fiend, and the show had
already attracted my interest, but, with the addition of a drug comic, it now
has my attention.</div>
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<br /></div>
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But that wasn’t all! The ad continued:</div>
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<br /></div>
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And for good measure here is</div>
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SOME vaudeville:</div>
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<br /></div>
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Baxter and La Conda Acrobatic Dancers</div>
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Pinard and Manny Musical Comedians</div>
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National Quartette Singers Par Excellence</div>
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Perry and Elliot Seaside Chappies</div>
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And as an added starter</div>
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ELLA REID GILBERT</div>
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<br /></div>
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Seaside
chappies? Buddy, you have just sold a ticket.</div>
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<br /></div>
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So this was the Gayety, alternating between these sorts of
traveling variety shows and wrestling, and the wrestling continued apace. The first
ever black Heavyweight world champion, Jack Johnson, who the World-Herald
called “the most unique figure fistiana has even produced,” appeared at the
Gayety in April of 1910 and the theater made sure to have a few wrestling
matches to accompany him.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Champion wrestler Frank Gotch wrote a letter to the
World-Herald in February of 1911 that sounds like every single pre- and
post-match wrestling interview I heard on television in the 1970s: “As you are
aware, I wrestle Baba Managoff, one of the innumerable Terrible Turks, at the
Gayety theater next Saturday night, February 11, in you city, and while I know
he is big and strong and clever, I am going to throw him so fast that it will
make his head swim.”</div>
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<br /></div>
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“A rough game requires rough work,” he added.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Later that February, Omaha’s Farmer Burns, who was turning
50, retired from the sport on the stage of the Gayety by offering a
demonstration of his wrestling skills, along with Professor Simmer, “the
world’s strongest human,” who both demonstrated feats of physical strength and
gave a lecture on physical training. It was an auspicious event for the Gayety
– Farmer Burns was then a grand old man of wrestling, and had done much to
popularize the sport, and the event signified the end of an era. Burns had
trained Gotch, and he had and would go on to train 1,600 wrestlers total,
including two world champions.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He was also a man with a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>very thick neck. Twenty inches. He used to have men hang him by his
massive neck, and he would affect look of indifference, whistling “Yankee
Doodle.” This is from Wikipedia, and the entry cites a WWE article, and so it
sounds like a tall tale, even if there are photos of Burns with a noose around his neck. But Burns itself claimed it was true in 1931 in a
World-Herald article. He said it had happened in Rockford, Ill,
although the hangman would only drop him eight and a half inches. “I wanted to
go the whole six feet but they were so scared they wouldn’t let me try it,” he
complained.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I mention this because it just makes it so fitting that
Farmer Burns retired at that Gayety. After all, the man understood what makes
great theater.</div>
maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-84985540601953165932014-07-17T10:50:00.001-07:002014-07-17T11:03:00.648-07:00Unclad Actresses<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.museuma.com/william-bouguereau/le-printemps-aka-the-return-of-spring.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.museuma.com/william-bouguereau/le-printemps-aka-the-return-of-spring.jpg" height="400" width="235" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In 1890, in one of Omaha’s
first art galleries, a painting was attacked. The gallery? The Lininger,
started by civic leader George W. Lininger, whose collection wound up largely
at the Joslyn. The painting? “The Return of Spring” by William-Adolphe Bouguereau,
which was an image of an unclad woman surrounded by naked putti – those fat
little babies with angel wings. They fly about the woman like amorous
butterflies, but for a few that lounge on the ground like opium addicts. The
attacker, C.J. Warpinton (referred to in the World-Herald as “a Crazy Censor”)
was apparent incensed by the sheer angelic sensuality of the image that he bashed
a chair against it, tearing the canvas.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Someone attacked the painting again in 1976. Apparently it
is something of Omaha’s
answer to <span class="st">Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” although, to my jaded
eyes, it just seems like a bunch of fat babies flying around a classical
representation of a naked woman. And, even when it was attacked, locals seemed
puzzled. A columnist for the World-Herald who called himself “The Gleaner’s
Sheaf” complained in January of 1891 that this was wasted effort. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st">“If some female Warpinton would start out to
annihilate all objects tending to destroy the virtue of the sterner sex, it
would be more in accordance with the fitness of things,” the columnist wrote.
“[I]t is to be hoped, too, that she would not begin with an $18,000 picture,
which had not a trace of the voluptuous or sensual in it, and was exhibited to
a generally respectable audience who went to see works of art, and recognized
the fact that art had no higher subject to portray than God’s last and greatest
physical creation, the human body.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st">The Glener’s Sheaf had a recommendation for
what a female might instead turn her attention to, were she to want to root out
real lewdness, and I mention it because it gives us a sense that in the Victorian era, actresses loomed heavily in the erotic imagination:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st">“[S]he might pounce first upon those very
pictures in saloons which the male Warpinton seems to think was all right. And
then she would annihilate those cherished collections of which young men are so
fond, containing the figures of actresses in every variety of dress – or lack
of dress, and follow it up with the demolition of the flaming theater placards
, which are equally suggestive and lewd.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st"><b>SUGGESTIVE IMAGES</b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st">Our scolding columnist is, of course,
referring to suggestive images, and also pornography: The nude photographs and
paintings that hung above bars, the collections of scandalous images of female
performers in suggestive and somewhat unclad poses, and the signs that hung
outside performing venues that seemed to promise licentiousness to be found
inside the venue. According to this author, such images could be found
everywhere:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st">“She would go down into the pockets of young
men and examine the rivets of their knives, or the hidden mechanisms of their
scarf pins, or watch charms, or rings, and away would go more of the vile
pictures.” The author makes it sounds as though the typical Omaha young male of
1891 was a sort of pornographic stage magician, with erotic pictures stuffed
where a sleight-of-hand artist would tuck a bouquet of flowers, a songbird, a
rabbit, and some flash paper. In fact, in May of 1893, the Omaha Bee reported
on exactly this sort of young man: Frankie Parks, who was arrested for carrying
“a quantity of obscene photographs,” as well as a concealed weapon. Specifically,
a “long dirk,” which had they not clarified was a weapon might have generated
quite a bit of confusion among the paper’s readership.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st">Worse, an 1895 article in the World-Herald
discusses the discouraging fact that some young men, enamored with certain
actresses, would have tattooed onto their bodies suggestive images of the actresses, which proved to be a problem later when they prepared to marry.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st">I would like to take a moment to distinguish
between highbrow theater, where presumably these sorts of lewd images didn’t exist,
and the lowbrow offerings of saloon-dancehalls and the like, which, as we have discovered,
were often fronts for prostitution. I am sure the performers who appeared at
Boyd’s Music Hall would not have been pleased to find themselves on the same
blog as the performers who appeared at the Park Theater, and would be reading
my blog with a scowled visage. But, then, the moralists of the era didn’t care
much to make that sort of distinction. As far as they were concerned, both the
highbrow and lowbrow venues sold vice to the public. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st">I have found a stern lecture from a nearby
neighbor, Reverend G.C. Rankin of Kansas
City, who railed against the breaking of the Sabbath
by attendees of the “Sunday night play house” in January of 1891. “It is not for
the benefit and accommodation of the better class of people that the Sunday night
theater opens its doors,” he warned in the pages of the Kansas City Times. “…
And when the promiscuous mass of pure and impure humanity if gotten together
before the footlights of the Sunday night playhouse, instead of being elevated
they are left on a lower plane of self-respect than when they assembled. All of
them seek lower depths of degradation and shame from that which has been
suggested to them by the exhibitions and associations of the occasion.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st">In fairness to Reverend Rankin, that does
sound like a pretty good evening of theater. And what are these “exhibitions”
of which Rankin speaks? According to him, the theaters post “lewd pictures in
the faces of our people.” We’ve heard about this now in Kansas
City and in Omaha,
and it’s probably fair to ask what sorts of pictures these were? In all
likelihood, modern audiences would find these images inoffensive, but
it is possible to see a large selection of Victorian theater posters online,
and they do seem to favor women with exposed legs and shoulders, sometimes
being menaced by a man who seems about to beat them, and sometimes posing brazenly
in what looks like circus costumes. </span>In 1886, the World-Herald complained
of “glaring advertisements of shows and displayed photographs of actresses in
suggestive deshabille.” </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st">Obviously, this isn’t the sort of pornography
that one could apparently find in every young lad’s snuff case, but, to the
ministers and moralists, it wasn’t much better either.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st"><b>A VICTORIAN UNDERWORLD </b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st">There were, to be sure, a lot of actresses in
the Victorian era who posed for actual pornography. There is a
much-cited scholarly article called “The Actress in Victorian Pornography”
which discussed, in part, how common it was to find stage actresses in
pornographic images, and just how many of these images explicitly referenced
the fact of theater and the stage. There was a child actresses named Isa
Bowman, who originated the stage role of Alice
in Wonderland, was friends with Lewis Carrol, wrote a book about him, and also,
by the way, married the marvelously named pornographer George Reginald Bacchus,
and he created an erotic fictionalized memoir based on her life called “</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">The Confessions of Nemesis Hunt.” Obviously,
her experiences are not typical, but they do illustrate that the line between
legitimate theater and the pornographic underworld was thinner than we might
expect. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s hard to know how much of this went on in Omaha. There has been
pornographic photography in the Gate City since at least 1890, when a woman
named Rosa King, who the World-Herald referred to as a “dissolute citizen of
the third ward,” went to Council Bluffs and “had a photographer make a number
of tin types of her in a state of attire which has not been seen in vogue since
the time of Eden.” She was arrested for circulating lewd photographs, which she
was circulating to her admirers, presumably to hide in their boot heel or secret
away in a secret compartment behind their umbrella handle. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In 1894, we find another Iowan photographer snapping these
sorts of images, and I will offer his name without comment: Oscar Seaman. The
photographer had apparently set up quite a successful mail-order business, and
was sending his photographs throughout the country when the cops got him. “The
pictures are described as obscene and degrading in the extreme,” the Bee
informs us, and while we don’t know if any of the models were from Omaha, we
can probably safely assume that at least a few were from Council Bluffs,
because, well, it’s Council Bluffs.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<b>HOLLYWOOD NUDES</b></div>
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<br /></div>
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I have one more story to tell about this subject, although
it is not set here. The story takes place in Hollywood, at the palatial estate of Harold
Lloyd. The silent film comic was a native of Burchard, Nebraska,
and got his start as a performer at the Burwood theater here in Omaha, as I mentioned. Lloyd was
preposterously successful as a film actor, grossing more than Charlie Chaplin,
and his estate, Greenacres, was massive.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Perhaps remembering his youth in Omaha, when, presumably, he secreted photos
of semi-clad actresses under his straw hat, Lloyd like to use this estate to
snap photographs of naked actresses, some of them in 3D. His photography was
often featured in men’s magazines, and a collection of his 3D images was
released a few years ago, called “Harold Lloyd's Hollywood Nudes in 3D!” His
models included pinup queen Bettie Page, cult film legend Tura Satana, and
burlesque performer Dixie Evans. Apparently he kept all the images in his photo
studio in his house, but where’s the fun in that?</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Men are supposed to stash photos of unclad actresses on
their person. That’s the Omaha
way.</div>
maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-58340316358728719422014-07-13T10:09:00.001-07:002014-07-13T10:09:17.890-07:00The Divorce<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
I promised bad actors with this blog, and, by God, have I got one for you.<br /><br />I don’t mean this regarding his qualities as a theater professional, which were well-regarded. I refer to his qualities as a human being, which were terrible, if newspapers of the time are to be believed.<br /><br />His name was Willard Mack, although he was born Charles McLaughlin, and he was not an Omahan, having been born in Ontario and raised in Brooklyn. And I’ll give a quick overview of his theater career before describing how it intersected with Omaha, and how this made him awful.<br /><br />Mack was an actor and playwright, and wrote a piece about the North-West Mounted Police, who he claimed to have been part of. The play was called “In Wyoming,” and did quite well and traveled throughout America (it played in North Platte in 1910.) His plays were often set in Canada, and several of them were eventually adapted into films, while Mack himself made a career for himself as a Broadway and eventual film actor. He is perhaps best remembered now for having met and coached a young chorus girl named Ruby Stevens, whose career he helped immeasurably, including recommending to her that she change her name to Barbara Stanwyck.<br /><br />For a while he ran his own stock company, and this is where we come to Omaha, and to awfulness. He started the company with his then-wife, Maude Leone, and Maude was a local actress for some years. She started her career here with the Burwood Theater, a little venue at 1514 Harney Street that also launched the career of silent film star Harold Lloyd. (The theater eventually became a burlesque house called the Gayety, and that will be a story of its own.) Leone debuted at the Burwood in February of 1909 to critical raves, the World-Herald describing her as “a stunningly beautiful woman who comes highly recommended by many managers and critics.” Although her previous engagement was in Duluth, Minnesota, and she had appeared elsewhere, including Chicago, she was, according to the paper, “well-known in Omaha, and is a cousin of Mrs. S. B. Stewart,”<br /><br />She appeared in the lead role in a play called “All-of-a-Sudden Peggy,” which had been a Broadway smash and eventually a film, and the ads for the film give an abbreviated sense of the story: It tells of a “quick on the trigger girl who proves her own matchmaker.” The World-Herald was ecstatic about her performance, writing “If her work in other productions reaches the same high plane of naturalness, elaboration of detail and the same air of spontaneous dramatic expression, there can be no doubt but that the critics of the Chicago papers were right in their unstinted praise of her work.” The writer then went ahead and quoted some of these critics, probably simply transcribing from a press kit sent over by the Burwood. Then, as now, critics could be lazy.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1_MbH6joAN-_2gQbKZpgmfuT3jUnjsvBCXeyZ8rdHsIFYFXiASSMKQXEj7qgxtEvkEUzk8f1cNgJC80kWbz3oOupVJVJnzOZ1jwaVb8fNXVHrqeOP43ZelSnhxyDhEUEvdsMc6LcxFLo/s1600/sappho.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1_MbH6joAN-_2gQbKZpgmfuT3jUnjsvBCXeyZ8rdHsIFYFXiASSMKQXEj7qgxtEvkEUzk8f1cNgJC80kWbz3oOupVJVJnzOZ1jwaVb8fNXVHrqeOP43ZelSnhxyDhEUEvdsMc6LcxFLo/s1600/sappho.jpg" height="243" width="400" /></a>Her appearance was a sensation. On the closing of the show, the theater held two receptions for her, allowing audience members to join her onstage and shake her hand; both sold out. Knowing they had a good thing going, the Burwood cranked up their publicity, announcing that Leone would play Sapho in their next production. Further, in the production Leone would wear a crystal gown weighing 86 pounds, and the theater was forced to turn to an insurance company to insure the gown against theft. The gown was so heavy that the leading man had to make special preparations for the show, as he would be expected to carry Leone -- and the gown -- up a spiral stairway. He had stuck to an all-beef diet, and was now carrying a sandbag weighing 224 pounds up and down a flight of stairs. Ads for the show played up Leone’s striking physical appearance, showing just her eyes and coyly arched eyebrows. “Maude Leone will use these eyes at every performance,” the ads said.<br /><br />Leone remained at the Burwood until May, when the Burwood company disbanded.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>THE HUSBAND</b><br />
<br />Leone was married to William Mack all this time, although he is never mentioned as visiting Omaha. They married in 1902 in Cedar Rapids when she was 15, and seem to had performed together since 1900, when they appeared in Sedalia, MO. She starred in the terrifically titled “Madame Satan” in 1903 in Michigan, playing the title role, with Mack as a member of the cast. By 1906, she and Mack had started their own company, called the Leone-Mack Stock Company. They toured relentlessly through 1908, and then, suddenly, in February of 1909, we find Leone at the Burwood with no mention of Mack. At the end of 1909, Leone is back with the stock company and her husband, and there is never any real explanation for her season-long hiatus in Omaha.<br /><br />They continued to perform for years together, touring the country with their stock company. But in June of 1912, it came to light that maybe Mack wasn’t the best person to share a company or a life with. The first hint of this came in Omaha, where the company was booked to play at the Orpheum and Leone demurred, claiming to be ill. Then, in September, the Seattle Daily Times reported that Mack was divorced and would be marrying Marjorie Rambeau, a former child actress and star on Broadway who was preparing to give up a life in the theater to be Mrs. Mack.<br /><br />Suddenly, the cause of Leone’s illness came out. Mack had demanded a divorce from her while he was in Omaha. In the meanwhile, when Mack married Rambeau, he claimed to have already been divorced for nine years, saying that Leone had charged him with drunkenness. This lie was enough to land Mack in jail in Utah, where the law said you must be divorced six months before remarrying, and the Salt Lake Tribune had a field day with the story, reprinting letters Leone and Mack had sent regarding the divorce. “He wrote me a crazy letter,” Leone wrote, adding a parenthetical “I think he was full of cocaine when he wrote it.” The contents of the letter? Mack wrote to her “insisting that I say I divorced him. You know he couldn’t get one from me to save his soul. I saw from his letter that he was in some sort of a scrape, and would go mad if I didn’t give him a loophole of escape, so I went quietly to a lawyer here who started my divorce before, and got a divorce from him on the first of this month.”<br /><br />If this all seems pretty muddled, well, it is. Nobody seems clear on the timeline, or who asked what when, and Mack seems to think he might still get back together with Leone, although admits that he needs to get onto the “water wagon” to do so -- in other words, stop drinking. The Salt Lake Tribune offered up an especially hurt letter from Leone, reading the following:<br /><br />“I know just how you felt, but, oh, you could have spared me so much,” she wrote. “As it is, the shock has nearly floored me. When the lawyers sent me the papers from Salt Lake it nearly killed me.”<br /><br />In the meanwhile, Leone’s mother went to the press, claiming that Mack has once threatened to kill her.<br /><br />It simply got worse for Mack. Although Leone claimed to have filed for divorce in September in Omaha, the County Clerk denied any such filing taking place. Mack stuck by his guns, claiming he and Leone were long divorced, but that he now longed for his ex-wife. “‘Skiddles’ face has been before me almost constantly of late,” he told newspapers. “Skiddles” was, we are told, his nickname for Leone.<br /><br />Skiddles, in the meanwhile, seemed to have no affection left for Mack. If there was no record of her September petition for divorce, well, it was easy enough to petition again. And this time, she did not hold back. As the World-Herald of October 26, 1912, reports it, in the text of the divorce filing Mack was “charged with being a habitual drunkard and a drug fiend … He has also been guilty of extreme cruelty without using personal violence.” <br /><br />The World-Herald continued: “She says that Mack’s conduct in drinking and swearing at her for more than two years past, has been such as to endanger her health and at all times almost unfitted her in a measure to carry out her work as an actress and leading woman in her chosen profession. She fears that he will carry out threats to injure her in person and reputation.”<br /><b><br />AFTER THE DIVORCE </b><br />
<br />
That cinched it. With Mack officially, if embarrassingly, divorced from Leone, he was free to marry Rimbaud. Mack and Leone’s careers ran parallel, and sometimes intersected, from that point on -- for instance, both were institutionalized in 1915 following nervous collapse, and Leone starred in several of Mack’s scripts. Leone’s career faltered and was ended by an accident in 1929 when she fell from a bus in Los Angeles, which rendered her an invalid and precipitated a decline that included hallucinations and delusions of persecution; she died in March of 1930.<br /><br />Mack, in the meanwhile, continued to be successful in the world of theater while notably unsuccessful in the field of decency. He divorced Rimbaud in 1917; she charged him with repeated indiscretions with other women. He immediately married an actress/dancer named Pauline Frederick, who divorced him in 1919. He later married another woman, Beatrice Banyard, and she divorced him in 1924, citing his alcoholism. He agreed, speaking to the San Diego Union, saying “The rumor that I had gone crazy is all wrong. It’s ridiculous. I wasn’t loco. I was blind; stone blind. Someone sold me liquid blindness for whisky.”<br /><br />In 1924, Mack almost literally went blind in one eye when he drank bootleg whiskey made from wood alcohol. He swore off alcohol after that. He died in 1934, and his death brought a last, unexpected gesture of affection. It was not from a wife, but instead from his male secretary, Edgar Mathews. Despondent over Mack’s death, Mathews attempted, and failed, suicide by slashing his wrists.maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-33017609630226895142014-07-10T06:41:00.001-07:002014-07-10T20:54:39.830-07:00Stranded in Omaha<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Let me introduce you to sisters Ada and Minna Simms. The two had a florid, invented shared biography, but we won’t concern ourselves with the stories they told about themselves. They also ran the most notorious brothel in Chicago, the Everleigh Club, but we won’t concern ourselves with that. Instead, we are going to look to their early days in Omaha, when they were stranded.<br />
<br />
The Simms sisters, according to author Karen Abbott, hailed from Virginia, and were born to a family that was wealthy once, but lost their fortunes in the Civil War. The sisters then became performers, and were stranded in about the year 1895. It was a propitious time to be a stranded actress, as Omaha’s World Fair, the Trans-Mississippi Exposition, was about to get started. So the sisters changed their last name to Everleigh, naming themselves after their grandmother’s letters, which were always signed “Everly yours.” They opened a brothel opposite the Fair, made a small fortune, and relocated to Chicago and into the history books.<br />
<br />
And here we have one of the more famous examples of the phenomenon of the stranded performer. Then, as now, there was an appealing if artificial sense of glamor around the performing arts, and it created opportunities for abuse. The World-Herald first addressed the subject in May of 1888 when they ran an article titled “Some Stage Struck People” and subtitled “A Large Lot of Them in Omaha, but They Are Mostly Girls.” After detailing the supposed but nonexistant attractions of the theatrical life, including a high paycheck, traveling in high society, and the opportunity to sleep late, the author tells the story of an ad found in a local paper that read “WANTED -- Young lady, nice-appearing, to go on the road with troupe.”<br />
<br />
The author had a friend who was a theatrical manager, and who declared the ad a fake. This manager concocted a scheme to send one of his actresses to answer the ad, and so she did. “The advertiser is AN OLD GUY,” the paper revealed, “an old doctor -- no, don’t use his name, but he is on the fourth floor of the old Paxton block.” It turned out the man had a business selling toiletries, and was, in fact, looking for a woman to work in his office. He knew that women were more likely to answer his ad if they thought he was looking for an actress.<br />
<br />
The author concluded with a warning about the attraction of the life of a performer, mentioning that when an Oriental opera company came to Omaha the previous year, two local tailors, Cohen and Weinberg, abandoned their shop on Sixteenth and Burt Street to join the company. They also left their wives behind. The company was broke, and the two tailors were stranded in Denver.<br />
<br />
There’s a fairly detailed story in the July 3, 1890 issue of the Washington DC Evening Star called “Scheme of a Stranded Actor.” The story is set 16 years before and tells the true story of a troupe that got stuck in Omaha when they ran out of money, as told by one who was there to a group of appreciative fellow actors. Omaha strandings had already become the stuff of legend, it seems. The actor tells of desperate performers telegraphing for money, pawning their belongings, and begging money off locals in their attempts to get home. This actor concocted a scheme to get back to New York on just $2. He constructed a fake ticket out of an old calendar, and then made a big show of placing it in his hat band before his other passengers. He lay back by the window and pretended to sleep. Presently the conductor came by and gave him a little shake, at which point he pretended to be startled enough to cause his hat to fly out the train window. He scolded the conductor on causing him to lose his ticket, which the other passengers confirmed, and so managed to travel all the way home without paying his fare.<br />
<br />
By 1898, strandings were frequent enough the the World-Herald decided to make a joke of it, writing the following in May: “From the number of Shakespearean companies that have stranded this year and the members of which have been obliged to walk home, it looks as though the word ‘legit’ might soon be written ‘leg it.’”<br />
<br />
These stories typically involved unscrupulous or incompetent managers, who either made off with the company’s money or slunk away in debt, leaving their performers stuck. Life on the road was uncertain enough that the loss of a performer could strand a troupe, as happened with the Factory Foundling company in October of 1904, as reported by the Kansas City Star in a story called “On the Kerosene Circuit.” The troupes two lead actors, who were owed back pay, quit the company and sued over everything, including the scenery and a Great Dane dog, leaving everyone stranded somewhere. The troupe tried to reorganize in Omaha, where they had a booking, and got stuck there, while the actors and their dog remained in Kansas City, “forced to do manual work,” as the story tells us.<br />
<br />
Sometimes managers could be vindictive, as in the following story.<br />
<br />
In 1907, three actors were stranded in Omaha when a South Dakota sheriff contacted local authorities and informed them the performers were wanted on a charge of larceny. The three were arrested and locked up for four days, until the sheriff could arrive. When he did, he spoke with them, decided not to press charges, and left again. According to the actors, they had been hired in South Dakota to perform, arrived to discover the venue was substandard, and left again, and the manager swore out a complaint against them, saying they had stolen clothing, simply out of spite. <br />
<br />
By the time the sheriff was satisfied the performers were innocent, the actors’ train tickets had expired, and they were destitute, and so could not purchase new tickets.<br />
<br />
There was also an incident in October of 1914 when fourteen Sioux Indians from the Rosebud reservation, who had been hired to perform in a Wild West show, were abandoned by an unscrupulous agent in the Burlington station. The management had handed them a bag when they started home, claiming it had their payments, but when they arrived in Omaha they discovered it was filled with worthless scraps of paper. The leader of the troupe, Chief Strange Horse, promised he would “make things interesting” for the delinquent manager when he got home.<br />
<br />
In May of 1915, the Red Rose company came to Omaha with two chorus girls, Vira Burke and Doris Lohhr, and then left without them. The chorus girls claimed they were fired without notice and management refused to pay them what they were owed, leaving them without the funds to pay their own way home.<br />
<br />
I started this story with the tale of two stranded performers who became madams, and will end with one more, although this story is impossible to confirm, as is everything in the early life of Anna Wilson.<br />
<br />
From 1870 to her death in 1911, Wilson was one of Omaha’s most notorious characters. The proprietor of a 25-room brothel, the common-law widow of legendary local gambler Dan Allen, and eventual city philanthropist (upon her death, Wilson gave her mansion to Omaha to serve as the City Hospital), Wilson was a figure of both fascination and mystery. Almost nothing is known about her life before she came to Omaha. We don’t know if her name actually was Anna Wilson. We’re not sure how or when she got to Omaha.<br />
<br />
There is some speculation that Wilson came from New Orleans, and, upon her death, an obituary appears in a St. Joseph, LA, paper that I have never seen elsewhere. It does not credit its sources, but makes explicit claims about Wilson’s past. The paper is called the Tensas Gazette, and its story is titled “Dive-Keeper Gives Riches to Charity,” with the following subhead: “Miss ‘Anna Wilson,’ Who Came as Stage Girl to Nebraska Metropolis, Repentant, Gave Her Resort and Wealth to City.”<br />
<br />
Here is the paragraph from the article that explains the appearance of the words “Stage Girl” in the subhead: “Anna Wilson went to Omaha when it was a frontier town several years before the Union Pacific railroad was completed in 1867. Her first appearance was on a music hall stage. She was bright and pretty … The young girl remained on the stage only a short time. When the music hall went to the wall she was without an engagement. In the emergency she took up with a noted ‘square’ gambler, Dan Allen, and became his common-law wife.”<br />
<br />
Is it possible? One supposes it might be, although I have known quite a few actors and precious few of them, left stranded in town, would conceive of starting a brothel, as both Wilson and the Everleigh sisters did. <br />
<br />
There is another possibility. In her earliest appearances in the newspapers, Anna Wilson is referred to as Annie, and looking through the papers from the era, there is a prostitute, or several prostitutes, named Annie Wilson who makes occasional appearances here and there. In December of 1866, an Annie Wilson is arrested in Harrisburg, PA, during a raid on a bawdy house. Another Annie Wilson, or perhaps the same, was reported as having lost her mind in Cleveland, OH, in 1868; she worked in a brothel, was scarcely 17, and had attempted to physically harm herself. Later in 1868, in Philadelphia, a fistfight in a brothel caused the arrest of an Annie Wilson.<br />
<br />
Was our Anna Wilson any one of these girls, or all of them, proving herself to be both unusually mobile and unusually prone to arrest? We just don’t know. All we have to go on is some tantalizing bread crumbs scattered throughout newspapers, and there seems to be no evidence at all that she was ever an actress.<br />
<br />
Well, almost no evidence. There is one thing we know for certain, and it does suggest Wilson had a taste for the theater. When she died, Anna Wilson left behind a massive personal library, numbering thousands of volumes. Among these volumes, especially highlighted in the aftermath of her death, was “one of the best Shakespeare libraries in the west,” as the Sandusky Register in Ohio put it.<br />
<br />
When your reputation for your Shakespearean library reaches as far as Ohio, there is a real possibility you were once an actor.maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-37049600186992688512014-07-05T09:55:00.000-07:002014-07-05T10:58:28.660-07:00Hayseeds, Dancing Girls, and Crime: The Nebraska Music Hall<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<b>THE VENUE</b><br />
<br />
Back in the 1930s, in the middle of the Great Depression, the US government tried to write a history of Omaha. They hired writers through the Federal Writers' Project of the Work Progress Administration, set them out to document the city, compiled the results, and then just … failed to do anything at all with it. I’m not clear on what happened, except that, from the sounds of thing, the incomplete manuscript showed up at the Omaha Public Library, where some industrious librarian glued it all together and then bound the results. The results are something called “Omaha: A Guide to Its History and Environs,” which looks less like a book than a photocopied college thesis.<br />
<br />
But it’s just the best. I mean that honestly. When I first moved to Omaha, it was my guide to the town, and it was especially useful, as it has divided Omaha up into a series of walking tours. Following one of the tours, I discovered the story of William Brown, who was lynched at the courthouse in 1919. I wrote a play about it, and have had more than a little success with that play. I also read that Oscar Wilde performed here at Boyd’s opera house, a story that I don’t merely retell here on this blog, but also turned into a play. I read about May Allison, a brutal thief who lived in a now-long-gone part of town called Ramcat Alley, and I have mined that story a few times, once in a play called boyElroy, once for a zine. The book has a collection of slang terms from the meat packing houses in South Omaha that I lifted for a one-act I wrote for the Shelterbelt last year. I have been robbing this history since the day I arrived, and will continue to steal from it until the day I leave.<br />
<br />
And so here is yet another story from the book, the story of the Nebraska Music Hall, which is mentioned very briefly. The WPA book has this to say about the venue:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Douglas between 13th and 14th the former Academy of Music: In the late nineties it was occupied by the Nebraska Music Hall, a playhouse patterned after the Haymarket theater in New York. Police records of the day reveal that more robberies were perpetuated here than in any other resort in the city. Cheap cigars, beer, vulgar sketches and the display of the charms by the women performers attracted many rustics</blockquote>
<br />
<b>VICE AND PERFORMANCE</b><br />
<br />
So, firstly, the Haymarket theater in New York. This was a three-story dance hall in Manhattan’s vice-ridden Tenderloin district, and was finely built to look like a Broadway theater. From outward appearances, it was a legitimate venue, featuring Moulin Rouge-style dancing girls, but it was a front for prostitution and theft.<br />
<br />
And this is precisely what Omaha’s Nebraska Music Hall offered. In fact, the two daily newspapers, the Omaha-World Herald and the Bee, ran parallel histories of the venue. In the World-Herald, it shows up exclusively in the crime section. At the Bee, where the Music Hall ran advertisements, it showed up in the amusements section. So it is that, unique among these sorts of dismal Omaha venues of the era, we can see what sort of aboveboard entertainment they offered to camouflage the vice.<br />
<br />
This blog being what it is, we shall start with the vice. We’ve mentioned the Academy of Music before -- it was Omaha’s first dedicated theater building, built in 1866 and home to the city’s first stock company. It first appears in the newspaper as the Nebraska Music Hall in 1896, and, in the World-Herald, it was already a source of nuisance. The paper ran a brief item on May 11 telling of a farmer, Sam Bowen, who was found unconscious at the back of the theater. He had two wound in his head and told the police he was robbed.<br />
<br />
Just three days later, the paper ran another tale of an abused farmer. This time, it was a man named William H. Vincent, who was involved in an increasing violent dispute with an employee of the theater named William A. Randall. Farmer Vincent seemed to think he had been taken advantage of, and was about to pull some brass knuckles and settle the matter when a police officer interfered.<br />
<br />
Brass knuckles showed up again in August, when a clerk named Clark from Denver received a severe beating in the alley behind the theater, the brass knuckles injuring him so badly the World-Herald expected he would die. The police arrested several people in connection with the beating, including Frank Lawler, the Music Hall’s bartender.<br />
<br />
Clerk Clark did recover, and it is another four months before the Music Hall finds itself in the World-Herald again. This time, it appears in a story titled “He Intended to Murder Her,” telling of a machinist named John M. Kinkenon, who shot his wife and then himself. Now, the story starts at a notorious bar at the near northside called The Arcade, which will be the subject of future posts, as it had its own theater and its own history of violence, and Mrs. Kinkenon was employed here as a cook. She left the building with her son and soon found herself stalked by her husband. She contacted a police officer, who questioned the husband, but released him when he pleaded innocence. He followed her around downtown for a little while longer and then, in front of the Music Hall, shot her in the neck and committed suicide. He had been threatening to kill her for weeks, but then, as it too often is now, these sorts of threats were met with official indifference.<br />
<br />
In January of the next year, the police commission decided to appoint a special policeman named HD Fisk to the Music Hall. The police force wasn’t terrifically large then, and it’s a sign of the city’s deepening concern over the Music Hall that they assigned one officer specifically to the venue. Shortly after that, arrests began at the venue with some frequency: A waiter named Jack Howard who stole from a patron and from the till; a patron named Ed Clark who started a fight; waiter Charles A. Antwell, arrested for fighting with “a Jew.”<br />
<br />
In July of 1898, the World-Herald ran a story about one of the Music Hall’s performers, Professor Alfred Lunblum. He was a 40-year-old violin player who had come from Chicago just a few days earlier for an engagement at the theater. The newspaper wasn’t especially interested in his work as a performer, however. Lunblum, it seems, had abandoned his wife and come to town with $135 of her money and with another woman. The wife showed up, complained to the police, Lunblum left for Chicago with her, and, as the World-Herald puts it, “[t]he girl he brought to Omaha with him will be left behind to paddle in her own canoe.”<br />
<br />
On December 12 of 1898, the manager of the theater, George Mitchell, suddenly ran off to Chicago, leaving significant debt behind him and claiming that the theater had not been a success. This was a bit of a surprise to the property’s owner, W.A. Redick, who Mitchell owed money to. He shouldn’t have been surprised. Mitchell’s primary business was as a liveryman, and he had been guilty of crooked dealings previously: In 1895, he accused a man of stealing a wagon and harnesses; these charges were dropped when it came out that the man had bought the items from Mitchell.<br />
<br />
1898 had been a bad year for Mitchell. In March, he had slipped under a heavily loaded wagon and lost a good portion of his big toe on his right foot. If he didn’t leave Omaha broke, he did leave it somewhat defeated.<br />
<br />
But if Manager Mitchell was gone, the theater remained, and within a year ads began to appear in the World-Herald, such as this one from August 29 of 1899: “WANTED -- One 1st violinist and one cornet player. Apply J. C. Clark, Nebraska Music Hall.”<br />
<br />
One suspects this is the same J.C. Clark who made frequent appearances in the World-Herald, starting in May of 1890 in a story called “Sunday Sinners: Fifteen People Tell Why They Did Not Go to Church.” In Clark’s case, he was not in church because he was arrested:<br />
<br />
“Clark is undoubtedly a smooth man and is one of those run in with the gang of thieves captured early Sunday morning. He had in his possession a lot of blank checks on every bank in Sioux City. When he was brought before the judge, he sprung a lot of crocodile tears, and a snivel and a pathetic story about his poor wife and dear children, and the judge discharged him despite of the fact that he failed to remember where he had been or what he had been doing during the past year.”<br />
<br />
<b>A CHANGE IN MANAGEMENT</b><br />
<br />
The Music Hall quickly made its way back into the crime papers. Interestingly, it seems likely that when Manager Mitchell absconded to Chicago, he left behind a debt to the Bee, as this publication immediately lost interest in the Music Hall as a performance venue and started looking into its criminal activities. So it is on April 16 of 1899 the Bee runs a story called “Dance Artist in Trouble,” telling of Laura Woodson, a song and dance artist of the Music Hall, who was arrested for “getting too fresh with hayseeds.”<br />
<br />
The victim was John Long of Auburn, Nebraska, who made the acquaintance of Woodson and soon found his money purse was missing. He complained to management, who brought him to a former boxer who “offered to furnish him the trouble he wanted at reduced rates.” Long decided to prosecute, saying that “he wishes to impress it upon their plebian minds that men from the country should be accorded the same reverential treatment as the most urbane citizen who enters the hall.”<br />
<br />
Note that this seems to be a paraphrase on the part of the Bee’s writer. Long himself is quoted upon being ejected from the hall, and he says “These fellows get altogether too fresh with hayseeds.”<br />
<br />
In September, the Bee offered a rather odd story called “Baby Wins Rough Man,” telling of performers at the Music Hall becoming concerned when a ragged man with unkempt hair brought a baby girl into the theater with him. He claimed the baby was his own, and had been taking the girl on a tour of Omaha saloons and music halls, but the performers called the police on him. When questioned, the man admitted the baby was not his, he had just found her in the street, but “was attracted by her cute ways.” The infant was returned to her desperate mother.<br />
<br />
The rowdiness of the venue continued. On September 4, the World-Herald reported that Richard Leoni, a performer at the music hall, attacked a man named Abram Marks, who gave him a severe drubbing. Leoni claimed Marks had said insulting things about his wife. On the 15th, a woman named Susie Hill and four police officers chased a man into the theater and arrested him. He had blackened Hill’s eye, and when he told the judge that he milked cows for a living, the judge retorted “you’ll pull no udders for many a day.”<br />
<br />
In November, according to the Bee, police were looking for “Curly,” the “spieler” for the Music Hall. According to the paper, Curly was a “hot air virtuoso,” which presumably referred to his speaking abilities, but was now wanted for stealing horses from a local livery stable and attempting to sell them in Glenwood, Iowa.<br />
<br />
What was a <i>spieler</i>, you may be asking. Well, as it happens, a story from later that month in the World-Herald tells us. The story is one of Charles Anthill, a man who had recently quit his job, brutalized a woman, and was making a reputation on Douglas Street as a desperado. This night in November, Anhill accosted the Music Hall’s spieler, who was standing in front of the venue crying out “Walk right in gents -- the greatest show on earth --” Anthill informed the spieler that Anthill planned to “drink some one’s blood that night.”<br />
<br />
Later he shot Dave Hill, the proprietor of the nearby Owl Saloon, grazing his neck. “A one-legged man in the barroom ran out the back way without his crutch and a man with two limbs ran out as though shot in the leg,” the World-Herald tells us.<br />
<br />
And that’s the last we hear of the Music Hall, at least in local papers. The venue makes one last appearance in January of 1900 in a Utah paper, The Deseret News. The story, reprinted from the Omaha News, tells of a cattle dealer from the Beehive State who liked to come to Omaha for a good time. <br />
<br />
“He had heard that the Nebraska Music Hall has a number of attractions and drifted in there first night in town,” the paper tells us. “What he drank, and how much he drank, or whether he drank at all, he has no positive knowledge, yet his expense bill showed that he had bought early and often. One of the serpentine dancers entertained him from start to finish and did not hesitate to call to her assistance all of her friends.”<br />
<br />
The night ended up costing the cattleman $100. The next day, he returned to the Music Hall and demanded to see the woman who had cost him so much money. The manager hesitated, but the cattleman insisted he meant no harm, so he brought her down. The cattleman then proceeded to toast her, saying “In my earliest days, I have rustled cattle, put my brand on my neighbors calves, and now have the reputation for compelling my cattle to drink more water than is good for them just before they are weighed up, but miss, I doff my sombrero to you as the most expert grafter I ever met.”<br />
<br />
The venue’s manager, J.C. Clark, makes one more appearance in the World-Herald in 1900, when he arrested in Allegheny after he and his wife shoplifter what the paper described as “considerable loot.” “It is believed that his real name is J. C. O’Neill, and that he was one of the notorious Blinky-Morgan Gang who operated so extensively in this section a number of years ago.” He had, it seemed, been arrested in St. Louis is 1899 and charged with murder, “and police think they are wanted in other cities.”<br />
<b><br />MUSIC HALL PERFORMERS</b><br />
<br />
So there we have it, a history of criminal mischief in one Omaha performance venue. But as I mentioned, we also have a fairly detailed inventory of the sorts of performance to be found at the Nebraska Music Hall, and I will end this by listing a few of the notable performers:<br />
<br />
Della Latham, “contortion dancer”<br />
Ella Dunbar, “the burlesque queen”<br />
Freda Maloof, “muscle dancer”<br />
Ed Brumage, “silence and fun”<br />
Ruby Knight, the “plain American girl”<br />
Thomas Gibbons, “negro delinerator”<br />
Sig. Almon Zrinyi, “the great hand balancer and equilibrust”<br />
Tom Hardle, “Irish character”<br />
Leo La Reno, “the strong man”<br />
<br />
It was, in other words, the sort of mixture of dance, comedy, and novelty acts that could be expected from early vaudeville. There was ethnic and blackface comedy, young girls singing popular standards, other girls dancing somewhat risque dance numbers, and a large selection of the sort of entertainment that is mostly lost now. One suspects Ed Brumage offered a silent comedy act, while Almon Zrinyi demonstrated feats of juggling. A “negro delineator” was a one-man blackface show, generally involving songs and monologues, and was a bit different than a minstrel show, in that the white performer was generally attempting imitation rather than mockery -- negro delineators prided themselves on producing performances in which audience members genuinely thought they were African American.<br />
<br />
There’s another story, but it is a longer one, and so I will tell is separately. But, for a while, Omaha was home to a performer who claimed to be the original Little Egypt, the belly dancer who had wowed America at the Chicago World Fair. She came in to town on a train dressed as a tramp, and she quickly found work at the Nebraska Music Hall, and we will come back to her story soon.<br />
<br />
It’s tempting to view these performances as merely being a front for vice -- especially when so many of these performers were guilty of vice themselves. But vaudeville survived its reckless early years to become one of America’s entertainment institutions, generally offering the same mix of music, dance, comedy, ethnic performance, and novelty acts. Knowing this, the Nebraska Music Hall, and venues like it, seemed to offer a partnership of convenience. <br />
<br />
Both vaudeville and vice could do very well without each other -- so much so that one Omaha paper could write exclusively about performance while the other wrote exclusively about crime, and you might not think they were even writing about the same venue. But cheap liquor, cheap entertainment, and cheap companionship are three tried-and-true ways to fleece a hayseed, and Omaha, thanks to the then-booming industries of rail and meat packing, had hayseeds aplenty. All you needed was a building, a show, a liquor license, and a few unscrupulous employees and you had a business plan.<br />
<br />
The hayseeds came to town rich. One way or another, they were going home broke.maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-15332914643677143502014-06-26T13:41:00.001-07:002014-06-29T10:37:26.754-07:00The Burlesque Troupe<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://static.squarespace.com/static/523aec87e4b00be6bfa73bb8/523b2914e4b0756f69e1b59c/523b2917e4b0756f69e1b717/1332235328099/1000w/lydia1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://static.squarespace.com/static/523aec87e4b00be6bfa73bb8/523b2914e4b0756f69e1b59c/523b2917e4b0756f69e1b717/1332235328099/1000w/lydia1.jpg" width="278" /></a></div>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Victorians loved burlesque. The word then meant
something different than it does now. The
Victorian burlesque didn’t involve amply endowed women revealing pulchritudinous
flesh while a baggy pants comic waited offstage.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
No, the Victorian burlesque was a theater of satire and
parody, often lampooning already existing songs and plays. The Victorians
made fun of everybody. Shakespearean burlesque was enormously popular, but there
were also burlesques of operas, melodramas, folk tales, and popular dances.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Although these burlesques proved to be very popular in New York, and eventually throughout the U.S., they seem
primarily to have been an English creation, and reflected certain British
sensibilities regarding performance. One of these is comic cross-dressing, a
staple of the pantomime (where it was typically men who took female roles). There
was also a long tradition of women appearing in male roles, both in mainstream
theater (where it was called a “travesti” or “breeches” role) and in the music
hall, which had a number of successful male impersonators.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Victorian burlesque seemed to borrow from all this, and I offer all this as an abbreviated explanation as to how a troupe called Lydia Thompson’s
British Blondes, led by an actress who had done drag acts in England for years,
and featuring scantily clad young actresses pursued by male impersonators, came to
Omaha in the 1870s, and wound up leaving one of their own behind.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Firstly, we should introduce Lydia Thompson. She was a London native, the
daughter of a bar-owner, and she left home to become a professional dancer at
age 14. She quickly became a star, touring Europe.
In 1859, The Times declared her “one of the most eminent of English dancers,"
and, as her career progressed, she found increasing success playing the
“principal boy” in burlesques – the lead male juvenile character. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
By 1864, Thompson was working with Alexander Henderson, a
successful theater manager, and, after a series of lucrative collaborations,
married him. The two relocated to New York in
1868, and here began to adapt British burlesques for American audiences,
rewriting dialogue and song-lyrics, as well as incorporating songs that were
then popular in the United
States. They put together a small troupe of
women, eventually calling them the “British Blondes,” and the resulting show was a
sensation during the 1868-69 Broadway theatrical season. It was meant to run six months,
but, including tours of the U.S.,
it ran for six years.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The show was not without its critics. The use of female
performers in male roles drew the ire of some writers, including Wilbur F.
Storey, owner of the Chicago Times. In response, Thompson horsewhipped him.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s impossible to find any local news coverage of Thomson’s
troupe when they reached Omaha
– perhaps the intrepid newsmen feared they might likewise be horsewhipped. But
thanks to an issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, we know when they
were in town. On Saturday, July 16, 1870, the New York
newspaper ran this item: “The Lydia Thompson Troupe will begin a season in Omaha July 14th.” Follow
up items in the same publication show that the troupe performed through early
August.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The same publication also identifies the show, and the cast.
It was called “The Bronze Horse,” a burlesque of what was already
an opera comique by French composer Daniel Auber. The story is a fantasia set
in China,
and, according to Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, the cast included Edith
Bland, Mrs. De Bar, and May Preston. I mention this because one of those names
will prove to be important to this story.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
While there are no local references to Thompson’s
performance here, we do know about one of her audience members. Her name was
Ellen E. Griffin, she was 25, and came from a wealthy New York family. She followed Thomson around the
country, and she was desperately in love with her. We know this because the
Nashville Union and Democrat documented it, publishing a number of Griffin’s love-struck letters to Thompson, including this
one from the Metropolitan House in Omaha,
a hotel:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Well, here I am, my little divinity; at least what is left
of me. Now I suppose that you think that fatigue and excitement – sometimes
fright – of this trip, will deter me from taking another one; but you are very
much mistaken. You know that I love you.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Later, Griffin
wrote Thompson this poem:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“I love you, I love you,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Let Henderson
dare</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To chide me for loving</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Your golden hair.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“I love you, I love you,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And cost what it may</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Will follow you again</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At some future day.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Alexander Henderson, Thompson’s husband, did not seem to
appreciate Griffin’s
affections for his wife. In another letter, Griffin
wrote the following: “To Mr. Henderson:--Miss Thompson informed me this morning
that you intend shooting me.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At the start of this story, I mentioned that the troupe ended
up leaving one of their own behind. It was Edith Bland, one of the principals
from “The Bronze Horse,” and she stayed with her mother, who must have been
touring with her. Bland was six foot tall, pretty, and, according to a letter
to the Omaha Bee from 1883, had an aristocratic bearing.</div>
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<br /></div>
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It’s unclear why Bland chose to stay in Omaha, although she was offered a job with
our first stock company, run by Henri Corri, and that may have influenced her
decision. She stayed on for several years, appearing in soubrette roles at the Academy of Music. The Bee recalled Bland and her
mother in this way: “These two lived together in rooms in the third story of Caldwell block, the same
in which the Academy is situated. They always appeared well dressed, and the
taste which Edith used in her toilettes was always particularly spoken of.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Edith Blande (sic) was a very ambitious girl,” the Bee
continued. “During her residents of about five years in Omaha she worked hard and used all the money
she could earn to improve her acting and her wardrobe, for she was aiming to be
a star.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Bland partnered with a local photographer, Frank Currier, to
produce a series of photographs of her, which she sent about to agents. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Her diligence paid off. In 1873, Bland received an offer “from
an Eastern manager to join a troupe whose destination is Europe,”
according to the Sioux City Journal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On
January 13 of 1834, an ad in the Washington Evening Star lists a one-week
engagement of a comic opera called “Land
of Gold.” Included in
the cast is the following: “First appearance of the charming burlesque actress
Edith Bland.” By November of 1883, when the Bee wrote their memories of the
actress, she had already attained one of the first signs of stardom: she was
the subject of gossip. “The rumor that she married the son of a duke in Newcastle is not true,”
the Bee informed its readers.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In 1893, the Oamaru Mail claimed that Bland had been in Sydney, Australia,
where she attempted to accompany a lion-tamer into his den, but that
authorities stepped in and stopped the performance.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
She went on to have a successful career in theater,
frequently appearing on New York
stages, and her private affairs continued to be the subject of public scrutiny.
An 1895 article in the Denver Post accused Bland of having been the mistress of
Edward Solomon, the English composer, and claimed Solomon had abandoned his
English wife to run away to America
with Bland. A Daily Illinois State Register story from 1883 had substantially
the same information, but added to it claims that Bland paid Solomon’s bills
and he beat her. This, however, may be a different Edith Bland – a publication
called “Fact, Fancy, and Fable: Ready Reference on Subjects Commonly Omitted
from Cyclopedias” from 1889 lists them as two separate women.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In 1896, Bland was sued for divorce by her then-husband,
Austin <span class="st">Brereton</span>, for what the Omaha World-Herald
described as “her unfounded jealousy of him.” In 1897, the Boston Journal
offered the conclusion to the case: dismissed for want of proof. They did
summarize his charges against his wife. She was “cruel, had a bad temper, and
had abandoned him.” The World-Herald also hinted at a story that I have found
no further documentation for, saying that Bland returned to Omaha when a male acquaintance of hers was
preparing to marry, and made things difficult for him.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s hard not to wonder if a horsewhip might have been
involved.</div>
maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-30976752204127246232014-06-25T11:04:00.001-07:002014-06-29T11:01:12.539-07:00The Orator<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
I am going to devote this story to a fellow born in Dresden, New York. After 65 years, he died in Dobbs Ferry, New York. During the expanse of his years, he only spent a few days
in Omaha. They
were, however, hugely entertaining days, as you will see.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
His name was Robert G. Ingersoll, and he was one of America’s great
orators. The son of a preacher, he was lawyer, Civil War veteran, close friend
of Walt Whitman, and professional speaker of great popularity and erudition. He
could speak extemporaneously for three hours before a rapt audience, and he
spoke knowledgeably about a variety of topics – including religion. He had his
own ideas about this subject, which we shall get to shortly.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Ingersoll spoke at Boyd’s Opera House for the first time on
May of 1891, lecturing on the subject of Shakespeare. The text of
his speech was published posthumously, and so we can see approximately what he had to say on
the subject. Mostly, he passionately defended the Bard’s genius and offered a
summary of the man’s biography and works. This was an entirely unsurprising
approach to the topic, as the American west was starting to have its share of
nouveau riche bankers and ranchers and landowners. (The theater itself was built
by a stockyard owner). Omaha was then a dusty
frontier town of violent men, muddy streets, gambling dens, and brothels, and
its no surprise that the newly moneyed wanted to bring some culture to the Gate City.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But there are a few lines in Ingersoll’s speech that hint
that the man was wrestling with some questions of faith. “Famine and faith go
together,” he declared. “In disaster and want the gaze of man is fixed upon
another world. He that eats a crust has a creed. Hunger falls upon its knees,
and heaven, looked for through tears, is the mirage of misery. But prosperity
brings joy and wealth and leisure -- and the beautiful is born.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Heaven is the mirage of misery? Apparently, a few people
caught that Ingersoll’s speech was peppered with phrases like this, as populist
politician Ignatius Donnelly came to town town the following month offering his own
oration at Boyd’s, titled “Mistake of Ingersoll in Literature <i>and Religion</i>.” Italics mine.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Let me take just a moment to detail Ignatius Donnelly’s viewpoints,
because he was a crank. More than that, he was a sort of crank extraordinaire.
He challenged Ingersoll’s entire biography of Shakespeare, claiming the playwrights
works were actually written by Francis Bacon. He also published a popular book
on Atlantis, a book theorizing that the earth was about to be destroyed by an
enormous meteor. (The book was called “Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel,”
which sounds less like a doomsday book that a Swedish death metal album.) He once founded a failed utopian community in Minnesota. So whatever Ingersoll thought,
Donnelly was probably going to take issue with it, because seemingly everything Donnelly
believed was mad.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But what did Ingersoll believe? He expounded on this in
October of 1893 on a return engagement with Boyd’s, a speech titled “Myth and
Miracle.” Boyd’s was filled for this event.<br />
<br />
This was, I should note, Boyd’s second music hall, located at 17th and Harney. I mentioned his first in another article, and that seated 1,700. This new opera house was larger than the first, so Ingersoll’s
lecture drew 2,000 people.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And what did Ingersoll wish to tell the assembled masses of Omaha? The World-Herald
selected some of his plum quotes and reprinted them, such as “There is only one
good in this world, and that is happiness” and “Spiritual people look upon this
world as containing little that is good” and “More beautiful truths fell like
diamonds from the mouths of Shakespeare’s clowns than can be found in all the
books of Moses.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So we have a portrait
of a man who seems deeply ambivalent about religion. In fact, The World-Herald
was a bit circumspect about Ingersoll’s viewpoints.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Robert Ingersoll was an atheist.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He didn’t use that word for himself – his nickname, instead,
was “The Great Agnostic,” which suggests ambiguity. But Ingersoll’s viewpoints
were hardly ambiguous. He viewed most religious writing as hogwash and most
religious leaders as charlatans, and said so. Here are some quotes from a
transcribed version of Ingersoll’s “Myth and Miracle” that the World-Herald
didn’t print:</div>
<br />
<blockquote>
-- These spiritual people have been known as prophets, apostles, augurs, hermits, monks, priests, popes, bishops and parsons. They are devout and useless. They do not cultivate the soil. They produce nothing. They live on the labor of others. They are pious and parasitic. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
-- The spiritual have endeavored to civilize the world through fear and faith -- by the promise of reward and the threat of pain in other worlds. They taught men to hate and persecute their fellow-men. In all ages they have appealed to force. During all the years they have practiced fraud. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
-- The "spiritual" have been, are, and always will be the enemies of the human race. </blockquote>
<br />
And that’s just from his introduction! One cannot help but
admire the temerity it must have taken to stand before 2,000 of Omaha’s best citizens and excoriate them as
suckers for believing in the mystical mutterings of con artists.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Unexpectedly, nobody seemed that bothered. A local rabbi,
Leo Franklin, offered a response (published in the Bee) that included “let us
not be too hard on this poor infidel.” Franklin
felt that Ingersoll was just making a living, which he didn’t seem to mind, but
ultimately felt atheism was an expression of ignorance. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The World-Herald, in the meanwhile, took the tack of
self-congratulation. “Ingersoll stands today as living evidence of both the
tolerance and the Christian sentiment of the American people,” the World-Herald
claimed. “Though his opinions are directly opposite of the people of this
country, he is personally one of the most popular of its citizens.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A little while later, in frigid December, a writer at the
World-Herald used Ingersoll as the setup to a joke: “If Bob Ingersoll insists
that there is no hell,” the writer asked in mock irritation, “will he please
explain what becomes of the caller who leaves the office door open in winter?”
Ingersoll remained a figure of fun in the World-Herald, although they followed
his career with no small amount of fascination.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Ingersoll returned again in 1895, and his topic this time
seemed designed to inflame passions: “The Bible.” He opened with these
extraordinary words:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Somebody ought to tell the truth about the Bible. The
preachers dare not, because they would be driven from their pulpits. Professors
in colleges dare not, because they would lose their salaries. Politicians dare
not. They would be defeated. Editors dare not. They would lose subscribers.
Merchants dare not, because they might lose customers. Men of fashion dare not,
fearing that they would lose caste. Even clerks dare not, because they might be
discharged. And so I thought I would do it myself.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Gauntlet thrown down, he proceeded to call the bible
ignorant and savage, its authors uneducated, its contents cruel, absurd and
impossible, and its followers brutal. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He sold out Boyd’s, of course. The World-Herald identified
local religious leaders in the audience, but they were in the minority. Most of
the audience were appreciative, and Ingersoll had to frequently stop for
applause or for laughter. These do not sound like Americans who disagreed with
him but were filled with Christian tolerance. This sounds like an audience that was genuinely receptive to Ingersoll’s message.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Ingersoll brought a revised version of one of his older
speeches, “Superstition,” to Boyd’s in January of 1899. The World-Herald wrote
of him in unabashedly complimentary terms: “Erect, magnetic, urbane, and genial
as ever, age sits well upon him,” and concluded their article with a hopeful
note from Ingersoll, who said “The majority are advancing in spite of themselves.” It
was to be the last time Ingersoll would appear at Boyd’s; he died in<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>July of that year.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s hard to tell how many adherents Ingersoll had in Omaha, or in general. In
the period after the Civil War, America
experienced a crisis of faith. Some, like Ingersoll, rejected religion
altogether, but many looked for alternatives to mainstream Christianity. In
particular, this period saw the rise of Spiritualism, an indigenous American
religion rooted in communicating with the dead. Spiritualism had followers in Omaha, some of whom might
have shared Ingersoll’s skepticism regarding Christianity without concerning
themselves with the wholesale rejection of the supernatural.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Additionally, at this time, atheism was increasingly becoming
associated with radical political movements in Europe.
Anarchism and communism were both explicitly atheistic, while nihilism rejected
all authority, earthly and sacred. These movements began to take root in America, and many Americans started
to define themselves in opposition to this new form of alien radicalism. The Russian
Revolution seemed to cinch it, reinforced by decades of Cold War. America stood
in opposition to Communism, and American churches stood in opposition to
Communist atheism.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Just this past year, a Pew study determined that even now,
in 2014, half of Americans objected to the idea of a family member marrying an atheist.
Half! It’s hard to imagine Robert Ingersoll now, taking the stage before 2,000 Omahgans and telling them that their beliefs are bunk.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What a different world it was back in the 1890s, when a man
like Ingersoll could find a mass audience in America,
and sell out the premiere opera house in Omaha.
Nowadays, we wouldn’t even let him marry our sister. </div>
maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-26965965428862349912014-06-24T08:23:00.001-07:002014-06-29T11:12:36.070-07:00Disorderly House<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI-4mzG-4L_47XJj1TRGd3AEU41LoH7HZwGgy_0m8t9gYuQfL173MXpSznGBxoyEmuaotqKg50g1vxwZ2E-QCluOm8ugXAId1HLJCIe31zTa6OdmeFrt5u8MFefpjtWUd5zJqXtJMlfBc/s640/suffragette+with+monkey.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI-4mzG-4L_47XJj1TRGd3AEU41LoH7HZwGgy_0m8t9gYuQfL173MXpSznGBxoyEmuaotqKg50g1vxwZ2E-QCluOm8ugXAId1HLJCIe31zTa6OdmeFrt5u8MFefpjtWUd5zJqXtJMlfBc/s640/suffragette+with+monkey.jpg" height="373" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
An brief but tantalizing article was printed in the Omaha World-Herald on January 25, 1891, and I will reproduce it in entirely:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
ARREST OF VARIETY MANAGER.<br />
<br />
Yesterday a warrant was issued from the police court, charging Manager Kellogg of the People's Theater with keeping a disorderly house. The complaint alleges that Kellogg has a number of girls soliciting trade for beer, and that the girls work everyone they can for suckers. The complaint alleges that a house of this kind is a nuisance to any community and should not be allowed in the city.</blockquote>
<br />
Disorderly house is a specific criminal complaint, albeit one we don't hear much anymore. At its simplest, it represents any house in which the behavior of the inhabitants is liable to become a nuisance. In practice, it typically meant a brothel. In fact, here is the city ordinance from 1881:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Sec. 3 <b>[Complaint of Citizens.]</b>--If two or more citizens shall at any time make a written complaint to the city marshal to the effect that any house or place in their neighborhood is openly and notoriously kept or maintained as a house of prostitution, or disorderly house, it shall be the duty of that officer to forthwith make a proper complaint before the police judge against the person or persons so keeping or maintaining such house, and against all inmates thereof, and all such persons shall, on conviction, be punished as provided in section one of this chapter.</blockquote>
And so it is that disorderly houses, when they appear in Omaha news, tend to be brothels. The first mention of such a thing seems to be the story of Mr. Harry Lucas, arrested in 1880 and charged with keeping a disorderly house -- in particular, something called a "deadfall," which Herbert Asbury helpfully defined in his book <span class="reference-text">"The Barbary Coast – An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld" and paraphrased by Wikipedia: "</span>The deadfalls were the lowest of the establishments and had hard
benches, damp sawdust on the floors, the bar was rough boards laid atop
of barrels, had no entertainment, and their wine was often raw alcohol
with an added coloring"<br />
<br />
In 1885, a charge of a disorderly house brings a war of words between a doctor, JW Search, and a madame named Thompson, with Thompon's lawyer casting aspersion against Search, saying that he was a man "who don't know nux vomica from aqua fortis." Nux vomica is a poison nut from a tree that produces strychnine, by the way, while aqua fortis is the corrosive nitric acid. So now you know more than Dr. Search.<br />
<br />
Search presented voluminous, and apparently upsetting, details about the sanitation at Madame Thompson house, which she and her "girls" denounced as lies. The result? "[A] verdict in favor of Mrs. Thompson."<br />
<br />
This wasn't an uncommon outcome. Omaha had semi-legal prostitution, thanks to a clever reversal of the usual system of prosecuting and then fining lawbreakers. According to Alfred Sorenson's "Story of Omaha," "Many immoral women inhabited the tenderloin district in the vicinity of Ninth and Douglas streets. Police raids on disorderly houses were of rare occurrence, no arrests being made unless some serious disturbance required the presence of the officers of the law. Instead of fining these women in open police court the custom was to receive the monthly fines -- $10 for the landladies and $5 for each inmate -- from the hands of a messenger who was sent to the court to 'settle up.'" As Sorenson points out, "The custom was virtually a license system."<br />
<br />
And so there winds up being a surprising number of stories about charges against disorderly houses that are dropped. And why not? They had, after all, prepaid their fines. And so we never hear of the charges against the People's Theater again.<br />
<br />
Interestingly, this is not the first time the phrase was connected to the People's Theater. In March of 1889, then manager John Sellon tried to work around the city's ban on prize-fighting by having two pugilists engage in a pillow fight as an "afterpiece," according to the Omaha Bee. The police shut it down, much to the irritation of Sellon. He responded by "claiming that he pays a license to run a variety show, and so long as he does not conduct an indecent or disorderly house he thinks he should be allowed to say what kind of acts should go on his stage."<br />
<br />
The People's Theater wasn't the only performance venue slapped with the disorderly house label either. In February of 1890, police arrested four women from a location on Twenty-seventh street called Theater Comique. The Bee reported on the theater in this way: "The so-called theater is one of the vilest in the west where loose women and coarse men mingle with one another in the gallery and wine room with the utmost freedom. The stage show abounds in suggestive language and is a public disgrace to a civilized community. The women receive a mere pittance for their labor and in the wine room and at their abodes are nothing but unlicensed prostitutes."<br />
<br />
The Theater Comique was one of the theaters run by the notorious Nugent brothers, who have appeared on this blog before.<br />
<br />
A few days following the Bee story, the arrested women were released after their manager paid a fine (although one woman was advised to leave town). The Bee received a message regarding the theater from a local businessman: "It is a nest of iniquity that should not be tolerated in any city. Nightly the young sons of respectable parents spend their time there and become contaminated by their vile associates they are compelled to mingle with," although the letter writer allows that the variety show itself is not too bad.<br />
<br />
Nonetheless, the women returned to work, as the Bee put it, plying "their disreputable vocations in abbreviated garments." One wonders why the arrested at all, but the first story might hold the key. They aren't identified simply as prostitutes, but as <i>unlicensed </i>prostitutes. Once their fines were paid, they were functionally licensed, and, as People's Theater manager John Sellon suggested, once you pay your license, you expect to be able to decide what sort of acts go up on your stage. Or in your wine room. Or in the abodes of your performing girls.maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-15051703432099337122014-06-23T10:45:00.001-07:002014-06-24T08:12:21.980-07:00Shooting an Actor<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBvhVzzBPAbW6hItdSyk_3FEUarR3hIiEoRmXO-EpP7BkSZgnxyUDba0PtszJZbFKu0a3cjooRJkTVBll2tss0W0R6vAitHe6KWOe-xewEVf4-sb6A6OUFAHTatmD6JZaZNQ8AwrPDs9s/s1600/cameraphone.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBvhVzzBPAbW6hItdSyk_3FEUarR3hIiEoRmXO-EpP7BkSZgnxyUDba0PtszJZbFKu0a3cjooRJkTVBll2tss0W0R6vAitHe6KWOe-xewEVf4-sb6A6OUFAHTatmD6JZaZNQ8AwrPDs9s/s1600/cameraphone.jpg" height="387" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Here’s a story that is maddeningly lacking in follow up, but I
am going to print it anyway, because it’s a story about a local actor getting
shot by a jealous husband, and if such a story doesn’t have a home here, where
does it?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The victim in the story is James Kellogg, who the
World-Herald from July of 1911 identifies as an out-of-work actor. Kellogg
hadn’t been doing very much to deserve a shooting. He had stopped by his wife’s
place of business, a short-lived but marvelously named theater called the Cameraphone
at 1403 Douglas, where she played piano.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The trouble was that Mrs. Kellogg had a former husband, J.W.
Wheaton. He had apparently disappeared for a few years, his ex had divorced
him, and he wasn’t happy about the fact. Returning home, he “tried to pay
attention to his former wife,” according to the World-Herald; the term is
vague, but he probably engaged in the sort of behavior we would now identify as
stalking.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
On the night of July 4, Wheaton found Kellogg in the alley behind the
theater, talking through the stage door to the former Mrs. Wheaton (and current
Mrs. Kellogg.) Wheaton called to his ex wife, she refused to talk to him, and
then Wheaton
fired three shots at Kellogg. Kellogg at once ran into the theater. The third
shot caught Kellogg in the shoulder. Kellogg was taken to Wise Memorial
hospital where they probed his wound, trying to recover the bullet, but were
not successful. At the time the story was written, Kellogg was “suffering
intensely” and might die.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Wheaton,
in the meanwhile, wandered to a nearby saloon, Stoddard and Meredith’s, on 14th
between Douglas and Farnam. This is where the police found him.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And then? Well, nothing. Presumably Kellogg didn’t die, or
there would have been a follow-up story about Wheaton’s murder trial. Kellogg and his wife
never appear in the papers again. I wish Mrs. Kellogg were Margaret Kellogg,
the eccentric local millionaire who lived with a lifelong female friend, a
monkey, and pug dogs who she dressed in jewelry, and who, when she died in
1957. She had a provision in her will that one of the dogs be put to death because after she passed away;
he was “mean.” But Margaret was not the Mrs. Kellogg from the Cameraphone shooting.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And we don’t know much about the shooter. There was a wealthy
local businessman named J.W. Wheaton, but it hardly seems likely that he would
disappear for a few years and then reappear just in time to shoot someone
without it being a bigger deal. It’s possible that he was the same man that had
been discovered unconscious in March on 12th and Harney, intoxicated and
concussed, either from his fall or from being attacked by hoodlums. This Wheaton was a railroad man who then lived in Iowa, which is
consistent with the newspaper’s report that the shooter had been away. And
the Bee tells us that this Wheaton
had a wooden leg. It’s not proof of anything, but if I had a wooden leg, and I
shot someone, I wouldn’t bother trying to run away, but instead head to the
nearest bar. But this is conjecture. We just don't know anything more about who shot James Kellogg.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Anyway, neither the Bee nor the World-Herald ever revisit
the story, and so there is nothing more that I can tell you, except that, in
1911, you could shoot an actor and nobody would think it was a very big deal.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I can, however, tell you more about the Cameraphone theater,
which opened in 1908, because it straddles the moment between live performance and film. It mostly
showed movies, but they were generally filmed versions of popular stage shows
or variety performers. The theater’s name means “talking picture,” and its first ad
boasts of “motion pictures that actually talk.” This was done using a system designed by Oregon inventor James
Whiteman that was also called cameraphone, and used a synced wax cylinder to
play sound along with a movie years before sound movies became commercially
viable. The theater also had live acts, and they primarily consisted of an “illustrated” song – a live
singer would stand before the crowd and enjoin them to sing along, while the
text of the song played behind her, often with pastoral illustrations. The
theater also had an amateur night.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Cameraphone doesn’t seem to have been a very
well-maintained organization. A 1915 issue of The Moving Picture World contains
a report from a man named Joseph Smith who had visited the theater and found
the projectionist smoking. Back then, film stock was made out of nitrate film
stock, which was highly flammable. Smith complained to the proprietor, who told
him he should visit a doctor. Further, the picture quality was terrible: “During
the entire three reels the picture was half yellow, and I guess the operator
had planted a grass seed on the aperture and it had started to grow,”
Smith wrote.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The theater wasn't much better with their live performers. In
1910, an actress named Marie Morrell Farrell was struck by a falling curtain as
she performed. She subsequently suffered ongoing violent headaches, and sued
the theater for $1,000 for damages, citing negligence.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The theater seems to have gone out of business in 1917, but
it went uncommented on in the local papers. Back in those days, the passing of
a theater attracted as little attention as the shooting of an actor.</div>
maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-53187249436360765542014-06-21T09:28:00.002-07:002014-06-21T09:40:22.547-07:00Fatty<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTfUkpHMjZ-D27XLz69556xC_GuNQx4IwGW9Lojj8rqF6K2812NDpURA24Fz8lCXllQTdJH9b0nodYiUxUkb0K4EOkGtRkb_m2R5CvEtVEaiNS728PDgYrWtEcQIz4w4uvI-CFppWwvgA/s1600/fatty.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTfUkpHMjZ-D27XLz69556xC_GuNQx4IwGW9Lojj8rqF6K2812NDpURA24Fz8lCXllQTdJH9b0nodYiUxUkb0K4EOkGtRkb_m2R5CvEtVEaiNS728PDgYrWtEcQIz4w4uvI-CFppWwvgA/s1600/fatty.jpg" height="400" width="203" /> </a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
There is a great story to be found in the book “Upstream Metropolis,” one of the better histories of Omaha. It tells of Fatty Flynn, a 425-pound former circus performer who ran a saloon that catered to “visiting sports” -- people who wanted a quick game of cards between train rides.<br />
<br />
The source of this story is “Omaha Memories” by Edward Francis Morearty, who gives more detail. In Morearty’s book, the proprietor is named Glynn, not Flynn, and he is said to have built a five-story building on Eleventh and Douglas Streets where he kept his saloon.<br />
<br />
It’s a brief story, and tantalizing in its brevity. Omaha had a building built by a massive former circus clown that catered to traveling gamblers? The story is so entertaining that a local brewpub called Jobber’s Canyon, now closed, had a beer named Fatty Flynn, along with one named Underworld Anna, named after Anna Wilson, Omaha’s famed madame. Omahans love their colorful criminals -- goodness knows I do.<br />
<br />
It’s a good thing, in a way, that Jobber’s Canyon is closed, as I have some bad news. Almost every single fact in the above story is wrong. Fatty Flynn was not a former circus clown. He did not build a five story saloon. And his name wasn’t Fatty Flynn. It wasn’t even Glynn.<br />
<br />
His name was Robert Glenn, and just because Morearty misremember everything about him, and “Upstream Metropolis” repeated his errors, and added one of their own, doesn’t mean his story isn’t worth telling.<br />
<br />
He was a large man, and, while his early nickname was Bob, he did eventually acquire the sobriquet Fatty. But he wasn’t a circus clown; he was the former deputy sheriff of Norfolk, Va., his home town. There he met a woman named Fannie Oates, a well-known burlesque actress, who, with her husband Col. James Oates, had a touring company of a musical called “The Black Crook” -- widely regarded as one of the first true musicals.<br />
<br />
Glenn joined the company, touring with them to Canada and Australia. He eventually wound up in Omaha -- nobody has recorded how -- where he worked for a while as a hotel clerk, but, when he had the opportunity, purchased the Atlantic hotel saloon on 10th and Howard Street. For years was a saloon owner, including operating a saloon on 11th and Douglas -- a building that was mostly a liquor warehouse. Despite Mr. Morearty’s claims, there is no evidence Glenn owned or built the structure; instead, it was built by Stubendorf and Nestor, the liquor warehousers, according to an Omaha Bee story from 1884.<br />
<br />
He was part of the early theater scene in Omaha; he briefly co-owned the People’s Theater, where he often appeared in roles that required a girthy comic actor. In the 1880s, he purchased a block of real estate on Eighth and Leavenworth, rehabilitated it, and lived off the profits from its rental, going into semi-retirement. He died of heart failure in October of 1894 at about the age of 60.<br />
<br />
But there’s one detail I haven’t covered, and it’s something Morearty got right in his list of wrongs. Glenn was a sporting man. In his early career, he is associated with the Nugents, who eventually owned (and sometimes died at) the notorious Buckingham theater. Glenn co-owned the People’s Theater with a Nugent, and Glenn coproduced the first minstrel act in Omaha with a Nugent. But while the Nugent’s saloons-cum-theaters were notorious for violence, Glenn’s saloon goes unremarked upon in the crime pages.<br />
<br />
He was, however, associated with the gambling community. His first appearance in the Omaha Bee, on June 18 of 1880, is in the following brief:<br />
<br />
“A party principally composed of the sporting fraternity of the city, participated Wednesday evening in a pleasant trip to Florence, where they partook of spring chicken and other delicacies. ‘Fatty’ Glenn punished so much of the fowl that he is still crowing.”<br />
<br />
Glenn also appears as a character in a pathetic Omaha Bee tale of a broken horse named Old Jim, who local gamblers had passed from one to the other as a raffle prize. The horse had originally been called White Jim and had been sold in 1874 by a trader named “Irish Mike,” who then sold the rest of his horses in Yankton, disappeared, and is thought to have been murdered.<br />
<br />
The buyer of Jim was a trader named Sam Morgan, and after Irish Mike’s disappearance, Morgan had his own bad luck. He had a barn full of horses on Sixth Street, and all but one died of illness. The one that survived was Jim, so Morgan raffled him off, hoping to raise enough money to buy Christmas gifts for his children. Jim changed hands a few more times, winding up in the Buckingham, owned by the Nugents, who raffled him off to their performing staff. A ballet dancer won. She got drunk in celebration, and that night sold Jim to a deadbeat, who left him in a barn and refused to pay the debt. Jim was then won by a gambler who was up on his luck, sold when the man was down on his luck, and eventually made his was into Glenn's possession in July of ‘80.<br />
<br />
The Bee picks up the story here: “‘Fatty’ had tickets printed for a New Year’s raffle. Old Jim by this time had become very popular. He was known far and near. Every one took a chance. On the night of the contest the wind was blowing a terrific gale and the snow was a foot deep. Old Jim was hitched at the back door. His whinneys could be heard long and frequently. Fatty took down his banjo and played a juba. The boys sifted for a few minutes, when it was announced that Old Jim was once more to be raffled off. Policeman Morris Sullivan won him. It is unnecessary to state that the drinks flowed freely.”<br />
<br />
Newspapers talked less about Glenn's gambling than his weight, which, at over 400 pounds, was a subject of fun -- something he himself seemed to encourage (his humor about the subject is often commented upon), but seems cruel nowadays. In 1889, the World-Herald ran an entire humor story called “The Obese Men of Omaha,” telling tales of their largeness, and they begin with Glenn:<br />
<br />
“Of all the Omaha men who waddles and shakes the earth, Fatty Glenn is probably the most picturesque. It is related of this remarkable man that when in Chicago not long ago he observed a machine in the reading rooms of the Young Men’s Christian Association, at the top of which was this legend:<br />
<br />
“‘Drop a nickel in the slot and ascertain your exact weight.’<br />
<br />
“Mr. Glenn lifted himself up on the scale and dropped a nickel into the slot. The indicator gave a distressed sort of quiver and then remained hopelessly in its original place. ‘What’s the matter with this arrangement?’ inquired Mr. Glenn. ‘Is this a new bunco game? Have I been sold again?’<br />
<br />
“‘The scale’s discouraged,’ answered the superintendent of the Young Men’s Christian Association; ‘Try a quarter.’”maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-86889969673630348842014-06-20T10:41:00.001-07:002014-06-20T10:47:18.328-07:00Annie Dean's Dream of Death<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://digital.omahapubliclibrary.org/earlyomaha/galleries/albums/alb001_028.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://digital.omahapubliclibrary.org/earlyomaha/galleries/albums/alb001_028.jpg" height="313" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
This will be a brief item, and a bit incidental, in the sense
that the main character in it was not directly involved in Omaha theater. But it is such an odd tale
that I would be remiss in omitting it.
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
First, the main character: Her name was Annie Dean, and she
was the half-sister of Julia Dean Hayne, who starred in the very first
theatrical production ever mounted in Omaha,
produced in the summer of 1860. The play was held in the Herndon House, a
rather fancy local hotel built on 9th and Farnam Street in 1858 that played host to
both Abraham Lincoln and <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ulysses S.
Grant. It was fancy enough to serve lobsters and oysters, which were hard to come by in Omaha.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Nonetheless, the Herndon House did not have a proper stage.
The performance was held in the dining room, and the hotel borrowed bolts of
muslin from a nearby store to make curtains. Nobody seems to remember what the
show was, but it was a touring production. In fact, Julia Dean Hayne was a fairly
accomplished stage actress of her era, a member of a theatrical
dynasty, and she toured extensively in the American south and west. There is a
good chance the show that night was actually James Sheridan Knowles’ “The Hunchback,” telling
of a country girl in London.
This was the play that made Hayne’s reputation 14 years earlier, and it was a
play she often took on tour.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
By the way, having a hotel as a venue and borrowed muslin
sheets as a curtain was probably quite familiar to Hayne. Her tours took her to
some pretty tough places in the west, including mining camps, and so her venues
were often makeshift.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But enough about Hayne. As I said, this story is about her half-sister Annie Dean. Annie was married to a theater man, after a
fashion. His name was Colonel John Y. Clopper, a Civil War veteran who ended up
co-owning and doing theatrical promotion for the Academy
of Music, Omaha’s first dedicated theater space, which
would eventually become the People’s Theater.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I feel that we have established Annie’s Dean’s theatrical
bona fides, so on to the odd tale I mentioned. In the spring of 1887, Annie
Dean, now a widow, resided in Denver.
One night, she had a strange dream. I will quote the Omaha Bee from the time: </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“[S]he saw her approaching end, saw her body laid in the
coffin, and the scene impressed itself so vividly on her mind that she observed
the dress in which she was clothed, the manner in which her hair was arranged, and
even the ornaments in her collar.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Annie was convinced that the dream meant she was about to
die. Her friends tried to comfort her, but she insisted that, were she to die,
she should be laid to rest in exactly the way she saw it in her dream.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Two weeks after the dream, Annie died. Her friends did as
she wished, located a dress like the one from the dream, arranging her hair as
she had seen it, ornamenting her collar, and even setting her head in the
position Annie had dreamed.</div>
maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-59748664959638979472014-06-19T14:16:00.001-07:002014-06-19T14:19:10.318-07:00Miss Ward, I Presume: A Journalist, an Actress, and a Suicide<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/Sir_H._M._Stanley_with_the_officers_of_the_Advance_Column.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/Sir_H._M._Stanley_with_the_officers_of_the_Advance_Column.jpg" height="243" width="400" /></a></div>
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<![endif]-->I feel like H.M. Stanley has exited the popular
consciousness. When I was a boy, it was still possible to hear the phrase “Dr.
Livingstone, I presume.” It was infrequent and unmoored from context, but it
still made an occasional public appearance as a recognizable idiom.
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I can’t remember the last time I heard it, and so context is
needed, even though the subject of this article is an early Omaha actress and her suicide.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You see, H.M. Stanley, the Welsh-born journalist/explorer,
was an Omahan for a while. He came out when young and broke and wrote tales of
frontier life for the New York Herald. An example: He was on a train one day
outside Omaha
when a man named William Thompson climbed about. Thompson was the subject of a
lot of attention, as he had a great gory wound in his shoulder, from a
tomahawk, and was missing his scalp.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Actually, it wasn’t missing. It was in a bucket next to him,
and he was on his way to Omaha
to get it sewed back on. This didn’t work, and you can still see the scalp on
occasion at the Omaha Public Library, but that’s another story, because
Thompson and his scalp became a short lived theatrical sensation. My point is
that this was the sort of story Staley wrote from Omaha.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He proved adept enough at telling beastly tales from awful
places that James Gordon Bennett, founder of the New York Herald, retained him
and sent him on a variety of journalistic adventures. These included tracing
the source of the Congo River, seeking to rescue the besieged governor of
Equatoria in Southern Sudan, and finding Scottish missionary David Livingstone,
who had vanished in Africa. Stanley
found Livingstone in 1871 in Tanzania,
where the missionary had been very ill, and declared the famous words “Dr.
Livingstone, I presume.” Or perhaps not – the phrase may be an invention of Stanley’s for the sake of
a good story.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Whatever the case, Stanley
ended up famous, knighted, and may have been the inspiration for Joseph
Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” which itself was the inspiration for Francis Ford
Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now!” In addition, there are two species of snail named
after him.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But our story is set before all this, when he was living in Omaha at the dawn of the
city, about the year 1868 or 1869, and was so broke his clothes were threadbare
and he slept in the offices of a local newspaper. And, as I have said, it is
not the story of Stanley,
but is instead the story of an actress named Annie Ward, who he fell in love
with.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s easier to write about Stanley than it is Ward, as he left behind
such a celebrated biography, and she barely appears anywhere but as a
supporting character in his story. We know that she was a member of Omaha’s forst stock company (the Corri Stock Company) at
the Academy of Music,
Omaha’s first permanent theater at 13<sup>th</sup>
and Douglas. We know she was beautiful, we
know something happened between her and Stanley, and we know that later she
killed herself.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What, precisely, happened is different in every telling. One
story has him mooning over her, regularly going to her performances, but her
being cruel in response, at one point kicking a bouquet of flowers he had
thrown onstage. Apparently there are a few letters from her to Stanley in his papers, and she is
affectionate to him, so this seems unlikely. “The Story of Omaha” by Alfred
Sorenson tells two versions, one in which a local editor mocks Stanley for his affections and is assaulted
by him. In another version, Stanley was not in
love with Ward, but the local editor, and that Stanley mocked him. There’s another version
in which Stanley borrowed a diamond ring from
Ward and the fight was over that, and yet another in which Stanley drew a revolver on Ward.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We don’t know what actually happened, except whatever
Stanley and Ward’s relationship, it ended. He went off to fortune and
adventure, and she may have gone to Utah, and
she eventually ended up married in St.
Louis</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And here is the moment we know the most about in Annie
Ward’s short life, for here is where she died in 1873, and the St. Louis Globe
told the story in some detail. She was then named Annie Baker and married to
Jacob Baker, an employee at a stationary house. She had been employed at<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i><i><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">DeBar's Opera House, bit had been out of work for a
while. Apparently, there was some disagreement between Annie and her husband,
and she wrote him a piteous letter that the paper reproduced:</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">“Jake
– Why did you go away last night? Come home as soon as you receive this, for I
have a letter to show you. I was very lonely last night, and I cannot rest till
I see you. I will wait until half-past ten, and if you are not here I will go
and hunt a situation, and you will be annoyed no more by your wife. – ANNIE</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">“P.S.
– The landlord has just come in and inquired for you. I must leave here, that
is certain. What can I do? Come.”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Annie
ended up staying with her sister for a few days, still waiting the return of
her husband and growing more despondent, threatening to drown herself. Finally,
on a day in early October, she went out to try to locate her husband, failed,
and poisoned herself with arsenic. She was 27.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And that’s all. Or almost all – there are older newspaper
stories about a stage actress named Annie Ward, who performed throughout the Midwest. She’s a young woman, pretty, talented, a
soubrette, and it’s probably our Annie. For instance, in May of 1870, an Annie
Ward appears at the Opera House in Leavenworth, Kansas, in a farce called “An
Object of Interest,” where she “favored the audience with some fine singing,”
according to the Leavenworth Bulletin. She appeared a few more times in Leavenworth, playing
characters with names like “Little Bill” and “Cricket,” and starring as
Pocahontas in June. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
She’s mentioned as staying in Kansas
City in 1972 and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>having
previously been part of the Globe Theater in Chicago. She’s in Denver in February, where the Denver Rocky
Mountain News describes her voice as “charming.” </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And that’s it. I wish there was more, as she was among Omaha’s first actresses,
and, for a while, she seems to have made a career of it, and even today that is
rare and worth mentioning. But there is nothing else I have found about her,
and she wouldn’t be remembered at all were it not for a poorly remembered
relationship with a famous man and a suicide that, if it is mentioned, is
mentioned as an afterthought.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But she was more than a woman who spurned a great man. She
was more than a young suicide. Her story, now lost to history, is the story of
a professional actress during the frontier years of the American west, and how
great would it be to have that story? </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
All we have is a poorly remembered tale of unrequited love,
a sad ending, and a few critical plaudits. It’s not enough, but it’s what we
have, and so, for the telling of this story, it will have to do.</div>
maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-12662129725936449902014-06-18T06:37:00.003-07:002014-06-18T06:56:35.724-07:00The Suffragette Onstage<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://indianapublicmedia.org/momentofindianahistory/files/2012/03/helen-gougar-edit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://indianapublicmedia.org/momentofindianahistory/files/2012/03/helen-gougar-edit.jpg" height="266" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
One of the great traditional goals of theater was to serve as an opportunity for a community to present itself onstage. The Little Theater Movement in America, directly inspired by nationalist Irish plays, often did this, telling tales of local history, local tall tales, and staging local color.<br />
<br />
For whatever reason, Omaha doesn’t seem to have done much of this. Our early stock companies tended to do local version of whatever everybody else had done years earlier, which is mostly the case today. I can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t because, when locals attempted to use the stage to address local subjects, it looked like what Mrs. Gougar offered in May of 1890. It was just one woman, all she did was talk, and she castigated Omaha.<br />
<br />
This is not a blog about the closely linked suffragette or temperance movements in Omaha, but, my goodness, somebody should start such a blog, because Omaha’s early politically active women are worth looking into. Did you know they took over a space on 15th and Capitol and started their own restaurant, using the proceeds to underwrite their activism? Did you know it was so popular that the women running the restaurant gave up on using it as a mechanism of charity and simply broke off to form a series of successful local restaurants?<br />
<br />
And I don’t have time to truly detail the works of Mrs. Helen Gougar, who was based in Indiana but was a frequent a visitor to Omaha, and locals frequently booked local theaters for her to speak upon. Gougar was nationally visible for her activism, which included suing her home state for the right to vote, and her involvement with the temperance movement led to her having an active role in party politics.<br />
<br />
Gougar was booked into the People’s Theater on 1309 Douglas Street, a vaudeville house, but her subject was decidedly not vaudevillians: “Relation of the Wage-Earner to the Saloon.” Gougar’s speech proved popular, though, the World-Herald reports that the theater was filled.<br />
<br />
I find the substance of her speech to be terrifically interesting, as she takes issue with something called the “high license.” When Gougar was active, there was a sort of general recognition that saloons were a problem, as they were publicly connected with lawlessness, domestic abuse, and alcoholism. The high license was an attempt many cities made to address this, by making the cost of having a saloon license high enough that it would reduce the number of saloons and bring up the general quality.<br />
<br />
Omaha did this, and, as Gougar points out, it didn’t really work. There were still plenty of saloons -- contemporary estimates put it at 219 saloons, or one for every 468 inhabitants, which may not have been an enormous number of saloons, but for a city the size of Omaha, it was plenty. These businesses essentially paid a sin tax of $1000 per year to the city to keep operating, and Gougar took issue with this. Her argument: “because an extra tax of $1000 was put on their business saloon men were forced to add new attractions to these resorts and so debauch the greater number of men.” She had a point -- newspapers of the era mention frequent raids on Omaha bars for gambling and other vice. It was not uncommon for local saloons to function as a sort of a cabaret, with dancing and singing girls, and it was also not uncommon for these performers to be prostitutes, and for there to be a brothel above the bar. And while prostitution was tolerated in Omaha, there are frequent tales of drunken men having a “high time” with these women only to wake up with their pockets empty.<br />
<br />
“Whale element in Omaha controls your city politically?” Gougar asked. “You are forced to answer the saloons, the fiends, the deadbeats, the people who were not wanted in the old country and come here to sap the life of your country. The time has come when you men must be patriotic and destroy the saloons or they will destroy the American Republic.” Gougar pointed out the anarchist riots in Chicago, and claimed they were the result of saloons.<br />
<br />
Gougar made the relationship between the saloons and prostitution explicit. “You have more prostitution in the city, according to its size than exists in any city on this earth,” she castigated the audience. “You have more arrests here last year according to the population than any city in the world. Yesterday I found out how you derived revenue in this city by the prostitution of your girls ... Can you realize that this city is so corrupt that no attempt is made to weed out these rapidly increasing houses of vice. I want you to stop worrying over a lot of debased saloon keepers and work for the fallen women.”<br />
<br />
“I asked one of your officers, ‘Do you never arrest the men who frequent these places,’” she continued. “‘No,’ said he, ‘not unless they commit some additional crime.’”<br />
<br />
Gougar was right. Although prostitutes were arrested, it was almost always for petty larceny; we only know they were prostitutes because their arrest records list that as their profession, not their crime.<br />
<br />
Was anything done about it? Mrs. Gougar was speaking in 1890, and in the 1930s there were still the sorts of saloon/brothels she complained about, and the last of them, the notorious Bell Hotel downtown, managed to hang on until 1953.<br />
<br />
Maybe the full house in Omaha that October came because they agreed with Mrs. Gougar. If so, they were unable to do anything about it.<br />
<br />
I have a different theory, though. I think a lot of people in the audience went because they wanted to hear about Omaha from the stage. And more than anything, they wanted to hear how naughty we were.<br />
<br />
It may not have been effective politics, but it sure was good theater.maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-6221292203438950442014-06-17T09:33:00.003-07:002014-06-17T09:53:49.742-07:00Portrait of an Old Actor<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://www.joslyn.org/post/sections/56/Files/Duveneck---Old-Doc-1938-20.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://www.joslyn.org/post/sections/56/Files/Duveneck---Old-Doc-1938-20.jpg" width="312" /></a></div>
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It’s probably for the best that I don’t teach theater
classes, because I might end up being discouraging. I am old enough now, and
versed enough in the history of theater, to know that it can be an awful
profession, especially as one ages. To illustrate this, when I was in Los Angeles, I took a
year-long series of classes through the Actor’s Fund of America. This
organization started in 1882 because of overwhelming problems suffered by
actors – a large part of what the organization originally did was locate funds to buy burial
plots for actors, who otherwise risked simply being dropped into a pauper’s
grave in potter’s field. The Fund still offers free shoes to actors. Free
shoes! What other profession needs that?
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The classes I took stressed the need for performing arts
professionals to have what was politely referred to as a “parallel career,” but
what they were talking about was having a real job. The profession is simply
too mercurial to be reliable. Playwright Robert Anderson famously said “You can
make a killing in the theater, but not a living,” but now it’s increasingly
unlikely to ever make a killing. When Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright <span class="st">David Lindsay-Abaire was in Omaha,
he was explicit that he did not make enough money from his plays to pay his
bills. Pulitzer finalist Lee Blessing, when he was here, said that he makes
enough from his plays to purchase a home in New York,
if he didn’t mind living under a log in Central Park.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st">And so my theater classes would begin with
the students reading aloud the dying pantomime actor sequence from Charles
Dickens’ “The Pickwick Papers” (“</span>Everybody who is at all acquainted with
theatrical matters knows what a host of shabby, poverty-stricken men hang about
the stage of a large establishment”). Then I would march the entire class down
to the Joslyn to look at one particular painting.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The painting in question is called “Portrait of an Old
Actor,” and is by the American painter Frank Duveneck. The Joslyn acquitted it
in 1938 as part of their American Collection, but it was probably painted much
earlier – the museum estimates it dates back to the 1880s or 1890s. Duveneck
was a Kentucky-born, Munich-trained painter who was especially admired by the
likes of Henry James (who called him “the unsuspected genius.”) Duveneck’s
painting were at once rigorous and stylistically bold, often involving dark
colors, deep shadows, and striking facial expressions.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
All of this is on display in “Portrait of an Older Actor,”
which could be an image of Dickens’ dying pantomimist. It is an portrait of a
once-handsome face, now turned haunted and hollow, cheeks sunken, perhaps from
missing teeth. The actors looks askance, as though startled by something. His
hair is a mop of gray; when younger, his look might have been carefree and
tousled, but now looks unkempt. His clothes are elegant but battered, with a
dandylike cravat of muted red wrapped around his throat. It’s a portrait of a
man struggling to maintain a certain dignity and fashionableness, but the
results are simply that he looks even more broken.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s easy to imagine him at the end of his days, which seem
not too far ahead, shouting out the sounds of Dickens’ dying actor: the clown’s
shrill laugh, blending with the low murmurings of the dying man.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So this is how my class would be. I would put Duveneck’s
portrait at the front of the classroom and each day would have us start with some
terrible reading from the miserable life of one who lived and died in the acting
profession. I would repeat what was endlessly repeatedly to me by the Actor’s
Fund – that one must have a parallel profession if one is to make a go of the
world of theater.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I mean, even Dickens knew that. “The Pickwick Papers”
contains a character named Alfred Jingle, a strolling actor with a tendency to
mangle the English syntax. But Jingle has a second job, and one that is likely
to be a better career for him than acting would. It is the second profession
that seems to delight Dickens and eventually causes him to indulge in an
act of authorial charity by sending Jingle to pursue his fortune in the West Indies.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Were Jingle just an actor, in Dickens world, as in the real
world, he would risk alcoholism and a pauper's death. But with his second profession, he
can make something more of himself, and we would all do to remember that.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You see, Alfred Jingle was also a con artist.</div>
maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-1022088538564301382014-06-17T06:12:00.000-07:002014-06-17T06:12:37.199-07:00Oscar Wilde in Omaha: Flapdoodles and Nincompoops<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://images.forbes.com/media/2010/07/28/0728_oscar-wilde_390x220.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://images.forbes.com/media/2010/07/28/0728_oscar-wilde_390x220.jpg" height="225" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
This story begins with a return to an opera house that once could be found in
downtown Omaha. So again we go to Boyd’s, on Farnam and 15th, which had been
built by a man named James E. Boyd. He had been born in County Tyrone,
Ireland, but had made his fortune in Pioneer Omaha as the founder of the
city’s first packing house. He eventually went on to two terms as
Omaha’s mayor and was Nebraska’s 7th governor.<br />
<br />
Incidentally, in a story
generally left out of the official history, he was also brother-in-law
to Dr. Charles A. Henry, who, in 1855, killed a man in a land dispute and
was the subject of Omaha’s first murder trial. Dr. Henry later built
Omaha’s first pharmacy. I mention this because this is exactly the sort
of story you find when you rummage through Omaha’s early history. Great
men and criminals often knew each other, or were kin, or were even the
same man.<br />
<br />
And I mention this because Boyd built the venue for another Irishman
to come to Omaha in the spring of 1882, and this was another man who was
both great and a criminal. His name was Oscar Wilde.<br />
<br />
There was an operetta at the time called “Patience,” written by
Gilbert and Sullivan. The production satirized a movement called
aestheticism, which favored beauty for its own sake, and was a cousin to
decadence, an artistic movement that favored pure artifice. Wilde
represented both, and there was a character in Patience named Bunthorne,
a giddy, simpering poet, and it was widely thought that this character
was based on Oscar Wilde. In fact, Wilde’s connection to the play was a
publicity stunt. Wilde shared a theatrical agent with the star of the
show, and, when the operetta opened in America, Wilde was hired to
publicize the show.<br />
<br />
He did this by crisscrossing the country, speaking on aesthetic
subjects such as “The English Renaissance” and “The Decorative Arts.”
Wilde was not unknown in Omaha. When he began his 1882 American tour,
the Daily Herald ran an unexpectedly supportive piece denouncing the
“blackguards” in the press who mocked Wilde as being anything other than
“an elegant gentleman, a scholar, and a poet of no mean pretensions.”
Wilde’s tour created an international reputation for the author, who
was, at the time, only 28 and had so far produced exactly one book of
poetry.<br />
<br />
Despite the Herald’s original defense of Wilde, the author became
something of an ongoing figure of sport in the paper. In fact, in five
days after they wrote the piece defending Wilde, the Herald wrote of
him: “Oscar Wilde, the apostle of the beautiful, is as ugly as a mud
fence.”<br />
<br />
The World-Herald covered Wilde’s tour across America, continuing their back and forth between supportiveness and mockery. One
day they might publish one of his lectures or complain that college
youths in Boston who mocked Wilde were “flapdoodles” and “nincompoops,”
and on another day they might write “Oscar Wilde acquired his first
distinction by wearing a yellow cravat.” That’s it, by the way. That’s
the entire news item. Later, an irritated letter writer would accuse the
paper of slinging “borrowed mud.”<br />
<br />
And then, on March 14, the Herald announced the news: Wilde would
appear at Boyd’s Opera House under the auspices of the Social Arts Club,
which the Herald sometimes called the Omaha Ladies Art association. And
on March 21, Wilde stood before the people of Omaha, as well as curious
visitors from Council Bluffs and Lincoln, at Boyd’s resplendent venue.
He spoke on the subject of “Decorative Art.” “He wore a suit of black
velvet,” the Herald informed readers the next day, “with knee breeches
which has been his usual dress in this country. His hair fell about his
shoulders in heavy masses and his dreamy, poetic face grew animated, and
his large dark eyes lighted up as he entered upon his subject.”<br />
<br />
“Do not mistake the materials of civilities for civilization itself,”
Wilde informed his listeners. “It is the use to which we put these
things that determines whether the telephone, the steam engine,
electricity, are valuable to civilization.” He also complained that he
did not like machine-made ornaments and demanded schools for design.<br />
<br />
The reporter for the Herald also wrangled an interview with Wilde,
who was disappointed to discover the reporter could not speak with any
authority about the architecture of Omaha. “The west part of America is
really the part of the country that interests us in England,” Wilde told
the reporter, “because it seems to us that it has a civilization that
you are making for yourself.”<br />
<br />
“Patience” made it to Omaha eight years after Wilde did, on November 3
of 1890, also at Boyd’s. It was presented by the J.C. Duff Comic Opera
Company as part of a series of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. The
review the next day allowed that the opera had some “historical
interest” but that the actor playing Bunthorne “[did] not speak
distinctly enough to bring out the full effect of his lines.”<br />
<br />
Another
performer was “indescribably unsatisfactory,” and the reviewer
complained the second act in this performance was “colorless and
insipid.” He also mentioned that the lyrics included “atrocious
doggerel,” but since that was the point of the dialogue, it is hard to
tell whether this is a criticism or not. One senses that local interest
in aestheticism, even in parody form, was cooling, It would cool further
as Wilde went from international celebrity to international scandal.<br />
<br />
When Wilde died, young and disgraced, in 1900, The World-Herald took
the opportunity to take a potshot that strikes me as undeserved, based
on Wilde’s gentlemanliness and genuine interest in our city. Discussing
his visit, the paper wrote: “It was at a time when ‘aestheticism’ was at
the full bloom of its glory and when Wilde, handsome, boyish, with his
weakly sweet baby face, his mannerisms and affectations in dress, was at
once the chiefest apostle of the cult and the adoration of scores of
silly women.”<br />
<br />
And with that, in Omaha, the flapdoodles and the nincompoops had their day.maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-65641644700910874182014-06-16T18:22:00.000-07:002014-06-16T18:33:11.991-07:00The Shooting of Buffalo Bill<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www2.liu.edu/cwis/cwp/library/sc/circus/1bufl.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www2.liu.edu/cwis/cwp/library/sc/circus/1bufl.jpg" height="400" width="306" /></a></div>
<br />
I’m just now writing a play about Buffalo Bill for The Rose theater in Omaha. You see, William Cody, better known to the world as Buffalo Bill, started his Wild West show in Omaha in 1883, and he had a long relationship with Omaha, including sending his daughter Irma to the Brownell-Talbot school here. He was also almost shot while in town, and I will get to that in a moment.<br />
<br />
There was about a decade of Buffalo Bill’s life when he transitioned from being a frontiersman into a showman, starting about 1872, when he appeared in a stage play called “The Scouts of The Prairie” by Ned Buntline, a wild west author who had done much to forward Buffalo Bill’s reputation. This was followed up by a play called “Scouts of the Plains,” which included Wild Bill Hickok in the cast, and it toured for a decade. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Buffalo_Bill%27s_Last_Scalp.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Buffalo_Bill's_Last_Scalp.jpg" height="320" width="204" /></a></div>
The show’s content will give you a sense of what entertainment was like on the frontier, and it set the template for Cody’s Wild West shows: Dozens of men dressed as Indians battled the heroes on the stage, and reportedly included a scene in which Cody scalped a Native American. This scene was supposedly based on a real story from Cody’s life, when Cody scalped a Cheyenne warrior named Yellow Hair at Warbonnet Creek in Northwestern Nebraska. The event occurred shortly after the Battle of Little Big Horn, and was often referred to as “The First Scalp for Custer.”<br />
<br />
Cody would include this grisly incident in his Wild West show, and, while on tour, displayed the fallen warrior’s scalp, feather war bonnet, knife, and saddle. Popular images of Buffalo Bill Cody often showed him standing over Yellow Hair, holding his scalp or feather bonnet triumphantly in the air.<br />
<br />
In 1881, Buffalo Bill had moved on to another show, called “Prairie Waif.” The play was scripted by John A. Stephens, an actor producer who had created a “Great Western Star Circuit” to display the talents of cowboy performers. According to the St. Paul Globe from 1901, Buffalo Bill commissioned the play from Stevens, who demanded $5,000 to write the play, which caused Cody to let out a marvelous holler: “Great Omaha!” Cody agreed to $4,000.<br />
<br />
The play was, according to Stephens, basically “The Lady of Lyons” in buckskin. It came to Omaha in October, to the Academy of Music on Douglas between 13th and 14th, and an Omaha Bee ad from October 4, 1881, describes the cast: <br />
<br />
Dr. F. Powell . . . White Beaver<br />
He-Nu-Ka . . . The First Born<br />
<br />
The Most beautiful Indian Girl in the World.<br />
A noted troupe of<br />
SIOUX INDIAN CHIEFS<br />
<br />
Supported by a<br />
POWERFUL DRAMATIC COMPANY<br />
<br />
And the evening included:<br />
<br />
FANCY RIFLE SHOOTING by Buffalo Bill.<br />
<br />
The Omaha Daily Herald was thrilled, saying that “it has been a long time since Buffalo Bill trod the boards on ‘his native heath,’” and quoting rave notices from a recent production in Minneapolis that called the play “the best of its class ever presented here.”<br />
<br />
Two days later, “Prairie Waif” was no longer the news about Buffalo Bill, and what news there was went national. For instance, the Arkansas Gazette published this notice:<br />
<br />
“A dispatch of Tuesday night says that while Buffalo Bill and his wife and daughter were walking to his hotel in Council Bluffs from the operahouse Monday evening, an unknown man rode up and fired three shots at him from his revolver. J.T. Benedict, a demented saloon-keeper, was discovered to be the assailant, and has been held in $1000 to answer.”<br />
<br />
The Cleveland Plain Dealer offered more detail: Cody and his family, along with castmember Dr. Powell and his wife, were crossing Broadway to the Ogden House. An excited man on horseback passed, turned, drew a large revolver, and fired three shots at Cody, one nearly hitting the showman in the face. The man then galloped away.<br />
<br />
In “Prairie Waif,” Cody played himself as a frontier detective, and suddenly it seemed like he was perfectly cast, as he immediately set out to investigate the shooting. Cody sent out messages to livery stables in the area to see if any horses had been taken that afternoon, and almost immediately got a response: A man named Benedict had demanded a horse from a stable on Broadway, and drew a pistol on the stableman. Benedict was quickly located and identified, and he was discovered to be carrying a revolver with three empty chambers.<br />
<br />
The New Haven Register viewed the event with some amusement. “A Council Bluffs ‘crank’ fired three shots at Buffalo Bill the other day,” they wrote. “Bill was so scared that he will base a new play on the incident.”<br />
<br />
J.T. Benedict, now nicknamed “cranky,” gave an interview with the Daily Herald on October 6 protesting his innocence. He was then in the basement jail of the Pottawatomie County Courthouse, and the reporter described him as follows: “Benedict is a smart-looking, restless fellow, about thirty years of age, with a black moustache and imperial and dark complexion.” Benedict claimed that Cody had seen him and denied he was the man who had shot at him, and only later was he arrested.<br />
<br />
The article also mentions a rumor going around that the shooting was a publicity scheme, although Benedict doesn’t agree. <br />
<br />
The reporter concludes by saying that “[t]here remains little doubt but that Benedict was the shootist, and no motive beyond a morbid lust for notoriety appears. He was not intoxicated.”<br />
<br />
The Plain Dealer article mentioned earlier summed up Buffalo Bill Cody’s feeling about the shooting: “Bill thinks that ‘cranks’ were worse than Pawnees on the war path, and hereafter declares war on the whole fraternity, and warns them to look out for their scalps.”maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-75488482268849604382014-06-16T11:04:00.004-07:002014-06-17T06:31:10.444-07:00Correcting the Record Regarding a Stabbing at Boyd's<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ3wmW1ZmweJVkdPJLz-Ky8ZqRX7gF73-td8fdjHLI-6BfAdTq0bYPt2f1uGDBrCksI9e6ldIpfWj_bo0vtgmH_TDOauQUJJJGoOHMFk8yTP5azXjvpXmxn-BUBQpQjDIy4XkEhkyr00o/s1600/stabbing.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ3wmW1ZmweJVkdPJLz-Ky8ZqRX7gF73-td8fdjHLI-6BfAdTq0bYPt2f1uGDBrCksI9e6ldIpfWj_bo0vtgmH_TDOauQUJJJGoOHMFk8yTP5azXjvpXmxn-BUBQpQjDIy4XkEhkyr00o/s1600/stabbing.JPG" height="300" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If you go to the<span id="goog_1975723591"></span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyd%27s_Theater_and_Opera_House" target="_blank"> Wikipedia page<span id="goog_1975723592"></span></a> about Boyd’s Opera House,
you’ll discover that there was supposed to have been stage manager named Arthur
Sprague who stabbed a song and dance man named Jim Mulligan after Mulligan
insulted his wife. Mulligan is then supposed to have quietly bled to death in
the wings, unnoticed.
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now, anybody who has ever been a stage manager in the world
of Omaha
theater understands the urge to stab an actor, but, alas, this story is
misreported. In 1963, the World-Herald ran a story called <span class="citationnews">"When Omaha Had Its Golden Age of Theater," and
this is the only local reference to the feud between </span>Sprague and
Mulligan. The reporter doesn't credit its source, and his source is wrong.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There was, in fact, a Sprague and Mulligan, and a stabbing, but it
didn’t happen here. And the true story quite a bit more amusing than the World-Herald’s
version, so, in the service of correcting the record, as well as sharing a
diverting tale of a bloodshed, I’ll tell an abbreviated version.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The story took place at the Tivoli theater in Denver in April of 1882,
reported in the Denver Rocky Mountain News, and there is one additional
character: Mrs. Sprague, better known as Madame Desiree. According to the
newspaper, Sprague and Desiree made "a serious assault upon (Mulligan) ...
stabbing him in a frightful manner.” Mulligan’s first name was John, not Jim,
as long as we’re setting the record straight.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There was, it seems, a longstanding quarrel between Sprague
and Mulligan based on “alleged familiarity” with Madame Desiree. When Desiree
appeared at Mulligan’s theater, he had the temerity to call her a “bladder,”
which was then slang for an incompetent actress. This enraged the Spragues to
such an extent that they attacked Mulligan backstage. Arthur Sprague drew a
dirk that was in a “place of concealment in his wife’s bosom” and stabbed
Mulligan a few times in his chest. Desiree claims to have tried to discourage
her husband, receiving a wound on her wrist for her trouble, but once Mulligan
was down she helped her husband beat his soundly with a cider bottle. Mulligan
eventually escaped, hiding in the audience.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sprague claimed Mulligan simply injured himself with a razor
he used to make stage properties, and, besides, Mulligan had insulted Madame
Desiree many time. Mulligan, who had survived the experience, showed up to
court with a doctor, revealed ghastly scars on his chest, and had the doctor
testify that only a dirk could have caused such injuries.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s a terrific story, but not an Omaha story. How did it end up connected with
Boyd’s Opera House? Who can say? The only other John Mulligan I could find in the World-Herald was
a 66 year old man who was reported to have died in New Hampshire in 1937, the
victim of an especially vivid dream in which he was butted by goats, which
caused him to fling himself out a window while still asleep. Again, not an Omaha story, and not the
same John Mulligan. Or, at least, one hopes it wasn’t the same man, as who
survives being stabbed by a bladder only to be butted to death by dream goats?</div>
maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-92212829866338498372014-06-13T12:02:00.003-07:002014-06-17T06:33:47.298-07:00The Farnam Street Theater Fire<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVf7RA_LO1yL3SWp745mKqb9pVWQa3LxPZyQV0L8AWs-LJ2lpyXZ3LBc6TkbXLjQlqZvUPI-UGJaVZNf79bbuhax0FkY1aQMyGnDeh6a-7hw7nKMcPy3QNw4ycvCMZQQzf8I9GTa57bVk/s1600/farnam-street-fire.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVf7RA_LO1yL3SWp745mKqb9pVWQa3LxPZyQV0L8AWs-LJ2lpyXZ3LBc6TkbXLjQlqZvUPI-UGJaVZNf79bbuhax0FkY1aQMyGnDeh6a-7hw7nKMcPy3QNw4ycvCMZQQzf8I9GTa57bVk/s1600/farnam-street-fire.png" height="400" width="285" /></a></div>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
If there are two words that have a long history of tragic
pairings, it is “theater” and “fire.” The Brooklyn Theater was consumed in
1876, killing perhaps 300. The Iroquois Theatre in Chicago burned in 1903, and perhaps 605
perished in flames. The Garrick in Hereford,
England, became
an inferno in 1916, taking eight children with it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So it goes, through history, performance venues going up
like tinderboxes, their deadliness entirely dependent on whether or not there
was a show at the moment of incineration. I worked with a theater in Omaha, the Blue Barn, that was part of a fire in 1999. I was then managing editor of The
Reader newsweekly, and found myself in the unique situation of reporting on the
event; I don't know if there was ever another playwright who reported on the burning of the theater that produced him. Thankfully, there were no fatalities, and the venue was up and running
again within a year.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The same could not be said of Omaha’s finest Opera House, Boyd’s. Built in
1881 by one of the city’s founding fathers, James E. Boyd, who would become
both Mayor of Omaha and Governor of Nebraska, it was a palatial structure.
Located at 1621 Harney, the structure could seat 1,700; it lasted 10 years, was
renamed the Farnam Street Theater, and then burned to the ground.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The date was October 3, 1893, and here are the essentials of
the story: The Opera House was to show a play called “The Waifs of New York.”
Instead, it caught fire, thoughtfully doing so before any audience members
arrived. Theater staffers saved whatever valuables they could gather, and the
fire department showed. They fought the fire, but the building, in sections,
collapsed, damaging nearby businesses, including crushing two saloons.
Firefighters entered the building, and the floor collapsed beneath one, Alfred
C. “Alf” Gjerum, who was killed. By morning, the building was destroyed, and
Gjerum’s body was recovered.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is Omaha,
however, and the barest essentials leave so much of the story untold. There
were the crushed saloons, for example: The Drum and Ed Wittig’s. The Drum
Saloon was divey and a hangout for miscreants, but that made it a fairly
typical OImaha bar of the era. The Bee tells an 1891 story of a group of
confidence men who duped a man into withdrawing another man’s money from his
bank account. They made off with almost $300, and headed directly to the Drum,
where they got drunk and were quickly located and arrested. The Drum also makes
news for cashing forged checks and acting as the meeting place for burglars.
Weirdly, it also seems to have been a hangout for cops, and was the location
for a notable fistfight between the heads of the city’s detective agencies. (It
feels like this last story deserves more detail, but the Bee sadly reports that
“the particulars … would require more than the skill of either of the
contestants to make public.”)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Ed Wittig’s, in the meanwhile, seems to have been a joint
favored by amateur firemen, including Wittig’s son, who enjoyed his job so much
he once fell off his shed’s roof while demonstrating firefighting techniques
and dislocated his shoulder. The bar was also the location of an argument over
the ashes of one Edward Kuehl, a shoemaker and fortune teller, dead of a
morphine overdose, who may or may not have asked that his remains be kept at
the bar. I can’t discover whether his ashes were kept there. If so, they burned
up twice.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s hard not to imagine that, as the theater collapsed onto
these two saloons, both the firemen and the officers surrounding it let out an
audible groan. And perhaps so did some of the bystanders, which likely included
confidence men, burglars, detectives, and perhaps fortune tellers.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Let’s talk about the bystanders. An immense crowd, covering
several blocks, gathered to watch. It took thirty five patrolmen to contain the
gathered masses. Some were injured when the walls collapsed, including
“Professor” J.E. Gaynore, an eccentric local dance instructor who had an
undeniable talent for being at precisely the wrong place at the wrong time,
including having been one of the only witnesses to the hatchet murder of Ada
Swanson, a domestic servant who took the wrong man to a basement in 1915. At
the time of the fire, Gaynore was struck by falling bricks, and was moved to a
nearby candy store, badly bruised and injured internally.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Other bystanders decided this was an opportune moment for
some petty larceny. There was a boy named Harry Martin, as an example, who ran
into the Snow, Lunc & Co pharmacy, which would be nearly destroyed in the
blaze, and made off with soaps and toiletries. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There are also unconfirmed reports that pickpockets worked
the crowd watching<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the fire, but we can
safely assume these reports to be true. Pickpockets worked every assembled
crowd in Omaha
in those days. In the same year as the theater fire, newspapers advertised a
pickpocket-proof pocket watch bow called “Non-Pull-Out,” a pair of pickpockets
were spotted craftily going through women’s purses among the holiday crowd in
downtown stores, and the police raided a house, recovering $700 worth of goods
stolen from a tailor, but also discovered it to be the home of a pickpocketing
ring. There are dozens of other, similar stories. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Finally, I would like to take a moment to discuss the play
that nearly went up that evening, when the theater went up instead. It was
immensely popular, and the audience that night would have been
standing-room-only, which would have been catastrophic had the fire started
when 1,700 patrons were in attendance.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So what sort of plays could attract such attention? “The
Waifs of New York” was a touring melodrama starring Katie Emmett, an
accomplished soubrette and theatrical producer who owned the rights to the play
and toured with it relentlessly. The script was by Thaddeus W. Meighan, a
playwright and journalist and therefore a man after my own heart. It is almost
impossible to get a sense of the plot of the play, thanks to a maddening
refusal on the part of the critics of the day to even discuss such thing. But
it was a melodrama, so we know it probably was episodic, contained music, and a
series of fraught situations. The would be spectacular scenes of jeopardy and
escape, and we know of one in which the heroes hung from a trestle while a
train passed overhead. We also know what the play was about: poverty and
homelessness in Gotham.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The play was so inspirational that in 1888, three boys from Philadelphia saw the play and decided they might also like
to be New York tramps, so hopped a train for New York and immediately
turned themselves in to the police, exhausted, cold, and hungry. They were sent
home with a stern lecture.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The play had productions from about 1874 to 1896, most of
the men starring Katie Emmett. She came to a rather sad end in 1927 at the age
of 68. Infirm and broke, she requested aid from the Actor’s Home, writing
pitifully that “I am old and alone now, and I am afraid I lack the courage I
once had. I’ve worked hard, and with it had many knocks. Although I still have
this little home, I’ve reached the stage where I cannot ask help from my
friends any more.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
She didn’t give the Home enough time to get back to her.
Shortly after writing the letter, she took an overdose of sleeping powder and
ended her life.</div>
maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-33242162847316976412014-06-12T20:58:00.002-07:002014-06-17T06:22:09.746-07:00The Baboon<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyGFdz3xwClnW4HbTETtSvAabxeeM0bEUZ_WzQo435WpltPx0u4DGVNPstffWVP3ANvNkAscN9UJel92FWOk90kRUhIHI-i6HROzccbQsz8ig2IPP1NgYy0tlA0kcjmb6UKQmZg2V8Txs/s1600/baboon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyGFdz3xwClnW4HbTETtSvAabxeeM0bEUZ_WzQo435WpltPx0u4DGVNPstffWVP3ANvNkAscN9UJel92FWOk90kRUhIHI-i6HROzccbQsz8ig2IPP1NgYy0tlA0kcjmb6UKQmZg2V8Txs/s1600/baboon.jpg" height="400" width="318" /></a></div>
<br />
One of the last remaining Omaha theaters from the days of Vaudeville is the Orpheum, downtown on 409 S 16th Street. As its name suggests, it was part of the Orpheum circuit, and so has a storied history of performers, including native son and daughter Fred and Adele Astaire, who danced there during their vaudeville days.<br /><br />But the Orpheum was built on the remains of an earlier theater, the Creighton, named in honor of city father John A. Creighton, who helped found Omaha after a youth spent battling desperadoes in Montana. (This is true; after one assault by bandits, he escaped with just a broken leg, and the local paper declared "We believe that the only way to kill John Creighton would be to cut his head off and then carry away the body.")<br /><br />The theater had its own stock troupe, but also hosted visiting acts, and this is how we come to the story of an escaped baboon.<br /><br />The baboon belonged to a Professor Fred Macart, who trained animals and had a traveling show consisting of dogs and monkeys. He toured to Omaha in January of 1899, appearing at the Creighton, and failed to keep control of his performers. One performer in particular: A trained baboon that was usually kept chained up in the dressing room.<br /><br />Somehow, she threw her chains, a fact that was discovered by a hapless stage manager named Stewart, who opened the door to the dressing room and was immediately attacked by the baboon. The animal was muzzled, and so simply flung Stewart to the ground, and then proceeded to assault whatever stagehand was available.<br /><br />The baboon fled to an attached saloon, the Lewis, and leapt on the bar. As the bartender fled, the animal seized a bottle of whiskey and two bottles of beer and then retreated back to the dressing room. There, the baboon consumed some or all of the whiskey and then flung the bottle through a mirror. This excited her enough to send her from room to room, smashing mirrors wherever she saw them.<br /><br />Finally, Professor Macart arrived and managed to calm down the baboon, who fell asleep with a towel around her head.<br /><br />The baboon was likely Babe, whose role in the show was essentially that of a stagehand. moving stage properties about during the act. Babe had some behavior problems, including a streak of jealousy that caused her to attack Macart’s wife on two occasions. In London, Babe attacked her with such fury that she tore Mrs. Macart's clothes off. This led to the policy of keeping Babe chained and muzzled, but the Creighton wasn’t the first time she managed to escape that. In 1895, in New York, she got loose and again attacked Mrs. Macart, shredding her clothes and biting at her face. “I would very soon make a subject for a baboon funeral,” Professor Macart told the New York Herald, “but Babe is too valuable to us.”<br /><br />Macart, it turns out, was a bad bet as an animal trainer. In 1906 in Los Angeles another baboon, a massive beast whose name, thanks to Macart, was a racial slur, broke free on stage and terrorized the audience, receiving a punch in the face from an audience member. This caused Macart’s other monkeys to go into a frenzy, seizing and smashing things.<br /><br />Who was Fred Macart and who was his wife? A 1919 obituary in the Riverside Daily Press gives his story, and it’s worth reprinting in full, because, while he wasn’t good with baboons, he was great with autobiography:<br /><br />“‘Prof.’ Fred Macart, who was the first man to do the triple jump over the elephants in the old days when P.T. Barnam was in the circus business, died yesterday at his home in Santa Monica. He was 70 years of age and leaves a widow, who, under the name of ‘the woman with the iron jaw,’ used to send thrills through the circus-going crowds of the old days by her ridge-pole ride down a taut wire with her teeth in a vice-like grip on a bit of leather attached to a pully. He was born in London, a scion of the Macart-Genet family, which for 300 years practically controlled the wild animal business of Europe.”maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-79412863133708153862014-06-03T11:49:00.001-07:002014-06-03T12:02:01.476-07:00The Mermaid in a Case of Glass: Entertainment at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/GrandCourtLookingWestNightRinehartTransMississippi.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/GrandCourtLookingWestNightRinehartTransMississippi.jpeg" height="315" width="400" /></a></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
In 1898, Omaha was a boom town, thanks to the convergence of a few mutually supportive industries. There was the railroad, there was meat packing, and there was vice. Buoyed by this growth, and hoping to buoy it higher, a group of Omaha businessmen decided to throw a fair. They were headed up by Gurdon Wattles, who had built a fortune creating Omaha's public transportation, which he did with a combination of ambition and ruthlessness -- he was a notorious strikebreaker, and wasn't above provoking violence to push his agenda.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But we're here to discuss his ambition, and it found its most complete expression in the fair I mentioned, the Trans-Missippi Exposition. The event lasted six months and was set in what was functionally a temporary city built in north Omaha on 180 acres of land, about where Kountze Park is now. The event attracted 2.6 million people, including William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan, and showcased the western half of America, including an Indian congress and a performance by Buffalo Bill, who had started his Wild West show in Omaha.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It also showed the world what Omaha had to offer. There were the railroads -- the event was timed to open alongside the new Burlington Railroad station. There were the stockyards, represented by cattle, including an event called "Live Stock Day," where 3,000 animals were displayed.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And there was vice. It wasn't to be found on any of the official documents, but it wasn't hard to find either. There was prostitution, as there always was in Omaha. In fact, the famous <span class="st">Everleigh sisters, Ada and Minna, who would own one of Chicago's most famous brothels, got their start in Omaha after being stranded by a theater company, and opened a popular, if temporary, brothel alongside the Exposition. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st">There was gambling, as there always was in Omaha. A syndicate offered to build gambling houses directly on the fairgrounds, but were turned down. According to the Omaha Bee, the syndicate went ahead and struck a deal with the police chief and built their own gambling den near the fair.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st">There was liquor, as there always was in Omaha. Brewers proudly displayed their wares, creating a minor controversy among the religious, as the Expo was open on Sundays.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st">And there was questionable entertainment, as there always was in Omaha. Daily performances included "Balloonists, Day-light fire-works, High wire walking, High Diving, Log Rolling, Boat race," according to the secretary's report from the event. There were also lumberjacks demonstrating logrolling during something called "HooHoo Day." There was a midway with a miniature train, an ostrich show, and something called "Hagenback's Trained Wild Animal Show," featuring animals that could have been trained better. A young lioness named Daffy managed to bit one trainer trough his hand and another in his thigh, causing quite a lot of blood loss.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st">(There was also a Secret Societies day, which, appropriately, had no events, and the members of the secret societies in attendance gave no indication of their membership in the organizations, but instead kept it a secret.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="st">And there were the various novelties that crowded the midway, as they had at the original midway, at Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, which directly influenced the Trans-Miss event. (We may have taken the world's fair from Chicago, but, then, they got the </span><span class="st"><span class="st">Everleigh sisters from us.)</span> The midway's itinerant performers were the subjects of a March 13, 1898, poem in the World-Herald by </span>Will M. Maupin, a longtime Nebraska newspaperman, and he described the scene better than I could:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
THE FAKIRS ARE IN TOWN</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The exposition time draws near,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Which fact is plain to see;</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The fakirs come with games so queer</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To humbug you and me.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Two-headed pigs, six-legged cows,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Men ossified and brown –</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Great men they are, with haughty brows,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The fakirs are in town.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Kinetoscopes and graphophones,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The couchee-couchee dance,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The solo fiend with strident tones,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And men with games of chance.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The mermaid in a case of glass,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The juggler of renown –</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
These are the fakes of this great class</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of fakirs in the town.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Fat-women and two-headed girls,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The woman with a beard;</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The dwarfs and the Circassian pearls</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Who have at courts appeared.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Harlequin and Pantaloon,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The gaudy, painted clown,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Arrived two months ahead of June –</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The fakirs are in town.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Indian and the Chinaman,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Koreans and Kanaks;</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The agile man from far Japan,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Monstrosities in wax.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Indian doctor with his dope</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now salts the dollars down.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Oh who can hope to ever cope</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Wit fakirs in the town.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
They come from far and likewise near</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To live in Omaha,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And think the exposition here</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Will hosts of suckers draw.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now this advice we give to you – </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Don’t meet it with a frown –</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When you come here have naught to do</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
With fakirs in the town.</div>
maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-68842240686401434742014-06-02T12:43:00.003-07:002014-06-03T12:02:40.736-07:00Misbehaving Omaha Celebrities<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://media.tumblr.com/496423e2d3de4fcacb2f883362f4994a/tumblr_inline_mzpw7pLtcq1s5hcb4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://media.tumblr.com/496423e2d3de4fcacb2f883362f4994a/tumblr_inline_mzpw7pLtcq1s5hcb4.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
There is a mugshot of<b> Nick Nolte</b> from 2002 that’s
fairly notorious, showing the actor looking haggard, his hair somehow
both matted and standing away from his head, as though he had received
an especially potent electric shock hours before and it was just now
wearing off.<br />
<br />
There’s an earlier one I like better, from 1961, when the actor was
20 and had spent years as a star athlete in high school. He’s young and
clean-cut in the image, but he stares at the police camera with a look
of remarkable disdain.<br />
<br />
Nolte was one of two young men arrested and charged with selling fake
IDs; the other was a 21-year-old named Thomas B. Rosenzweig. The pair
altered the IDs and then sold them to college students for $6 to $10.
Nolte was fined $110 for his role in the crime.<br />
<br />
The ID cards that Nolte and his compatriot falsified? Selective service cards, which made the crime federal.<br />
By the way, the news articles of the day give Nolte’s address at the
time: 1150 S. 94thSt. I’m going to go ahead and guess that if you dig
around in that neighborhood a bit, you can still find a 20-year-old who
will make you a fake ID.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">
<img src="http://media.tumblr.com/0454fcf248c881e7522edd4470adef25/tumblr_inline_mzpwcnZEyB1s5hcb4.jpg" height="280" width="400" /></div>
<br />
<div class="no-indent">
</div>
<br />
On the topic of youthful celebrity misbehavior, <b>Peter Fonda</b>
once told me that he had planted a fake bomb at the Omaha greyhound
station. He’s about as amiable a human being as I have ever met – he
uses the expression “golly” with complete earnestness. But he’s also
responsible for “Easy Rider” and still drives his Harley cross-county to
Sturgis every year, so there’s a bit of a wild side to him.<br />
<br />
It would have had to be at the end of the 50s or the start of the
1960s, as that’s when he was a student at UNO. Fonda recounted the story
to the Columbia Daily Spectator on April 18, 1970: He claimed to have
worn an eye-patch, trench coat and beret to drop a fake bomb in the
station, and then alerted the police and stayed to see what happened.<br />
<br />
And, son of a gun, if you go back to October 25, 1958, we find a
story called “Bus Depot ‘Bomb” Dud.” It tells of a depot manager finding
a bomb, setting it outside the building, and two police officers
dismantling the thing to discover no detonator or explosive.<br />
<br />
The police had received a call warning of the explosive from an
“unidentified youth” saying he had overheard other youths saying they
were going to bomb the station. The story is never linked with Fonda,
but it mirrors the details of his story perfectly, so I’m going to go
ahead and credit him with the event.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://media.tumblr.com/7bf35e3b1edf4525d0c4de1edb2e0a4f/tumblr_inline_mzpwbljHqB1s5hcb4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://media.tumblr.com/7bf35e3b1edf4525d0c4de1edb2e0a4f/tumblr_inline_mzpwbljHqB1s5hcb4.jpg" height="400" width="296" /></a></div>
maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-65502930588580087212014-06-02T11:49:00.002-07:002014-06-02T11:51:28.498-07:00The Perfumed and Gilded Lust of Her Theaters: A Sermon from 1893<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://digital.omahapubliclibrary.org/earlyomaha/galleries/artwork/awo_049b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://digital.omahapubliclibrary.org/earlyomaha/galleries/artwork/awo_049b.jpg" height="320" width="194" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In April of 1893, Rev. Dr. Frank Crane of the First Methodist
Episcopol Church
rose before his congregation and offered an astonishing, fire-and-brimstone
tour or moral turpitude in Omaha.
He castigated the city’s abundance sources of vice, including Omaha’s then-booming red light district,
called the Burnt District, and drink, which Omahans always enjoyed in
abundance..</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But he took a dazzling, almost expressionist rhetorical turn
at the world of theater. He allowed that there might be some good in it – he especially
singled out Edwin Booth, a sensational American actor who once saved Abraham
Lincoln’s son, Robert, from getting hit by a train. Alas, this act of heroism
was literally overshot by the actions of Booth’s brother, John Wilkes, who
murdered Lincoln.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But Dr. Crane argues that good examples of theater only
serve to camouflage the moral corruption underneath. He is especially appalled
by a production of “Cleopatra” by the playwright Sardon which, as far as I can
tell, never made it to Omaha,
although his play “Fedora” had played at Boyd’s Opera House in 1887. In fact,
Dr. Crane all but admits he has never seen any of these plays, but is instead
basing his impression on their posters.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As we have seen, and will continue to see, the world of
early Omaha
theater was indeed beset with vice. It may not have matched Dr. Crane’s
swirling, delirious fantasia, but then, what could? One wishes that local
theaters had treated Dr. Crane’s words the way they would a pull quote from a
drama critic and added the text to their despised posters. One play might boast
“The feature is moral uncleanness!”, while another might claim that their play “is
the apish attempt of society to foist on the American people the manners of the
French.” I know I would want to see these plays. Nothing sells boffo box office
like a whiff of moral repulsion.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Without further ado, here are Dr. Crane’s words. I have
added in paragraph breaks, as he didn’t seem to consider them necessary, but
otherwise the text is as he wrote it:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
There are some institutions of society that are storm centers
of impurity. They are all the worse because respectable people approve of them.
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Take, for instance, the theater. I am not inclined to hurl
diatribes at the stage. I am as fully aware as any one that the influence of
some actors and plays is uplifting. No one but a bigot could accuse Jefferson or Booth, “The Old Homestead” or “Hamlet,” of
an immoral tendency. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But herein is the difficultly. There are just enough of
these irreproachable plays and actors to furnish a shield to hold up whenever
the pruriency of the stage is attacked. As well as you know some plays are good
as well you know that these are in the painful minority. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One does not have to go to them to tell that. If the
billboards are any evidence of what is exhibited inside there can be but one
attractive feature for the majority of plays to which the theatergoing public is
drawn, and the feature is moral uncleanness. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Allowing the full justice to the merits of the stage, to its
possibilities, it still remains a fact that our best people countenance moral
abominations there to the very edge of disgust. What possible inducement can
there be to a woman, especially a girl of refined tastes, to go to a play where
the chief attraction is a woman whose nudity is clothed only in transparency? </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You may say it is art or style or anything else. You may
cover yourself with theater-bare retort, “Evil to him who evil thinks.” But you
and I know and God knows that there is but one reason why people are attracted
to and pleased by a play such as that of Camille, where the most brazen and
acknowledged of prostitutes poses for the sympathy of men, or Sardon’s Cleopatra
where the shimmer of gauze discloses what is not wished to be concealed, and
classic literature and history are the excuse for surrounding a half-nude form
with voluptuous scenery; or any of those plays whose glory is the ballet. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Society is doing its best to make such things pass. It is
attending them with mothers and daughters. It is declaring that this is
cultivated life. It is the apish attempt of society to foist on the American
people the manners of the French. If to be cultured means to love those rank
scenes I shall delight to be called a boor. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You may dress it up and blow the trumpets of fashion before
it, and flash electric light upon it, and take the elite all to see it, but in
the name of sound common sense and good, old fashioned manliness and
womanliness, I declare unto you that the perfumed and gilded lust of her
theaters is doing more to debauch the taste of Omaha than all the denizens of
the burnt district twice over. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I do not speak in the name of prudery, nor of fanaticism,
not of religious bigotry, but in the name of the sweet girl you love and would
make your wife, my boy; in the name of the gentle mother who sits among her
children awaiting your return home, my brother; in the name of good old
American decency and sweetness. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There are some codfish aristocracy among us who will not be
satisfied until they have foisted all the loose habits and customs of the
rotten crust of Europe upon us. I appeal to
the great, strong, sensible heart of the public; how can the theater as it is
today have any other effect than to dull the fineness of your respect for
women, teach your wives and sweethearts familiarity with the ways of the French
demi-monde and altogether be the pet breeding ground of the bacteria of moral
impurity?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Oh don’t you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt, </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sweet Alice, so good and so true.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If you do, Ben, stay away from the theater.</div>
</blockquote>
maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-4824860631330147872014-06-01T16:28:00.001-07:002014-06-02T10:08:17.990-07:00An Impromptu Performance at Billy Maloney's<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2GSJ_qtXn93GqIcL41oUVUKbXtGqqaHPrbb0G3R5D-5y-u_zFLYYaZrDl4JlAZjcnr_uEsmB9hyXyABxAJoXekaUnfSrBW6r-YSp_U3HdVu3t_crQYy3JsnEcpuM8OWmjCxUxsoVa-28/s1600/bartender.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2GSJ_qtXn93GqIcL41oUVUKbXtGqqaHPrbb0G3R5D-5y-u_zFLYYaZrDl4JlAZjcnr_uEsmB9hyXyABxAJoXekaUnfSrBW6r-YSp_U3HdVu3t_crQYy3JsnEcpuM8OWmjCxUxsoVa-28/s1600/bartender.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
We make such a fuss about nontraditional venues nowdays. We pat ourselves on the back for turning non-theaters into theaters, and for taking nonactors and making them actors, and this is supposed to be new.<br />
<br />
It's not new. Not in Omaha. At the end of November in 1902, the entirety of Billy Maloney's Saloon in Omaha became an impromptu venue, with many of the employees and habitues serving as performers, all at under the direction of one man.<br />
<br />
But first, a brief sentence about Billy Maloney's. There's not to much to say about the venue, except the owner seems to have been a down-on-his-luck boxer with some ties to the underworld -- he is on one occasion connected to kidnapper Pat Crowe. He owned a place that onetime bartender Jud Cree described to the World-Herald in 1942 as having "color" and being populated by real "characters."<br />
<br />
Among these was Ferdinand Ahler, a small man from Augusta, WI, who inebriated himself in the bar that day in 1902 and declared himself a great fighter. Someone objected, and here is where the story gets a little theatrical. I'll let the World-Herald take over the narration here:<br />
<br />
"... Ahler grabbed a chair and made the whole bunch, audience, waiters, and performers stand up against the wall with their hands at their sides like little soldiers.<br />
<br />
"When he had everyone arranged to his satisfaction Ahler picked out the piano player and bellowed:<br />
<br />
"'You play!'<br />
<br />
"The piano player played and, to the tune of 'I Don't Know Why I Love You, But I Do,' Ahler piled up the tables and the chairs in the center of the room. Then he picked out a likely looking damsel and ordered her to sing. She did. Meantime Ahler placed a chair on a table and himself on a the chair and reigned supreme over the whole roomful of men and women. As soon as one singer had exhausted her repertoire he would make her take her place in line again and another fairy would be ordered beneath the limelight."<br />
<br />
Ahler continued like this, threatening patrons with a lifted chair, sometimes conducting them with the chair, until one press-ganged performer managed to sneak out and alert the police. They sent an officer, Dan Baldwin, who raced back to Billy Maloney's.<br />
<br />
There, he met a man exiting the bar and singing jauntily, so he arrested him. It wasn't until he got back to the station that the mistake was uncovered, and so Baldwin returned to the bar. When he entered, Ahler was still conducting, and briefly menaced him with the chair in order to force him into line. Ahler then noticed Baldwin's badge.<br />
<br />
"The game is played," Ahler said dejectedly. "I'll go with you, Mr. Officer, but I want to tell you if there's anyone can run the music shop I'm it."<br />
<br />
Ahler was fined $1. The police wanted to charge him with running an unlicensed theater, but the judge wouldn't hear it.maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-28253944970489239452014-06-01T15:31:00.000-07:002014-07-14T08:16:39.000-07:00The Park Theater: A Reeking Den of Infamy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://media.tumblr.com/4fcd07a0c9aaa68f40380835ab5ead92/tumblr_inline_muk9bdGrmV1s5hcb4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://media.tumblr.com/4fcd07a0c9aaa68f40380835ab5ead92/tumblr_inline_muk9bdGrmV1s5hcb4.jpg" /></a></div>
<div id="docs-internal-guid-255794bd-adc4-9146-07c1-a1d236315fd0">
There
is a lot of talk about how to reinvigorate theater nowadays, when the
audiences are aging and the medium seems moribund. I think it is useful
to look to the past, to when theater was still popular, and ask what
they did right. As an example, I give you the now forgotten but once
notorious Park Theater, which, between the years 1898 and 1904, sat in
the basement of a saloon at 1324 Douglas Street.</div>
<br />
So here is the theater’s first success: Location, location,
location. It managed to center itself approximately between Omaha’s
developing Sporting District, where gamblers tried their hands at games
of luck, and the town’s long-established Burnt District, where
prostitutes plied their wares. And the Park Theater offered both
gambling and girls, and that brings us to the theater’s second success:
content.
<br />
<br />
Setting a standard that I think Omaha fine arts should still
try to live up to, the Park Theater only ever managed one review on the
arts pages, by the Omaha World-Herald religious editor (more on this in a
moment). But the venue managed at least 30 mentions on the crime pages,
including a front page story from the Omaha Daily News from January
1900 that provided the illustration at the top of this story, and whose
headline tells us everything we need to know about the theater: It was a
“reeking den of infamy.”<br />
<br />
<b>THEATER OWNER “KID” FLYNN</b><br />
<br />
The Park Theater was co-owned by a man named “Kid” Flynn,
always referred to by his nickname in the local press, but for one
article that gives his initials as P.J. He may or may not have been the
same Kid Flynn who managed and trained local boxers — another
then-disreputable professions that I shall detail more later — but he
certainly was the same man who co-owned the upstairs bar, Stafford and
Flynn, and was an associate of Omaha’s gambling king (and soon to be
crime boss) Tom Dennison.<br />
<br />
He was a rough, unpleasant man. In 1898, The Omaha Bee reports
his arrest after Flynn assaulted a waiter in a Douglas St. restaurant.
As the Bee describes it: “Flynn is a bartender for a saloon a short
distance from the waiter’s place of business and was in the habit of
having his meals brought in by the waiter. The latter claims that Flynn
was overparticular and caused him to make many useless trips to secure
articles. When he expostulated it is asserted that Flynn seized upon the
waiter and threw him out of the saloon.” The punishment? A $10 fine,
plus “costs.”<br />
<br />
In 1902, Flynn was arrested for beating a woman. Her name was
Myrtle Dubois and she was a music hall performer who frequently
habituated Stafford and Flynn. Kid Flynn was convinced she had stolen
several cocktail glasses and, when she denied it, struck her repeatedly
in the face. He was pulled before a judge named Berka, who was somewhat
famous for leveling large fines against woman beaters. He fined Flynn
just $6, immediately causing howls of protest that Flynn was let off
easy because his venue was “protected,” presumably by Dennison’s
interests. A year later, when Dennison was in the midst of a power grab,
Flynn would return the favor by testifying on Dennison’s behalf in a
court case against one of Dennison’s competitors.<br />
<br />
<b>INSIDE THE THEATER</b><br />
<br />
Thanks to the aforementioned religious editor of the
World-Herald, writing in June of 1898, we know what the theater looked
like, and the questionable quality of the performances it offered.
Speaking in an awkward third-person, the author describes his
experiences at the Park Theater:<br />
<br />
“Passing down a hallway at the rear of the saloon, they came to
a room in which a young lady sat tearing off tickets from a reel, which
she sold at a dime apiece. The theater proper was divided from this
room by a door of ducking. The religious editor stopped and inquired
anxiously of the doorkeeper when the performance would begin, and when
the latter told him immediately, asked if smoking was allowed. The
doorkeeper replied that it was and volunteered the further information
that he need not take off his hat, either, unless he wanted to. When he
got inside, he didn’t want to.<br />
<br />
“The Park theater has a fine solid floor of granite and the
parquet and dress circle are plentifully refurbished with mahogany
tables capable of holding four beer glasses. The floor slopes gently
toward the stage, so that an unobstructed view can be had of the
footlights and what is above them at all times. The two innocents were
early and whiled away the first half-hour gazing at the advertisements
upon the 10x12 stage and listening to popular ahs by the orchestra, a
man in his shirt sleeves and closely clipped head at a piano. Along one
side of the theater was suspended a curtain extending from about two
feet above the ground to the height of one’s shoulders and from the
stage door to the stairway in the rear leading up into some mysterious
regions where the stars were perhaps dressing.<br />
<br />
“After a suitable time had elapsed, the manager rang a gong on
the stage and nodded to the top of the stairs. Down came the first
performer, who passed unseen from stair to stage with nothing but her
head and knees downward showing from above and below the curtain. She
was dressed in sober Quaker brown with a white handkerchief chastely
crossed upon her breast and after singing a pathetic song suitable to
the costume, lifted her dress and disclosed a most wonderful combination
of red silk and white lace petticoat in which she did some aristocratic
kicking. “Little Edimia,” a 150-pound piece of humanity, was next
called upon of skirt and hose through one solo, and after gazing upon
her blue expanse one of the reporter’s blushes were so warm that they
took their departure and cooled him off in the night air.”<br />
<br />
<b>THE CRIME PAGES</b><br />
<br />
As I mentioned, the Park was not famous for its performances,
which, from the above description, sound like a fumbling predecessor to
the modern strip show (although they did at one point have a performing
dog, who was stolen from the theater in 1902). In fact, the performers
at the theater would thereafter consistently be referred to by the press
as “actors” and “actresses,” in quotes — a delightful bitchy gesture on
the part of our local press.<br />
<br />
No, the Park was famous for its crimes. Most of them involved
somebody going into the theater with a lot of money and leaving with
none at all, as happened to George Lehnkuhl, a Sioux City gentleman who
spent an evening in October of 1899 having what what the World-Herald
describes as a “social session” with two actresses, and found himself
$20 poorer for it.<br />
<br />
Out of towners seemed to have an especially hard time of it,
such as Iowa brothers Oscar and George Henry, who tried out the bar in
June of 1900. The Bee describes the two bellying up to a table with a
bottle of booze, and then the following happens to Oscar: “Then the
chair on which he sat floated out through the roof and he soared
majestically over the city. He experienced a sense of exhilaration. The
buildings beneath him were mountains in volcanic eruption, the river was
a sea serpent, the moon a constellation. In his ears was a tinkling as
of fairy bells, in his blood the essence of starlit dawns. Then his
cane-bottomed mount passed out into space, and he saw more solar
eclipses, bobtailed comets and short-termed aerolites than he had ever
dreamed of before. He was about to join Andre in a quest for the north
pole when the day bartender awoke him with a rough shake and he found
himself emerging from the ice chest.”<br />
<br />
Brother George was missing.<br />
<br />
Newspapers at the time had so much fun with the venue that I
will include another tale, from the World-Herald, dated June 15, 1900,
and telling of one Walter Kent, who became “temporarily but sadly
deranged” at the theater as a result of “the mutlicolored fluids for 50
cents a bottle and dallying with the highly colored sirens.”<br />
<br />
According to the story author, Kent “became filled with the
noxious notion that he was sole master of a full and budding harem.” For
a while, Kent “merely exercised the more peaceful and lamb-like
prerogatives of a master seraglio but when he began to throw apple
champagne bottles at the heads of the scantily petticoated damsels he
came back to real life with a thud. One of the girls fastened herself
like a pediculus capitalis in the roots of his hair. while another with a
clubbed bottle attempted to separate brains and man with sundry hard
and resounding smites upon the most vulnerable portions of his anatomy.”<br />
<br />
At the moment, a policeman showed up and arrested Kent,
probably saving him. By the way, “pediculus capitalis” is cod Latin, and
refers to lice.<br />
<br />
And there were sadder stories, such as that of the deaf
Reverend Edward Matthews, a 55-year-old missionary who wandered into the
Park Theater in November to get out of the cold. The bartender, Ned
O’Brien, insisted that Thomas buy beer if he was to stay, and then
overcharged him. When the reverend objected, O’Brien beat him. Then
there was James D. Thomas, a cigar maker, who was found dead in the
theater in January of 1902, reportedly of heart failure. The Park
theater was no place for the old or the infirm, it seemed.<br />
<br />
<b>QUESTIONABLE ENTERTAINMENT</b><br />
<br />
Aside from the venue’s painted actresses, shaven-headed
pianists, and stolen performing dogs, it was repeatedly raided for other
amusement, all questionable. In its first year of operation, police
found a gambling room at the back of the theater. In March of 1899, the
theater was host to an illegal pugilism match between Andy Dupont and
“Mysterious” Billy Smith, the former a boxer who was notorious for
having killed another fighter in a match in south Omaha just a few
months earlier. Both boxers were arrested after the match ended.<br />
<br />
In September of 1902, Park was raided by the police as part of a
series of raids intended to confiscate “picture machines.” These were
devices that were sometimes referred to by the rather marvelous name
“peeposcopes,” and were machines that, for a nickel, would act like a
slot machine, except instead of paying out money instead paid the
gambler with a look at a lewd image.<br />
<br />
The most questionable entertainment in the city at the turn of
the century was opium, and while the Park Theater couldn’t provide the
substance, according to a World-Herald story from April of 1900 (written
by a journalist with the astonishing sobriquet “Cheyenne Bob”), Park
Theater’s performers knew where. The story tells of a raid on an opium
den in the basement of a building on Capitol Street, between 11th and
12th Streets, run by two Chinese men. The raid produces two men, and a
woman dressed in black, and the latter identifies herself as an actress
at Park theater. She tells the police that she is in mourning for her
sister, who had died a few weeks ago.<br />
<br />
“Do you wear those clothes when you are at the theater,” a police officer asks, rather dimly.<br />
<br />
“Oh no, I have my stage clothes on now, but I put these on over them.”<br />
<br />
The policeman then asks if she enjoys opium.<br />
<br />
“No, not a bit,” she answers. “It tastes like old rags.” She
explains that she only smokes to keep “George” company. George is one of
the men she got arrested with. The policeman asks if they are husband
and wife. No, they have just been dating for a few weeks. “I met him at a
dance one night and I kinder toook a liking to him, but — “<br />
<br />
The officer asks if she ever intends to smoke opium again.<br />
<br />
“Oh, no, sir: I assure that this experience has entirely cured me.”<br />
<br />
The Park Theater closed in 1903, primarily as the result of a
negotiation with a man named J. Martin Jetter, who held the liquor
license for the building and may have been one of the owners of the
theater. In order to continue having his license, he had to shut down
the Park; he agreed.<br />
<br />
Eventually, Jetter would run his own brewing
company that produced Jetter Beer, and when he died in 1954 at the age
of 79, his obituary in the World-Herald merely identified him as a
“retired salesman.”<br />
<br />
The Park Theater was, by this time, long forgotten.<br />
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maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7331599632297599713.post-17535274617036446782014-06-01T15:21:00.001-07:002014-06-02T13:01:47.350-07:00The Buckingham Theater’s Red-Eyed Legacy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
There was once a theater called Buckingham, located near the corner
of 12th and Dodge, and its terrible tale is mostly hidden away in the
prehistory of this town. While the Omaha Daily Bee started publishing
about the time the Buckingham ended, the newspaper makes scant mention
of the place, but for occasional stories indicating its awfulness,
including one from March of 1885 detailing the miserable circumstances
of an actress at the theater.<br />
<br />
The actress was named Minnie Woodford, and she came to Omaha from
someplace else, promised a job and a salary by the theater’s proprietor,
Jack Nugent, who had brought the first successful minstrel act to Omaha
five years earlier. After a month of work, she went to Nugent to ask
when she would get paid, and he responded by insulting and then
assaulting her. This, The Bee noted, was common practice, and the
actresses were left adrift with no money and no option but to leave
Omaha and go back to wherever they came from.<br />
<br />
Beyond this, The Bee had little to say about the theater. The
World-Herald attempted to offer a history of the venue in 1894, when the
Buckingham building was razed, a few years after a tragedy that closed
the theater. They told of Jack Nugent, who they said had once been a
good man from a good family, and had started a series of theaters in
small wooden buildings: The St. Elmo Variety Theater, located at 112-14
South 12th Street, and the Theater Comique, also on 12th. Jack ran these
joints with his two brothers, Jim and Bill, and two half brothers who
would only answer to nicknames: Henny and Tootsy.<br />
<br />
Despite having a wife who, the Herald, informs us “kept him as
straight as any woman could,” there must already have been some bad in
Jack, as his theaters are remembered as brutal places. “It was no
unusual thing to hear of a man being murdered there every week,” Edward
Francis Morearty wrote in his book Omaha Memories in 1917. He also
called it “one of the toughest joints between Chicago and Leadville,”
and, according to Morearty, then mayor C.S. Chase ordered the place shut
down, and Jack simply changed its name to the Buckingham.<br />
<br />
The World-Herald locates the form of Jack’s fall, and it is the form
of a woman, Nellie McIntyre, a “bleached variety actress from Denver” over whom
Jack lost his head, and his wife.<br />
<br />
The Herald describes Jack’s business as consisting of painted women
cajoling men to buy overpriced alcohol, overcharging them, and then
threatening them if they refused to pay up – a pattern of behavior
confirmed by several complaints published in the Bee. "[A] black eye and a
torn coat was a trademark of his place,” the World-Herald wrote.<br />
<br />
“The popping of corks and the crack of revolvers kept the police
close at hand,” the story continued. And this is how the
theater ended: Sometime around 1885, Jack got into a fight with a
customer, Frank O’Kinchel, and the theater manager, C.A. Sinclaire, and
guns came out. After several shots, Jack’s brother Jim lay on the floor
with a bullet in his forehead. “When the policemen came,” the
World-Herald reported, “some of the bulldogs kept there were feasting on
Jim’s blood and brains.”<br />
<br />
Shortly thereafter, the theater was taken into public custody, and
the Women’s Christian Temperance Union petitioned to take over the
property and turn it into a Gospel Mission. It remained in their custody
for several years, offering its services to the collection of gamblers,
rogues, and degenerates who frequented the many saloons and gambling
halls in the neighborhood, until the building came down in 1894.<br />
<br />
Jack’s legacy of badness outlived his theater – there’s a puzzling
story from the Daily World from 1885 about Jack Nugent paying a man $800
to kill a man named Colonel Watson B. Smith, which Nugent declares
nonsense, pointing out that he was on the road with the McIntyre and
Heath Minstrel Show at the time of the killing. In September of 1887,
Nugent is arrested after nearly robbing a man at a saloon and then
drunkenly wandering upstairs to assault a woman. In October of 1887, the
Daily World reported that Nugent became demented after taking medicine,
and had escaped friends and fled to Council Bluffs.<br />
<br />
And, then, for the most part, Jack is gone, not to resurface until
1894, where he is uncovered helping out at revival meetings for a pastor
named Savidge. Nugent’s wife had attended a few of these meetings over
his objections, and so he had locked her out, but then had changed his
mind and was now converted.<br />
<br />
But there was one legacy of the Buckingham still uncovered, and it
was a terrible one. It came to the surface by the thousands in 1912,
according to the World-Herald. An old junk shop called Ferer’s was to be
partially torn down to make way for a new sidewalk, and inside workmen
discovered wagons filled with old bones and covered with steer hides.
When the workmen went to move the wagons, a torrent of albino rats
streamed out from underneath. The workmen killed 200 with clubs, but the
rest escaped. Underneath the building, investigators found a honeycomb
of tunnels and nests, leading all the way down to the Missouri River.<br />
<br />
These were the progeny of a small group of albino rats that had
belonged to an actress at the Buckingham, who had lost them one night
when the cage was left open, and had never been recovered. And to this
day, they never have. If you see an albino rat in the streets of Omaha,
it may still be a legacy of the Buckingham, the city’s most murderous
theater.maxsparberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13773887613885555844noreply@blogger.com