We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
266
Actorviews
about? We took him out of Trenton, Missouri, didn’t we?’ ”
“Well,” said I, “anyway, with the minstrel show you didn’t have to drink four ounces of whisky every day at sunrise.”
“No,” said Mr. Overman; “with the minstrels we didn’t begin drinking till it was time to get up for the morning parade. But the nights were longer and wetter.”
He took his savings, such as they were, to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where they were disastrously invested in craps at a place famed as the White Elephant.
“Cleaned!” said he. “I was drinking champagne when I went in, and I couldn’t buy a beer when I came out.”
“Aren’t you ever going to become an actor?” Mr. Overman’s biographer inquired.
“Right now I am going to become an actor. A friend of mine in Hot Springs gave me his job while he went on a week’s vacation, and I played my first part in a store window. I was Psycho — ‘Is He Man or Wax?’ I sat in front of a horseless piano in a store window and the saps would press their noses against the glass and bet whether I was stuffed — and I couldn’t break my trance to take any of the bets.”
“That’s where you learned your fatal repose?”
“That’s where I earned thirty-five dollars and learned to appreciate ham and eggs. . . . Then I got a job selling Houser’s Elixir with a medicine show and enough money to wear good clothes back to Trenton, Missouri .... and swing on the awning rope there in front of George Lee’s Restaurant — ‘Short Orders at All Hours’ — and tell the tow boys the adventures of a man of travel and a judge of whisky.