Vaudeville Victim

           In the 1950s it was almost as though the United States was waking from a sleep sometimes filled with dreams and other times nightmares.  The second half of the 20th century saw the emergence of the victims of the first half.  There were the victims of wars, the Great Depression, and political and social change.  And then there were the victims of vaudeville.  My father was a victim of vaudeville.


         My father was born as vaudeville was dying.  November 16th of 1932, ten years after my father's birth, the famed Palace Theater in New York switched to a movies only programming schedule.  The live vaudeville shows were becoming a thing of the past as the popularity of talking pictures swept the nation.

        Some of the vaudeville stars made the successful transition from stage to screen.  Bob Hope, W.C. Fields, Al Jolson, Mae West, and many others did well in the new medium.  The biggest group of artists to suffer was the variety acts--the magicians, acrobats, animal acts, and jugglers.  The touring vaudeville circuit was no longer the lucrative guarantee for work that it had been prior to talking pictures.

         After leaving his stint in the Navy during World War Two and a couple of seasons on the basketball team of West Virginia University, my dad began pursuing a part time career as a juggler.  He still had the dreams that many entertainers of that era had:  Vaudeville was going to come back bigger than ever.  


         The shows he worked in the fifties almost seemed like vaudeville.  Veteran acts from that past era were booked on shows with newcomers like my dad.  Some of the acts were legends in the business.  The show line-ups were often much like those one might have seen twenty years earlier, except now the venues were different.  Instead of the grand old theaters of the heyday of the vaudeville era, now the shows were in nightclubs and at corporate functions.  The working entertainers were still living the dream.

          But that dream was dying.  Rock and roll had arrived and was here to stay.  And then there was the biggest vaudeville threat of them all--television.  The vaudeville dreamers no longer dreamed of getting booked on a "circuit" or of playing the Palace Theater.  Now it was The Ed Sullivan Show or one of the other television variety shows.  The dreams of the vaudevillian dreamer didn't die easily.

           My dad never made it to The Ed Sullivan Show--almost but no cigar.  We auditioned our act for the show producers and they were very interested.  Then the show went off the air.  We worked regularly and performed in some big time shows.  We made some pretty decent money for a job on the side, but my dad was no idle dreamer.  He always kept a good daytime job.  His juggling act was something he did because he loved it and he had a vaudeville dream that started in his childhood.

          Many people today may have never heard of vaudeville or may not have an idea of what it was.  Now vaudeville is mainly only of interest to a few historians or a handful of hobbyists who have an interest in the era.  Movies about vaudeville are not especially popular anymore and are only occasionally run on classic movie channels.  Vaudeville is dead and so are most of its victims.

------

         Have you voted for Alex J Cavanaugh's book trailer yet?  Alex is one of the A to Z co-hosts. The trailer for his book CassaStar is part of the You Gotta Read Reviews Book Video Contest.  Make sure you click on over and vote for his trailer.   Voting will close 11:59 PM Central April 26--that's tonight if you are reading this today!  Show your support for our gracious A to Z co-host Alex J. Cavanaugh and if you've never visited his blog now is a good time to do so.


--------


If you haven't heard yet, there will be an A to Z Challenge Reflections Mega Post on Monday May 2nd.  Read more about this post here.
--------


Are you a fan of vaudeville?   Do you have any favorite vaudeville inspired movies?  What is your favorite genre of performance entertainment?




----------


------

Juggling Jacksons

A Brief History of The Juggling Jacksons

1950s


                 When my dad, Bob Jackson, met my mother, Lois Kay Trevillian, he was a juggler and she was a dancer.  They got married and while my mother was pregnant with me she learned to juggle.

          They worked long hours in rehearsing a juggling act until they finally put together a fast-paced act they called The Juggling Jacksons.  The act became a popular fixture in nightclubs, at conventions, and in other show venues in the early to latter 1950s around the Cleveland, Ohio and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania areas.


1960s

         After four more children and moves to San Diego, California and the Chicagoland area of Northern Indiana, the kids were added to The Juggling Jacksons in what my father used to call "The Big Act".  It was a fast paced act that incorporated intricate juggling patterns.

         This new larger Juggling Jacksons act began playing numerous fairs, circuses, corporate parties, and other shows throughout the Midwestern United States.   Then Bob's day job transferred him and his family to the quaint town of Maryville in East Tennessee.

              The "Big Act" was sharpened up and often performed as a self-contained show throughout Tennessee, Kentucky, the Carolinas, and other Southern states.   The Juggling Jacksons continued to perform for several years until the kids started moving on into adulthood.  Bob and Lois continued to perform--again as a two person act--into the 1980s.

Mid 1970s til Now

           And me?  After a few years at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, I went on as a solo act in the Ken Griffin Magic Show in 1975.   For the next sixteen years, I toured the country with various shows often as a juggler, but mostly as a show manager.  In my juggling act I was billed as "The Juggling Jackson".

            So if you were wondering about the picture in the header of the blog, this is a brief account of how it came about.  And my blog title Tossing It Out?    It was my juggling metaphor for tossing out ideas to readers and juggling words and phrases.  Do I still juggle?  Not often, but I still can--it's just like riding a bicycle.




*******

Autobiography of a Nobody (excerpt)

The following is an excerpt of my father's autobiography as he wrote it.  I hope to eventually have it all transcribed from his original manuscript.  What is presented here today has not yet been edited.

From Chapter 2 of Autobiography of a Nobody:

            We had no kindergarten like the children have today. Our school was a building where grades one through six were taught. I was not a good student. I wasn’t a smart student like so many of them were. I did not get a good scholastic foundation. It was my own fault, I thought too much of playing instead of studying. I can’t blame my parents either. With eight children to look after, individual tutoring was out of the question. However, my mother did insist on giving me my spelling words without fail every night. I could spell. But reading1 arithmetic, geography, and other studies did not come easy for me. Hindsight is better than foresight, so if I had it all over to do again, I would know that I should allocate time to my lessons instead of thinking everyday was a picnic with games to play.

            Seventh and eighth grades were the same pattern. I got by as an average or below average student. I did get a lot of exercise walking to and from school, morning, noon, and evening. The school was in the main part of Clarksburg.

            High School--grades nine through twelve--was a big step up for me, I looked forward to gym classes. You had a choice of swimming, or playing basketball. Swimming was the choice of Fish Mouth. It had nothing to do with his nick-name. He just loved to swim. I always chose to play basketball.

            There was one class subject I really liked. It was typing. My teacher liked me, because I did work hard at it, and my father had a typewriter at home for me to practice. Practice does make the difference. I caught the eyes of other students in the class watching me as my fingers danced rapidly across the keyboard. I hope I did not come across to them as a smart alec show-off. Host of them were struggling after nearly a full semester to do 25 words per minute, to enable them to pass the course, or 30 words to take 2nd year typing. I was moving along at a clip over twice as fast as this without really trying.

             Since I was the fastest typist in the class, my teacher let me compete against other typists from other schools at different locations. This I liked. Thanks to my typing teacher, I got my first job after graduation. An officer of a large construction company called my high school for a good typist. She recommended me. From this job, I learned the field construction office profession, and never had a desire to do any other type of work.

            A very sad event happened to me while I was in high school. My father died. At the age of forty-seven, he laid at home in bed with appendicitis.. He was a Christian Science member. They believe in faith healing. He wouldn’t go to the doctor. Until —— it was too late! His appendix burst within him. He was rushed to the hospital. Peritonitis had set in. No wonder drugs then. Next thing, word came home that my father had died.
 
            I do not believe in Christian Science, They put out a good newspaper, but as for me that is it. It was a cold snowy day in December my father’s: funeral was held. He was buried in the family cemetery on a hill-side in Homer, W,Va. The pallbearers had a hard time slipping and sliding upon the glistening snow covered, slippery hillside carrying my father’s casket. As the cold wind, blew, the tear drops froze against my face. My mother was widowed with eight children, God bless her.  She was not a Christian Science follower. She believed in God.
 
            My father died December 19, 1936. Our Christmas was shattered! When I returned to school after time off, a friend of mine in gym class said to me, “What have you been doing, goofing off?”   Some people can say some mean things, but he didn’t know! With tears in my eyes, I told him I was off because my father died. This was a sad event, the saddest thing to happen to me up to this time.
                                               ####
 
              All Christmas stories aren't happy ones.  There is a happy outcome to this one in the sense that my father was a great Dad.  Christmas's were always very special in our house and we had a life of abundance in more ways than just material things.  He was Godly and good-hearted.  And he was very funny.
 
              My siblings and I were all adults when my father passed at the age of 67.  That was twenty years ago.  He left us at far too young of an age, but thankfully he saw us all go out on our own as adults and was able to see all of his grandchildren. 
 
                 Let me know what you think about this excerpt.  We were fortunate that he did leave us something in writing.  Have your parents left an autobiography?  Have you thought about interviewing them and writing a biography as a family history keepsake?
 
 

          

Some Obscurities, But There Nonetheless

          In my Monday post I had mentioned that a short piece which I had written about myself and my blog appears in the current issue of Jackson Brigade Quarterly (Vol. 18, No.2 issue dated February 2010).  This quarterly magazine is a publication of  Jackson Brigade , which is a genealogical association for descendants of John and Elizabeth JACKSON, who were the great-grandparents of Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson. 

        Stonewall Jackson, along with Robert E. Lee, was one the greatest confederate generals in the American Civil War.  He is considered to be one of the greatest military minds of United States history. Stonewall Jackson is part of my family tree.  I am  not a direct descendent of Stonewall Jackson, but I descend from his family line which is celebrated by the Jackson Brigade organization.

          I am proud to be part of this heritage and this was the primary reason for my article in the Quarterly.  Since membership is spread all across the United States and I am a fairly recent member of the organization, not many members knew of me.  The article gave me a chance to tell a bit about myself and my blog.  I hope to see members of the Jackson Brigade add themselves to my blog followers. And if Stonewall Jackson is a part of your family tree and you haven't joined the Jackson Brigade check out the website and find out how you can join.   In the future I hope to include some more stories about this Jackson family and those related to it.

         Unfortunately, most readers will not have access to the article that I have written for Jackson Brigade Quarterly since distribution is limited to members of the organization and a handful of libraries and historical organizations.  However, on the internet you can read another article that I wrote back in 1990 that is a tribute to my father.

         I was quite surprised many years ago when I ran across this article listed on Google.  The article does not appear under my pseudonym which I use in this blog and on my current written work.  You can read this article which appeared in the magazine Juggler's World , a quarterly publication of The International Jugglers Association.  My father had been among the earliest members of this organization and served as president in 1957.


          Getting published is almost always a thrill for a writer.  After all isn't that why we write?  I hope to have many future posts about articles that I get published.  Do you have any articles appearing in recent or upcoming publications?  What are some of the more obscure publications in which your written work has appeared?

My Mom's a Dancer: The Photos

        Back on December 16 I did a post called MY MOM'S A DANCER and received a number of requests for photographs.  During my Christmas visit to Tennessee to visit my mother, I was able to get some photos and other mementos which I present in today's post.  Here are some highlights of the show business career of Lois Kaye Trevillian Jackson.

             Lois Trevillian started taking dance classes at the Virginia Chittum school of dance in Morgantown, WV when she was about 5 years old.  She was still taking classes when this dance revue was presented on June 4, 1947.  Here is a listing for one of the numbers in which she appeared at the recital.

  Lois Kay(e) Trevillian met West Virginia University basketball star Robert Lee (Bob) Jackson in 1950.  He would sometimes perform his juggling act on the same shows where Lois was performing her dance act. They were soon married and performing together on a regular basis.

            Eventually Lois added magic tricks to her tap and acrobatic dance routine.  Any added novelty helped make an act more unique and sellable.   As time went on Lois learned to juggle and soon she had not only added juggling to her dance act, but she joined Bob to form a fast-paced team juggling act they called The Juggling Jacksons.  The act developed a strong reputation among theatrical agencies in the Cleveland, OH and Pittsburgh, PA area and they worked high caliber shows on a regular basis.  Their son Lee was born in 1951 and daughter Joy in 1952.  Lois continued her dance, but now incorporated it into the juggling act.

This story will be continued next Wednesday......