A Glimpse of Glory!

Saul Cohen was grumpy but oddly determined. It was Monday and he was off to work again, leaving Cincinnati, his adoring wife Roz, and their two school-age children.

“Honey, if your work upsets you just quit!” Roz urged him. “You’re an educated man and there are plenty of other jobs. Teach school again. Get work in one of those war plants, whatever makes you happy. But don’t stay on this job just for Papa’s sake.”

“There was this guy with the circus, see,” Saul replied, as he packed a suitcase. “His job was scooping up manure from the elephants and other animals. So one day a pal tells him to quit! Offers him a job at his used car lot where he’ll never have to demean himself again. And the guy answers, ‘What, and give up show business?’ “

 The unhappy district manager of six failing mid-western vaudeville houses, Saul Cohen kissed his family goodbye and caught his train. His next stop was the troubled Keith’s Theater, in downtown Indianapolis. Riding the dusty, packed and smoke filled train, the James Whitcomb Riley, he had to sit on the end of his suitcase. The train was overloaded with soldiers and sailors and all the seats were taken. The newspaper he’d brought with him featured front page stories about American tankers and freighters being sunk by German U-Boats off Virginia Beach and Long Island, and of merciless German attacks on life boats loaded with survivors. Saul was too old for military service, 43, and that irked him, too.

I’ll be glad when the war’s over and I can book  some decent vaudeville acts again. Tomorrow I’ll yell at those idiots in the home office about getting us better movies, too. Keith’s won’t last long with the crap we’re showing, Charlie Chan, Dagwood and Blondie, and that awful Peter Lorre-Mister Moto stuff.  We’ve got to shape up or ship out!  Loew’s Palace and Indiana Theaters get all the first run movies. The Lyric and Circle get the big name bands with their hit recordings. The Mutual and Fox have burlesque.  But even the Ohio and Cozy get better pics than we do! What do we get? Leaks in the plumbing! It’s almost as bad at our other theaters, Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati. And these days I have to book them all! We need something new. How did I get stuck with managing a string of vaudeville houses anyway? I’m an Ohio State graduate, a history major, for crying out loud! It was supposed to be a summer job, helping my brother-in-law. Then when Joseph gets drafted! I tried to enlist, but they turned me down. Then, like a dummy, I offered to help Roz’s father, Papa Julian, until he found a full time replacement.  I also did it because I love vaudeville, always have. I even did a small time magic act myself, dressed as a clown, appearing at children’s hospitals in Columbus while I was in college. That’s where I first met Roz, sweet Roz. She was a nurse, and it was love at first sight. Roz, in her starched white uniform, and me, hiding behind a bum’s make up wearing a red sponge rubber nose. Papa Julian was pretty nasty about our getting married. He wanted a nice medical student, not some clown of a history teacher.

          “What the hell does a simple minded school teacher know about theater, or management, or making money? You’ve been sucking at the public nipple for a living; you never had to meet a payroll. Why, you couldn’t pour wine out of a bottle with the instructions on its bottom. And you want to marry my daughter?”  That old goat! So, here I am, useless as the Italian Army watching this damned war deliver vaudeville its final death blow. That would really tickle Papa ‘cause he could  convert to movies and popcorn, and get rid of me.

 Saul stood to stretch his stiff legs, staggering out to the swaying train’s clickety-clack platform between coaches. He stared unconsciously through the steel door’s glass window at the Indiana country side. For the hundredth time he wondered at the peculiar sight of a mature tree growing out of the Greensberg courthouse tower when a sudden rain storm blocked his view. Big blobs of rain drops lashed at the speeding coach as it thundered on, past seas of corn fields on both sides of the tracks.

Back in 1928, whe