The theatre of science; a volume of progress and achievement in the motion picture industry (1914)

0 f ^ c I e n c e 359 ville Held, the number of booking agencies vastly increased, many of these still confined their method of communication with the performer and the manager to the old-fashioned correspondence, using the telegraph system when expedition was a necessity. The writer being somewhat hard of hearing and assuming that the advent of science as an aid to man was beyond his reach, transacted all of his business (which in the period from 1893 to 1898 was the largest and most important of the vaudeville-booking bureaus) without installing telephone service, and as it was my wont to have my office in my own home far from the business centre, the spectacle of many of the men now millionaires who control vaudeville's output presenting themselves at my apartments to procure attractions for their programs was daily on view. One day seated in my office (three flights up, and no elevator) were S. K. Hodgdon (fancy this Keith executive going daily to an agent's home at this period), M. C. Anderson, Hurtig and Seamon, Henry Behman (who came from Brooklyn to West 53rd Street to see me twice daily), William Morris (then an office boy for George Liman), Nick Norton, and many others; while outside in the hall standing and awaiting an exodus from inside, were a half dozen men who today sit in sumptuously appointed sanctums in the United Booking Offices, while no less than one hundred sub-agents with offices in the same building rarely come personalUy in contact wdth them, an extensive telephone service being the sole method of communication. Such is progress. In all those years (1893-1898) I had not once held a receiver to my ear. I heard many mutterings of complaints from managers and artists alike, but some