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Female Impersonator Julian Eltinge Gets His Start in Boston’s Gay ’90s

The rise of female impersonator Julian Eltinge was a twist on the old story of instant stardom. In it, an agent/producer spots an ingénue from an amateur play in the provinces and rockets her (or him) to fame on Broadway.

Eltinge started out in the drag shows popular in Boston around the turn of the 20^th century. They took him to Broadway, to European tours and to the vaudeville circuit as a star of George M. Cohan’s troupe.

He became one of the highest paid stars on stage, appearing in a string of hit Broadway musicals. He published three Julian Eltinge magazines, including Julian Eltinge’s Magazine of Beauty Hints and Tips, which promoted his own line of women’s cosmetics, corsets and shoes. A Broadway theater was named after him. He starred in early silent films, hobnobbed with Hollywood stars and built a lavish villa where he lived with his mother.

Offstage he cultivated a manly image, smoking cigars, cursing, riding horses, breaking engagements with women and staging fights in bars. He began to decline in his early 40s and died mysteriously on May 7, 1941.

1^st Corps of Cadets

It all started with a fundraiser to build what is now The Castle at Park Plaza in Boston’s Back Bay. Also known as the Armory of the 1st Corps of Cadets, it used to be the headquarters for Massachusetts’ elite militia unit. Now a steak can be ordered in the gun room, as it is home to a Smith & Wollensky restaurant.

The 1st Corps of Cadets was organized in 1741 as a company of young gentlemen like John Hancock, who had the time and money to serve as the ceremonial honor guard for the royal governors.

The Armory of the First Corps of Cadets

The 1st Corps mission evolved over the years. By 1890, members decided they needed a place to meet, train and store their weapons. They commissioned William Gibbons Preston to design a granite, castlelike structure that could withstand crowd violence. Preston included a six-story tower. To pay for the building, the 1st Corps raised money through public subscription and annual comic operettas. Known as the Cadet Theatricals, members of the all-male cast played both men and women at the Tremont Theatre (now the site of a Loew’s Multiplex).

The Evolution of Julian Eltinge

Many details of the life of Julian Eltinge are unclear. He revealed little about his personal life because he wanted to quell rumors that he was gay. “I am not gay, I just like pearls,” he often said.

His birthday has been given on various dates, but a researcher finally nailed it down. He was born William Julian Dalton on May 14, 1881, in Newton, Mass., the son of Julia Baker Dalton and Michael Dalton. His father, a failed gold prospector, later opened a barbershop in Butte, Mont.

According to one version of the story, he played a girl in the Cadet Theatricals at the age of 10. His performance inspired the next year’s show to be written around him.

But his biographer, Martin Litvin, writes that Billy Dalton was encouraged by his mother to dress in skirts and entertain men in the saloons of Butte. When his father found out he beat him severely. At 17, he went to live with an aunt in Boston, where he worked in a dry goods store.

Fame

Another biographer picks up the thread. In Extravaganza King: Robert Barnet and Boston Musical Theatre, Anne Alison Barnet writes that Billy Dalton was then studying dance and taken the name Julian Eltinge (rhymes with sing). His dance instructor recommended him to Barnet, the Cadet Theatricals producer, because he had beautiful legs and was a joy to work with. He played the part of a soubrette named Mignonette in Miladi and the Musketeer.

The next year another amateur theatrical group asked him to perform — the Bank Officers Association, a benevolent society for bankers. The cadets had decided not to produce a show that year, but to spend more time drilling. Rumor had it that the military brass frowned on drag performances as unseemly.

And so the BOA took center stage, and Julian Eltinge stole the 1901 show as Claire de Loinville in Miss Simplicity. Two years later he dazzled the audience in Baron Humbug. A prominent producer named E.E. Rice then took him to Broadway.

The rest is history.

With thanks to the Julian Eltinge Project.

Images: By Tom™5 – Armory of the First Corps of Cadets, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4793014. This story was updated in 2022.

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Yogi Berra Hits His Way Through New England (Under a Fake Name)

Yogi Berra might never have starred for the New York Yankees had he not talked his way onto the Navy team based at the Groton submarine base in 1945.

Yogi Berra in his unflattering uniform

He had to beg the manager to let him try out. He was a short, squat, awkward gunner’s mate who’d seen action on D-Day. Now, as World War II wound down, he’d returned to the States and longed to play baseball.

“If I didn’t make it in baseball, I won’t have made it workin’,” he said. “I didn’t like to work.”

Yogi Berra

The base’s ball club was run by James Gleeson, a former Major League outfielder nicknamed “Gee-Gee.” Gleeson didn’t think Berra looked anything like a ballplayer. “So I’m ugly,” Yogi later said. “I never saw anyone hit with his face.”

Gleeson didn’t believe Yogi was the property of the New York Yankees, either.

James “Gee-Gee” Gleeson

Yogi finally convinced him, and he went on to become a Hall of Famer and a beloved cultural figure. His unwittingly witty comments were known as Yogi-isms. “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded,” was one of his many classic lines. So was, “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”

Yogi tried to distance himself from his Yogi-isms. “I never said most of the things I said,” he said.

Lawrence Peter Berra

Berra was born Lawrence Peter Berra on May 12, 1925 in St. Louis to a family of Italian immigrants. He dropped out of school after eighth grade because all he wanted to do was to play baseball.

“Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets,” he said.

After his best friend Joe Garagiola signed with the St. Louis Cardinals for a $500 bonus, Yogi Berra decided he had to have a $500 bonus too. The Yankees gave him one, along with $90 a month to play for their Norfolk, Va., minor league team, the Tars.

As a Tar in 1943, Yogi Berra hit seven home runs and 56 RBIs – including 23 in one double header. At the end of the season Berra enlisted in the Navy. He became a gunner’s mate and saw action on D-Day aboard a rocket boat, a 36-foot landing craft that sprayed rockets on the beach before the troops landed. Berra spent 10 days on the boat before he finally returned to his ship.

About the invasion, he said, ‘we were closer than the hitter is to the Green Monster at Fenway Park.’ At 18, he didn’t think anything could kill him.

I didn’t know enough to be scared. I had my head up over the side of the boat all the time, looking around like it was the Fourth of July in Forest Park and after the fireworks we were going to go over and get some hot dog and cokes.

New England Baseball (Not the Red Sox)

Before he was mustered out, Yogi Berra was stationed at the submarine base at Groton, Conn., where he finally convinced James Gleeson to let him play.

New England was a good place to hone one’s baseball skills as World War II wound down. Thousands of young men who played baseball, some in the Major Leagues, were stationed at military installations throughout the region. They could play for service teams like the Groton Raiders. Or they could play for for teams in the New England League like the Nashua Dodgers and the Pawtucket Slaters. They could even play for both. The League didn’t allow players signed with professional teams to play semi-pro games as ringers, and the military discouraged the practice. But on the semipro teams they could make $50 a game – half a month’s pay. So the professionals played under assumed names on their days off.

As a Yankee in 1953

Yogi Berra played under an assumed name for the Cranston Chiefs (later the Providence Grays) of the New England League.

His record is murky, as local sportswriters protected the identity of the players. “The New England is a league of aliases and fictitious names. No scribe desires to prevent any young man from earning a dollar by using his right name,” the Lynn Evening Item wrote.

Cusano?

The Italian-American Writer blog shared a memory of Yogi Berra as a Chiefs player:

At Cranston Stadium, for example, a guy named Cusano kept hitting home runs for the Cranston Chiefs and few people knew that his real name was Yogi Berra, a top Yankee prospect.
The city updated the field and raised the fence 30 ft because one day Berra… uhhh Cusano… hit a ball 500 feet off the roof of the Cranston Bible Chapel in centerfield.

The real Crash Davis (Kevin Costner played the fictional Crash Davis in Bull Durham)

Crash Davis had played professional ball for the Philadelphia Athletics before being drafted by the Navy. As the war wound down, he managed the Lawrence Millionaires of the New England League.

I remember one game when we were playing in Providence, Rhode Island, and all those players were using assumed names. Jimmy Gleeson, who had been with the Cubs and the Reds, was playing in the league and first base was open so I elected to walk him. I didn’t know that little guy that was hitting next but I knew Gleeson. That short little guy looked about 18 or 19 years old, and it turned out he hit a home run with the bases loaded. His real name was Lawrence ‘Yogi’ Berra.

The Legend of Yogi Berra

Yogi Berra in 1956

On June 25, 1945, the Yogi Berra legend was born. The New York Giants, returning from a series with the Boston Braves, played against the Groton team. Berra went 3-for-4. One of his hits came off a wild pitch. Giants manager Mel Ott decided he had to have the odd little catcher. He offered the Yankees $50,000 for Berra. Yankees general manager Larry MacPhail refused without knowing who Yogi Berra was – but decided to find out.

MacPhail summoned Berra to New York for an interview. Yogi walked in wearing the sailor’s outfit so unflattering to his short, squat physique. “You want to see me, Mister?” he said to MacPhail. MacPhail was stunned. He later recollected that Yogi ‘looked like the bottom man on an unemployed acrobatic team.’

But Yogi managed to convince MacPhail he was a professional ball player — by asking who he should see about his expenses for the trip.

MacPhail promoted him to the Newark Bears, just one rung down from the New York Yankees, for the 1946 season.

The Yankees

On Sept. 22, 1946, Yogi Berra was called up to the Yankees. As a Yankee he would appear in 14 World Series and on 18 All Star teams, and he would win the American League’s Most Valuable Player honor three times. In 1972, he was elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame.

On a night the Yankees chose to honor him, he expressed his appreciation: “I’m a lucky guy and I’m happy to be with the Yankees. And I want to thank everyone for making this night necessary.”

James Gleeson in 1964 became Yankees’ manager Yogi Berra’s first base coach.

Yogi Berra died on Sept. 22, 2015, at the age of 90. His advice to mourners: “You should always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise, they won’t come to yours.”

With thanks to The New England League: A Baseball History, 1885-1949 By Charlie Bevis and Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee By Allen Barra. This story was updated in 2022.

Images: Newark Bears By buba69 – https://www.flickr.com/photos/buba69/1297630664/sizes/o/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31323851.

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Jonathan Haraden, Revolutionary Privateer Who Captured Everything He Came Alongside

During the American Revolution, Capt. Jonathan Haraden captured dozens of British merchant ships at sea. Most people could only hear of the privateer’s bold exploits, but on June 4, 1780, thousands had a ringside seat for one of the most dramatic engagements of the war.

Jonathan Haraden

Haraden preyed on British fears of Yankee privateers, outmaneuvering larger foes and often capturing them through sheer nerve — without firing a shot. If he ordered his helmsman to steer for a vessel, his crew assumed they had their prize in the bag.

Pirate Navy

Privateers were crucial to the American war effort.

They commanded 1,697 ships – 26 times as many as the continental navy’s 64 vessels. It was a risky business. Seventy-eight percent of privateer ships were captured or sunk by the Royal Navy.

John Adams was a fan:

This is a short, easy, and infallible method of humbling the English, preventing the effusion of an ocean of blood, and bringing the way to a conclusion … it is by cutting off supplies, not by attacks, sieges, or assaults, that I expect deliverance from [our] enemies.

Jonathan Haraden Takes Everything

Haraden’s exploits on the sea put him alongside John Paul Jones as an American naval hero.

According to one story, an American ship’s boy imprisoned on a British brig-o’-war spied a sail on the horizon. He began to sing and dance. The sailors asked him why. “My master is in that ship and I shall soon be with him,” the boy said. The sailors asked him who his master was. “Captain Haraden,” the boy said. “He takes everything he goes alongside of, and he will soon take you.”

The boy was correct.

Jonathan Haraden was born in Gloucester, Mass., on Nov. 11, 1744, but went to work for merchant George Cabot of Salem as a boy.

When the Revolution broke out, he was commissioned lieutenant of the Tyrranicide, a brigantine in the Massachusetts State Navy. The ship was destroyed in the ill-fated Penobscot Expedition, and Harden took command of the General Pickering. The vessel was a Letter of Marque ship, a merchant ship with official permission to sail as a privateer when the occasion warranted. It was a smallish frigate, with 14 six-inch guns and 45 men and boys.

The Penobscot Expedition

General Pickering

The General Pickering carried weapons and cognac from France and rum, sugar, chocolate and molasses from the Caribbean. Along the way Haraden captured a number of enemy merchant ships, making himself and the ship owners rich.

In April of 1780, Haraden set sail on the General Pickering with a cargo of sugar, bound for Bilbao, Spain, a favorite rendezvous for privateers. In the Bay of Biscay, the General Pickering overtook the British privateer Golden Eagle, which had 22 guns and 60 men.

It was dark, and Haraden decided to bluff. “This is an American frigate, sir,” he shouted through the speaking trumpet. “Surrender, or I will strike you with a broadside.”

The Golden Eagle, a victim of outsized fears of American privateers, fell for the ruse and surrendered. Haraden put 15 of his men onto the Golden Eagle and sailed into Bilbao Harbor with his prize sailing alongside. Another ship was sailing out. It was the Achilles, a British privateer with 42 guns and 140 men. It recaptured the Golden Eagle at dusk, but the battle would soon begin.

French privateer Confiance attacking an East Indiaman, Kent, 1800, by Ambroise Louis Garneray.

The Spanish Flotilla

By morning, word broke out that a British and an American privateer were about to do battle– within sight of land. Thousands flocked to the coast and got closer to the action in fishing boats, cutters, rowboats and sailing vessels.

Haraden maneuvered the General Pickering between the Achilles and a line of shoals and raked the British vessel with a broadside fire. The wind died down, and it took two hours for the Achilles to work herself into position and escape the American fire. The General Pickering, with her cargo of sugar, sat so low in the water the larger ship couldn’t rake her. A witness said the General Pickering looked like a longboat next to a ship. Another said Haraden stood exposed as shot flew around him – as if he were amid a shower of snowflakes.

Cheers rose from the flotilla of boats and the spectators on shore as the General Pickering raked the Achilles. Finally the Achilles captain was able to bring the ship about and open fire on the General Pickering.

After three hours, the General Pickering ran short of ammunition. Haraden ordered his men to load the cannons with crowbars. They flew like iron arrows, tore through the Achilles’ rigging, smashed the decks and sent the gun crews from their stations. The flight of crowbars persuaded the Achilles’ captain to retreat, and the General Pickering recaptured the Golden Eagle.

By then the flotilla of small boats had pressed in closer to the General Pickering. At the close of battle they escorted the victor into the harbor. The crowd swarmed to his landing place, caught up Captain Haraden and carried him through the streets on their shoulders.

Hot Chocolate Pot

The grateful owners of the General Pickering then gave Haraden an engraved silver hot-chocolate pot and two silver canns, now at the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem.

Haraden continued capturing British merchant ships. Almost exactly two years after the battle with the Achilles, Haraden aboard the General Pickering encountered the Caesar. The two ships fought for two hours, but neither gained a decisive advantage. Said Haraden,

…both parties separated, sufficiently amused.

Finally his luck ran out, but only briefly. When he sailed into the Dutch Caribbean port of Sint Eustatius, British Admiral George Brydges Rodney’s fleet captured the General Pickering and her prizes. Haraden managed to escape, and he returned to privateering in command of the Julius Caesar.

Jonathan Haraden died in Salem on Nov. 23, 1803.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Lt. Col. Ethan Allen Hitchcock Views Indians as ‘Part of the Great Human Family’

Lt. Col. Ethan Allen Hitchcock was ordered to Florida in 1842 to ‘clear out the Indians,’ a duty he accepted but vowed to do without shedding blood.

Ethan Allen Hitchcock

He was the grandson of Ethan Allen, the famed Vermont Revolutionary War general, but he struggled with questions of right and wrong during his long military career. The Mexican War, for example, disgusted him because he viewed it as an insult and an encroachment on the rights of the Mexican people.

He also respected the Indians he was ordered to ‘clear out.’

Ethan Allen Hitchcock

Hitchcock was born on May 18, 1798, in Vergennes, Vt.,the son of Samuel Hitchcock and Lucy Caroline Allen.

He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, commissioned as a third lieutenant and quickly rose through the ranks of the U.S. Army. He served in the Seminole War in Florida and as the right-hand man of Gen. Winfield Scott during the Mexican-American War. He also served as a major general in the Civil War.

Hitchcock was a devoted scholar, an admirer of Spinoza and a collector of books on alchemy and flute music.

On Aug. 31, 1842, a band of Creek warriors attacked the Perkins family in Washington County, Fla., killing them all in their home. The attack terrified settlers in the area. The state militia failed to track down the Indians. Hitchcock was ordered to join his regiment in Florida.

The Human Family

Ethan Allen Hitchcock commented on his assignment in his diary:

I have been much with Indians and look upon them as a part of the great human family, capable of being reasoned with and susceptible of passions and affections which, rightly touched, will secure moral results with almost mechanical certainty. I repeatedly urged Mr. Poinsett, when he was Secretary of War, to voluntarily assign to the Indians some small part of Florida, and they would soon be willing to go West. One reason why the Indians would not surrender is that they were under the impression that they would be killed if they did so. Years of bloody pursuit of them makes it absolutely necessary to give them assurance of protection and security. …Even if the war was originally unavoidable, which I do not believe, there have been many lives and at least ten million dollars wasted to pay for a ridiculous pride in warring against a handful of abused savages.

This story last updated in 2022.

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The Hope and Glory of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment

In the middle of the Civil War, 1,007 African-American soldiers of the 54^th Massachusetts Regiment disembarked at Boston South Station with 37 white officers. They then paraded in full dress uniform across Boston Common as a tumultuous throng cheered them on.

Sgt. William H. Carney of the 54th Massachusetts won the Medal of Honor for his valor at Fort Wagner.

It was May 28th, 1863, and they had trained for several months at Camp Meigs in Readville, Mass. They were on the way to war under the leadership of 25-year-old Col. Robert Gould Shaw.

They marched knowing that the Confederacy had promised to sell black soldiers into slavery if captured, and to execute the white officers.

The 54th Massachusetts

A third had worked as laborers, a quarter farmers. There were teamsters, waiters, barbers, seamen, cabinetmakers, a dentist and a druggist. Fathers had enlisted with their sons, and brothers enlisted together. Frederick Douglass’ two sons joined the 54th.

TDuring their march, the soldiers passed abolitionist Wendell Phillips’ house, where William Lloyd Garrison watched them with tears streaming down his face. They then passed the house of Oliver Wendell Holmes, who came out with Henry James, Sr., who saluted his son, an officer in the regiment.

Down State Street they marched, where a gang of rowdies tried to attack them. A large police force, however, repelled the toughs. The regiment then marched in review on Boston Common before Gov. John Andrew and set off to Battery Wharf singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic in a thousand voices.

John Andrew

Gov. John Andrew

That stirring moment was largely the work of Andrew, who became Massachusetts governor on Jan. 3, 1861, three months before the Civil War broke out.

Andrew, born in Windham, Maine, on May 31, 1818, was a 42-year-old lawyer who had taken up the abolitionist cause with fervor. He handled the legal defense of runaway slaves and helping to found the Republican Party. He was elected state representative from Hingham, Mass., in 1857, and his popularity as an orator and advocate took him to the governor’s office.

Detractors called him a ‘straight and impractical republican’ and, worse, ‘a lawyer of a low type and a brutal fanatic.’

As governor he immediately began preparing for war, accepting recruits from other states to serve in Massachusetts regiments. In 1862 he began working with Frederick Douglass to win permission to recruit African-American uniformed soldiers for the Union Army.

”If Southern slavery should fall, and colored men should have no hand and play no conspicuous part in the task, the result would leave the colored man a mere helot,” Andrew wrote. They would have ‘lost their masters, but not found a country.’

Paving the Way

Andrew and a group of Massachusetts radicals – radicals because they thought slavery should be abolished – then went to Washington in January to ask President Lincoln for permission to raise a colored regiment. Andrew wanted it to be a model for future African-American regiments.

Henry Augustus Monroe, 13-year-old drummer boy for the 54th Massachusetts.

Secretary of War Edwin Stanton granted permission, and the fabled 54^th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry was born. It did indeed pave the way for more African-American soldiers.

Seven months after the parade on Boston Common, Robert Gould Shaw led about 600 troops of 54th Massachusetts Regiment in an assault on Fort Wagner at the mouth of Charleston Harbor. Nearly half were killed, wounded or captured. Shaw died in the battle, and the Confederates tossed into a common grave with 74 of his men.

Though the 54th Massachusetts failed to take the fort, the soldiers’ skill and courage quelled any doubt about the fighting ability of African-American soldiers.

Heroes of the 54th Massachusetts

William H. Carney received the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1900 for rallying the troops at Fort Wagner. Born a slave in Virginia, he escaped and enlisted in the 54th Massachusetts.

During the fighting, Carney rescued the American flag when the standard bearer fell. He carried the flag to the enemy’s ramparts and back, saying “Boys, the old flag never touched the ground!”

Henry Monroe joined as a 13-year-old drummer boy for the 54th Massachusetts. He directed maneuvers with his drum during the battle. Later, as a Methodist minister, he described the rebel fort as a “slumbering volcano.” He then explained how it “awoke to action and poured forth sheets of flame from ten thousand rebel fires, and earth and heaven shook with the roar of a hundred pieces of artillery.”

Detail from Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ plaster cast for the 54th Regiment Memorial.

(You can see 43 photographs of the members of the 54^th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment here, courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.)

By the end of the Civil War, 10 percent of the soldiers in the Union Army were African American, double their population in the North.

Of the 54th Massachusetts, Andrew said,

I know not where, in all of human history, to any given thousand men in arms there has been committed a work at once so proud, so precious, so full of hope and glory.

Veterans of the 54th Massachusetts at the dedication of the Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment on Boston Common, May 31, 1897.

This story last updated in 2022. For the story of Frederick Douglass’ escape to freedom, click here.

Detail of Robert Gould Shaw Memorial By Postdlf, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2675742.

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