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Fred Allen Jokes His Way Through Dirty Old Boston

Before Groucho Marx, before Johnny Carson and before Saturday Night Live, there was Fred Allen. A wildly popular radio comedian, he created a fictional backstreet called Allen’s Alley on his show. In it, commentary on the news of the day came from his ensemble of actors, like Senator Beauregard Claghorn, so Southern he wouldn’t drink water unless it came in a Dixie cup.

Fred Allen in the 1940s

There is a real Allens Alley in Boston. It’s across from Lagrange Street on Tremont between Boylston and Stuart in the heart of the theater district. It was there that Fred Allen began his career as a wisecracking juggler on the vaudeville stage. He moved onto radio, and from 1932 to 1949 The Fred Allen Show made him a star. It also put him in the pantheon of great American humorists like Mark Twain, S.J. Perelman and Robert Benchley.

The vivid characters that populated Allen’s Alley were a big part of his appeal. So was his wordplay. He delivered lines like “What’s on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement?” He honed his humor through years of study, a habit he picked up as a teenaged employee of the Boston Public Library. And he developed his observational humor from the people he knew in a city we might know today as Dirty Old Boston. A city that teemed with corner saloons, flophouses, triple deckers, stockyards, Odd Fellows Halls and dim alleys.

Years after he made it big in New York and Hollywood, he said,

I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there.

Allens Alley in the late 1890s

Fred Allen

He was born John Florence Sullivan on May 31, 1894, or, as he put it, his tiny cry soiled the acoustics of Cambridge, Mass. His birth certificate put his birthplace in Boston, but Allen speculated his father, Henry, made the mistake after celebrating the occasion a little too much. A year later came a brother Bob, and then their mother, Cecilia Herlihy Sullivan, died.

His Aunt Lizzie took in the three Sullivan males. She already had a houseful that included her brother Joe, her two sisters, Mary and Jane, and her husband, Mike, a plumber who couldn’t work because lead poisoning had paralyzed him. Her tenants paid her $5 a week for room and board, and sometimes her sisters would quarrel and move out. Lizzie would then have to make do until they returned. She could make a leg of lamb last a week and sifted ashes from the furnace to salvage coal, her nephew wrote.

Henry Sullivan never earned his eldest son’s respect. “My father never raised his hand to any one of his children, except in self-defense,” Allen said.

Henry worked as a bookbinder by day, and when he returned home late at night ‘he seemed to have an impediment in his tread.’

“When my brother and I ran out to greet him we noticed that his breath was dominated by a potent element with which we were not familiar,” Allen wrote.

Perhaps because of his early poverty and family difficulties, or perhaps, simply, because of his Irish heritage, Fred Allen had a persistent sense of tragedy. Once, after rescuing a small boy from getting hit by a car, he shouted, “What’s the matter? Don’t you want to grow up and have troubles?”

Dirty Old Boston

They lived in a duplex on Bayard Street in the Allston section of Boston, where the local characters ranged from an overoptimistic candy salesman to a mountainous schoolmarm he tried to forget without success. Mr. Harrington, the pungent soap-grease man, visited Aunt Lizzie in a great and rancid weekly event. Allen’s super-religious Aunt Mame left the bedroom window open at night to let in the Blessed Virgin. A neighbor, a retired gentleman named Tom Carpenter, burst into wakes and took over whenever he saw a funeral wreath on a door, whether he knew the departed or not.

As a boy Fred Allen attended North Harvard School and St. Anthony’s Church, where he got drafted as a choirboy. “The first Sunday I sang in the choir two hundred people changed their religion,” he wrote.

Choices

After 12 years at Aunt Lizzie’s, Henry shocked them by announcing he would remarry. He told his sons they could come with him and his new wife, who they had never met. Or they could stay with Aunt Lizzie. Fred chose Aunt Lizzie, his brother chose his father.

On his 14th birthday, his Aunt Lizzie told him to put on his best suit and meet his father at a saloon, Con Keefe’s on Dartmouth Street in Boston. The characters and the setting could have populated Allen’s Alley. In his autobiography, Much Ado About Me, he wrote:

“Con Keefe’s was a popular alcoholic shrine, a cheer chapel with all the routine accouterments: the swinging doors, the five-cent beer, the free lunch, the starched bartenders, and the inevitable quota of frowzy thinkers draped along the bar.”

As his father lubricated his throat, he told him he had to get a job. Then he introduced his son to a Mr. Hempstead. “If I had been old enough to attempt character reading, I would have judged Mr. Hempstead to be the custodian of a thirst and, as acting custodian, to be fulfilling his every obligation to his charge,” wrote Allen.

Boston Public Library

Mr. Hempstead did indeed get him a job as a runner at the library. He eventually got promoted into a job that gave him spare time to peruse the stacks. There he found a book on juggling and a book on the history of comedy. He began to collect jokes:

“The professor’s mouth was an adjective hutch.”

“Wind of my prowess spread through the grammar school like bad news at a pessimists’ convention.”

“The last time I saw him he was walking down Lover’s Lane holding his own hand.”

High School

He entered the Boston High School of Commerce, which he called a pet project of Mayor John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald.

Honey Fitz, grandfather of President John . Kennedy

“There was a rumor that Mayor Fitzgerald had sung “Sweet Adeline” in office for so many years that the City Hall acoustics had diabetes,” wrote Allen.

The family moved to the Savin Hill section of Dorchester and later to a bigger place on Columbia Road in Dorchester. He was so busy working his way through high school he had little time and formed few friendships. So in his spare hours he learned to juggle or he squandered his money on vaudeville shows.

One day the library held a talent show for its employees. Fred Allen did his juggling act, and afterward a girl told him he was crazy to stay at the library. He should go on stage, she said.

If it hadn’t been for her, he wrote, he might have ended up the Boston Public Library librarian.

Piano Row

After graduation he worked for the Colonial Piano Company as a piano mover on Piano Row. He performed mini-dramas with two husky piano movers, a horse-and-wagon, a rope and a block-and-tackle. When a reluctant household failed to make installment payments on their piano, Fred Allen and his crew showed up at the door. They would go through the motions of repossessing the piano. The usual result was a housewife taking an oath on the graves of a number of departed relatives that she would pay up. On the rare occasion when that didn’t happen, they would give the person one more chance and leave with as much dignity as they could muster.

Piano Row today

When he wasn’t pretending to repossess pianos, he took his juggling act to Amateur Night shows, then all the rage.

Fred Allen took a two-week vacation from the piano store and toured amusement parks and resorts in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine. Later he bought a vacation getaway in Old Orchard Beach. There he developed an affection for rural New Englanders, who inspired the Allen’s Alley denizen Titus Moody. Moody, played by Parker Fennelly, was a dour Yankee who didn’t hold with furniture that talked—meaning radio, then television. Moody parlayed the character into the Pepperidge Farm spokesman well into his 80s.

Aunt Lizzie didn’t approve of her nephew’s theatrical ambitions, and routinely told him about an actor she knew who ended up in a drunkard’s grave. But he couldn’t resist the dollar, the fun and the excitement.

Scollay Square

He did well enough to turn professional. That meant Scollay Square, Boston’s Tenderloin, which he called the hot foot to Boston’s conservative high-button shoe.

Scollay Square back in the day

There he found plenty of colorful, cheerful Dickensian characters to inspire his imagination: chorus girls, freaks, acrobats, song-and-dance teams, sailors returning home from long cruises. The sailors, he wrote, ‘invariably rushed to the Old Howard [Theatre] to check on the current models of female pulchitrude and to see if any improvements had been made during their absence.’

Years later, he remembered his vaudeville days with fondness.

Vaudeville is dead. The acrobats, the animal acts, the dancers, the singers, and the old-time comedians have taken their final bows and disappeared into the wings of obscurity. For fifty years–from 1875 to 1925–vaudeville was the popular entertainment of the masses. Nomadic tribes of nondescript players roamed the land. The vaudeville actor was part gypsy and part suitcase. With his brash manner, flashy clothes, capes and cane, and accompanied by his gaudy womenfolk, the vaudevillian brought happiness and excitement to the communities he visited.

Becoming Fred Allen

Finally his act was good enough for New York. His arrival in New York was met with as much excitement as another flounder arriving at Fulton Fish Market, he wrote.

Eventually an Australian booking agent saw his juggling act and booked him for a year on the Fuller circuit in Australia. He started in Brisbane, where he did one show a night and had not much else to do. So he picked up a hobby he’d abandoned when he left the Boston Public Library: reading. For the next 11 months, he used his spare time to read the American humorists, including Mark Twain, Josh Billings, Charles Dickens, Bill Nye, Artemus Ward and Eli Perkins.

red Allen and dummy, 1916

He wanted to write, but he claimed his High School of Commerce education hadn’t taught him to weld nouns and verbs together into an acceptable literary pattern. In Brisbane, he resolved to improve his act, his jokes and his writing.

His Australian tour lasted so long he returned to the same cities, where the audience knew his jokes. So he took from his trunk a ventriloquist’s dummy that he bought on impulse – “I was lonely” – and adapted a routine with it. Later he added a banjo, then a guitar.

When he returned from Australia, he no longer performed as a juggler. He was Fred Allen, a monologist.

At Last, Success

In 1932, he went on the radio. For the next 17 years, The Fred Allen Show appeared in various guises and with various sponsors. It became Town Hall Tonight and finally the Texaco Star Theater.

Allen’s Alley

He wrote his own jokes, featured guests and satirized the news and musical comedies. In 1942 he introduced Allen’s Alley with characters like Moody, Senator Claghorn, the malaprop-prone Mrs. Nussbaum and the comic Irishman Ajax Cassidy. He had married Portland Hoffa in 1927, and she introduced the show with a high voice that sounded like ‘two slate pencils mating or a clarinet reed calling for help.’

He also appeared on television and in film. Allen had little good to say about either. “Imitation is the sincerest form of television,” he wrote. And, “Television is a device that permits people who haven’t anything to do to watch people who can’t do anything.”

He had even less use for Hollywood. “You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer’s heart,” he wrote.

Last Years

John Steinbeck advised him on how to write an autobiography. Fred Allen wrote Treadmill to Oblivion, published in 1954, and had almost finished Much Ado About Me in 1956 when he died. On the night of St. Patrick’s Day he had a massive heart attack while taking a late night stroll down West 57^th Street in New York.

“The droll humorist’s death plunged his fellow entertainers into mourning,” read his New York Times obituary.

Fifty years after his death, the introduction to the reissue of Treadmill to Oblivion called him ‘one of the great radio comedians – not to mention one of the great wits – of the 20^th century.

You can hear one of Fred Allen’s radio shows here.

Images: Piano Row District By Swampyank at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18003597. This story was updated in 2022.

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When Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Honeymooned (and Partied) in Westport, Conn.

In 1920, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport, Conn., so he could write, she could swim and they could both party their brains out.

The Fitzgeralds reigned as the king and queen of the Jazz Age. He was 23, she was 19, and their reckless high spirits – plus their drinking — had gotten them kicked out of several New York hotels.

American literature probably owes a debt of gratitude to the New York hotel managers who disinvited the Fitzgeralds. It was in Westport, after all, that Scott met a wealthy neighbor who inspired Jay Gatsby.

About a year after Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport, they visited his family in Minnesota. Here Zelda is pregnant with their only child.

Westport

When Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport, the town had not yet evolved into a tony New York suburb. But it was getting there. A 50-mile train ride to Times Square brought commuters to Times Square, and it began to attract literary and theater types from New York.

In the Fitzgeralds’ era, Westport brought literary critic Van Wyck Brooks, Dorothy and Lillian Gish and Broadway producer John Williams for weekends in the country. A New York culture took root in the town, and by 2014, the local historical society exhibited many of the 767 New Yorker covers produced by artists living in and around Westport.

Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Martha Stewart, Sandy Dennis, Harvey Weinstein and Shirley Jackson all made their homes in Westport.

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in this Westport, Conn., house. Image Courtesy Google Maps.

How Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Honeymooned

The Fitzgeralds blew into town in a secondhand sports car in May of 1920. Neither had a clue how to keep house, so closets filled with dirty laundry and neither of them cooked. Eventually they hired a house boy named Tana.

Earlier that year, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut novel, This Side of Paradise, sold out within four days of publication. It won him celebrity, a healthy income and Zelda’s Sayre’s hand in marriage.

Scott and Zelda wed on April 3, 1920 in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and frolicked in New York City. But Scott needed to get back to writing his second novel, and so they honeymooned in Westport from May to September. Zelda rented a large colonial home where he had a separate room in which to write and she could swim every day. Their neighbor, a multimillionaire named F.E. Lewis, let her cut across his property to walk to Compo Beach.

Lewis had inherited a fortune – what would amount to $300 million in today’s dollars — and he lived on a 175-acre estate called Longshore.

Today, it’s the Inn at Longshore, hosting corporate events and destination weddings. Back then, Lewis threw extravagant parties that Scott and Zelda attended. They weren’t the only celebrities he invited. Dancer Anna Pavlova, magician Harry Houdini and movie star Marie Dressler came too. At one party he featured camels, elephants, vaudeville acts and a cowboy and Indian show. Theatrical producer David Belasco, mentioned in the Great Gatsby, came, and John Philip Sousa wrote music for one of his parties.

Drinking Again

When Scott and Zelda didn’t go to New York for weekend parties they invited friends to stay with them. They drank heavily and fought often.

A Princeton friend came to visit and wrote,

Went to visit Fizgeralds in Westport…stayed drunk for two weeks straight. Atmosphere of crime, lust, sensuality, pervaded the home.

Another classmate, critic Edmund Wilson, found the couple ‘reveling nude in the orgies of Westport.’

They tore along the Boston Post Road in their sports car with occasional stops at roadhouses to replenish their gin supply. Then Zelda wrecked the car by driving over a fire hydrant.

At a party, they reported a false fire alarm. According to one story, the firefighters asked where the fire was and Zelda pointed to her breast and said, “Here.”

Gatsby

After the Fitzgeralds honeymooned in Westport, they moved to a New York City apartment near the Plaza Hotel. They later moved to Great Neck, Long Island, from 1922 to 1924, then to Paris, all the while spiraling downward into alcoholism, madness and early death. Scott managed to finish only four novels.

For many years, people thought Scott Fitzgerald patterned the setting for his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, on Long Island.

Then in 1996, a New Yorker writer named Barbara Probst Solomon asked whether Gatsby included a blend of their time in Great Neck and that first beachy summer when Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport?’

Author Richard Webb, Jr., grew up in Westport, and he was sure the answer was yes. In 2018 he published his book, Boats Against the Current: The Honeymoon Summer of Scott and Zelda: Westport, Connecticut 1920.

The book that tells the story of how Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport.

The title alludes to the ending of Gatsby, one of the most famous in American literature:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

This story about how Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport was updated in 2022.

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The Outrageous Comical Brown Comes to Town

If you live in a New England town with town hall, a school, a church or an opera house, chances are good it was visited at least once by the outrageous showman William B. Brown, better known as Comical Brown.

Comical Brown

Born in 1833 in Lancaster, Mass., into a Quaker family, as a child he prepared to become a shoemaker. But at 16 his musical talent took him in a different direction. He began performing small concerts on the violin to help support his blind father. It set the direction for the next 45 years of his life.

At first he took small parts in minstrel shows and regularly performed in the stage play Uncle Tom’s Cabin, based on the book of the same name. By the mid-1860s, however, he hit the road as a headliner. An advance man would work the towns on Brown’s calendar, appearing a few days in advance to plaster the town with fliers and newspaper notices for “That Comical Brown!” show.

His act consisted of a number of humorous monologues in which he took the role of cranky, old Yankee or warm-hearted Irishman. He joked with the crowd while spinning yarns and songs designed to draw laughs or groans. Mixed in, he played the violin and turned the stage over to other members of his small troop.

His other acts included Frank Hayden, boy soprano; E.A. Marsh, contralto, singing the Star Spangled Banner; or a trained dog act featuring Scottie and Prince Charlie doing tricks.

As Brown traveled from town to town, he updated his material each year or two so it was fresh whenever he rolled into town. He brought the fun of the vaudeville stage to the small towns of New England and beyond for a remarkable 45 years.

Comical Brown Makes ‘Em Laugh

In 1885 Brown compiled some of his best material and published it as Comical Brown’s Songster – equal parts cornball observations and slyly racy songs. Male/female relationships, man’s personal foibles, the temperance society and other timely topics were staples of his comedy. This number, Of Course It’s No Business of Mine, surely raised the rafters when he belted it out:

Now, for instance, at Mrs. Montgomery’s,
Every afternoon, just about three,
When her husband is out at his business,
A gent with moustache comes to tea.

He stays till half-past eight o’clock,
For the husband don’t get home till nine;
Now I’d like to know what he does there!
But then it’s no business of mine.

Across the way lives dear Miss Baxter,
A nice, dashing, handsome young girl;
Who, for the last twelve months or so,
Has been flirting with Mr. Fitz-Furl;

They say she is going to be married,
Well, I must say I think it is time;
For, if she’s not married, she’d ought to be,
But then it’s no business of mine.

I met Lucy Bell t’other evening,
With her nephew going out for a walk,
And, of course, as soon as she saw me,
She stopped and began a long talk

All about her dear little nephew,
Who she said was between eight and nine,
But some say it isn’t her nephew,
But then it’s no business of mine.

At Mrs. Fitz-Snooks’, round the corner,
Last evening I heard such a din,
And found that she’d not paid her rent,
So the Sheriff they quickly brought in.

I don’t know what she does with her money,
Though her nose always redly does shine,
I think that she spends it for brandy,
But of course it’s no business of mine.

Comical Brown Hits a Sour Note

Contralto E.A. Marsh costumed for The Daughter of the Regiment. (Library of Congress)

The indignities of the comedy circuit were many. The show had to go on each night in a new town, regardless of weather. Comical Brown’s critics suggested there was good reason he never played the same venue two nights in a row: because once the audience heard his act they would warn their neighbors not to bother.

One particularly joyless stop came in Charlton, Mass. where Brown was forced to play in a church rather than the town hall, which had burned. He churned out his music and jokes to a stone-faced audience, whose members were too intimidated by the church sexton glaring from the rear of the church to even crack a smile.

Over the years, Comical Brown moved around New England, living in Somerville, Mass. and Rutland and Barre in Vermont. As he grew older there were hints that he was slipping, though he was still much loved. The Saint Johnsbury Caledonian reported in 1891, “Comical Brown played to a large audience at the Opera House Thanksgiving night. Everybody was kept in good humor and though Brown is not as good as he used to be, he still makes folks laugh.”

Comical Brown’s career finally ended in 1893. At the age of 60 he was found unconscious at a Boston train station, possibly headed for his next concert. He died at the nearby hospital leaving behind a widow and two daughters. His death was reported as far away as California.

The Afterlife

The Comical Brown act lived on for more than a decade after Brown’s death in the form of the “Comical Brown Concert and Comedy Company.” It was also “billed as Comical Brown’s Old Show with a replacement cast.” Finally, his act became synonymous with outdated, stale jokes. Into the 1920s, if someone told a particularly unfunny, old joke, the proper response was, “That’s a great one. I think I remember Comical Brown using it.”

In 1909 Brown’s career was eulogized by Broadway playwright Stanley Rosenfeld in the comedy-drama The Barnstormer, about the star of one-man show traveling to backwoods towns in the waning days of his career. It was not a hit.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Who Killed William Dean? A Tale of Spies, Swindlers and Politicians

In August of 1918, someone murdered Dr. William Dean. His killer or killers tied up his body and submerged it in a rain cistern on his Jaffrey, N.H., farm. For the next 100 years people have tried to figure out the reason for his murder, and by whom.

There is no shortage of possible solutions to the question of who killed William Dean. The case led investigators through a tangle of suspects that included his wife, a friend and a World War I-era German spy ring.

William Dean (1908)

The Germans Are Coming

Had Dean’s murder not been set against the backdrop of World War I, finding his killer might have been far simpler.

In 1918, Americans were on alert, looking for German spying operations. Tensions had risen for years, as American relations with Germany frayed even before the country entered the war.

In April of 1917, New Hampshire militia spotted an unknown aircraft circling the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, furiously turning out naval vessels for the war effort. The militia fired on the plane, but it flew off into the night. Police conjectured the plane could not have gotten far and must have operated out of an airfield somewhere inland in the state.

Mount Monadnock

In Jaffrey, N.H., summer residents and year-rounders alike took the warnings about German spies to heart. Late into the evenings they took note of lights flashing from nearby Mount Monadnock, and from other peaks – including the hilltop farm William Dean owned. Neighbors suspected the lights were secret signals flashed by German spies, communicating with each other across the mountains.

And they reported these suspicions to the federal Bureau of Investigations, a precursor to today’s FBI.

The Night of the Murder

On August 13, 1918, the last day of William Dean’s life, a couple of unusual things happened. Early in the day he asked a neighbor leaving for Boston if she would get in touch with the police for him. He had information for them. He didn’t say what.

Later in the evening he got a visit from his friend, Charles Rich, the local political kingpin. Rich was a judge in Jaffrey as well as a banker and politician.

Main Street, Jaffrey, N.H., in 1907

Rich would later say he visited William Dean to ask how to treat an injury he had just received when his horse kicked at him, leaving him with a black eye and head injuries.

Dr. William Dean had stopped practicing medicine and had long retired. He lived as a gentleman farmer. Nevertheless, he advised Rich on his injury and Rich returned to his home at about 10 p.m.

Roughly two hours later Dean, 63, left his house and went to the barn on his property. Unlike most farmers who milk their cows at first light and dinnertime, Dean milked his single cow at the unconventional hours of midnight and noon. Upon entering the barn, he was attacked, beaten, strangled, bound up and carried to a cistern on the property.

Discovery

Dr. Dean’s wife Mary worried about her husband. The next morning, when a hired hand arrived to begin mowing, she asked him to look for him. He was dead, she feared. She even speculated he was under water.

Mary was 68 and losing her faculties. But her immediate conclusion that her husband was dead raised suspicions. When Dr. Dean’s body was discovered, suspicion fell on Mary, who was also Dean’s cousin.

But there were two obstacles to the case against Mary. There was no evidence that she was at odds with her husband. While she was not completely rational, probably suffering from dementia, she was never known to be violent. And, she was physically not a likely suspect. Smashing her husband’s head, strangling him and carrying him to a cistern were beyond her abilities.

Spies in the Hills

With the case against her seeming unlikely, townspeople turned their attention to the potential spy in their midst: Laurence Colfelt.

William Dean needed money, though not inordinately so. He and his wife had moved from their large house to a smaller bungalow on their property. They rented the large house to Laurence Colfelt and his family.

Colfelt, a New Yorker, lived on a trust fund. It wasn’t unusual for people from elsewhere to come to Jaffrey, but it was unusual for them to spend the winter. Colfelt’s lack of any work and lack of local ties made people suspicious of him.

Rumors circulated that he was German, or at least had German sympathies. Might he be a leader of the spies flashing signals to one another in the New Hampshire mountains? Might he, or other spies, have killed Dean because he had caught on to the spying operations in the hills?

William Dean’s House

William Dean was not pleased that Colfelt was not farming the property he rented, and he asked the family to move on. Shortly before the murder the Colfelts moved to Greenville, but the town was awash in rumors that Colfelt was angry with Dean.

Colfelt, though, was far away when William Dean was murdered.

The Banker/Politician

The man who had probably the biggest target on his back in the murder investigation was Charles Rich, the banker and friend of William Dean.

The morning Dean was discovered murdered, Rich had a fresh black eye and bruises on his head. He explained his horse had kicked at him and knocked a board he was carrying, striking him in the head. Many in town doubted the story.

Though William Dean and Charles Rich were friends, one other odd occurrence implicated Rich. The day Dean’s body was found, an employee and friend of Rich’s visited Mrs. Dean and cleaned up the barn where the murder took place. Perhaps he obliterated evidence in the process.

Could Dean and Rich have fallen out over some business dealing? Was Rich the person Dean wanted to talk to the police about?

With no clear suspect in the murder, the town sent for Pinkerton detectives to help investigate. And as they came up dry, another character appeared in town to assist in the investigation.

William Dean’s brother was concerned that the investigation appeared stalled and so he asked a friend of his wife’s to look into the case. The investigator was widely known for relying on psychic methods of investigation, so he first came to Jaffrey under an assumed name to avoid publicity. Soon he revealed his real name: Wilhem de Kerlor.

The Psychic Detective

William Dean with his oxen

Wilhem de Kerlor was a con artist. He lectured about psychic phenomena, worked the vaudeville stages as a psychic and traveled Europe, attempting to put his psychic abilities to work solving crimes. He found a wealthy wife, Italian fashion designer and adventuress Elsa Schiaparelli. The two were run out of England because of de Kerlor’s fortune-telling schemes. They washed up in America in Greenwich Village in 1916.

When de Kerlor heard of the Jaffrey murder, he saw it as a chance to make a name for himself and his newly formed “Bureau of Psychology.” A natural showman, de Kerlor developed a theory that a garden tool found in Dean’s barn caused the injuries to Rich’s face.

Federal agents had suspected de Kerlor of harboring pro-German sentiments, but when Dean’s brother decided to dismiss him from the case, the town of Jaffrey hired him to continue. Town selectman Edward Boynton was convinced Rich knew more about the murder of William Dean than he was letting on. That is roughly where the murder inquiry ended.

The Cold Case

A grand jury empaneled to investigate the case concluded that Dean was murdered, but the members of the jury could not determine who did it.

The closest thing to a trial in the case was a $10,000 libel lawsuit Rich brought against selectman Boynton. The suit aired the issues surrounding the murder, but got nowhere. The trial raised the issue of the flashing lights, but with the war long over no one was chasing German spies any more. Rich’s movements were chronicled in detail, and his defenders and detractors each told the details of his personality.

In the end the jury concluded that Rich had not been libeled, but it did not answer the question of who killed William Dean?

Elsa Schiaparelli

Mary Dean died shortly after the murder. The psychic investigator de Kerlor died in 1928, shot in a Mexican bar fight. And around Jaffrey, the murder played on people’s minds for decades. Boston reporter Bert Ford wrote an investigative book, The Dean Murder Mystery, that favored the German spying angle as the cause of the murder.

In town, the open rift between Rich and his enemies flared from time to time, but Rich remained a local political power until his death.

Meanwhile sleuths, both amateur and professional, have spent countless hours trying to solve the mystery of who killed William Dean. They haven’t gotten there . . . yet.

Thanks to: The Dean Murder Mystery, Bert Ford; Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography, Meryle Secrest and the Dean Murder Project. This story last updated in 2021.

Images: Mount Monadnock By Jonwmcinenrey – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39308867. Elsa Schiaparelli By John Phillips – LIFE Magazine, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21888448.

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The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of The Historic Opera House

Opera houses didn’t become a feature of American cities and towns until after the Civil War, though they existed before the American Revolution. The first of the American opera houses is believed to be in Williamsburg, Va., and dates to 1722.

Many early Americans thought the theater disreputable. The Continental Congress sure did. Calling it “unpatriotic and unacceptable“, Congress banned theater in 1774. Puritanical New England went further, banning theater in Massachusetts until 1790, and in Connecticut from 1800 to 1952 – at least technically.

In the prosperous years after the Civil War, most big cities had opera houses. Politicians in smaller towns wanted one, too. They thought it would make their town more cosmopolitan, and believed an opera house as important as a church or a jail, according to the Camden City Hall and Opera House National Register of Historic Places nomination. And

An opera house provided a sense of urbanity and many small communities used them as an enticement for the railroad companies to establish a stop in their villages.

Some cities, like Rochester, N.H., combined their opera house with government offices. It made economic sense because the money raised from the theater could help pay for the city hall.

Rarely did operas appear in the early opera houses. They featured stage plays and vaudeville acts and later movies. Many opera houses grew tarnished and tired before local do-gooders renovated them. Such was the case for opera houses in five New England states. The unusual library and opera house that straddles the Canadian border in Vermont is the exception.

Here, then, are six New England opera houses and their stories.

Goodspeed Opera House

The Goodspeed Opera House has overlooked the Connecticut River in East Haddam since a local merchant and banker, William Goodspeed, put it up in 1877.

Though called an opera house it produced plays. The first, Charles II, opened on Oct. 24, 1877.

After William Goodspeed died, the building was used as a militia base during World War I, then as a store and a warehouse for the Department of Transportation. In 1959, the state of Connecticut condemned the building. But a group of citizens bought it for a dollar. Then they took four years to restore the building.

In 1963, Goodspeed reopened as a venue for musicals, opening with Oh, Lady! Lady! Michael P. Price took over as director in 1968 and stayed until 2014. Since then, Goodspeed sent 21 musicals to Broadway – including Annie, Man of La Mancha and Little Johnny Jones — and won more than a dozen Tony Awards.

The theater is on the top two floors, which makes it a challenge to load and unload scenery. Legend has it that while loading the scenery for Annie, a gust of wind blew a large piece of scenery from the play into the Connecticut River.

6 Main St., East Haddam, Conn.

Stonington Opera House

The opera house in the tiny town of Stonington belongs to a list of 66 buildings identified as opera houses in Maine. Nobody seems to know, though, how many survive. It’s probably the oldest in the state with an original design for theater.

Typical of entertainment venues in Maine towns during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Stonington Opera House occupies a commanding position overlooking Stonington Harbor. It was built on a site used as a music hall since 1886 as the town’s population began to swell because of the granite quarrying nearby.

The building hosted national touring shows. which arrived via steamboat from Rockland. It burned to the ground in 1910 – allegedly on the night the town’s first fire hydrants started working.

A prominent local citizen, Dr. B. Lake Noyes, then rebuilt the Opera House. People used it to watch silent movies, attend high school graduations, dances and basketball games. In 1928, the town dentist bought it as a cinema, and two movies were booked most nights along with vaudeville acts. During that time artist John Marin included the Opera House (including the words) in several watercolor paintings.

Television ate into the movie business in the 1950s, and in 1962 it became a roller skating rink. Three young entrepreneurs bought the building in 1979, saved it from weather damage and showed summer movies until 1992. The building was then abandoned for years, but rescued in 1999 by a nonprofit called Opera House Arts. Today it offers theatre, music, dance, film and community events 52 weeks a year.

1 Opera House Ln., Stonington, Maine

Boston Opera House

The Boston Opera House was built as a lavish theater for vaudeville and movies in the Keith-Albee chain. It opened on Oct. 29, 1928, called the B.F. Keith Memorial Theatre after Benjamin Franklin Keith built the chain. People called his vaudeville shows “the Sunday school circuit” because they didn’t allow vulgarity — like the word “pants.”

Keith had long since died by the time the theatre bearing his name opened in Boston’s Downtown Crossing.

That same year the Keith-Albee chain merged with a western rival and became KAO, taken over by Joseph P. Kennedy. Kennedy merged it with his own small studio and RCA. The new company then became RKO. From 1929 to the mid-1950s the Boston Opera House, then called RKO Keith’s, showcased first-run films.

Movies waned in the late 1950s and the once-elegant theatre deteriorated along with the neighborhood. The Sack Theaters Co. bought it in 1965, divided it into two cinemas and renamed it the Savoy. By 1980, the building was a wreck. The Opera Company of Boston, run by opera impresario Sarah Caldwell, bought it, renovated it and renamed it the Boston Opera House.

A Rarity

The Boston Opera House then became the rare New England opera house that actually staged operas. For 10 years, Caldwell staged innovative operas including a number of U.S. premieres such as The Ice Break, Dead Souls and Montezuma, and the world premiere of The Balco

The Opera Company of Boston collapsed under financial pressure in 1991, leaving the theater dark and unheated. Water damaged the elaborate plaster interior and destroyed decades-old costumes. Finally in 1999, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy got landmark status for the building. The Clear Channel Company agreed to renovate it.

The Boston Opera House reopened on July 16, 2004 with the Broadway production of The Lion King. A couple of Boston venture capitalists now own it.

539 Washington St., Boston, Mass.

Rochester City Hall and Opera House

Business was booming in Rochester, N.H., when the Rochester Opera House opened on Memorial Day in 1908 with a singular feature: a movable floor. Rochester’s citizens took pride in the magnificent theater by a well-known architect, George Gilman Adams. It had a horseshoe balcony, grand proscenium, excellent acoustics and elaborate decoration. The floor could be raised for an audience to watch the stage performance or lowered as a dance floor.

Its space is shared with the city government, as are opera houses in Camden, Maine, Waterville, Maine, and Burlington, Vt.

All kinds of performances were staged at the opera house, except opera. By 1940, the Rochester Opera House’s luster had faded, and it was used by such groups as the Elks and Royal Order of Moose for charity dances. In 1962, a local entrepreneur named Bob LeBlanc began producing as many as 10 Broadway shows over 11 summers and drew large crowds.

A decade of abandonment followed. The first restoration project began in 1984, but ended after an estimate at fixing the floor came in at $1,220,000, more than a thousand times the original cost of $1,100.

Local leaders renewed the effort to renovate the old opera house, and in 1997 it opened its doors again for live theater performances. In 2017, the Rochester Opera House is staging tribute bands, comedians, dance performances and orchestral concerts

31 Wakefield St., Rochester, N.H.

Newport Performing Arts Center

The Newport Opera House, one of the nation’s oldest, was still undergoing restoration in 2022. Patrick Shanahan built it in 1867 next to his hotel to cater to wealthy Gilded Age elite. He called it Shanahan’s Opera House.

It was one of the stylish buildings surrounding Newport’s Washington Square. Douglas Fairbanks, John Barrymore and Mary Pickford, appeared on its stage. So did Harriet Beecher Strwe, Frederick Douglass and Duke Ellington.

The hotel was torn down after a fire in 1955 and the top floor of the opera house taken off two years later.

It was renovated as a movie theater, then chopped up into a triplex in 1979. Local civic leaders decided Newport needed a year-round performing arts center, formed a nonprofit and closed the opera house in 2010. Since then it’s been gutted to reveal historically significant architectural features such as the soaring proscenium arch, decorative plaster wall columns, vaulted ceilings and arched windows.

Supporters of the Newport Opera House plan to bring year-round performing arts to downtown Newport, including dance, music, theater, comedy and speakers.

19 Touro St., Newport, R.I.

Haskell Free Library

Martha Stewart Haskell, a Canadian, in 1904 gave the Haskell Free Library and Opera House to Stanstead, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vt. She did it in honor of her late husband Carlos, an American sawmill owner. The building’s ornate interior ran the cost of construction to $50,000 – about $130 million in today’s dollars.

Since then, Americans and Canadians in the surrounding towns have cherished it.

The international border runs right through the building, marked by black electrical tape on the floor. It resulted from a small fire in the 1970s that caused a fight between U.S. and Canadian insurance companies.

It’s said the Haskell is the only U.S. library without books and the only theater without a stage. The circulation desk is in Canada, the books are in the U.S, while most of the theater seats are on the American side and the stage is in Canada.

Asylum Seekers

After 9/11, U.S. and Canadian officials stepped up security around the Haskell Free Library and Opera House. Canadians have to cross the international line to enter the building and leave by the same door; otherwise, they’ll be picked up for illegal entry.

President Obama mentioned the library in March 2016 when he welcomed Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Afterward, librarians noticed an increase in the number of asylum seekers using the library to try to cross the border.

Mrs. Haskell intended the 400-seat theater on the second floor to generate enough money to support the library on the first. It never did, but it did provide entertainment: vaudeville shows, jazz and blues concerts, the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, I Musici de Montreal, dramas and children’s theater.

93 Cassell Ave., Derby Line, Vt.

Photos: Opera House Theater, Newport: By Swampyank at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18003269; Boston Opera House By Ruthanne Reid from USA – Boston Opera House, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18295357. This story last updated in 2022.

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The New England Summer Theater — Six of the Oldest

Summer theater has been a feature of New England resort towns since a Maine entrepreneur started staging plays in a former skating rink in 1899.

In 1916, the Provincetown Players produced Eugene O’Neill’s plays on a wharf. During the 1920s, summer theaters started up in Peterboro, N.H., Cape Cod and the Berkshires. They featured young talent, usually fresh out of college, and provided good, cheap entertainment for vacationing city dwellers. They were called ‘summer stock’ because they reused costumes and sets, and were performed by a resident company.

The ‘Straw Hat Circuit,’ as it became known, became a proving ground for Broadway plays. Stars like Bette Davis, Henry Fonda and Marlon Brando got their start in summer theater.

Here are six of the oldest summer theaters in New England, one in each state. If you have a favorite old summer theater, please mention it in the comments section.

Ivoryton Playhouse

The Ivoryton Playhouse

The Ivoryton Playhouse building started out in 1911 as a recreation hall for the workers of the Comstock-Cheney factory, which made ivory coverings for piano keys. There was another ivory manufacturer in Ivoryton, a village of Essex, Conn. It’s called ‘the town built by elephants.’

The building was vacant when an actor and director named Milton Stiefel came to Essex for a rest after touring nationally. He saw the potential of the unused building as a summer theater. He put his actor friends together in a troupe called The New York Players and staged the Broadway play Broken Dishes on June 30, 1930. By the end of the season the Ivoryton Playhouse was the first self-supporting summer theater in the country.

The theater quickly developed a national reputation and helped launch the careers of Cliff Robertson and Katharine Hepburn. It went dark during World War II due to gas rationing, but resumed afterward. The summer theater attracted such stars as Marlon Brando, Art Carney, Talullah Bankhead, Helen Hayes, Ezio Pinza, Betty Grable, Groucho Marx and June Lockhart.

Milton Stiefel retired in 1973, but stayed involved in the summer theater until he died in 1983. His successor couldn’t quite make a go of the theater and decided to sell it. Rumors spread that the building would be razed for a discount drugstore, and so supporters formed the non-profit Ivoryton Playhouse Foundation and bought the building. The theater floundered until 1987, when The River Rep company began to stage artistically successful productions.

This summer, the Ivoryton Playhouse will present Million Dollar Quartet, West Side Story, Saturday Night Fever: The Musical, and the world premiere of I Hate Musicals: The Musical.

103 Main Street, Ivoryton, Conn.

Lakewood Theatre

Lakewood Theatre

The Lakewood Theatre started out as a religious sanctuary for spiritualists on the shores of Lake Wesserunsett, six miles north of Skowhegan in Madison, Maine. It became a skating rink and a vaudeville theater.

By 1899, it was part of a swampy amusement park at the end of a trolley line when Herbert Swett began running it as a summer theater. He developed it into a venue for Broadway tryouts, which earned the theater the nickname “Broadway in Maine.”

During its heyday, such stars as Vincent Price, Ethel Barrymore and George M. Cohan played in Lakewood. The summer theater premiered one of the longest running play on Broadway, Life with Father, in 1939.

The theater declined after World War II. The Swett family sold it in 1970 and owners came and went for the next 15 years. Television and pop stars played the summer theater. John Travolta appeared in Bus Stop while taking a break from the Welcome Back, Kotter television series. He scrawled his signature on a backstage wall. So did Myrna Loy and Mama Cass Elliot.

In 1985, the The Cornville Players arrived with an agreement to perform three plays for six weeks. They were successful, and formed the nonprofit CUE (Curtains Up Enterprises). Since then, CUE has renovated the summer theater and stages comedies, dramas, musicals and children’s shows.

This season, the Lakewood Theater presents Arsenic and Old Lace, Some Sweet Day, Shout! The Mod Musical, Those Crazy Ladies in the House on the Corner, Avenue Q, The Savannah Sipping Society, Bullets Over Broadway, Baskerville and A Comedy of Tenors.

76 Theater Rd., Madison, Maine

Cape Playhouse

The Cape Playhouse

The Cape Playhouse, like the Lakeville Theater and Barnstormers, claims to be the oldest summer theater in the country.

We won’t debate the merits of their arguments, but we do question the original cover story about the Cape Playhouse, which also has a cinema on its grounds. The theater’s marketing claim was that a visionary ex-botany teacher named Raymond Moore moved an old church to a pasture on Cape Cod and transformed it into a world-famous theater complex. The Playhouse debuted Bette Davis, Henry Fonda and Humphrey Bogart, while the Cinema featured a spectacular ceiling mural by Rockwell Kent.

Actually lumber heiress and Cape summer resident Edna Bradley Tweedy backed Raymond Moore in his summer theater venture. She secretly married him a year before she died in 1953. She was at least 65, he was still in his late 30s. Tweedy had inherited the Bradley lumber fortune and left Moore a generous bequest. That became public when Moore quarreled over the will with her three daughters, the main beneficiaries of the estate.

Whatever. The Cape Playhouse was a smash hit when it opened in 1927. Three years later John Barrymore praised Moore for bringing Broadway to “dirt road and oil-lamp country.” The Cape Playhouse and Cape Cinema, he wrote, are “a dream come true, that has attracted the attention of the theatrical and playgoing world.’

This season, the Cape Playhouse presents Art, The Foreigner, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Red, Gypsy and Murder for Two.

820 Maine St. (6A), Dennis, Mass.

The Barnstormers

The Barnstormers, like the Cape Playhouse, claims to be the oldest ongoing professional summer theater. It was founded in 1931 by Francis Cleveland, the son of President Grover Cleveland. He ran the Tamworth, N.H., theater until he died in 1995.

Francis, his wife Alice and their friend Ed Goodnow founded the summer theater company in 1931. Their company of resident actors – mostly recent college graduates — performed different plays each night in Maine and New Hampshire. Sometimes they arrived at a barn in the afternoon, set up scenery and lights and performed in the evening — hence the name ‘Barnstormers.’

They finished each week with a Saturday evening performance in Tamworth at a former boxing venue where former First Lady Frances Cleveland, dressed in an evening gown, often greeted the audience.

In 1935, the Barnstormers bought Kimball’s Store on Maine Street in Tamworth and turned it into a summer theater. Since then the acting company rehearses one play by day and performs one by night. Barnstormers is one of three Equity theaters in New Hampshire.

This season, Barnstormers presents Spamalot, The Ghost Train, My Three Angels, Toward Zero and Driving Miss Daisy.

104 Main Street, Tamworth, N.H.

Weston Playhouse

Lloyd Bridges

Beginning in summer of 1937, a drama teacher at the Boston Conservatory of Music traveled to Weston, Vt., to produce 10 plays. For the next 34 summers, Harlan Grant produced ambitious summer theater programs. From that day to this, the Weston Playhouse never missed a summer theater season.

Among the actors launching the first professional season was none other than Lloyd Bridges.

Over the years the theater, housed in a remodeled church, encountered some difficulties. On a summer night in 1962 fire gutted the theater. But in the spirit of ‘the show must go on,’ the company performed the next night in a tent on a makeshift stage in front of an audience seated in folding chairs. An enthusiastic crowd assembled that night for the performance of Write Me a Murder.

The 300-seat theater was rebuilt for the following season. Floods damaged the rebuilt theater twice in the 1970s, but the Weston Playhouse has never ceased to thrive. It opens its season in 2017 on June 22 with the theater’s Young Company performing the musical Really Rosie. Also showing this summer are Once, Lost in Yonkers, The Music Man, Long Days Journey Into Night, Tenderly and Buyer & Cellar.

The Weston Playhouse is poised to launch a new arts center for the development of a new generation of playwrights, actors and directors.

703 Main St., Weston, Vt.

Theatre by the Sea

Theatre By The Sea

In 1933, Alice Jaynes Tyler brought “Broadway in a Barn” to the Rhode Island village of Wakefield in South Kingstown. It was on the grounds of a summer camp that had been crippled by the Great Depression.

For the next 35 years the Theatre by the Sea thrived as visitors spent days on the nearby beaches and nights seeking entertainment. Along the way, the Hurricane of 1938 put a dent in the theater’s façade. During World War II it did its part for the war effort by serving as a target for training pilots to dive at.

In 1963 it faced its closest brush with death when it nearly was demolished. But for a few seasons when it went dark, however, the summer theater never wavered.

Stars such as Marlon Brando, Carol Channing, Groucho Marx, Tallulah Bankhead, Mae West, Judy Holiday, Shelley Winters and more entertained the summer crowds night after night. In 2017, the summer theater opens again with Beehive, The Music Man, Beauty and the Beast and The Producers.

364 Cards Pond Rd, Wakefield, R.I.

If you don’t recognize the stars at the top of the page, they are Katharine Hepburn, Henry Fonda, Bette Davis and Lloyd Bridges.

Images: Theatre By the Sea, By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20434102

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