This Old Paper

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A while back we looked at the front of this card and the life and business of C.I. Hood and his famed Sarsaparilla.  Time to take a closer peek at the reverse of the card!

A good account of the life of circusman and entrepeneur Adam Forepaugh (1831-1890) can be found at wikipedia; details of his circuses can be found at circushistory.org.  Super-briefly:  He was born into poverty in Philadelphia, was a butcher, a horse trader, then a circus-man.  Forepaugh and Barnum had the two biggest circuses in the US in the 1870s and in the 1880s declared a truce and carved up the country into agreed territories.  Forepaugh still loved to cut into a big slab of meat while on the road with the circus, and that would be at the top of his to-do list with each town he visited.  He didn’t smoke, drink, or chew and would almost always sit at the front of the entryway to take in the crowd.  It is said he was also maybe a bit shady, employing pickpockets to nab  from attendees.  At the time of his death in 1890, family-friendly vaudeville and the family-friendly Ringling Bros were ascendant.

The concert lists the following acts:

• Lynch & Euson, In their Celebrated Irish Specialtes. Couldn’t find any further info on Lynch & Euson, though Irish acts were quite popular variety acts.
• Phil Gibbons, the Unequalled Ethiopian Personator. In 1882 was a ‘tambo‘ character in a minstrel show in New York City’s Aberle Theatre.  Listed as member of the concert for Frank A. Robbins’ circus 1885 (see below), and again for Forepaugh’s in 1887 (again, below).
• Sallie St. Clair, The Dashing Song and Dance Lady. She shows up in a basic internet search, but there seems to be a number of ladies with that name.  She’s maybe the same as the one mentioned here as being from St. Paul MN and of ‘protean fame’ (Protean acts, better known as quick-change acts, referred to the greek god Proteus who was a shape-changer among other things).
• Dilks & Gray, The Wonderful Musical Mokes, presenting a very artistic feature. ‘Musical mokes’ were multi-instrumentalists.  Couldn’t find anything further about these two, though.
• Henrietta Corbett, Refined Vocalist. Couldn’t find anything, but a similar card lists her as “Etta Corbett”.
• Sadie Connelly, Artistic Song and Dance. A Sadie Connelly is listed in an 1891 dramatic yearbook with a role in the play Yon Yonson.  A hilarious anecdote about her performance in that play, from Ah there: Pickings from Lobby chatter in the Cincinnati enquirer by Al Thayer (1894).  Her name mentioned in another Forepaugh playbill in 1887 (see below) last name spelled “Connolly”.
  
• McManus & Crowley, Wrestlers. Couldn’t find any further information.
• James Donohue, Clog and Jig Dancer. Couldn’t find any further information.

And to wrap it all up, a ‘laughable sketch’ called Fun in a Barbershop.  (Sounds like a hoot doesn’t it?)  Probably this was some kind of ensemble performance featuring most or all of the above line-up to wrap up the show.

One thing that is interesting about this card is that it involves in one way or another multiple types of live performances.  Circus, variety show, burlesque (see the 1887 card advert. referenced below), minstrelsy (via Phil Gibbons the ‘Ethiopian Personator’), and last but not least a connection (at least a temporal one) with another emerging theatre form:  This card is probably from 1883 or 1884 (1885 was the third year branded “Forepaugh’s Great Show”, but Phil Gibbons is listed here as being part of a concert for a different circus that year, so unless he switched midseason…), and it was in 1885 that E.F. Albee II and Benjamin Franklin Keith, both former circus-men, opened the Boston Bijou Theatre in a format that was to become known as ‘vaudeville’.  (I had tended to think of all these genres as distinct things, but there is probably a lot more overlap than I had considered.)

And indeed, 3 or 4 years after the card in question was published, Forepaugh was billing these after-shows as an ‘All-star Vaudeville Company’. (Bandwagon Vol. 2, No. 6, 1958, p. 6,via the amazing site circushistory.org):

Immediately following the Circus and Wild West Exhibition.

The Adam Forepaugh All-star Vaudeville Company
Will be seen in a New and Brilliant Programme
Just Look at the Array of Attractions!

Eva Hollis, the Piquant and Peerless Serio-Comic Vocalist.
Admiral Dot, in Topical Songs of the Day.
Sadie Connolly, in Artistic Songs and Dances.
Pat Harris, the High Priest of Irish Wit and Song.
Minnie Dunn, in Beautiful Ballads.
Walton & Slavin, the Eccentric Burlesque Sketch Artists.
Phil Gibbons, the Master Spirit of Ethiopian Comedy.
Bench & Edwards, the Kings of Song and Dance.

The Wizard of the Cornet! Levy’s Only Rival. Miss Bessie Gilbert The Undisputed Champion Lady Cornetist of the World.

It Costs Only 10 Cents to See the Concert

Looks as though Sadie Connolly was still around on the bill (although spelled differently).  Phil Gibbons shows up again, this time billed as the “Master Spirit of Ethiopian Comedy”.  Looks like this time around there was a bit of burlesque.  And instead of a play as the main feature, we see “Wizard of the Cornet”.  What I would pay to have seen that act!  What an amazing thing to be billed as.

It’s interesting to think about where this specific circus/concert was performed.  Forepaugh passed through C.I. Hood’s homebase of Lowell, MA a few times (August 16 1879, June 22 1883, July 12 1888) but I would tend to doubt such cards as these were only given out when the circus stopped at Lowell.  By the mid 1880s Hood’s Sarsaparilla was already widely available and he was so successful that he was expanding his factory and headquarters at that time.  There is also an example of a Hood’s Sarsaparilla trade card with Barnum’s show on the back, suggesting wider engagement with circuses to sell his products.  The fact that there are other cards with similar line-ups make it even more unlikely these Sarsaparilla-sponsored post-show variety acts happened only in Lowell.

But I can’t help but imagine ole C.I.Hood sitting under the bigtop in his hometown, dreaming up his medicine pitch for the circus, or maybe sitting down for a big chunk of meat and talking shop with Adam Forepaugh.

Lots of great background info for this article came from the books:

Vaudeville: From the Honky Tonks to the Palace by Joe Laurie, Jr.  Henry Holt & Co.: New York, 1953.  (full text available online)

American Vaudeville: Its Life and Times by Douglas Gilbert.  Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill book Company, Inc: New York, 1940.

Fifty Years in Theatrical Management by M. B. Leavitt.  Broadway Publishing Co., New York, 1912.  (full text available online)