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A PASSING FAD 17
On the night when the first pictures were shown at the garden, Mother allowed Henry and me to view this amazing new phenomenon—pictures that moved. We gaped in amazement at our first view of Niagara Falls in action; we fell in love with a beautiful creature who performed a "skirt dance"; and when the Empire State Express appeared on the screen and thundered straight at us, we almost jumped out of our skins.
The audience merely applauded politely at these sights; but when Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders rode onto the scene, fresh from the Battle of San Juan Hill, they were greeted by a spontaneous ovation.
In the ten or fifteen minutes it took to unreel the series of short subjects that made up the bill that night, I became an inveterate movie fan. And I am still one of Hollywood's best customers. Some movie actors like to brag that they never even go to see their own pictures. Perhaps I'm naive, but I like the movies; I even stay for the second feature.
The day after the movies had been shown at the Casino Father reported to Mother and Grand'mere that the customers had been highly entertained by the novelty of the night before, but that they had all agreed that moving pictures were just a passing fad— like automobiles.
The Casino turned out to be one of my father's most successful failures. It made him famous as a restaurateur, but it broke him. His next venture was the Bismarck Restaurant, a less pretentious but very fine restaurant, also in Cleveland, that he operated very successfully for a number of years.
Father had an instinct for setting a fine table and he loved good food and wine. He tried to get chefs and waiters who felt as he did and who understood the art of preparing and serving food. Some of his waiters stayed with him for years. Many of them were men he had found in European restaurants or on ocean liners during his trips to Europe. With chefs he was not so fortunate. No chef ever pleased him completely. He always claimed that good chefs were invariably madmen and that sooner