The Moving Picture Weekly (1916-1917)

24 — THE MOVING PICTURE WEEKLY As Neal looks off stage. N the very heart of picturesque old S t a t e n Island on a great big rambling farm, thirty odd years ago, there came into the world a wriggling pink and white bundle which proud and prophetic parents immediately daubed Neal Hart III. There wasn't anything about this particular bundle that differentiated it from its fellows that, by the thousands and the tens of thousands, wriggled themselves into greater New York and Monroe, La., day after day and second after second until — Buffalo Bill's show came to town and camped out on Staten Island. Then the difference in the no longer wriggling bundle became apparent. Grandfather Patrick took it to see Buffalo Bill lasso buffaloes and break bronchoes — or whatever Wild West shows are press-agented to do. And immediately there sprang, full grown, into the soul of Neal Hart in., an ambition — to becoAe one of the world's best saddle sitters. And he is. It was some show — that Buffalo Bill affair. The population of Staten Island and the horse riding, horse training, horse loving Hart family were there, en masse. But, Neal III., sat apart, silent, grave, preoccupied. Through his mind there was trickling a plan. The next day it fermented. Great signs, printed in a child's unmistakeable chirography, decorated barns, doors and fences. On the big rambling old Hart house, its The True Story falling sides a stone's throw now from the famous chicken dinners of Mrs. Dobler, and a half stone's throw from the offices where, for fifteen years, Neal's father served Richmond county as clerk, there went up a huge sign. It shouted that any kid who brought a goat into Neal Hart's back yard the next afternoon would be admitted free to the best Wild West show on earth and that any kid who didn't kick in with a goat would have to flash a copper for admission. The show was a howling success. On a gray goat sat Neal Hart and lassoed every kid that the kids who got in scot free brought. "Squaring It," Neal Hart's big, clean, powerful three-reel Western drama (which Universal officials pronounce one of the very best they have viewed in weeks), is the latest bulletin from the star who was brought up in the saddle. But that is leaping fences ahead of our narrative in very much the same fashion as did those famous jumpers of the horse-loving Hart family a few years ago, before picturesque old Staten Island was cut up into lots for artistic homes of prosperous scenario writers and Broadway playwrights, and ended the picturesque fox hunts. The ivy covered old Staten Island Institute (the late William Winter brought from Westminister Abbey the original sprig of that ivy) set Neal Hart as a boy straight in the rudiments grammer, the alpha and omega of the gj nasium, and developed a bent as a natu leader. There was no study that, in an credibly short time, he did not master tii oughly and well. There was no sport in wh he did not excel. Here, until he was fifteen years old he remained, in fact until his father. Cornelius A. Hart, now auditor of the Fi^ nance Department of the City of New York, came home one night and read a certain letter. It was from the late Rev. Dr. R. W. Wood, for many years pastor of the Presbyterian church of Stapleton, Staten Island, and it said that the Spaniards might do things and that every family on Staten Island ought to send at least one man down there to keep them quiet. Neal's father announced that he would be the man from that family, whereupon Neal's handsome sister Maudie began to ci-y. Neal III. didn't say a word. But the next morning the family found on the breakfast table a little note from him. It said he had decided to be the "one" man from the Hart family. /N the center of thus page is an illustration of Neal Hart as he appears in "Squaring It," the three-reel Bison drama in which he is at his best. The ilbistration at the right of the page shows Neal in a happy mood in "Double S uspicion," a Bison two-reeler releat time ago. The illustra torn of the page show Neal Hart's life on S fore the West and p him. His Virginia I Catcher, is shoivn in Hi