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198 THE HOUSE THAT SHADOWS BUILT
had grown up expecting a course at Stanford University and a career in the law. His father’s death ruined that. In his early teens he began carrying newspapers in Oakland, branched out to a small agency, and came into the old San Francisco Post first as clerk in the circulation department and afterward as reporter. When, near the turn of the century, the Cape Nome discovery blazed through the West, he rushed to Alaska. He found no gold; and, as John L. Sullivan once said in disgust of a wayward nephew, “he took to music”; for the cornet had fascinated him from infancy. Next, he was in Honolulu, the only white man in the Royal Hawaiian Band. Returning to San Francisco, he found that his sister Blanche had grown proficient with the cornet. They formed a team — “The Musical Laskys” — and toured for a season or so on the local Orpheum circuit. An Eastern manager offered them an engagement at one hundred dollars a week. They came East, bringing their mother, and “opened” in Boston.
Flat disappointment followed. Their act, said the manager, was not up to “the big time.” They saw that themselves, and dropped back to a small circuit at the old salary of fifty dollars a week, on which the three of of them managed somehow to exist for two or three years. Finally, the Musical Laskys found themselves the vaudeville relief to Herman the Magician. This company carried a treasurer, who stood watch at the door over the local ticket taker. Somewhere in Pennsyl