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SHOWMAN
We got as far east as Salt Lake City. The Mormons were always crazy about the theater, so business was good. Mormon amateur theatrical companies in those days were about the best I've ever seen— they didn't have to take any back-talk from the professionals. Brigham Young, the old founder himself, had been the biggest theatrical bug of them all. He owned the theater and was always trotting backstage to talk to the actors in his day— and, since he always came bringing the whole family, the place wouldn't have lacked patronage if nobody else had gone. He was dead when I got there, but I've seen four boxes filled with his children alone. Things were going even better than before because his successor had been equally prolific, was equally stage-struck, and always brought all his family too.
If Grismer hadn't been so stubby, he'd have been a famous star. A grand actor— master of every trick in the theater and an iron-bound disciplinarian. You walked chalk in his companies. And I walked cheerfully because I was learning the game under expert guidance. In the intervals of going on as Bermudas in "Under the Gaslight," and furnishing the motor power of the engine that came thundering down on the hero lashed to the track, and doing the first gravedigger in "Hamlet" with other such regular assignments, I poked my nose into so many odd jobs that the company called me "the handyman." I worked the props and moved the scenery on occasion. When we
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