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SHOWMAN
many a good meal during a long lifetime, but nothing that ever quite approached that.
It was the manager's own fault. We'd never have carried matters to such lengths if he hadn't flaunted his own ample feeding in our faces. In those catch-as-catchcan days unpaid salaries, starvation rations, absconding managers, sheriffs' attachments on scenery, were as much part of the customary picture as pirating the scripts we played. There were certain spots which no troupe ever entered without making up its mind to bankruptcy— Kansas notably, which was known throughout the theatrical world as "the death circuit." In Kansas you agreed to play for the well-known coffee and cakes and were lucky if you got them three times a day. Plenty of times, no doubt, I could have abandoned the theater and got myself far better fed at some less glamorous employment. But my new dignity as a professional would not permit a return to newspaper-selling or peanut-butchering. I might have to resort to dodges to keep soul and body together, but at least the dodges would have to have some flavor of back-drops and paid admissions behind them.
After my initiation with Grismer's company, I had to join a Tom-show to earn a living. But that was nothing to be ashamed of. I think that, if pushed, every American actor above a certain age would confess to having served time in an "Uncle Tom's Cabin" troupe —that was a standard ingredient for a normal career,
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