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W. C. Fields
gressive, Keith had a bias against smut; as the new acts poured into his office, he gave them a good dry cleaning, then turned them over to Boston. This was partly instinct and partly caution. The city was, and is, known to be handy with its bans, and would doubtless have frowned on the smallest jokes about sex, even if uttered by a pound-and-a-half midget.
In 1885 Keith formed a company with Edward F. Albee to present at popular prices the startling new musical plays of Gilbert and Sullivan. The next year they began the real estate acquisitions that were to lead to the largest chain of theaters in the world. Their first purchases were the old museum in Providence, Low's opera house there, and the Bijou Theatre in Boston. They built a theater in Philadelphia. Their new form of amusement caught on and swept the country ; by 1 9 1 1 , when Keith died, vaudeville was by a considerable margin the most widely attended stage entertainment in both this country and Canada. In 1928 it was estimated that, in the two countries, more than one thousand vaudeville theaters showed their acts to two million people daily. The Keith chain eventually grew to include theaters in nearly every American city with as much as 1 00,000 population.
Simultaneous with the first success of the Keith circuit, other chains sprang up in different sections of the country. In Chicago, Kohn and Middleton established a theater for vaudeville performances late in 1886, and in that same year Gustave Walters was ready with his Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco. Other names, most of them in the New York area, came to be identified with vaudeville before the turn of the century: F. F. Proctor and his Twenty-third Street Theatre; John J. Murdock with the Masonic Temple Roof ; Oscar Hammerstein and his Victoria Theatre, at Forty-second Street and Broadway; Alex Pantages and his Northwest Vaudeville Circuit. In Ohio, Gus Sun started a statewide circuit in 1905. Keith and Proctor combined forces in that
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