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My opinion

McGinn: Playing Springfield could make you famous once

Fanny Brice, George Burns and Al Jolson among the greats who once graced area stages.

A 1928 promotional flier for the Hilton sisters is in the scrapbook of Regent Theatre projectionist Clarence Milhoan.

The Marx Brothers plus 30 "dangerously beautiful" girls? Sign me up. An ad for the brothers' 1924 show at the Fairbanks.

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McGinn

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A newspaper ad for Fatty Arbuckle's string of local shows in 1927.

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By Andrew McGinn, Staff Writer Updated 11:04 AM Friday, November 25, 2011

I wouldn’t call it nostalgia.

I wasn’t alive.

My grandparents were barely even alive.

I wouldn’t have wanted to live in that era, anyway.

Not because they didn’t have TV.

More because they didn’t have a polio vaccine.

So it’s more accurate to call it a fascination — I find it fascinating that, prior to about 1928, Springfield was a hotbed of vaudeville, that rough-and-tumble form of theater where nearly every icon of slapstick sharpened the gags that eventually made them Hollywood immortals.

Of course, there were other kinds of acts in vaudeville, too, and they visited Springfield as well.

Despite the fact that he’s the subject of that incredible mural on the back of the crumbling Regent Theatre, I don’t think we fully grasp anymore the legacy of showman and impresario Gus Sun.

A Toledo native, he moved to town in 1904 with this crazy idea of presenting vaudeville and movies under the same roof for mere pennies — a successful experiment that arguably made Springfield every bit as important in vaudeville as New York and its birthplace, Boston.

From right here, Sun established a circuit of close to 300 theaters in places like Lima, Canton, Muncie, Ind., and Oil City, Pa., that brought affordable live entertainment to the masses.

In turn, hundreds of acts flocked to Sun’s office in Springfield with hopes of winning steady employment on his circuit — and many returned even once they hit it big.

I’ve done plenty of stories through the years on Sun, and on the rise and fall of his base of command, the Regent, which he had built in 1919.

But I’ve been short on specifics.

According to local legend, Sun gave the Marx Brothers their start on a local stage — but when?

While it’s now been put back into storage, the Heritage Center of Clark County briefly had something labeled “Gus Sun’s booking log” on display under glass.

In peering through the glass at the exposed pages, I recognized the Ritz Brothers — a trio of brothers who were sort of Marx-lite.

But the Ritz Brothers did become famous enough that, by 1939, they warranted a cameo in the classic Donald Duck cartoon, “The Autograph Hound.”

“Man,” I thought to myself at the time, “I’d love to flip through that book.”

It turns out that, for a $4 research fee, anyone can.

You just have to wear some nifty white gloves like Mickey Mouse.

The book wasn’t actually Sun’s — but, rather, a log kept by Clarence Milhoan during his time in the ’20s as one of five projectionists at the Regent.

The log spans every performer and every movie at the Regent from 1923 to 1928, when the Chakeres family assumed managerial duties.

This was an era in which the movies were silent and often had thrilling titles like “Puritan Passions,” “Omar the Tentmaker” and “Lovers in Quarantine,” and the acts occasionally got jotted down as just “Dummies.”

Milhoan, whose first job for Gus Sun was in 1915 as an usher at the Sun Theater, also dedicated a scrapbook to shows held at the Fairbanks, yet another of Sun’s Springfield theaters.

With as many as eight vaudeville acts every week at the Regent — Sun invented the “split week,” in which a bill of four acts and a movie would typically be replaced on Thursday by four entirely new acts — the names add up.

Many of ’em, like comic magician Frank Van Hoven and minstrel Bert Swor, were famous enough to later warrant obituaries in the New York Times, but, today, it’s like, “Who?”

But many more still elicit a sense of, “Wow.”

Some fascinating finds from the pages of Milhoan’s books:

• So, did the Marx Brothers really get their start here?

Good question.

A 1950 Collier’s magazine story on Sun is seemingly the only source of this local legend.

It’s well documented that Groucho Marx made his stage debut in Grand Rapids, Mich., in 1905 at age 15 as a singer with a vaudeville trio.

Milhoan’s books don’t go back far enough, but the Four Marx Brothers certainly were no strangers to Springfield.

On Sept. 7, 1916, they brought their musical, “Home Again,” to the Sun Theater for half a week.

Milhoan’s scrapbook contains copies of the contract. They were paid $400.

That show was the first in which audiences saw Harpo do the gag with stolen silverware up his sleeve.

Milhoan’s scrapbook also notes an appearance at the Fairbanks by the Marxes on Jan. 28, 1924, with “I’ll Say She Is,” the revue that made them too big for vaudeville.

Groucho by this point was sporting his thick greasepaint mustache.

In a brief profile on Harpo — then still being billed as Arthur Marx — the Springfield Daily News had this to say:

“Arthur Marx is not dumb. Let that be understood here and now. Arthur does not say a word during the entire performance, therefore the story is going all over the town that Arthur is dumb.”

• Comedian Billy House played the Regent for half a week beginning Oct. 8, 1923.

Now mostly forgotten, he was a bona fide star.

Disney artists later studied his movement in order to animate Doc in their 1937 masterpiece, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

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